The Joe Rogan Experience - August 02, 2017


Joe Rogan Experience #993 - Ben Shapiro


Episode Stats

Length

2 hours and 39 minutes

Words per Minute

221.99747

Word Count

35,305

Sentence Count

2,778

Misogynist Sentences

84


Summary

Ben Shapiro joins Alex to discuss his love for CNN's Piers Morgan and his thoughts on the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Alex and Ben also discuss the recent protests at UC Berkeley by Antifa, and whether or not the left is losing representation in the current political climate, and what that means for the future of the country. And, of course, there's a little bit of Alex's favorite conspiracy theory about the disappearance of a young girl from a plane, and why he thinks it's a good thing that her body was found in the crash of a Boeing 737-200, and that she was murdered by a plane crash. This episode is sponsored by SeatGeek, and is available on all major podcast directories, including Audible, iTunes, and Podcoin. If you don't already have an Audible membership, you can get your own ad-free version of the show by going to Audible.org/ThePeopleSpeak and entering the promo code: "ThePeopleHaveSpeak" at the sign-up page. You can also get 10% off his new book, "The People Have Spoken" which is available for purchase at Amazon Prime and VaynerSpeakers, wherever you get your books, starting at $99.99. Thanks for listening and supporting The People Have Speaks. The People Speak is a production of Gimlet Media. See linktr.ee/thepeoplewithspeakers to support The PeopleSpeak. Subscribe, rate, and review the show! Thank you for listening, and share the show on Apple Podcasts, and tell us what you think about it! if you think it's good, rating, rating and reviewing it on iTunes, reviewing it, and sharing it on your thoughts, rating it on social media or whatever else you're listening to this podcast! We'll be looking out for you! in the next episode of The People Has Spared Me a review, rating & reviewing it in next week's episode of the People Have a review! Subscribe to the People Speak Podcasts! Thanks again for listening to The People's Speaks Podcasts and reviewing the show? Subscribe on iTunes and rating/reviewing it on Podchats and other links to the podcast? Subscribe in your podcast on iTunes! or share it on the podchats! Rate/subscribing to the show is a review and review on iTunes?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Do we have enough love for tomorrow?
00:00:02.000 We don't have tomorrow.
00:00:03.000 Good.
00:00:03.000 I'll bring it in this week.
00:00:06.000 Ben Shapiro, we are live.
00:00:08.000 The people have spoken.
00:00:10.000 Well, thank you for having me.
00:00:12.000 Thanks for being here, man.
00:00:13.000 I became a fan of yours when I watched you with, what the fuck is his name?
00:00:18.000 The CNN asshole.
00:00:19.000 Oh, Piers Morgan.
00:00:20.000 Oh, that was glorious.
00:00:22.000 Thanks.
00:00:22.000 When you went after him with the Sandy Hook thing, like, right away, immediately, like, it was just glorious.
00:00:28.000 And you could tell that he didn't know what to do with it.
00:00:30.000 And he literally said, how dare you?
00:00:32.000 Which is what I say to people all the time when I'm joking.
00:00:35.000 I say, how dare you?
00:00:36.000 Exactly.
00:00:37.000 As one of my friends said, it looked like he was clutching his pearls.
00:00:39.000 He was really pissed.
00:00:41.000 I'm sure he was!
00:00:42.000 It was a two-segment interview, and during the break, I said to him, thanks so much for having me on.
00:00:45.000 He kind of growled at me.
00:00:46.000 He was not a happy camper.
00:00:48.000 Yeah, well, you crushed him, and one of my other favorite ones was Chelsea Handler crushing him, where she was literally talking, like, you don't even talk to me in the break.
00:00:57.000 In the break, you're checking your phone and checking Twitter.
00:01:00.000 And you could tell he was like, oh no.
00:01:03.000 He just, you know, he came from that weird British tabloid environment, and you found out that the company that he worked for did really creepy shit, like check people's voicemails.
00:01:11.000 They hacked into people who were dead, and they gave the family false hope because they had checked the voicemail, and they found out that someone checked in.
00:01:19.000 They thought, oh, maybe she's still alive.
00:01:21.000 And then we made him a host on, like, The X Factor and brought him on CNN. It was awesome.
00:01:25.000 I just don't understand.
00:01:25.000 Good media decisions all around.
00:01:26.000 Why CNN thought that...
00:01:28.000 We have this fascination with British people.
00:01:31.000 Yes.
00:01:32.000 If you have a British accent, we automatically add 20 points to your IQ. Yeah, they're great for selling mops late night and nonstick cookware.
00:01:41.000 And I enjoy John Oliver.
00:01:43.000 I think John Oliver is great.
00:01:44.000 Apparently he has, you know, a lot of people think of all British accents as being the same, but he has like a blue-collar British accent.
00:01:52.000 But I don't...
00:01:53.000 I can't tell the difference.
00:01:54.000 No, I can't either.
00:01:55.000 Too much, except when I'm watching My Fair Lady or something.
00:01:58.000 Well, I could tell people from, like, Manchester and stuff like that, because they, you know, they have, like, this sort of, like, way of talking so fast that all the words kind of pile into each other.
00:02:07.000 But, yeah, Oliver's, his recent one, Eddie Bravo got really mad at it, the recent one about Alex Jones is fucking hilarious.
00:02:17.000 I don't know if you've seen it.
00:02:17.000 It's almost impossible to make something not funny about Alex Jones.
00:02:20.000 Yeah.
00:02:20.000 You gotta meet Alex.
00:02:21.000 Have you met him?
00:02:22.000 I don't know that, given how much I've made fun of him.
00:02:25.000 Oh, it'd be fine.
00:02:26.000 Oh, really?
00:02:26.000 Trust me.
00:02:27.000 Yeah, he's a hot guy.
00:02:28.000 He wouldn't like to strip off his shirt and start...
00:02:29.000 He might, but he'd calm down.
00:02:32.000 You're a good guy.
00:02:32.000 We're basically on the same team.
00:02:34.000 He would come around.
00:02:36.000 If you remember the Piers Morgan thing happened two nights after Alex was on Piers Morgan.
00:02:40.000 So Piers was like flying high because he had that whole debate with Alex and Alex did his shtick and it was really over the top.
00:02:47.000 And he thought I was gonna be like Alex Jones part two and it was gonna be Piers, you know, succeeds again.
00:02:51.000 And Alex and I could not be more different than our approaches.
00:02:54.000 No, you're very rational and very reasonable.
00:02:57.000 And, you know, we've been talking about some of your debates.
00:03:00.000 We're good to go.
00:03:20.000 Between the left and the right, to the point where the right is almost non-existent, or at least doesn't have any representation.
00:03:28.000 And they're actively shunning that representation.
00:03:31.000 They're pushing people out.
00:03:32.000 I know what's going on with you and Berkeley.
00:03:34.000 Has that been resolved?
00:03:35.000 Yeah, I think that...
00:03:36.000 So Berkeley, after the publicity, they said they're going to try...
00:03:38.000 Explain to people if they don't know the whole story, please.
00:03:40.000 Yeah, so UC Berkeley, if you recall last year, I actually spoke there before any of this happened.
00:03:44.000 I spoke at UC Berkeley in like April 2016, and then Milo was supposed to speak there, and he actually went there, and there was a riot where Antifa infiltrated the student community, and there are all these pictures of them bombing things and blowing up cars, or setting them in a fire at least, and throwing things at windows.
00:03:59.000 Yeah.
00:04:00.000 So Berkeley shut down that event for safety reasons.
00:04:02.000 Then Ann Coulter wanted to speak there.
00:04:04.000 And they basically used what they call time, place, and manner restrictions to stop her.
00:04:07.000 They kept saying, well, we have safety problems.
00:04:09.000 We can't figure out how to do the event.
00:04:11.000 And in the end, they just canceled it because they didn't have security.
00:04:14.000 And then Young America's Foundation, which sponsors me to go to a lot of these campuses, they said, we want Shapiro to come.
00:04:19.000 And again, I spoke there like a year and a half ago.
00:04:21.000 And they gave them two and a half months advance.
00:04:23.000 And Berkeley said, well, we have no venues available.
00:04:26.000 And so this seemed to be another cover for we're not going to allow a conservative on campus because there are security problems.
00:04:32.000 So we made that public.
00:04:33.000 And then Berkeley said, no, no, no, no.
00:04:35.000 We'll make sure that you get in.
00:04:37.000 They gave us an alternative venue.
00:04:38.000 And they even said they'd cover the security fee because they didn't like the bad publicity.
00:04:41.000 Oh, well that's nice.
00:04:43.000 Yeah, so that should be good.
00:04:43.000 Well, you know what happened with Jordan Peterson yesterday?
00:04:46.000 Yes.
00:04:46.000 Yeah, just yesterday Jordan Peterson was banned from YouTube.
00:04:49.000 And YouTube has a new policy that it's very weirdly worded, but apparently they're allowed to block and restrict any kind of videos that are about religion or that could be deemed offensive,
00:05:04.000 which is almost everything.
00:05:06.000 Yeah, that's right.
00:05:11.000 So it won't be monetized?
00:05:13.000 It also won't be in the videos of interest?
00:05:16.000 I know they did this to Prager University as well.
00:05:18.000 They blocked like 10 of their videos a couple of months ago.
00:05:21.000 So it's, yeah, I mean, this is nasty stuff.
00:05:24.000 And listen, YouTube's a private company.
00:05:25.000 They have the right to do what they want.
00:05:26.000 But don't proclaim that you're a free speech promoting institution if you're going to block people like Jordan Peterson, for God's sake.
00:05:32.000 Well, the problem is they're not blocking things that are offensive to other people.
00:05:37.000 They're not blocking certain things that are representing Islam in a positive light.
00:05:42.000 That's right.
00:05:42.000 There's a lot of weirdness with this left-wing choice of what to censor and what not to censor.
00:05:49.000 And it's not just dangerous.
00:05:51.000 It's also bad for the whole idea of being a progressive or being a liberal.
00:05:57.000 Because it makes you look...
00:05:59.000 It makes them look really petty and really weird and really resistant and hesitant to actually have real debate.
00:06:06.000 Yeah, for sure.
00:06:07.000 And this is one of the reasons why I'm very meticulous in my terminology about people who are on the other side of the aisle.
00:06:12.000 I actually separate people who are liberal from people who are leftist.
00:06:15.000 So when there are people who try to ban speech, I call them leftist, and if they are not interested in banning speech, then they're liberal, meaning they want bigger government, they disagree with me on politics, but they're still willing to have a conversation, they want an open forum.
00:06:26.000 People who are on the hard left think that it's actually an insult to their identity to disagree with them, and this is what I experience sometimes on campuses, you know, Cal State LA, where there's a near riot when I speak.
00:06:35.000 University of Wisconsin, where people storm the stage and stand in front of it and won't leave.
00:06:39.000 Or Penn State, where we have, again, another near-violent incident over at Penn State.
00:06:43.000 Or DePaul, where they actually banned me outright.
00:06:44.000 So sometimes you get this routine from people who think that they conflate their viewpoint with their identity.
00:06:50.000 And then if you have a different viewpoint, you're denying them their humanity.
00:06:54.000 And it's like, no, I'm not denying you.
00:06:56.000 I just think what you're saying is dumb.
00:06:57.000 That's a very good point.
00:06:59.000 That's a very good point, is that they have their identity completely connected with their ideology.
00:07:05.000 And when you oppose these people, when you have these debates with these people, What's really fascinating is the level of hysteria that gets reached while you're staying calm.
00:07:14.000 Yeah, that's what I've noticed.
00:07:16.000 There's a ton of...
00:07:17.000 I tend to keep relatively calm, just as a human being.
00:07:21.000 And very often when I'm debating someone, you see them getting more and more and more emotional.
00:07:24.000 And people on the right love this because, of course, it's the triggering of the snowflakes.
00:07:27.000 But the easiest thing in the world to do is trigger some idiot college kid who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
00:07:33.000 What's hard to do is actually discuss...
00:07:35.000 Issues with somebody who's intelligent enough to make the point.
00:07:38.000 But the level of hysteria on the campuses has really increased.
00:07:42.000 I mean, I now have to travel with two members of security to every campus, just because you don't know which campus is going to go off.
00:07:48.000 I never had to travel with security before.
00:07:49.000 It's the weirdest thing in the world.
00:07:50.000 How long ago did this start happening?
00:07:52.000 Well, February of 2016 is when I started traveling with security.
00:07:56.000 So I spoke at University of Missouri.
00:07:57.000 Remember, they had a big blow-up at University of Missouri with Black Lives Matter taking over campus offices and suggesting that there was some sort of big racism problem at Mizzou, which is just ridiculous.
00:08:06.000 And so they flew me in.
00:08:07.000 I did a speech there.
00:08:08.000 And then the next time I spoke was Cal State LA. And they brought in a couple of security guys.
00:08:12.000 And I was like, what do I need security for?
00:08:14.000 I'm just speaking on a campus.
00:08:15.000 Who cares?
00:08:16.000 We get to the campus, and they had already tried to cancel my speech because of security.
00:08:19.000 And I said, I'm coming anyway, so tough.
00:08:22.000 I had to be escorted in by 20 armed police officers.
00:08:25.000 I had to be escorted off campus by motorcycle cops flashing their lights.
00:08:29.000 There were 300 students who had blocked all of the entrances, were physically assaulting people trying to get into the theater.
00:08:34.000 The police had to sneak the students in two by two into the theater.
00:08:37.000 They told them that until I left the campus, they couldn't actually let the kids out of the theater because they were afraid that if they let the kids out of the theater, they'd be attacked as they were released.
00:08:45.000 That one was pretty wild.
00:08:46.000 So after that, it was like, okay, well, I guess the security is necessary.
00:08:49.000 Wow.
00:08:50.000 What is shifting?
00:08:51.000 What is ramping things up?
00:08:54.000 I think the identity politics is ramping things up.
00:08:56.000 So I think there's a new mentality out there.
00:08:58.000 It's this intersectionality politics on the left that says that there are a bunch of victim groups, basically.
00:09:04.000 There are blacks and Hispanics and gays and Jews and Asians.
00:09:06.000 They're all victim groups.
00:09:07.000 And we get all those people together to attack the system because the system is keeping them down.
00:09:12.000 And there's a hierarchy among these victim groups.
00:09:15.000 And if you are a straight white male, you're at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy in terms of viewpoints that should be acknowledged because you're the creators of this vast white supremacist system that keeps down everybody else.
00:09:24.000 If you're a black woman, you're near the top, right?
00:09:26.000 If you're LGBT, you're at the top.
00:09:28.000 If you're a white guy and you challenge the viewpoint of a black woman, your viewpoint is an attack on her identity.
00:09:34.000 And therefore, she has the right to shut you down.
00:09:37.000 And so the idea is that your words are violence to her identity and therefore she has the right to react.
00:09:44.000 This is the term you hear on campus a lot is microaggressions.
00:09:46.000 This idea that my opinion microaggresses you.
00:09:49.000 Now, even that terminology I think is really stupid because normally in regular life we would say that's insulting and you said something I don't like.
00:09:57.000 The terminology microaggression suggests aggression, like I'm actually doing something aggressive to you.
00:10:02.000 And the rational response to someone aggressing you is to use physical force in response.
00:10:06.000 And so you start to see a more violent response.
00:10:09.000 I think it's been growing in our politics.
00:10:10.000 I think there's a reactionary side on the right that's growing.
00:10:13.000 If there's an identity politics on the left that says, you know, black identity politics, gay identity politics, female identity politics, I think you're starting to see in some areas of white identity politics that's almost formed in response.
00:10:23.000 Like, okay, well, if everybody else gets to have their identity politics, why can't we defend ourselves on those same grounds?
00:10:28.000 I hate that shit.
00:10:29.000 I mean, I think it's terrible.
00:10:30.000 I hate that shit too, and I would like to find the person who invented the term microaggression.
00:10:35.000 Because that fucker, whoever it was, they created quite a mess.
00:10:40.000 I'm sure you saw what happened at Evergreen with Brett Weinstein, where literally the left is eating itself, and that's where it gets crazy.
00:10:46.000 It's like you're not progressive enough, unless you're literally submitting to leaving your class because you're white.
00:10:54.000 Like, you can't be there because you're white.
00:10:56.000 They want a day of absence, meaning the professors, the white people.
00:11:00.000 And then when you don't do it, you're somehow another racist and a Nazi.
00:11:04.000 I mean, the whole thing was very bizarre to watch, but...
00:11:12.000 Yeah.
00:11:27.000 With that woman, what was her name, Crick?
00:11:29.000 Was that woman who got- Melissa, Melissa Click, yeah.
00:11:32.000 Yeah, whatever her name was.
00:11:33.000 When you see it in video, when you see her on video saying, can we get some muscle over here?
00:11:38.000 Exactly.
00:11:39.000 Like, this is fucking insane.
00:11:41.000 Like, you're telling a photographer, and by the way, a minority, an Asian man.
00:11:46.000 Yeah, he's an Asian guy, yeah.
00:11:46.000 Asian man taking photos of a public place that you've created some safe space.
00:11:52.000 But it's...
00:11:53.000 This weird thing where half of it is identity politics, but it's also wrapped up in this need to control people and control people's behavior, control their vernacular, control the way they communicate and how much you give in to groupthink.
00:12:10.000 It's weird.
00:12:12.000 It's scary.
00:12:13.000 And Jonathan Haidt, who's a social psychologist over at NYU, he did a really good piece for The Atlantic in 2015 about this phenomenon, this kind of safe space trigger warning phenomenon, this idea that you must never be forced into a position where someone has an idea that opposes yours.
00:12:26.000 And what he said is it basically makes people crazy.
00:12:28.000 You know, it actually makes you crazy.
00:12:30.000 The idea in psychology is that if you have a chain of thoughts, Leading to a bad outcome.
00:12:34.000 If you're depressed, right?
00:12:35.000 If you're depressive, then you have a chain of thoughts leading to a bad outcome.
00:12:38.000 The way that psychologists deal with that is with cognitive behavioral therapy.
00:12:41.000 They say, okay, where in this chain of thoughts are you going wrong?
00:12:43.000 Are you attributing to somebody a motive they don't have?
00:12:45.000 Is your wife really being nasty or is it you just attributing nasty to her and that's why you're getting depressed, you're spinning off, right?
00:12:52.000 Try to control your own chain of thoughts.
00:12:53.000 What the microaggression trigger warning culture does is it actually grants value.
00:12:57.000 The more you are offended, the more value you are granted.
00:13:00.000 And therefore, you have actually an interest in being offended.
00:13:02.000 We give you awards if you're offended.
00:13:05.000 You're treasured if you're offended.
00:13:06.000 Because it demonstrates that you're woke, right?
00:13:08.000 The more you are offended, the more we can show that you are woke.
00:13:11.000 And because you are woke, therefore, you're granted this virtue.
00:13:14.000 You get to lord it over everyone else.
00:13:16.000 I mean, I say in my speeches, if we could somehow identify, like, the LGBT, half black, half Hispanic, one-quarter Native American...
00:13:24.000 Little person.
00:13:25.000 You know, then we would finally have the person who we could go to to answer all of our questions because their identity would be unquestionable.
00:13:30.000 It'd be Yoda.
00:13:31.000 Right.
00:13:32.000 If we could find Yoda, we could just get rid of democracy and discussion all together.
00:13:35.000 He could just rule from on high.
00:13:37.000 He, she.
00:13:37.000 I don't want to put a gender on Yoda.
00:13:39.000 Right.
00:13:39.000 I don't think Yoda's gender.
00:13:41.000 Yoda?
00:13:42.000 Yoda's a dude, right?
00:13:43.000 It's gotta be a guy with a deep voice.
00:13:45.000 Maybe we're being rude by insisting.
00:13:47.000 I don't know.
00:13:47.000 But yeah, you're absolutely right.
00:13:49.000 No one's left enough.
00:13:52.000 Yeah, it's...
00:13:53.000 I don't know where the limit is.
00:13:55.000 And they're so far left that they've actually made common cause with the people they hate, right?
00:13:59.000 So when they talk about safe spaces...
00:14:01.000 In Missouri, you had all these black students protesting.
00:14:04.000 And they actually said, we don't want white people who think like us and who want to help us in our safe spaces.
00:14:09.000 We feel insulted by that.
00:14:11.000 And I just thought to myself, well, the KKK agrees.
00:14:13.000 Like, if you want to do safe spaces for separate races, I can find some Jim Crow racists who are totally up for that from, like, 1962. Right?
00:14:20.000 Well there's the really bizarre statement that I've heard over and over again that black people cannot be racist against white people because they don't have any power over white people.
00:14:28.000 Yes.
00:14:31.000 Wow.
00:14:32.000 Which is just...
00:14:32.000 It's inane.
00:14:33.000 I mean, it's an inane statement.
00:14:35.000 This idea that you have to have power in the superstructure in order for you even to be racist.
00:14:40.000 I can understand the argument if they said, look, you being racist is not connected to racist action.
00:14:45.000 If you don't have the capacity for action that affects people, then your personal racism is not as important as the racism of people in power.
00:14:52.000 That at least is an argument.
00:14:53.000 But the idea that you can't be racist at all if you're black because black people don't have enough power.
00:14:59.000 First of all, The idea that black people have no power in the United States is utterly crazy.
00:15:03.000 I mean, it's utterly crazy.
00:15:04.000 Well, especially when it was going on where a black man was the president.
00:15:06.000 Well, Obama was president.
00:15:07.000 The Attorney General was president.
00:15:09.000 I always said this about Baltimore.
00:15:10.000 We kept hearing, you know, Baltimore, right, where they had the riots.
00:15:13.000 They had riots.
00:15:14.000 And they were saying, well, the Baltimore PD, you know, they're cracking down on black people.
00:15:17.000 Okay, the chief of police was black.
00:15:19.000 The majority of the city council was black and Democrat.
00:15:22.000 The district attorney who was prosecuting the case was black.
00:15:26.000 The majority of the police department was minority.
00:15:28.000 The attorney general of the United States was black.
00:15:29.000 The president of the United States was black.
00:15:31.000 But the majority of the city of Baltimore is black.
00:15:34.000 But apparently it's the white guy's fault.
00:15:35.000 At some point, you're going to have to make your ideas actually work in concert with reality.
00:15:41.000 I can't do this with you.
00:15:43.000 Do you ever step back and look at...
00:15:46.000 This trend and look at what's going on in popular culture and look at what's going on with identity politics and this war between the left and the right and wonder where it's going.
00:15:56.000 I mean, it feels like the people on the left are completely emboldened by the fact that you have this guy in office who has said things like grab him by the pussy and he lies all the time and makes fun of people's plastic surgery.
00:16:11.000 You think that having this guy in this position I guess in some way emboldens them and makes them even more convinced the fact they're right, you know, fight, put up the resistance and hashtag resistance, hashtag resist.
00:16:27.000 It's all over the place.
00:16:28.000 Where does this go?
00:16:30.000 I think, well, no place good.
00:16:31.000 I think what's happening, and it's one of the things that I personally am not a fan of, and this goes all the way back to the Piers Morgan debate that you mentioned.
00:16:37.000 I mean, I started off that debate with Piers Morgan.
00:16:39.000 Saying to him, you don't get to attribute intent to me that I don't have, right?
00:16:43.000 You're standing on the graves of the Kids of Sandy Hook in order to promote your political agenda, implying I don't care enough about dead kids because I don't agree with you.
00:16:50.000 That is the sweet spot where a lot of people like to live, which is, if we disagree on politics, it's because you're an asshole.
00:16:56.000 It's not because we disagree on the best method to get to the goal or we have different goals.
00:17:00.000 It's because you're a bad person.
00:17:02.000 And I think that what you're seeing is with Trump, there's an attempt to cast all of his voters as people who love all of the things that are bad that he does and says.
00:17:11.000 It's not that they voted for him because they thought Hillary Clinton was the worst presidential candidate in the history of America, which is true.
00:17:16.000 They voted for him because they liked the grab him by the P word stuff.
00:17:19.000 They voted for him because they like that he's vulgar and he lies a lot.
00:17:22.000 They voted for him because they are bad people, right?
00:17:25.000 This is why people misread, I think, Hillary Clinton's deplorable speech.
00:17:28.000 The implication was, okay, everybody who voted for Trump is a bad human being.
00:17:32.000 They tried this with Romney, too.
00:17:34.000 I mean, they tried to castigate Romney, who's Whatever you can say about Mitt Romney.
00:17:37.000 Mitt Romney was maybe the most honorable person ever to run for the presidency.
00:17:40.000 They tried to cast him, as Joe Biden said, a guy who wants to put y'all back in chains.
00:17:43.000 He said that he straps dogs to the top of his car.
00:17:47.000 He's an evil, nasty guy.
00:17:48.000 Did he really say that?
00:17:49.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:17:50.000 This was a big issue in the campaign.
00:17:51.000 He straps dogs?
00:17:52.000 So there was a story, I think it was in the Boston Globe, about how back in 1982, he went on a family vacation, and when they were traveling, he put the dog in a cage and put the dog on the top of his car.
00:18:02.000 And this was like a big campaign issue, right?
00:18:04.000 You remember binders full of women?
00:18:06.000 Yeah, I remember that.
00:18:07.000 The 47% number, don't pay attention to them.
00:18:10.000 Right, exactly.
00:18:10.000 He's mean, he hates the poor, he hates women.
00:18:11.000 The binders full of women thing was particularly stupid because the entire point he was making is that I was trying to recruit women to my administration so they would bring binders full of female resumes to me so I could staff more women.
00:18:21.000 And they turned it into binders full of women.
00:18:22.000 He's like, Hugh Hefner.
00:18:23.000 Yeah, Mitt Romney?
00:18:24.000 Like, really?
00:18:25.000 So this attempt to castigate the other side is really bad.
00:18:28.000 And I think that you see some of that on the right, but I think it's more reactionary.
00:18:32.000 I think that the unearned moral superiority that the left likes to kind of wallow in, I think that's more on the left than on the right, although I think that there is an attempt by some on the right now in response to do some of that.
00:18:42.000 Well, it becomes these sticking points that you use to win, you know, and it becomes something that people repeat over and over again, you know, like the deplorable thing.
00:18:50.000 Racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe.
00:18:52.000 Yeah.
00:18:52.000 I was walking down New York City, down the street, right after Trump won when they were protesting, and there was this guy right next to me fucking screaming.
00:19:01.000 He wasn't even in the actual parade itself.
00:19:03.000 He was on the sidewalk, but he was screaming, Donald Trump, KKK, racist, sexist, anti-gay.
00:19:12.000 He had just boiled it down to this thing, but the best part about it was he saw a black guy coming towards him, and he just started screaming, Black Lives Matter!
00:19:20.000 Black Lives Matter!
00:19:25.000 I saw him.
00:19:26.000 I saw his soul.
00:19:27.000 In that one move, that shift to screaming Black Lives Matter when he saw a black guy.
00:19:34.000 There's the intersectionality for you, right?
00:19:35.000 You have to know how to appeal to every racial group on the basis of a stereotype.
00:19:39.000 It could have been Thomas Sowell.
00:19:40.000 He wouldn't have known.
00:19:41.000 Yeah.
00:19:42.000 It's almost like the laziness in having the ability to communicate is one thing, but having the ability to express a complete thought that covers something as nuanced and as complex as American politics in 2017, That's too hard.
00:19:58.000 So let's just yell out, Donald Trump, KKK! And this ability to boil down what's the difference between the left and the right to a little statement, or a bucket of deplorable, a basket of deplorables, whatever it is, binders of women.
00:20:13.000 It's so tempting, because it's so powerful that it works.
00:20:17.000 You can put it on the back of a bumper sticker.
00:20:19.000 I think we've also been shaped a little bit by...
00:20:21.000 We all live in Hollywood.
00:20:23.000 I mean, you live in Hollywood.
00:20:23.000 I live in Hollywood.
00:20:24.000 That means that, and I think all of America lives in that milieu because everyone watches TV, everybody watches movies.
00:20:29.000 So when we do politics, we tend to see it through the prism of House of Cards or any of the other political movies you've ever seen.
00:20:36.000 And that means there's a bad guy, right?
00:20:38.000 There's a bad guy.
00:20:39.000 There's a villain.
00:20:39.000 And the villain has to, it can't just be that the villain is somebody who's incompetent.
00:20:42.000 Usually in politics, if somebody is bad, sometimes they have a malevolent point of view, but that's pretty rare.
00:20:48.000 Usually it's somebody who's misguided, maybe they have some bad ideas.
00:20:50.000 Usually they're just stupid or incompetent.
00:20:53.000 This is what I keep saying to people who oppose Trump.
00:20:55.000 Why are you attributing to him malice when stupidity would do?
00:20:59.000 You keep saying that everything Trump is doing is out of some sort of malicious genius.
00:21:03.000 Are we watching the same film?
00:21:05.000 Like, if you have a problem with Trump, it seems to...
00:21:07.000 I have a solution for the left, by the way.
00:21:09.000 If they really hate Trump this much...
00:21:10.000 Listen, I thought Obama was a crappy president.
00:21:12.000 I have a deal.
00:21:13.000 How about we just minimize the power of Washington, D.C., and then we don't have to give a crap who's the president of the United States?
00:21:18.000 You think anybody in 1832 really cared who the president was?
00:21:20.000 It had no impact on their lives.
00:21:21.000 But now the presidency has this outsized impact.
00:21:24.000 We care about Washington all the time.
00:21:26.000 We treat it...
00:21:26.000 I mean, the truth is we watch it for fun.
00:21:28.000 I mean, right now, the last week particularly, with Scaramucci, you know, it's impossible.
00:21:32.000 It's impossible not to watch it for fun, but it's actually kind of serious business.
00:21:37.000 Like, there are other world leaders who are actually looking at this like, this impacts my nation.
00:21:40.000 For us, we look at it and we go, well, I wonder what's on TV on tonight's episode of Trump the series.
00:21:45.000 Well, when you say reduce the power of the president, I think there's a lot of people that would think that would be a great idea, because having one person has the authority over 300-plus million people, it is kind of ridiculous at this point in time.
00:21:55.000 But how would you go about doing that?
00:21:57.000 Like, what would be the best way to implement something like that?
00:21:59.000 I mean, it really isn't just the presidency.
00:22:01.000 You'd have to reduce the power of Congress as well.
00:22:03.000 I mean, you'd have to go back to a federalist-based system where localities and states have more power over local issues and the federal government just isn't that powerful.
00:22:12.000 Because what's happened basically in the constitutional structure, the federal government was never supposed to be anywhere near this big.
00:22:18.000 There are very certain delegated powers in the Constitution of the United States that Congress has, and they are very small.
00:22:23.000 I mean, it's things like building post offices and interstate roads and regulating interstate commerce.
00:22:28.000 But the idea that they could regulate, you know, your toilet flushing is just, that's silly.
00:22:32.000 I mean, the founders would have thought that was ridiculous.
00:22:34.000 Yet you have a federal government that's that big.
00:22:36.000 So Congress regulates on that.
00:22:38.000 But if you're in Congress, the last thing you want is to be answerable for that.
00:22:42.000 So what you do instead is you drop vague statutes, right?
00:22:44.000 You say things like, We hope that we're passing a law that says that we should fix the environment.
00:22:48.000 And then you kick it over to the executive branch.
00:22:50.000 And the executive branch, you know, run by President Trump or President Obama, has a bunch of executive branch agencies like the EPA. And the EPA puts together all these regulations that you've never seen, never heard of, you never elected these people.
00:23:01.000 They put together all the regulations.
00:23:03.000 And then those are the ones that actually govern your lives.
00:23:05.000 So if you're in Congress and things go bad, you say, well, that's not what I meant to do.
00:23:09.000 I told them to do good stuff.
00:23:11.000 And the bureaucrats who are not elected don't have to care.
00:23:13.000 So basically you have everyone kicking the can to the other person for purposes of responsibility.
00:23:18.000 The only way this is going to happen is if the American people just decide they're sick of the federal government running all this stuff, and they start actively working to elect people who want to minimize their own power, which is difficult.
00:23:29.000 I mean, most people in power don't want to minimize their own power.
00:23:32.000 Yeah, that seems almost impossible.
00:23:33.000 It seems like no one who's worked so hard to get to the top of the game is going to try to...
00:23:39.000 The other way to do it is to elect people on the state level who are pretty zealous about their own authority.
00:23:44.000 You've seen this from Greg Abbott in Texas, that every so often he'll say to the federal government, listen, you're telling me to do something?
00:23:49.000 Go screw yourselves.
00:23:50.000 What are you going to do about it?
00:23:52.000 Well, Texas is a weird one.
00:23:53.000 They're almost ready to leave.
00:23:56.000 Like, at any point in time, they're ready to put a fence up and go, fuck you.
00:24:00.000 I mean, weren't they for the longest time?
00:24:02.000 They were not really a state, right?
00:24:05.000 Yeah, they're still called the Republic of Texas, right?
00:24:07.000 So, yeah, I mean, people in Texas, I mean, it's a wonderful state.
00:24:11.000 I love that when you drive through Texas, every single store is called Lone Star...
00:24:16.000 You know, Lone Star Brewery or Texas this.
00:24:18.000 Everything is named after the state.
00:24:20.000 Like, nothing is really named after the country.
00:24:21.000 It's all named after the state.
00:24:22.000 Like, a lot of state pride in Texas.
00:24:24.000 There's a lot of state pride.
00:24:25.000 Maybe more than any place else I've ever been.
00:24:27.000 Yeah, well, not a lot of state pride in California because everybody's a transplant.
00:24:30.000 Yeah.
00:24:30.000 Well, there's some, you know, people who got here and it represents something that they always wanted.
00:24:36.000 You know, some sort of a liberal paradise where you could get famous for doing nothing.
00:24:42.000 Yeah.
00:24:44.000 I feel like there's some city pride, like there's Hollywood pride, there's San Jose pride, but like California pride?
00:24:49.000 I mean, the people who run the state are idiots.
00:24:51.000 Well, California's so confused.
00:24:52.000 I mean, we have a grizzly bear on our flag, but we don't have grizzly bears.
00:24:56.000 We have a team called the Los Angeles Lakers, not a lake in the state, right?
00:25:01.000 Yeah, our lakes are all man-made.
00:25:02.000 We have to keep pumping water in them because they'd fucking dry up.
00:25:04.000 Our river is just a giant concrete.
00:25:07.000 Yeah.
00:25:08.000 Ravine.
00:25:08.000 The L.A. River is hilarious.
00:25:10.000 When I've shown people the L.A. River, I'm like, that's the L.A. River.
00:25:13.000 They're like, shut up.
00:25:14.000 Yeah, the romantic and scenic L.A. River.
00:25:15.000 It's a real river.
00:25:17.000 Like, that's not a river.
00:25:18.000 No, no, no, it's the L.A. River.
00:25:19.000 Like, it just, it is L.A. It's a fucking concrete, shitty slide for water.
00:25:28.000 This city is so dirty.
00:25:30.000 I've grown up my entire life here.
00:25:32.000 I was born in Burbank, grew up in North Hollywood.
00:25:34.000 I've lived here my entire life.
00:25:36.000 The first time I realized I liked it is when I moved to Boston for law school, because at least the weather here is good.
00:25:40.000 But yeah, it's gotten so shabby lately.
00:25:42.000 It's such a shabby city.
00:25:44.000 The weather's amazing, but have you ever been to Mexico City?
00:25:47.000 No.
00:25:48.000 I've been a couple times for UFC events.
00:25:49.000 I'm not going back.
00:25:51.000 Because I would get headaches from the pollution.
00:25:53.000 And what Mexico City to me is, is like LA in the future, but with zero respect for the traffic lights.
00:26:00.000 When I mean zero, I've never seen anything like that.
00:26:02.000 I don't like it.
00:26:03.000 It's crazy.
00:26:03.000 They're very nice people.
00:26:04.000 Everybody's worried about getting kidnapped over there.
00:26:06.000 I find Mexican people to be some of the nicest people and real friendly and easy to get along with, but they don't give a fuck about traffic lights.
00:26:14.000 When we were stuck in traffic, like there's bumper to bumper and it's a green light going this way.
00:26:19.000 Cars just go in front of you and they just sort of make their way through and people hit the brakes and they make their way through the intersection.
00:26:26.000 It's a straight up red light and they just go.
00:26:28.000 And it's not just one.
00:26:29.000 One guy goes, and another guy goes behind him, and then you got like 20 cars, and it's just gridlock everywhere.
00:26:35.000 It's funny you say this, but it's actually indicative of why the United States works, that people actually follow traffic lights.
00:26:41.000 It's true in Italy also.
00:26:42.000 It's true in Israel.
00:26:44.000 When I visited Israel with my wife when we got married, no one pays attention to the traffic rules.
00:26:49.000 Everyone's honking their horns at each other.
00:26:50.000 I'm American.
00:26:51.000 I'm like, why are these people so rude all the time?
00:26:53.000 And my wife's like, honk the horn.
00:26:54.000 She's Israeli.
00:26:55.000 But it is why, in America, because we have a baseline, and this is what I think is breaking down, actually, so not to get too deep on a point about Mexican city traffic, but I think that, you know, the country was based on this idea.
00:27:07.000 There's a social fabric.
00:27:08.000 We all have respect for each other enough that we're going to follow the basic rules of the game.
00:27:11.000 And that's true as far as traffic lights.
00:27:13.000 It's true as far as financial dealings with one another.
00:27:16.000 And when you lose that, when you lose the basic respect for the guy who lives next to you, you know, you need to get through the red light.
00:27:22.000 You know, screw him.
00:27:22.000 It doesn't matter if it's red.
00:27:23.000 Then it's kind of indicative of a culture in collapse generally when small rules start to go broken.
00:27:30.000 Like in Italy, the problem in Italy is that 50% of their economy is black market because they have high tax rates and no one pays them.
00:27:36.000 You're starting to see that in California too.
00:27:37.000 California has the highest taxes in the country by far.
00:27:40.000 We also have the number one rate of deductions.
00:27:42.000 So we pass all these high taxes so we can congratulate ourselves for social justice.
00:27:47.000 And then we avoid all the taxes as much as we possibly can.
00:27:49.000 It's wonderful for the economy.
00:27:50.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:27:52.000 Those people are making a frickin' fortune.
00:27:54.000 Well, I just also feel like when you get a giant number of people smashed into a small area, and with LA, it's not even a small area.
00:28:01.000 It includes Greater Orange County, and it goes into the Conejo Valley, and it's just like there's so many of us.
00:28:07.000 There's so many.
00:28:08.000 It's almost like you get that sort of diffusion of responsibility thing where there's just too many people to care about and you lose this feeling of value that you have for fellow people.
00:28:19.000 I lived in Boulder for a little while.
00:28:21.000 And when I lived there, the People's Republic of Boulder, you want to talk about lefties.
00:28:25.000 Oh, yeah.
00:28:25.000 Holy shit.
00:28:25.000 If you had a right-wing anything on your lawn, like a sign for someone running for it, they would take it down.
00:28:32.000 Wow.
00:28:32.000 They'd literally take things down.
00:28:34.000 But when I was there, I was amazed at how many people are polite when they drive and they wave.
00:28:40.000 There's only 100,000 people.
00:28:42.000 Exactly.
00:28:42.000 So that's what I was going to say.
00:28:44.000 I'm looking it up while we're sitting here.
00:28:45.000 It's like 110,000 people in Boulder, and the population of L.A. County is 10 million people.
00:28:49.000 It's at least.
00:28:51.000 Plus Mexicans.
00:28:51.000 You've got to count Mexicans, and then you've got to count everybody's connected to all the other counties around it.
00:28:56.000 It's not like there's some border.
00:28:58.000 You just drive around.
00:29:00.000 That's exactly right.
00:29:02.000 The first time I visited Oklahoma, I had this.
00:29:04.000 I was in Oklahoma for doing a radio show.
00:29:06.000 Southern California, look at that, 23.77 million.
00:29:09.000 Sorry, go ahead.
00:29:10.000 I'm in Oklahoma, and I'm walking down the street, and the first thing that, and some lady and I catch eyes.
00:29:16.000 Now, in L.A., you're from L.A., you look away, right?
00:29:19.000 You don't want to get stabbed.
00:29:21.000 If you catch eyes with somebody, it's rude.
00:29:23.000 You don't catch eyes with people in L.A. And I'm walking down the street, we catch eyes, the lady goes, how are you?
00:29:28.000 I called my father.
00:29:29.000 I was like, where am I? What's going on here?
00:29:31.000 Like, this is not regular.
00:29:32.000 But I do think that there is something to the idea that if you have too many people in too small a space, we're all up in each other's business so much that it's very hard to say to people, okay, liberty, stay away from one another, leave each other alone.
00:29:44.000 It's like, yeah, but he lives next door and he's a jackass.
00:29:46.000 Hate that guy.
00:29:47.000 Because he's, like, right next to you.
00:29:49.000 In Oklahoma, the guy next to you is three miles down the road.
00:29:51.000 There's that.
00:29:52.000 And there's also...
00:29:53.000 It's been replicated in rat population density studies that you get more mental illness.
00:29:58.000 You get more weird, aggressive behavior when they stack rats in these cubicles and then just jam them closer and closer together.
00:30:07.000 And that's exactly what's happening with people.
00:30:10.000 Manhattan is famous for it.
00:30:12.000 I mean, I enjoy visiting Manhattan.
00:30:14.000 And every time I'm there, I'm always like, no, I can't...
00:30:17.000 I can't live here.
00:30:18.000 There's just too many humans.
00:30:19.000 I was there last week, and I like the sky, so you can't actually see the sky in Manhattan, right?
00:30:23.000 I mean, you just see these brick buildings, you know, 25 stories high.
00:30:27.000 And I noticed that we were walking past the store, and there was a shirt on sale.
00:30:31.000 And the shirt's entire text was, F-U-U-F-ing F. And I thought, only in New York could you sell this, right?
00:30:36.000 I mean, you try to take this anywhere else, and people would have been like, wait, what now?
00:30:40.000 But New York, I'm sure that's a bestseller.
00:30:41.000 That's why, honestly, I think it's one of the reasons why Trump won, is because he's basically just a guy from New York.
00:30:47.000 He's like a taxi driver from New York who's really, really wealthy.
00:30:50.000 And, you know, he does what a taxi driver from New York would do if you're really, really wealthy.
00:30:53.000 He marries models and builds gold toilets and all this kind of stuff.
00:30:56.000 And people in the rest of the country actually take that language seriously.
00:30:59.000 So when he says stuff like, yeah, we're going to bomb the shit out of him.
00:31:02.000 People in New York are like, yeah, that's what we do, you know?
00:31:05.000 And people in Oklahoma are like, wow, he's serious.
00:31:07.000 Like, that's actually going to happen.
00:31:09.000 And it's like, probably not.
00:31:11.000 Probably that's just how people from New York kind of talk.
00:31:13.000 We saw this last week, right?
00:31:15.000 He was talking about the cops, and he was saying this thing about...
00:31:17.000 Covering their heads before they put them in the car.
00:31:18.000 Yeah, covering their...
00:31:19.000 He's talking like a Long Islander.
00:31:20.000 You know, he's talking about like, you know, they throw him in the back of the paddy wagon and we do all the, and you don't put your head on the, fine, they bump their head, they just killed someone.
00:31:28.000 And so the entire media went, now how dare he?
00:31:30.000 He's talking about how cops should rough people up.
00:31:32.000 Listen, is it appropriate for the President of the United States to talk like that about treatment of suspects?
00:31:36.000 No.
00:31:36.000 Are we supposed to take this super seriously?
00:31:38.000 Like Trump is actually recommending a policy change with regard to...
00:31:41.000 He's working the room.
00:31:42.000 That's what he does.
00:31:43.000 He works the room.
00:31:44.000 He's a New York real estate guy who works the room.
00:31:46.000 And more than anything else, if you understand New York and you understand LA, you understand Trump.
00:31:50.000 He's not a giant mystery.
00:31:51.000 He's just any other reality TV star.
00:31:54.000 He's a reality.
00:31:55.000 He's a marketing image guy.
00:31:56.000 I mean, that's what he does.
00:31:57.000 Like, he's not even that great at real estate.
00:31:59.000 He puts his name on the side.
00:31:59.000 He brands himself.
00:32:00.000 He puts his name on the side of buildings.
00:32:01.000 They pay him not to be involved in the real estate business so they can put Trump on the side of his hotels.
00:32:06.000 Great.
00:32:07.000 I mean, that's what he does.
00:32:08.000 That's why I'm kind of shocked that he's kind of crappy at the imaging as far as being a president.
00:32:11.000 You'd imagine that he would be better at this part of it, at least.
00:32:13.000 I just think he didn't understand the volume of hate that was going to come his way.
00:32:18.000 And I think he's such an egomaniac, he has a hard time dealing with it.
00:32:21.000 He has a hard time separating.
00:32:22.000 And that's one of the things that I've read about him, that he's getting better at getting away from the comments and not reading comments on Twitter.
00:32:29.000 But he fucking blocks people.
00:32:31.000 You know about that.
00:32:33.000 Yeah, somebody sued him, yeah.
00:32:34.000 Well, there's a group of people suing them, and now they're actually starting to rule against public officials, people who are in the public light, being able to block citizens and having their own opinion about what this person is doing or not doing.
00:32:47.000 So then you have to say, well, are you allowed to be vulgar?
00:32:50.000 Towards the president?
00:32:51.000 I mean, how far does that go?
00:32:53.000 I mean, what are you allowed to say?
00:32:54.000 I mean, my view is you should be able to say whatever the hell you want about anybody.
00:32:57.000 But you can't threaten them, obviously.
00:32:58.000 Well, you can't threaten them, obviously.
00:32:59.000 But it does go more to the level of pettiness.
00:33:03.000 He's the most powerful man on the planet, and he's busy blocking people on Twitter at 3 o'clock in the morning.
00:33:08.000 Well, that whole Joe Scarborough and what is her name?
00:33:11.000 Mika Brzezinski.
00:33:11.000 That was just insane.
00:33:12.000 The bloody face thing.
00:33:13.000 He was saying that she sh- This is the fucking president.
00:33:16.000 He's saying she showed up with bloody scars or she was bleeding from her recent facelift.
00:33:22.000 Exactly.
00:33:23.000 And first of all, it turns out that it probably wasn't true.
00:33:26.000 Of course it wasn't true!
00:33:27.000 I mean- Who the fuck goes out when you're bleeding?
00:33:30.000 I agree with you.
00:33:31.000 I agree with you.
00:33:33.000 I wrote a piece in National Review about this.
00:33:36.000 You say that the level of hatred directed toward Trump is warping Trump.
00:33:39.000 I think that it's also warping some people on my side of the aisle who are so interested in the fight that they're less interested in advancing the policies that I'd like to see achieved.
00:33:48.000 I think there's a whole group of people where, let's say that Trump would just resign tomorrow.
00:33:51.000 He'd say, you know what?
00:33:51.000 I've had it.
00:33:52.000 Screw it.
00:33:52.000 I'm out.
00:33:53.000 And Mike Pence becomes president.
00:33:54.000 And then Mike Pence proceeds to do all the things conservatives want him to do.
00:33:57.000 You know, we get tax reform and we limit immigration and we do all of these things.
00:34:02.000 But he does not tweet about Mika Brzezinski's bloody face.
00:34:05.000 I think there's a whole group of people on the right who'd be pissed.
00:34:07.000 They'd miss it.
00:34:09.000 Right.
00:34:09.000 Especially now, because it's fun.
00:34:11.000 Exactly.
00:34:11.000 What they want is somebody who pisses off the left more than beats the left.
00:34:15.000 Pisses them off.
00:34:16.000 If you piss off the left...
00:34:17.000 I think Obama sort of trolled some of the right into insanity.
00:34:20.000 I think there are a lot of people on our side where it's like...
00:34:22.000 This jerk.
00:34:23.000 He keeps saying things just to piss us off.
00:34:25.000 And Obama did do some of that.
00:34:27.000 And so Trump is kind of a Twitter troll.
00:34:29.000 And so he does the same thing.
00:34:30.000 We're like, yeah, that's awesome.
00:34:33.000 Two days ago, yesterday, there was a report that Trump said that he thinks the White House is shabby.
00:34:38.000 Now, I can say, as somebody on the conservative right my entire life, if Obama said that, we would not let him forget that for 1,000 years.
00:34:43.000 That the White House is shabby.
00:34:45.000 I mean, it's an ass move to say that the People's House is shabby.
00:34:48.000 First of all, it's a mansion.
00:34:50.000 And second of all, this is the most iconic building on the face of the planet.
00:34:54.000 Oh, it's shabby.
00:34:55.000 What was he saying it was shabby?
00:34:57.000 They were asking him why he visits his golf courses so much.
00:35:01.000 And he said, oh, because my golf courses are nicer, because the White House is shabby.
00:35:06.000 But there are people on the right who are like, fine, it's funny.
00:35:09.000 At least he's trolling the left.
00:35:10.000 At least it's ticking them off.
00:35:11.000 Guys, ticking off the left is not a substitute for defeating the left if you actually care about defeating the left.
00:35:16.000 This is one of the things that drives me nuts, because my life goal has been to promulgate particular ideas, not just to piss off the left, but I think that in the fight, there are a lot of people who have fallen into the trap of thinking these two things are identical, right?
00:35:28.000 You piss off the left, that means you're winning.
00:35:30.000 It's like, no, pissing off the left may be part of it, but that's not how you win.
00:35:35.000 You win by saying things that are true, and if they get pissed, they get pissed.
00:35:37.000 Well, my good friend Bill Burr did this piece about Obama back when Obama was mocking Trump and saying, the one thing that I am that you'll never be is the President of the United States.
00:35:48.000 The crowd went nuts.
00:35:49.000 Remember when he did that?
00:35:50.000 And Obama was saying this on stage, and you see Trump in the audience boiling with his big frog, double chin, just sitting there eating it all, and that fucking stuck in his craw.
00:36:03.000 There's a whole story that came out from BuzzFeed about his interaction with a guy named McKay Coppins, a reporter for BuzzFeed, in which McKay was basically saying to Trump, like, you're a joke.
00:36:12.000 You're not going to run.
00:36:13.000 I think Trump ran just because he was sick of people telling him that he wasn't going to be president.
00:36:18.000 I really think that's half of what drives him.
00:36:20.000 That doesn't mean that he can't do good things.
00:36:22.000 I hope he does do good things.
00:36:23.000 He's the president.
00:36:23.000 I want every president to do things I like.
00:36:26.000 He's going to have to get it under control a little bit because he was willing to keep the Mooch.
00:36:31.000 I mean, the Mooch was only ousted because of John Kelly, and the Mooch is it.
00:36:35.000 What did the Mooch say?
00:36:37.000 It was about Steve Bannon sucking his own cock?
00:36:40.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:36:41.000 About him performing acts of...
00:36:42.000 Why would he think that he could say that once he's in the office?
00:36:45.000 First of all, why would he think that Steve Bannon could even possibly do that?
00:36:47.000 I mean, Bannon's not that flexible.
00:36:48.000 I know Steve.
00:36:49.000 That's not something in Steve's repertoire.
00:36:51.000 Maybe he's got a giant unit.
00:36:53.000 But it doesn't matter, just the idea that he would think, I mean, he must be emboldened by the fact that Trump has said so many outrageous things.
00:37:00.000 Well, I mean, there were reports from the New York Post that he actually, that Trump liked it.
00:37:03.000 That all that happened is that there was so much blowback that he had to replace Kelly, and he puts Kelly in there, and Kelly's like, you can't do this.
00:37:09.000 Right.
00:37:10.000 And Trump's like, okay, fine.
00:37:12.000 But doesn't it seem more crazy to fire a guy after 10 days than it does to sit him down and say, hey man, don't say that again.
00:37:19.000 Apologize.
00:37:19.000 Let's move forward.
00:37:20.000 That's what they should have done the next day.
00:37:21.000 But the problem is he'd been doing it for a week at that point.
00:37:24.000 He was out there saying that Reince Priebus was leaking on the president and was an enemy of the president for a week.
00:37:28.000 And he was saying that he was going to get him fired.
00:37:30.000 Right.
00:37:30.000 And at the same time, remember, this is the same week that Trump himself is tweeting out that Attorney General Sessions, who is his most loyal supporter for a year and a half, that that guy is like a traitor.
00:37:39.000 Right.
00:37:39.000 And that he wishes he would go away.
00:37:41.000 Right.
00:37:41.000 Because he recused himself.
00:38:03.000 And Comey found out on television.
00:38:05.000 On TV, right?
00:38:05.000 Which is hilarious.
00:38:05.000 He sends an emissary to go to LA and give him a letter.
00:38:09.000 Everyone he fires has to be fired in the most roundabout.
00:38:12.000 I think the dirty little secret is I'm not sure Trump actually likes firing people.
00:38:16.000 Oh, wow.
00:38:17.000 I think he kind of likes torturing people, but I'm not sure that he actually likes firing them.
00:38:21.000 Well, he maybe doesn't like people being mad at him face to face.
00:38:25.000 I think that's it.
00:38:25.000 I think that's it.
00:38:25.000 He wants them to love him in front of his face.
00:38:27.000 So, like, when he's not there, you know, he can make a phone call.
00:38:30.000 Fire him!
00:38:31.000 You're fired, Jetson.
00:38:32.000 Hang up the phone.
00:38:33.000 You don't have to actually see the guy.
00:38:35.000 He wants that guy to like him.
00:38:37.000 Yeah.
00:38:38.000 The Comey thing was really bizarre because it was like, oh, you can do that?
00:38:43.000 This guy is looking into improprieties and you can just say, no, you can't do that anymore.
00:38:49.000 You're fired.
00:38:50.000 You can't look into the things I've done wrong.
00:38:52.000 Yeah.
00:38:52.000 Well, the way he did it was the stupid part.
00:38:54.000 So I was calling for Comey to be fired since last year.
00:38:57.000 I thought the way he handled the whole Hillary thing from beginning to end was terrible.
00:38:59.000 I thought that Trump should have replaced him before he became, you know, basically day one.
00:39:03.000 Here's my new cabinet.
00:39:04.000 Comey did a great job, you know, usher him out the door, bring in somebody new.
00:39:08.000 He kept him around.
00:39:09.000 And then the first thing he said to Comey, you remember, was when he met him, he said, you're more famous than I am.
00:39:14.000 Well, when Trump says that to you, You know, that's the writing on the wall right there.
00:39:19.000 First of all, it's not true.
00:39:20.000 But second of all, I think maybe there was also a part of the problem was that Comey's a giant.
00:39:25.000 Yes.
00:39:25.000 You know, Comey's, what is he, 6'8"?
00:39:28.000 6'8", 6'9", yeah, something like that.
00:39:29.000 Giant dude towered over Trump.
00:39:31.000 The whole thing is such a comedy.
00:39:32.000 And Comey's saying he was trying to hide in the curtains to avoid Trump.
00:39:36.000 You just see Herman Munster over there hiding in the curtains.
00:39:41.000 I'm enjoying the show.
00:39:43.000 I mean, it's wild.
00:39:45.000 If I didn't think that nuclear war was a possibility, I'd probably enjoy it more.
00:39:48.000 But if I see a fucking Korean missile headed our way, I'm going to be pissed.
00:39:52.000 When Comey was handling the email thing, what specifically did you not like about it?
00:39:57.000 What I thought was crazy was when he restarted or reopened the case because of Huma having used her Computer, with Anthony Wieners, all that stuff.
00:40:10.000 I was like, that's not enough.
00:40:11.000 That seems crazy.
00:40:12.000 Deleting the emails, to me, seemed like...
00:40:16.000 I had Mike Baker on from the CIA, and he said, essentially, anyone else would be in jail for what she did.
00:40:23.000 For sure.
00:40:23.000 For sure, right?
00:40:24.000 Well, Comey, so he screwed it up and then he re-screwed it up.
00:40:27.000 So when he originally said publicly, we're not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, he was doing something he didn't have the authority to do.
00:40:33.000 The FBI does not decide whether to prosecute people.
00:40:36.000 They refer the information to the DOJ and then the DOJ decides whether to prosecute people.
00:40:40.000 It was Attorney General Loretta Lynch's decision whether to prosecute or not.
00:40:43.000 The statute itself, I mean, I'm a lawyer, the statute itself did not say, do you have intent to commit espionage?
00:40:49.000 Do you have intent to make classified secrets public or expose them to the possibility of being made public?
00:40:55.000 Intent is not an element of the crime, right?
00:40:57.000 If you do it, it's a crime.
00:40:59.000 So my wife, she's a doctor, and that means that she is under HIPAA requirements.
00:41:03.000 There's no element under HIPAA that says that if she reveals somebody's, you know, proprietary medical information by accident, well, there's no intent, so she's okay.
00:41:11.000 That's not part of the statute.
00:41:12.000 If she brings somebody's medical records out to her car and somebody steals the medical records, you know, if she's working at the VA or something, that's a crime.
00:41:19.000 It doesn't matter if she intended to do it and just left it in her purse.
00:41:21.000 So Comey read the element of intent into the crime to get Hillary off, and then he said, okay, we're not going to prosecute this.
00:41:26.000 We're going to leave it alone.
00:41:28.000 He shouldn't have intervened in the first place.
00:41:29.000 Remember, he made an entire case basically for why she should be prosecuted.
00:41:32.000 And then at the end he goes, but we're, you know, but no, we're not going to do that.
00:41:35.000 He also said, we're going to keep Congress updated on any future development.
00:41:39.000 Well, you get to October and there's a future development.
00:41:41.000 They found this laptop with all sorts of information on it, with new emails from Hillary Clinton that they haven't seen before.
00:41:47.000 And now he has an obligation to inform Congress because he told them that he would.
00:41:50.000 And so he screws the pooch again.
00:41:52.000 Because he's afraid that if he doesn't reveal that information, Hillary goes on to win, and then it comes out there's something criminal, then people are going to blame him for Hillary winning and putting a criminal in the White House.
00:42:02.000 So instead he says, oh, well, I'll be fully transparent.
00:42:04.000 I have to honor my institution.
00:42:05.000 I'm going to put this out there.
00:42:07.000 Of course, then Hillary loses, and now he screwed up twice.
00:42:11.000 And then he gets into the White House and now he's supposed to be investigating the Trump-Russia stuff at the same time.
00:42:17.000 So now he's investigating basically both candidates in the 2016 election.
00:42:20.000 He handled this the wrong way every step of the way because he was so focused on what will uphold the integrity of the FBI and the integrity of the investigations and the integrity of the DOJ. He was less worried about, okay, what do I actually have to do under the law?
00:42:34.000 What's my obligation under the law?
00:42:35.000 His obligation under the law is to shut his piehole, hand the information over to Lynch.
00:42:38.000 If Lynch wanted to kill the investigation, let her do it.
00:42:40.000 So, in a sense, Trump was right in saying that he's a grandstander.
00:42:44.000 Yeah, for sure.
00:42:44.000 I mean, I think that part was right.
00:42:46.000 But the problem, remember, was not the firing of Comey.
00:42:49.000 It was that two days after he fired Comey, he went to Lester Holt on NBC, and he said, the reason I fired Comey was not all the excuses I gave about the Hillary stuff.
00:42:58.000 It's because of the Russia stuff.
00:42:59.000 I was angry about how he was handling Russia.
00:43:02.000 I mean, that's really stupid.
00:43:05.000 Yeah.
00:43:05.000 That's intensely stupid.
00:43:06.000 It's intensely stupid, but it's also strange that it didn't go anywhere.
00:43:10.000 Right.
00:43:11.000 Like, that was it.
00:43:12.000 Like, that's against the law.
00:43:13.000 Well, so it's, you know, obstruction.
00:43:16.000 So obstruction, looking at the statutes, obstruction is a little bit more than that.
00:43:19.000 So you have to actually obstruct an ongoing investigation into criminal activity.
00:43:23.000 There's a counterintelligence investigation going on, but not necessarily a criminal one.
00:43:27.000 So not to get too specific about it, but...
00:43:28.000 Well, that is specific, but you should get specific about it.
00:43:31.000 Yeah, I mean, the obstruction laws, I mean, I've looked into kind of the statutes that they've used to suggest obstruction, and it's not clear that there's any statute that specifically governs something like this.
00:43:39.000 Plus, it is true that Trump does have the power, as the chief executive, to fire, as the commander-in-chief, to fire the FBI director for any reason he chooses.
00:43:47.000 Now, all that said, he can be impeached for any reason, criminal or non-criminal, right?
00:43:51.000 Impeachment is not a...
00:43:53.000 You don't actually have to have committed a crime to be impeached.
00:43:55.000 Well, most people don't even understand what impeach means.
00:43:57.000 They think that somehow or another impeach means you get kicked out of office.
00:44:00.000 Right.
00:44:00.000 That's not what it is.
00:44:01.000 There's the House, and they have to vote to impeach you.
00:44:04.000 And then there's the Senate, and they have to vote by a two-thirds majority, or a 60, yeah, I think it's a two-thirds majority, to actually convict you of a set of crimes that they come up with.
00:44:12.000 But these are all political definitions, right?
00:44:14.000 When it says high crimes and misdemeanors, it doesn't mean they actually have to prosecute you like they would in a criminal court, and you'd have to go to jail or any of that kind of stuff.
00:44:21.000 Like, they could impeach anybody at any time.
00:44:23.000 Clinton didn't even have to commit perjury.
00:44:24.000 If they wanted to impeach him, they could.
00:44:27.000 They could have impeached every president you can impeach.
00:44:29.000 It's just a vote.
00:44:30.000 It's just a vote.
00:44:31.000 So all the talk about what's criminal and what's not criminal, the problem for Trump, there are two ways of reading Trump's behavior in the whole Russia thing, right?
00:44:37.000 Way one is he's got something to hide.
00:44:39.000 That's the most obvious way.
00:44:40.000 He's got something to hide.
00:44:41.000 That's why he gets rid of Flynn.
00:44:43.000 We don't know why he got rid of Flynn.
00:44:44.000 He gets rid of Comey.
00:44:45.000 We don't really know why he got rid of Comey and then brags to the Russians that it took pressure off him on the Russia stuff.
00:44:50.000 So way one is he's hiding something and now he's firing everybody who gets in the way.
00:44:55.000 The chain of evidence doesn't not fit that.
00:44:57.000 The people he's angry at in order are Attorney General Sessions, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the former head of the FBI James Comey, the acting head of the FBI McCabe, and the special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
00:45:10.000 So those are all people involved with Russia.
00:45:12.000 Those are the only people he's really angry at.
00:45:14.000 So there's something to be said for the idea that maybe he's trying to hide something.
00:45:17.000 On the other hand, We haven't actually seen any hard evidence of collusion itself.
00:45:22.000 So we saw an attempt to collude by Donald Trump Jr. But we haven't actually seen any evidence that the Russians were providing special information to the Trump administration, which was then being weaponized for use in the campaign.
00:45:32.000 We haven't seen any of that stuff.
00:45:33.000 So here's the other plausible theory, and this goes to Trump's personality.
00:45:37.000 He's so petty and he wants to be loved so much that he is angry that people keep saying he won because of the Russians.
00:45:44.000 And so now, every time people say that, he just gets pissed, and he fires people.
00:45:48.000 So, Comey...
00:45:49.000 I mean, this is totally plausible, right?
00:45:51.000 Comey comes to him and has said privately that you are not under investigation.
00:45:56.000 And Trump says to him,''Well, why didn't you say that?'' And Comey says,''Well, I can't say that, because if I say that, I'm going to have to update Congress if you do fall under investigation.'' And Trump doesn't like that.
00:46:05.000 He wants the public to know he's free and clear.
00:46:07.000 So he fires Comey.
00:46:08.000 And then he goes up public, and he says,''I didn't like how he was handling the Russia thing.
00:46:11.000 I'm innocent.
00:46:12.000 Why won't these people leave me alone?'' Right?
00:46:14.000 So there's two ways to read this.
00:46:15.000 Either he's totally innocent but stupid, or he's trying to hide something.
00:46:19.000 Those are the only two plausible ways of reading the situation.
00:46:22.000 The Donald Trump Jr. thing was really bizarre because he released all the emails.
00:46:26.000 Like, I just...
00:46:27.000 Yeah.
00:46:27.000 Almost like, look, I've got nothing to hide.
00:46:29.000 Like, you aren't supposed to do any of these things you're saying in these emails.
00:46:34.000 Yes.
00:46:34.000 That was not a good moment for Trump Jr. Do you think he got...
00:46:37.000 I mean, and then you hear that he was coached by his dad.
00:46:40.000 Again, none of this is good stuff.
00:46:43.000 I think that Donald Trump Jr. releasing the email...
00:46:45.000 First of all, it is imperative to note, eight minutes later, the New York Times released basically the email chain.
00:46:50.000 He was beating it out of the gate.
00:46:52.000 And so he puts that out there.
00:46:54.000 Which is a smart move.
00:46:55.000 I mean, it would be smart if he had found a way to spin it.
00:46:58.000 Right.
00:47:00.000 This is the thing in politics now.
00:47:01.000 The way politics works now is your smartest move, if there's dirt about you, is to be the first person out the gate with it and you put a spin on it, right?
00:47:09.000 So like Barack Obama, imagine if Obama hadn't said anything in 2008 and then we found out a week before the election that he did coke in high school.
00:47:16.000 Now, a lot of people wouldn't care.
00:47:17.000 A lot of people would, right?
00:47:18.000 In 2000, George W. Bush was hit with a DUI charge from like 1973, and it probably lost him a point in the polls.
00:47:24.000 So what Obama did is he wrote an entire memoir, and he just kind of dismissed it, right?
00:47:29.000 In the middle of the memoir, he goes, you know, when I was in high school, did a little blow.
00:47:32.000 No problem.
00:47:32.000 Did a little blow.
00:47:33.000 And everybody went, oh, okay.
00:47:34.000 Did a little blow.
00:47:35.000 All right.
00:47:35.000 You know, cool.
00:47:36.000 So if you're going to release this kind of stuff, you have to put a spin on it.
00:47:40.000 Trump Jr. didn't.
00:47:40.000 He just put out the emails.
00:47:41.000 And the emails themselves contain the damning material, right?
00:47:45.000 It says right in there, you know, there's a Russian government lawyer.
00:47:48.000 The Russian government sees this as part of its effort to aid Mr. Trump's campaign.
00:47:51.000 And Donald Jr. is like, thumbs up!
00:47:53.000 He's like, I love it.
00:47:54.000 Sounds awesome.
00:47:54.000 He says, I love it.
00:47:55.000 Let's meet.
00:47:56.000 And so that does not look good.
00:47:58.000 It's not quite as much as people on the left want to say it is, meaning that there's no evidence yet that any information was actually exchanged with the Russians or that anything came of the meeting.
00:48:07.000 Most of the people in the meeting who have said something have said nothing came of it.
00:48:10.000 You know, but we don't know whether Trump knew about the meeting.
00:48:12.000 I find it kind of hard to believe he didn't, you know, considering every major campaign figure was there.
00:48:16.000 But, you know, and then they just keep lying.
00:48:20.000 And this is the part that's a problem.
00:48:23.000 Are they lying because they just think they can get away with it and they're stupid?
00:48:26.000 Or are they lying because they're actually being meticulous about their lies?
00:48:30.000 I tend to think the former, because this isn't a professional administration.
00:48:33.000 I think these, I think Trump, you know, fibs a lot.
00:48:36.000 He says things that are, I mean, like, on stupid things.
00:48:38.000 He says things like, the leader of the Boy Scouts called me and told me that he loved my speeches.
00:48:42.000 Best speech ever!
00:48:42.000 And then the leader of the Boy Scouts is like, uh, what?
00:48:45.000 So, is that a calculated lie to hide something?
00:48:47.000 Or is it just that Trump lies by nature and so he does it a lot?
00:48:50.000 Well, I think he's just so used to putting that spin on things, that publicity spin.
00:48:55.000 Right.
00:48:55.000 And the thing that he said about this was that this is what happens in politics.
00:49:01.000 You get dirt about your enemy and people exchange information.
00:49:05.000 It's just what happens.
00:49:06.000 It's just you're seeing it now.
00:49:07.000 So a lot of people are like, yeah, well, that makes sense.
00:49:09.000 Right.
00:49:09.000 And this is something that, again, I think that we're shaped by Hollywood a little bit.
00:49:13.000 Politics is dirty, but some of this stuff is not usual.
00:49:16.000 It's actually not particularly usual to meet with a government that is really not friendly to the United States to receive information about your political opponents.
00:49:24.000 But if you've watched House of Cards, you think, well, I mean, that's like two steps down from throwing somebody under a subway, so what's the big deal?
00:49:29.000 Do you watch House Cards?
00:49:29.000 I don't, because I work in politics, and when I go home at night, the last thing I want to do is watch entertainment about politics.
00:49:35.000 I watch Game of Thrones.
00:49:35.000 That's as political as it gets.
00:49:37.000 House of Cards is a great show, but if it's half right, like, I always wonder.
00:49:43.000 The thing that gets me is when people suicide themselves that are on their way to trial.
00:49:48.000 I'm like, okay, I don't want to be that fucking guy.
00:49:50.000 I don't want to be that tinfoil hat guy.
00:49:52.000 But how many people are going to suicide themselves?
00:49:55.000 I mean, for sure, someone's been murdered.
00:49:59.000 Somewhere along the line, someone knew something, some powerful people got to them, and they murder them.
00:50:04.000 It's going to happen.
00:50:05.000 It has happened.
00:50:06.000 It must have happened.
00:50:07.000 I think it happens a lot in Russia.
00:50:09.000 I don't believe what Trump said.
00:50:12.000 And again, I think Trump has a skewed vision of what politics is.
00:50:15.000 And because he thinks that the outer limit of politics is Russia, he thinks anything inside that limit is now okay.
00:50:21.000 But do you think it's ever happened in the United States or just in Russia?
00:50:23.000 Like political assassinations?
00:50:25.000 I can't name a specific example of where it has.
00:50:28.000 Are you open to the possibility?
00:50:30.000 Like Lyndon Johnson.
00:50:32.000 You think Lyndon Johnson could whack somebody?
00:50:33.000 I don't think Lyndon Johnson whacked anybody.
00:50:35.000 What about Kennedy?
00:50:36.000 I don't think that Kennedy whacked anybody.
00:50:38.000 What about Hillary?
00:50:39.000 I don't think Hillary whacked anybody.
00:50:40.000 If I had my last thousand bucks, I'd be super tempted to bet on black.
00:50:47.000 I'd be super tempted to go, you know what?
00:50:49.000 I think she went dark.
00:50:51.000 I think she's whacked a few people.
00:50:53.000 Let's see what we got here.
00:50:55.000 I'd want to see Whitewater.
00:50:56.000 I'd want to see Vince Foster.
00:50:58.000 I want to see that Enron guy who shot himself in the head twice.
00:51:00.000 There's a few...
00:51:02.000 If I could really...
00:51:05.000 If I could, you know, man, I think it's happened.
00:51:08.000 I just don't know who and when.
00:51:09.000 I'm sure it's happened at some point, but again, if I don't know who and when, I'm hesitant to, like, I think that we, and I think that we tend to think things are regular when they are, I mean, that'd be really irregular.
00:51:18.000 Yes.
00:51:18.000 Right?
00:51:18.000 So we tend to think that this stuff is happening, like, every day.
00:51:20.000 And that's why you see Trump on TV saying, well, Putin, Like, America hasn't killed people.
00:51:24.000 And it's like, well, no, not quite like Putin.
00:51:26.000 I mean, like, Putin legitimately murders his journalistic enemies.
00:51:29.000 Yes.
00:51:29.000 Like, I haven't seen you trying to double-tap Jake Tapper.
00:51:32.000 So I'm pretty sure, no, it's not a regular thing around here.
00:51:35.000 Even Obama wasn't trying to, like, kill Chris Wallace.
00:51:38.000 Right, but maybe they, you know, maybe...
00:51:42.000 Well, Putin is obviously the extreme example, right?
00:51:44.000 Well, obviously the extreme example is North Korea.
00:51:47.000 But Putin is in that range of a totally feared, essentially a dictator who's...
00:51:54.000 I mean, there are a bunch of them, right?
00:51:55.000 I mean, Erdogan in Turkey.
00:51:57.000 Sure.
00:51:58.000 Maduro.
00:51:59.000 Assad.
00:51:59.000 Yeah, Assad.
00:52:00.000 Maduro now in Venezuela, who's literally jailing his political opponents.
00:52:04.000 Yeah, Venezuela is now a complete dictatorship, and this is very recently.
00:52:07.000 Right, but America is a...
00:52:08.000 I mean, would you believe it if I said, like, leaders in France had people regularly whacked?
00:52:13.000 I'd find it a little bit hard to believe.
00:52:14.000 I don't think we're significantly worse than France in the whacking people in politics business.
00:52:18.000 I don't think regularly, but I think every now and then, the move is...
00:52:22.000 I'm open to the possibility, but I'd have to see the evidence, the lawyer in me.
00:52:25.000 Well, I don't think we're a house of cards.
00:52:27.000 I don't think it gets that ridiculous, but...
00:52:28.000 The point I'm making is, if you think that's a regular thing...
00:52:30.000 If you think that it's not a rare thing, and maybe once in a while, once every 20 years somebody gets whacked quietly for a political reason, if you think that's a regular thing, then fibbing is way inside the line.
00:52:40.000 You hiding documents is really...
00:52:43.000 Or you writing your son's stupid statement about a stupid email exchange and then fibbing about it publicly.
00:52:49.000 That's really inside the line.
00:52:51.000 So, again, I don't think that...
00:52:52.000 I think some of this...
00:52:53.000 I have a rule about the Trump administration.
00:52:55.000 I never attribute to malevolence what I can attribute to stupidity.
00:52:58.000 Because I think that that's...
00:53:00.000 More likely to be the case.
00:53:01.000 It's like the Occam's razor of the Trump administration.
00:53:04.000 I think that is a smart way to think, but I think sometimes malevolence is real.
00:53:09.000 Remember the Gary Condit, Chandra Levy thing?
00:53:11.000 Yeah, that was weird.
00:53:12.000 That was a weird one.
00:53:13.000 For people to know the story, this guy was having an affair, the girl turned up dead, and then 9-11 happened right away afterwards, so people kind of forgot about it.
00:53:23.000 But they found her body in the park, and everybody was like, Jesus Christ.
00:53:27.000 Like this is a woman that was about to testify that she was having an affair with this guy and That one was a good one.
00:53:35.000 Not a good one, obviously, a terrible one.
00:53:38.000 So let me say this.
00:53:39.000 I think that if there's murder in politics, it'll probably tend to fall more into the personal than the political.
00:53:44.000 It'll probably fall less in terms of, like, I have a political vendetta against this guy, and I'm going to kill him.
00:53:48.000 We haven't really done much of that since Alexander Hamilton and Burr.
00:53:52.000 But listen, Teddy Kennedy left a woman in the back of his car in a body of water.
00:53:57.000 Right.
00:53:58.000 Drunk driving, right?
00:53:59.000 That was the thing with him.
00:54:00.000 He just didn't want to be responsible for something horrible that he did.
00:54:03.000 Similar to Dick Cheney not meeting with the police for something like 18 hours after he shot his friend in the face.
00:54:11.000 Yeah, I don't think he was trying to assassinate his friend.
00:54:13.000 No, he was just drunk hunting.
00:54:16.000 Maybe.
00:54:18.000 I would imagine.
00:54:19.000 I can't rule that one out, so...
00:54:23.000 Yeah.
00:54:23.000 Honestly, I'll find Teddy Kennedy a little more suspicious.
00:54:25.000 You leave the woman in the back of the car, swim out of the car, go to a house, sleep, come back the next day and, my God, she's dead.
00:54:30.000 Well, yeah, it turns out when you leave somebody underwater for 12 hours, they tend to do that.
00:54:35.000 It's weird how that works.
00:54:36.000 Well, unless he was so drunk that he didn't know what he was doing, which can happen.
00:54:40.000 You can get blackout drunk when you wake up and you go, wait a minute, did I crash my car?
00:54:44.000 So I don't drink that heavily.
00:54:45.000 Is that really a thing?
00:54:46.000 Like, you climb out the window of the car, swim out to the river, bank, go to somebody's house, come back, like, a day later, and you're like, oh, shit, there was a girl in the backseat.
00:54:56.000 I've never had it happen, but I have had what I would call slideshow nights.
00:55:02.000 You know, where I get hammered, and then, like, I wake up in the morning with a pounding headache, and I just...
00:55:08.000 I just have these flashes in my head, like, who was that person?
00:55:11.000 Like, where was I? Where were we?
00:55:13.000 Oh, yeah, there was that.
00:55:14.000 And then you'll eat breakfast with your friends that go, you remember that thing?
00:55:17.000 And you go, oh, yeah.
00:55:18.000 Jesus.
00:55:20.000 So it's not necessarily blackout like I did something horrible and I completely forgot about it, but I forgot a lot of it.
00:55:26.000 Okay.
00:55:27.000 But some people, I have a friend and he goes gerbilize.
00:55:30.000 There's a switch that goes off, three or four shots in, and he's gone.
00:55:35.000 And he's not there anymore.
00:55:36.000 And you almost gotta like nerf the world around him and protect him and get him in his bed.
00:55:40.000 And he wakes up in the morning, he doesn't know a thing.
00:55:42.000 He doesn't know a thing about what happened.
00:55:44.000 And it's really bizarre.
00:55:46.000 It's a legitimate blackout.
00:55:46.000 So you guys nice to him or you do terrible things to him while he's blacked out?
00:55:48.000 No, we're nice to him, but...
00:55:51.000 Your instinct is to get the fuck away from him and just let horrible things happen.
00:55:56.000 But the stories are legendary.
00:55:58.000 But he does.
00:55:59.000 He gets shark eyes.
00:56:00.000 He gets these black soulless eyes where he's gone.
00:56:04.000 And you go, oh no, he's gone.
00:56:06.000 Yeah, it's weird.
00:56:07.000 But I wonder what that is.
00:56:09.000 I feel like that's a neurological issue.
00:56:10.000 I feel like if alcohol does that to you, there's probably some switches that aren't connected right in the head.
00:56:17.000 I imagine there's something going on, yeah.
00:56:18.000 Yeah.
00:56:19.000 Yeah.
00:56:20.000 So, Teddy Kennedy, who knows?
00:56:21.000 I mean, he was obviously a raging alcoholic, and that could have been a part of the problem.
00:56:26.000 I mean, he literally might have gone home not even knowing that he killed somebody.
00:56:29.000 I mean, that would have to be his...
00:56:31.000 I mean, it's his only defense, so you'd imagine.
00:56:33.000 Well, that was one of the things that they said that they would have used as a defense, again, with OJ. That OJ, with the CTE, that he might not have even known what he was doing, that he might have flown into some...
00:56:44.000 Blackout rage.
00:56:45.000 That would be an amazing defense.
00:56:47.000 I would like to hear that.
00:56:48.000 Everyone who has CTE now gets to run around chopping up their ex-wife and randos who end up at their house.
00:56:53.000 That's a hell of a defense, sort of like the Twinkie defense, right?
00:56:56.000 Yeah, well, the Twinkie defense was hilarious.
00:56:58.000 But there are people that think that you're going to see more and more things like that out of former NFL players with massive brain trauma issues.
00:57:08.000 It's actually a serious legal question.
00:57:11.000 There's always been the question...
00:57:12.000 This was a couple weeks ago.
00:57:14.000 This kid doesn't even know he did this.
00:57:16.000 Oh, God.
00:57:16.000 Oh, wow.
00:57:17.000 Former NFL player Devon Hall accused of killing his mother.
00:57:20.000 He doesn't remember.
00:57:21.000 Yeah, he's in jail right now and doesn't recall.
00:57:23.000 Yeah, well, that's real.
00:57:24.000 I mean...
00:57:26.000 Yeah, I don't find that wildly implausible.
00:57:28.000 I mean, the fact is that we have an insanity defense, right?
00:57:31.000 And what it means is you don't know right from wrong.
00:57:33.000 Well, if you don't know what you're doing, like, this is something they teach in law school.
00:57:36.000 If you're sleepwalking, you kill somebody.
00:57:38.000 There's no motive.
00:57:39.000 So it's difficult to, like, you need mental treatment, but should you be in jail for that?
00:57:43.000 Not really.
00:57:44.000 I mean, they've had cases where people are, like, sleepwalking and...
00:57:47.000 They think that, and they're dreaming at the same time, so they think that their wife is actually like, this defense has been used, where they think their wife is some sort of monster in the room, so they club her to death, and then they wake up and they're like, oh, that was my wife?
00:57:59.000 It's a really creative defense, or it's true.
00:58:01.000 I mean, one of the two, so...
00:58:02.000 Well, if we know that people can go crazy and we know that brain trauma is a real issue, the two of them together, I mean, there's something about getting knocked around in the head where it's so completely unpredictable and then you add in this impulsive nature of their behavior that happens.
00:58:19.000 There's something really weird about brain trauma.
00:58:22.000 It causes a lot of very strange, impulsive behavior in people.
00:58:26.000 They really can't understand even why they're behaving the way they're behaving.
00:58:31.000 It's just not good.
00:58:33.000 Obviously, this is way off track.
00:58:36.000 It's not that far from politics to brand trauma.
00:58:38.000 You don't want a former NFL player being the fucking president.
00:58:42.000 They did the CTE study.
00:58:44.000 There was 111 players and 110 of them had CTE. I mean, you tell me.
00:58:50.000 I mean, you have more experience with this.
00:58:51.000 I mean, I didn't find that shocking at all.
00:58:53.000 I mean, they've been calling people punch drunk since 1910. Well, see, the thing is, when you get to that, when you get to the slurring your words part, you're so gone.
00:59:02.000 Like, you're already gone.
00:59:04.000 There's a lot of people that have CTE that speak really well, and they're very articulate, and they're very reasonable, and you wouldn't even understand that they're dealing with all this host of neurological issues.
00:59:16.000 By the time your voice, obviously I'm not a neurologist, but by the time, as it's been explained to me, your voice is slurring and you're dealing with, like, real heavy-duty symptoms, like, you're fucked.
00:59:27.000 Like, you're so gone.
00:59:29.000 Like, you're way off the deep end.
00:59:32.000 So here's a weird question for you.
00:59:33.000 I mean, what would you do about, like, I think the NFL's gonna start losing viewers because of this.
00:59:37.000 I think they are.
00:59:38.000 I think you're right.
00:59:38.000 And, you know, I wonder about MMA. It's a factor.
00:59:42.000 I think there's two things going on.
00:59:44.000 There's the fuck it factor, where people are like, I don't care, I want to watch people get their ass kicked.
00:59:48.000 It's fun.
00:59:49.000 It's exciting.
00:59:49.000 People love it.
00:59:50.000 It's consensual.
00:59:51.000 It's primal.
00:59:52.000 Yeah, and people know what they're signing up for when they do it.
00:59:55.000 They know the consequences of it, and it's worth the glory to be the guy who delivers it versus the guy who receives it.
01:00:01.000 So I think there's that.
01:00:02.000 But then there's also, look, the Colin Kaepernick thing, I think that probably cost a lot of ratings for the NFL. Yeah, there was that poll that came out that said, I think, of the 12% of people who said that they were not watching NFL games last year, 28% of that 12% said that the Kaepernick national anthem thing was the reason.
01:00:21.000 Yeah, I mean, some people, it probably emboldened them.
01:00:24.000 They probably liked it, and they wanted to watch it more.
01:00:26.000 This is fascinating about the cultural breakdown of the country.
01:00:28.000 Basically, white people hated it, and black people loved it.
01:00:30.000 This is how the polls were.
01:00:32.000 It was like 72% of black people thought it was great, and an equal percentage of white people thought that it was just terrible.
01:00:37.000 Which is a fascinating look at sort of how race relations work in the country at large.
01:00:43.000 It's actually one of the reasons I think that ESPN has been losing ratings.
01:00:45.000 Like, I used to watch ESPN religiously.
01:00:47.000 And now all I want is to just watch my sports and not be bothered with the politics.
01:00:51.000 Because I say I do that during the day.
01:00:53.000 And it's a pet peeve of mine that every time I turn on ESPN, I have to lecture about Caitlyn Jenner or about Black Lives Matter.
01:00:58.000 It's like, shut up!
01:01:00.000 Caitlyn Jenner hasn't even been athletically relevant since before I was born.
01:01:03.000 I was born in 1984. Well, the Caitlyn Jenner piece, when they did it for ESPN, and I don't know if this is true or not, but the word was that her getting Athlete of the Year, or whatever the award was that she got.
01:01:15.000 Yeah, it was like the Hero of the Year award, yeah.
01:01:18.000 Hero!
01:01:20.000 That was directly tied to the exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer.
01:01:24.000 That makes sense.
01:01:25.000 They sold the two of them together as a package deal, which I buy 100%.
01:01:29.000 For sure.
01:01:30.000 If you don't, come on.
01:01:32.000 You don't know how TV works if that's the case.
01:01:34.000 Where she came from.
01:01:34.000 She's a fucking Kardashian.
01:01:36.000 Okay?
01:01:36.000 She's a giant Kardashian.
01:01:38.000 That's right.
01:01:38.000 That's what she is.
01:01:40.000 Notice I'm saying she.
01:01:41.000 Yeah, you're saying she.
01:01:42.000 I would say she.
01:01:43.000 Very politically correct.
01:01:44.000 Yeah, I'm not.
01:01:45.000 But the video where they circled her house and she was like moving in the shadows behind the drapes.
01:01:51.000 Did you ever see that?
01:01:52.000 No.
01:01:53.000 It was wonderful.
01:01:54.000 It was wonderful.
01:01:55.000 I mean, it was like the first time she was revealing herself as this woman.
01:01:59.000 So they're circling her house.
01:02:01.000 She has this glorious house and looks like it's in Malibu or somewhere.
01:02:05.000 They're circling the house and it's in the hills with a helicopter filming.
01:02:09.000 It's like fucking high production value shit.
01:02:11.000 This isn't just like...
01:02:13.000 Hey, you know, we met with Caitlyn at home.
01:02:15.000 Caitlyn, tell us your troubles.
01:02:16.000 You know, like Kristen Beck, the former Navy SEAL, you know, who just sits down very reasonably and says, this just feels better for me.
01:02:23.000 This is who I am.
01:02:24.000 Right.
01:02:24.000 No, no.
01:02:25.000 There was like curtains and shadows and it was mysterious.
01:02:29.000 And then she starts talking like, well, you know, I've always been a man.
01:02:33.000 You're like, oh, God.
01:02:35.000 And then there was the weirdest part where she said she got surgery, but it doesn't make me any...
01:02:41.000 It wasn't like I was any less of a man or less of a woman before the surgery.
01:02:46.000 Well, this is the case about gender, right?
01:02:48.000 Well, then why get the surgery?
01:02:49.000 That was like...
01:02:50.000 This is, well, there are a lot of questions as to the logic of all of this.
01:02:54.000 You call Caitlyn Jenner she.
01:02:56.000 Caitlyn Jenner is a biological man.
01:02:58.000 How dare you!
01:02:59.000 I'm triggered!
01:03:00.000 Sorry to break this to all the people who listen to your show.
01:03:03.000 Caitlyn Jenner's, I had a tweet this week.
01:03:05.000 All the people that listen, probably.
01:03:06.000 I agree with you.
01:03:07.000 At least a good amount do.
01:03:09.000 The number one retweeted tweet I have ever had had a hundred and I tweeted I think a day ago and it has a hundred and twenty thousand likes and it's it was there was a headline from CNN that said transgender man gives birth to trans what was it was transgender man assigned the female sex at birth Gives birth to healthy baby boy.
01:03:28.000 And so I tweeted, woman gives birth to boy.
01:03:31.000 Because it's a woman.
01:03:32.000 I mean, that's not a headline.
01:03:34.000 I'm sorry.
01:03:34.000 Just because the woman believes she's a man doesn't make her a man.
01:03:38.000 Biology still exists.
01:03:39.000 Sex still exists.
01:03:41.000 If you want to say she's a woman who feels like a man, that's fine.
01:03:43.000 If you want to say that...
01:03:45.000 And by the way, I don't even care if she gets hormone treatments or if she wants to have surgery.
01:03:49.000 It's a free country.
01:03:49.000 Do what the hell you want.
01:03:50.000 But when you start insisting that I just throw biology out the window...
01:03:55.000 I don't understand why that's any better than I, as a religious person, saying every time you say something, you have to mention God.
01:04:01.000 I don't have the right to do that to you.
01:04:03.000 That's idiotic.
01:04:04.000 Are you fascinated by it?
01:04:05.000 Are you fascinated by the transgender...
01:04:08.000 I'm fascinated by the society's obsession with it.
01:04:11.000 Yes, that's a good way of saying it.
01:04:13.000 There's not just an obsession.
01:04:16.000 It's...
01:04:18.000 It's compulsory and it's rabid.
01:04:20.000 So I think that there's a couple of things that are going on.
01:04:22.000 One is that it's very dark, but I think that there is an element of, like, this is different, and we get to revel in the weirdness of it, but we're gonna pretend that it's all about the civil rights of it.
01:04:33.000 We're gonna feel, like, special because we're on their side.
01:04:37.000 We're not watching Caitlyn Jenner because it's a curiosity and because it's weird and entertaining.
01:04:41.000 We're doing it because we're on Caitlyn Jenner's side.
01:04:44.000 But there have been trans people forever.
01:04:46.000 Yeah, right.
01:04:46.000 I mean, Renee Richards was a trans person, right?
01:04:48.000 Yeah.
01:04:48.000 I mean, it's happened throughout history.
01:04:50.000 I mean, there's...
01:04:50.000 What was I reading a couple of days ago about a Roman...
01:04:55.000 Like, there was something about reports of some trans soldier in the Roman army, you know, more than a thousand years ago.
01:05:03.000 It's got to be...
01:05:04.000 If it exists now, and it's existed before it was popular...
01:05:07.000 Yeah.
01:05:08.000 I mean, there's got to be a lot of people that turn trans now just because it's exciting.
01:05:11.000 Oh, there it is right there.
01:05:12.000 A trans soldier in the ancient Roman army.
01:05:14.000 That wouldn't...
01:05:15.000 Of course!
01:05:16.000 It wouldn't be surprising.
01:05:17.000 I'm not shocked.
01:05:18.000 I'm not shocked.
01:05:19.000 I mean, it's a condition.
01:05:21.000 I mean, the DSM called it gender identity disorder, and then they called it gender dysphoria.
01:05:24.000 It's a condition.
01:05:25.000 I mean, like, I'm not saying conditions don't exist.
01:05:27.000 It was gender dysphoria, but that, in a lot of people's mind, is labeling it somehow a negative.
01:05:33.000 Well, I mean, it is highly linked to suicidality.
01:05:37.000 There's a 40% lifetime suicide rate for people who have this particular gender disorder.
01:05:41.000 That seems to me not to be, like, a great positive.
01:05:43.000 Whether or not they transition, yeah.
01:05:44.000 Whether or not they transition, yeah.
01:05:45.000 I mean, again, I don't care if you transition, do what you want to do.
01:05:48.000 But the idea that we as an entire society have to redefine what sex is, and we have to blind ourselves to what biology is, this is something I'm not willing to do.
01:05:55.000 I think that it's actually damaging to kids, particularly.
01:05:58.000 Okay.
01:05:58.000 I'm more than willing to call her a she.
01:06:00.000 But you can only change your name once.
01:06:02.000 I'm willing to call Caitlyn Jenner Caitlyn Jenner.
01:06:04.000 I'm not willing to call Caitlyn Jenner a she.
01:06:06.000 Because you can't change your sex.
01:06:07.000 You can change your name.
01:06:08.000 You can change your name to whatever you want.
01:06:09.000 I don't care.
01:06:11.000 Caitlyn Jenner is not a chicken.
01:06:12.000 Caitlyn Jenner is not a woman.
01:06:14.000 Caitlyn Jenner is a man.
01:06:15.000 A biological man.
01:06:16.000 And if a man lost his penis in a tragic accident, it wouldn't make him a woman.
01:06:21.000 And if he were born with high doses of estrogen in his bloodstream, he would also not be a woman.
01:06:26.000 Right.
01:06:26.000 You're determined by your chromosomes.
01:06:28.000 And this is not even talking about intersex people.
01:06:29.000 Like, intersex is an actual status.
01:06:31.000 Intersex is a biological status.
01:06:32.000 But this nonsense that if you, Joe Rogan, decide tomorrow that you are a woman...
01:06:38.000 No surgeries, no homeowner, nothing.
01:06:41.000 You just, tomorrow, you wake up, and not decide, but you feel like a woman.
01:06:45.000 Then you have always been a woman.
01:06:46.000 We must treat you as a woman.
01:06:47.000 You don't have to change anything about yourself for us to even determine whether you're a woman.
01:06:50.000 We just, like, no.
01:06:53.000 I'm sorry, no.
01:06:53.000 I mean, like, I had mental illness.
01:06:55.000 I had a grandfather.
01:06:56.000 I get so much shit for this.
01:06:58.000 But I had a...
01:06:59.000 This is not me being unsympathetic to people who suffer from a condition that is really tragic and obviously harms people, you know, in terms of, again, the rates of suicide and depression are astounding.
01:07:09.000 My grandfather was a bipolar schizophrenic.
01:07:13.000 And it would have not been good for him or my family if people had said to him, Nate, you're right, the radio is talking to you.
01:07:19.000 Nate, you're right.
01:07:20.000 The curtains are talking to you.
01:07:22.000 They put him in a mental hospital, they gave him lithium, and then he was better, and he could actually live a normal, relatively happy life.
01:07:28.000 There's no good treatment for gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria, whatever you want to call it, but to suggest that it is a condition that doesn't require treatment, that really it's just that you're actually brain female, again, this is ascientific.
01:07:39.000 There's no scientific evidence to back this whatsoever.
01:07:42.000 Even these studies that have been done talking about there's a female brain and a male brain, first of all, if you say this to a feminist, you're a sexist.
01:07:49.000 If you say to a feminist, there's a female brain and a male brain, and the male brain works differently than the female brain, the feminist will look at you like, how dare you?
01:07:56.000 Well, it's also one of the rare times where you're allowed to celebrate classic definitions of female beauty when a man embraces him when he becomes a woman.
01:08:04.000 Lipstick, high heels, short skirt, this is like not sexist.
01:08:08.000 Caitlyn Jenner was only a woman when Caitlyn Jenner was on the cover of Vanity Fair and a Bustier.
01:08:12.000 Right.
01:08:12.000 But if he had just said, listen, I look exactly the same as I did yesterday, but I'm a woman.
01:08:17.000 Yeah, if he got a short haircut and dressed like Billie Jean King.
01:08:20.000 Right, it's the reason why the media loves Laverne Cox.
01:08:23.000 Because Laverne Cox has had surgeries and looks a lot like a woman.
01:08:26.000 I don't know who Laverne Cox is.
01:08:27.000 The guy from, well, the transgender woman from Orange is the New Black.
01:08:32.000 I never watched that show.
01:08:33.000 I've never watched that show either, but she's on the cover of Time Magazine.
01:08:35.000 Oh.
01:08:35.000 Or he's on the cover of Time Magazine.
01:08:37.000 Well, there was the woman in that show.
01:08:39.000 Isn't that the one where the girl, Ruby, is that the girl?
01:08:42.000 That's Laverne Cox.
01:08:43.000 Okay.
01:08:43.000 That's a woman?
01:08:44.000 Or a man?
01:08:45.000 That's a man.
01:08:45.000 It used to be a man.
01:08:47.000 It's a woman now.
01:08:48.000 Very tricky.
01:08:48.000 No, still a man, but...
01:08:49.000 Transgender tipping point.
01:08:51.000 I'm so out of the loop.
01:08:52.000 I'm that old man.
01:08:53.000 I'm that old man who I always wondered.
01:08:54.000 Look at that headline there, right?
01:08:55.000 It says, America's Next Civil Rights Frontier, and that's the key.
01:08:57.000 You have a bunch of people in the United States who are suggesting that they want the next civil rights fight.
01:09:02.000 Always the next civil rights fight, right?
01:09:03.000 Yeah.
01:09:03.000 So the civil rights fight is immigration, or the civil rights fight is gay marriage, or the civil rights fight is transgenders.
01:09:08.000 Okay, how about this?
01:09:09.000 How about there was only one real civil rights fight, and it was about black people who had been historically oppressed in the United States for 200 years.
01:09:14.000 There had been slaves.
01:09:15.000 Yes, who had been slaves, and then Jim Crow.
01:09:17.000 Nobody's owning transgenders.
01:09:42.000 This is correct.
01:09:43.000 If I'm a business owner, and I hire you, and you're a man, and you come in the next day, and you're dressed in a woman's clothing saying you're a woman, but you still have a full beard, I don't see why I, as a business owner, am expected to eat the cost of that.
01:09:56.000 That seems bizarre to me.
01:09:58.000 Eat the cost is a great way to phrase it.
01:10:01.000 I didn't have a dog in this fight.
01:10:02.000 I was completely open and liberal about it until there was a case where a man who had been a man for 30 years became a woman for a little less than two years and then started MMA fighting women.
01:10:16.000 Yes, exactly.
01:10:16.000 Exactly.
01:10:17.000 And beating the fuck out of these women and not proclaiming that he or she used to be a man because, in quotes, it was a medical condition that I did not need to disclose.
01:10:30.000 Like, that's not a fucking medical condition.
01:10:32.000 Right.
01:10:35.000 She wasn't winning because she was skillful.
01:10:38.000 She was fucking manhandling these women.
01:10:40.000 It was ugly.
01:10:41.000 Of course!
01:10:42.000 It was horrible.
01:10:43.000 But again, it's so funny how the transgender movement destroys the feminist movement by living off of the sort of lies that the feminist movement promulgated.
01:10:51.000 So the feminist movement said stupid things like, women and men, equally athletic proficient.
01:10:56.000 Well, that's something that has been repeated very recently, that there's no biological difference in the genders, and it's all social.
01:11:02.000 Absolute horseshit.
01:11:03.000 I mean, I'm just sorry.
01:11:04.000 There's no scientific evidence to back that, and it's particularly true with regard to actual physical capacity.
01:11:09.000 This is just nonsense.
01:11:10.000 Not just no scientific evidence, but a mountain.
01:11:13.000 Yeah.
01:11:14.000 A mountain of it against it.
01:11:15.000 My favorite study on this is, you know, you remember there was those commercials about, like, throwing like a girl, running like a girl?
01:11:19.000 Right.
01:11:20.000 Remember those feminist commercials saying, what is it to be running like a girl?
01:11:22.000 And they would show an adult woman, and she'd be running all girly.
01:11:24.000 And then they would show a little girl, and she's running.
01:11:26.000 And it's still a little girly, but she's running, you know, like, normally.
01:11:30.000 Fierce.
01:11:31.000 Exactly, fierce.
01:11:31.000 It's only society that has forced the little girl to run like a woman.
01:11:34.000 First of all, I have a three-year-old girl.
01:11:36.000 She runs like a girl.
01:11:37.000 Second of all...
01:11:39.000 And it's not because I'm teaching her.
01:11:41.000 It's not because her mom runs, because she doesn't, right?
01:11:43.000 Does she play with dolls because you're a sexist pig?
01:11:45.000 It's because of that.
01:11:46.000 My daughter started off liking trucks, like, in the first year, and I can give a shit.
01:11:49.000 And now she likes playing with dolls and dressing up in princess dresses.
01:11:51.000 Like, who cares?
01:11:52.000 She's a girl.
01:11:52.000 She's always been a girl.
01:11:53.000 She'll always be a girl, whether she likes trucks or whether she likes dresses.
01:11:56.000 Yeah, that was an issue with one of my daughters, too.
01:11:58.000 My daughter was a little worried about her.
01:11:59.000 I go, she's going to be a dyke.
01:12:00.000 She's like, no!
01:12:01.000 I go, what's the big deal?
01:12:02.000 You like lesbians.
01:12:03.000 Who cares?
01:12:04.000 I don't care.
01:12:05.000 I'm like, I do not care.
01:12:06.000 And she's like, and then she turned the corner, and then she got, but we just let her be whatever she's in.
01:12:10.000 But she was really into, like, Batman for a while.
01:12:12.000 Yeah, my daughter is into Batman, and then she was into Wonder Woman.
01:12:15.000 Like, who cares?
01:12:15.000 But what's funny about this is that the left kept saying, even when I met my wife, right, who's a conservative, and I made her more conservative when we got married because that's what men tend to do to their wives.
01:12:27.000 But she, you know, I remember early on we had a conversation about this, and I said, women don't throw like men.
01:12:33.000 And she got, like, all offended.
01:12:34.000 And I said, but that's factually true.
01:12:36.000 She said, right, but it's insulting.
01:12:37.000 It's like, no, that's factually true.
01:12:40.000 Like, I'm sorry to...
01:12:42.000 There have been studies.
01:12:43.000 Out of a thousand, if you took a woman throwing a baseball and then a thousand men throwing a baseball, the woman will throw faster.
01:12:49.000 Then out of those thousand men, this is in the book The Sports Chain, the woman will throw faster than two of those men out of a thousand.
01:12:56.000 And we're not talking about like Goose Gossage here.
01:12:58.000 We're talking about like...
01:12:59.000 Regular humans.
01:12:59.000 We're talking about the accountant from down the block.
01:13:01.000 We're talking about Paul Ryan flinging a baseball.
01:13:02.000 Yeah.
01:13:03.000 Right?
01:13:03.000 I mean, that's not the way this stuff works.
01:13:05.000 Well, that was the counter that Fallon Fox used, was that she actually lost to a woman.
01:13:09.000 She lost to a woman named Ashley Evan Smith.
01:13:11.000 But what I said was, no, this proves my point, is that you're not good.
01:13:15.000 You're just a man.
01:13:16.000 Well, this was, you know, John McEnroe got slapped all over the lot when he said about Serena Williams, she's great.
01:13:21.000 Serena Williams is great and all.
01:13:23.000 But if Serena Williams were competing, he said she's the best female player ever.
01:13:25.000 And they were like, well...
01:13:26.000 Why not just the best player ever?
01:13:28.000 And he's like, because she's a woman.
01:13:29.000 Like, if she were a man, she'd get her ass kicked.
01:13:31.000 And everyone was like, no, how dare you?
01:13:34.000 There is something called the Universal Tennis Ranking.
01:13:36.000 She would rank in the mid-ranks of college male players if she were a man.
01:13:40.000 And Serena Williams had said, like, five years ago, no, I'd never want to play with, like, Andy Roddick.
01:13:43.000 He'd kill me.
01:13:44.000 She actually did this.
01:13:45.000 There was a 200th-ranked man in the world who she wanted to just warm up with.
01:13:49.000 And they played, like, just a normal match.
01:13:52.000 He won 6-1, 6-0.
01:13:54.000 And he was like ranked 200th in the world.
01:13:56.000 And the only shock was that he dropped a point to her.
01:13:59.000 Well, there was the issue of Renee Richards when Renee Richards started playing tennis against women and kicking their ass.
01:14:04.000 And he was a middling player at best as a woman, or as a man rather.
01:14:09.000 But as a woman, he was a fucking killer.
01:14:13.000 Hey, I mean, this is what should insult feminists.
01:14:15.000 It turns out that Caitlyn Jenner won all these Hero of the Year awards and everything.
01:14:18.000 We men are so great that even when we decide to be women, we're better than women.
01:14:21.000 That was the most bizarre thing.
01:14:23.000 You've only been a woman for six months.
01:14:24.000 But he's amazing at it.
01:14:25.000 He won woman of the year.
01:14:26.000 He's incredible at it.
01:14:27.000 He's a natural.
01:14:28.000 He's a gold medalist as a woman.
01:14:28.000 It turns out that men are better even at being women than women.
01:14:31.000 No wonder feminists are pissed, and they should be.
01:14:33.000 And this whole glossing over the difference between feminists who have been claiming that women are distinct from men and important and different and better in certain ways.
01:14:42.000 Like, I don't understand how you hold these two simultaneous thoughts.
01:14:44.000 Hillary Clinton needs to be president because we need a female president.
01:14:47.000 But also, Donald Trump, if he said he was a woman tomorrow, would be a woman.
01:14:51.000 How do you hold those two simultaneous thoughts?
01:14:52.000 I always thought that in the last week of the election, if Trump thought he was going to lose, he should have just declared himself a woman, and then he too could have run as the first female president.
01:14:59.000 That would have been amazing if he did it.
01:14:59.000 That would have been incredible trolling.
01:15:00.000 If he just showed up with a dress and lipstick.
01:15:03.000 Oh man, and the entire left could have been- I identify as a woman.
01:15:05.000 I'm the best looking woman ever.
01:15:06.000 I've been voted as the best looking woman of all time.
01:15:09.000 One of the great arguments that I got in online, it wasn't even arguments, but so many people were calling me a bigot because of this Fallon Fox thing.
01:15:17.000 It was stunning because it was so confusing to me.
01:15:20.000 I'm like, I'm talking about defending a biological woman.
01:15:24.000 Like, these biological women, at least two of them, got the fuck beaten out of them by Fallon Fox before they found out that she used to be a man.
01:15:32.000 I'm like, that's not an issue to these people?
01:15:34.000 And so this one woman said, she's always been a woman.
01:15:37.000 And I said, okay.
01:15:39.000 She gave birth, she impregnated a woman and got her pregnant.
01:15:43.000 I go, what about then?
01:15:44.000 She goes, even then.
01:15:45.000 So even then, she was a woman.
01:15:47.000 She was fucking a woman with her dick and getting that woman pregnant.
01:15:52.000 Like, we are in fantasy land.
01:15:54.000 Yeah, it's crazy towns out there.
01:15:56.000 This doesn't mean, this is what's crazy.
01:15:58.000 Like, you can't, just because something's illogical, you can't just decide that someone's a bigot.
01:16:02.000 Like, we're in a weird area.
01:16:05.000 We're talking about bone structure and here's the crazy thing.
01:16:08.000 Muscle density.
01:16:09.000 There's a crazy thing is that they always rely on these gender reassignment doctors to define the terms.
01:16:16.000 And it's really interesting because I got deep, deep, deep into the rabbit hole with this because I was really shocked at how many people were angry at me.
01:16:22.000 And there is one doctor who is a board-certified endocrinologist who sort of broke it down.
01:16:28.000 She's like, not only is the science behind this crazy, but when you have gender reassignment surgery, One of the big issues with men transitioning into women is bone density.
01:16:38.000 She's like, when you have gender reassignment surgery, you're taking estrogen, which actually preserves bone density.
01:16:44.000 Not only do they have less bone density once they become a woman, they might have more.
01:16:50.000 Because you're preserving it.
01:16:52.000 You're not going to automatically be just like a woman in a year or so.
01:16:56.000 I don't think surgeons...
01:16:57.000 I mean, I know too much about doctoring from having spent 1,000 years with my wife's medical education to believe that doctors have the capacity to magically change a man into a woman.
01:17:06.000 No.
01:17:06.000 Maybe it's going to happen one day with like CRISPR or something like that when they start using, you know, genetic, literally genetic editing.
01:17:13.000 Before birth, maybe.
01:17:13.000 I mean, if you actually edit the chromosomes before birth, but no.
01:17:17.000 I mean, like, no.
01:17:18.000 Once your genes have been defined, once your chromosomes have been defined, like, this is fifth grade science, people.
01:17:23.000 It's fifth grade science.
01:17:25.000 What scares the shit out of me is when you hear these stories about people deciding that their child, who's like eight or nine years old.
01:17:31.000 This is effed up beyond belief.
01:17:32.000 It's scary because a nine-year-old, like a fucking 17-year-old doesn't know.
01:17:36.000 That was the thing about that Ruby Rose girl.
01:17:38.000 She was saying that when she was young, when she was a teenager, she wanted to be a man.
01:17:41.000 She wanted to be transgender.
01:17:43.000 And that she had gone through that phase and now she's so happy that she didn't do anything.
01:17:47.000 Right.
01:17:47.000 Well, they say that 80% of kids who experience any sort of gender dysphoria as children grow out of it.
01:17:53.000 So when you have a society that reinforces it, and then in Canada, they're passing laws now that say that if a kid says, you know, you have a girl, and the girl says, I'm a boy, and she's three, that the government can come into your house and take the kid.
01:18:05.000 Because obviously, if you don't want to humor the kid and get the kid treatment or surgery or hormone blockers, then you're obviously doing something wrong to the kid.
01:18:13.000 This is just...
01:18:14.000 It's insane.
01:18:15.000 First of all, if anyone tried to do that with my kid, I would meet them at the door with a gun.
01:18:18.000 I mean, this is the kind of stuff where you're talking legit civil war.
01:18:22.000 Like, when you say that the government can take people's kids from them because the government knows better than you how to parent your kids on basic things like, are you a boy or a girl?
01:18:31.000 That's going to get violent pretty quickly.
01:18:32.000 If you send someone to my door with a gun saying, I'm taking your daughter from you because your daughter says she's a boy at school and you're not going to take her to a psychiatrist to start her transitioning process...
01:18:42.000 No.
01:18:43.000 But how did we get so far down this rabbit hole of insanity?
01:18:47.000 And this is, again, this is not taking away the personal choice of a 60-year-old man like Bruce Jenner who decides he wants to be a woman.
01:18:54.000 Do what you want.
01:18:54.000 Free country.
01:18:55.000 Go have at it.
01:18:56.000 Have a good time.
01:18:57.000 But how did we get so crazy that that becomes an option that people aren't They're not paying attention to the massive variables that a child encounters.
01:19:09.000 Psychological variables, stress variables, what's going on in the home, what's happening hormonally, what's happening psychologically, what is happening to you, and how can you decide, like, this is it.
01:19:20.000 You're going to allow this kid to make a lockdown decision to begin gender transition surgery at, like, 9 or 10 years old.
01:19:29.000 Yeah, you can put hormone blockers in there to an 8-year-old.
01:19:30.000 Yeah, and then they'll show you this girl who's like 13, who used to be a boy, and you see her act and talk, and they go, how could you imagine that this isn't a girl?
01:19:44.000 Okay?
01:19:45.000 I don't know.
01:19:47.000 I just don't know what happened.
01:19:49.000 I'm gonna go with the fact that there's a Y chromosome in every cell of that person's body, except, ironically, for some of his sperm cells to tell me that that's probably a boy.
01:19:56.000 And yes, you can block the manifestation of some physical characteristics.
01:20:00.000 That does not change the chromosomes.
01:20:02.000 And there are legitimately intersex people, right?
01:20:04.000 I mean, there are people who legitimately have conditions like Kleinfelter syndrome.
01:20:07.000 I mean, these are actual biological things.
01:20:09.000 But if you're telling me any boy can be a girl, no.
01:20:13.000 No.
01:20:14.000 The answer is no.
01:20:37.000 I mean, telling kids that we are going to force you into, like, you express when you're five that you think you're the opposite sex, and now at eight we're going to transition you into this, and your suicide rate is exactly the same as somebody who didn't do that?
01:20:48.000 Or it's very similar to somebody who didn't do that?
01:20:51.000 And, like, this is somehow supposed to benefit the person?
01:20:54.000 It's just, it's beyond imagination.
01:20:57.000 I think it's cruelty.
01:20:57.000 Well, it's very strange, for sure.
01:21:00.000 And as someone who doesn't experience gender dysphoria, I like to, I mean, when someone's got some sort of an issue, whatever it is, whether you call it an issue or a condition or whatever the fuck it is, and I don't have it, I try to be as...
01:21:15.000 Stand-offish.
01:21:16.000 I tried to be as objective.
01:21:17.000 I tried to be as kind as possible.
01:21:19.000 This is a weird one, though.
01:21:21.000 This is a weird one because it's become some sort of a fad, and any criticism of it whatsoever, even discussion of it, you are labeled as a transphobic piece of shit.
01:21:31.000 Yeah, I think it's only weird, honestly, because it's run into the weird sexual politics that dominates in the country.
01:21:36.000 Because if we were to talk about anorexia, which is a form of body dysphoria, or if we were to talk about, I mean, there actually is something body identity integrity disorder, right?
01:21:44.000 Where people want to lose an arm.
01:21:47.000 We would be saying, well, the problem is in your brain, it's not in your arm.
01:21:51.000 Chopping off your arm seems a little extreme, but if you want to do that, go ahead.
01:21:54.000 But if you were a kid and a five-year-old, you wouldn't say, oh, well, this kid's going to suffer with this their entire life.
01:21:58.000 Let's just chop off their arm now.
01:22:00.000 Let's prevent their arm from developing.
01:22:02.000 This is not...
01:22:03.000 And to tell the entire society that this is a positive good is a whole other thing.
01:22:07.000 It's one thing to try and treat people who have a disorder humanely.
01:22:10.000 It's another thing to redefine the terms of the entire civilization as well as biology in order to fit that.
01:22:17.000 It's valuing the subjective over the objective.
01:22:19.000 Science is objective.
01:22:20.000 Your feelings about who you are is subjective.
01:22:23.000 You can have those feelings, but once you are trying to translate those feelings into the objective standard we all must hold by, now you're encroaching on my territory.
01:22:31.000 It's not just you doing what you want to do anymore.
01:22:33.000 You're telling me what I have to do, and that's a different thing.
01:22:35.000 Right.
01:22:35.000 Now, when people say that there's this 40% suicide rate amongst transgender people, one of the arguments that I've heard is it's because they're not accepted.
01:22:44.000 Right.
01:22:44.000 I've heard this too, yeah.
01:22:45.000 Yeah.
01:22:45.000 And that if they were accepted, and then they felt themselves, and they felt loved for their true self, then it would be just like everybody else.
01:22:53.000 And I've seen no evidence to suggest that.
01:22:56.000 If there is a decrease based on treatment, then it's marginal at best.
01:23:01.000 But that dysphoria, is it uniform?
01:23:03.000 I would like to know, is gender dysphoria, is it in a similar percentile as anorexia, or what bodybuilders get, or what strippers get when they get triple F tits?
01:23:16.000 I'd have to look up the anorexic suicide rate.
01:23:19.000 Body dysphoria is a weird thing, you know?
01:23:22.000 It is.
01:23:23.000 I've met people.
01:23:23.000 There's a girl that goes to my yoga class that's anorexic, and it's so disturbing.
01:23:28.000 It's so sad.
01:23:29.000 Oh, it's horrifying.
01:23:31.000 It's horrifying.
01:23:31.000 And listen, I'm not saying that we should mistreat people, but if, again, you're talking about an entire society being forced to redefine basic biological terminology, then, like...
01:23:43.000 Be an adult.
01:23:45.000 Live with this.
01:23:46.000 I'm happy to treat you with...
01:23:48.000 Listen, I would hire a transgender person, but I'm not going to change what reality is in order to humor you.
01:23:56.000 If you call yourself Napoleon, I'm not going to call you Napoleon.
01:23:58.000 You're not Napoleon.
01:23:59.000 This is not something I'm up for.
01:24:00.000 Would you take it into consideration, though?
01:24:02.000 I mean, when you're looking at the—what if someone was really good at their job and someone else was equally good at their job but not transgender?
01:24:09.000 Would you lean towards the not transgender person?
01:24:11.000 Because you say, well, the transgender person, they're dealing with a host of psychological issues, obviously.
01:24:16.000 Well, I mean, I think that you would have to think about, you know— Typical aspects of reliability just the same way you would with any other mental disorder if you knew somebody was was manic depressive Which is super common and you have somebody who's equally qualified who's not manic depressive You might think well that might have an effect on how they do their job.
01:24:32.000 Yeah, so maybe I mean, I You know, I haven't had enough personal experience with Transgender people to know whether it would impact a secretarial job or something probably not Yeah, probably not but it's it but again to pretend that like transgenders in the military This seems to me like a decision that should be made my military people Who actually have to determine how much does this impact the job?
01:24:51.000 And if you already have a group of people with a 40% suicide rate who have higher levels of instability as a group, not individually, as a group, and you're choosing which groups to pick from to be on the front lines in small units living under severe pressure for months at a time,
01:25:07.000 is that what you're going to go for?
01:25:10.000 Or is that something where you'd have to overcome certain presumptions in order to get there?
01:25:15.000 Yeah, I tweeted something that Kristen Beck wrote the other day about when the military ban, when Trump, apparently there was not a real ban.
01:25:25.000 No, it's bullshit.
01:25:25.000 I mean, basically, Trump was trying to distract from the Sessions thing.
01:25:28.000 Is that what it is?
01:25:29.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:25:30.000 Two minutes later, he was back to tweeting about Sessions.
01:25:32.000 This was the part about that I didn't like.
01:25:33.000 Like, I actually agree that there is a question as to whether the military should be recruiting transgender people because I think that the military has certain, like, it creates a bunch of questions.
01:25:43.000 Not just questions about who showers with whom, but also questions like, okay, you have a transgender man.
01:25:47.000 Does he have to fill the female standards of fitness or the male standards of fitness?
01:25:50.000 Right.
01:25:50.000 Right.
01:25:50.000 These are actual questions.
01:25:52.000 How does it work with troop cohesion?
01:25:54.000 You have a group of men, and now you have a man who's technically a man, but do you treat him as a woman?
01:25:59.000 Does he have to carry the same amount of stuff as the guy?
01:26:01.000 How does that work exactly?
01:26:02.000 The cost of gender transition surgery and hormones and psychologists, does that come into play at all here?
01:26:09.000 Would you recruit from the anorexic community for the military?
01:26:12.000 These are like real questions.
01:26:14.000 But that said, that's why they commissioned a study from General Mattis at Department of Defense.
01:26:19.000 He was going to look into all of this and then give a report in six months.
01:26:22.000 And Trump just sort of tweeted it out there.
01:26:23.000 I agree that I think that Trump's general, you know, his general attitude on it is probably correct in terms of what the military is there doing, what it's not there to do.
01:26:32.000 But what I don't agree with is how he did it at all.
01:26:34.000 Because it's disrespectful to the people in the military who are transgender.
01:26:37.000 I mean, like, I wouldn't want to find out in a tweet.
01:26:39.000 I want a better rationale than two tweets, and then we're back to, you know, like, look, they're doing more than I. I mean, they're serving the military.
01:26:47.000 I didn't serve in the military.
01:26:48.000 It seems like it would be pretty hypocritical of me to say, well, it's perfectly respectful to say, in two tweets, you're out.
01:26:53.000 We're good to go.
01:27:05.000 This is a weird PR thing, but it really stirred up people in the comment section.
01:27:10.000 Which I think it was designed to do, right?
01:27:11.000 I'm sure.
01:27:12.000 Well, either that or he just felt like tweeting.
01:27:15.000 I think that's what it was.
01:27:18.000 I mean, he wanted to shift the conversation.
01:27:19.000 And the funniest thing about that is that he did it in two tweets.
01:27:22.000 And the first half of the tweet was, in consultation with my generals and my military experts, we have decided that we will no longer accept...
01:27:29.000 Ellipses.
01:27:30.000 10-minute gap.
01:27:31.000 Transgender people in the military.
01:27:32.000 So there was a story at BuzzFeed that was kind of funny.
01:27:36.000 They went and interviewed a bunch of people in the Pentagon, and a bunch of the people in the Pentagon were like, during that 10-minute gap, I didn't know whether we were going to nuclear war or what, right?
01:27:43.000 Because that first tweet was like, we will no longer accept it.
01:27:46.000 Could have been North Korea's missile test program.
01:27:50.000 Wow.
01:27:51.000 Yeah, but this, again, is evidence, you know, I think it's an example of, even if I think the policy is good, good policy done the wrong way is actually counterproductive for the policies that I want to see done.
01:28:02.000 Like, I want it laid out by Mattis.
01:28:03.000 I want it laid out by Defense Department.
01:28:05.000 I want all the reasons laid out so we can have a good discussion over it.
01:28:07.000 I don't really want just, like, thought vomit on Twitter.
01:28:11.000 That's just not, I don't think it's effective.
01:28:12.000 Well, it also seems that this issue is such a hot issue, and it's also an issue that you're not really allowed to have an opinion on, other than the standard opinion that this has always been a woman trapped in a man's body, and this is the way it is, and it's totally healthy.
01:28:27.000 By the way, this Descartesian notion that it's like the soul in the machine, and there's a woman deep down for 40 years who had three children with a man's penis, and now is escaping.
01:28:39.000 It's like Ghostbusters.
01:28:43.000 Ghostbusters.
01:28:45.000 Have you seen the man in England?
01:28:46.000 Was it in England?
01:28:47.000 No.
01:28:47.000 It was Germany?
01:28:48.000 The man that identifies as a six-year-old girl?
01:28:51.000 Yes.
01:28:51.000 And so they turned him into a six-year-old girl.
01:28:53.000 So there's this clip.
01:28:54.000 Yeah, exactly.
01:28:54.000 So there's that clip of me that's gone around the internet a fair bit where I'm talking to a college girl about this and she's saying, like, men can be women and women can be men.
01:29:00.000 And I said, well, how old are you?
01:29:01.000 I love that clip.
01:29:03.000 I mean, come on.
01:29:04.000 Why aren't you 60?
01:29:05.000 Why aren't you 60?
01:29:05.000 Yeah.
01:29:06.000 And she's, like, baffled.
01:29:08.000 Like, what?
01:29:08.000 And then it finally hits her and it's like, well...
01:29:13.000 Yeah.
01:29:13.000 I think this is what's kind of frightening about the age we live in is that we can't even come up with common definitions of basic things.
01:29:19.000 How are we supposed to have conversations with each other if you can't decide what a man is or what a woman is or whether a scientific fact ought to be relevant or not?
01:29:28.000 At least we could decide what was a scientific fact or not before, and now it's like the subjective has just eaten everything.
01:29:34.000 If I don't think it's a scientific fact, it's no longer a scientific fact, and therefore I no longer accept it.
01:29:37.000 Well, we've changed the parameters of the argument.
01:29:38.000 It's become about freedom.
01:29:40.000 The freedom to be your authentic self versus biology.
01:29:43.000 Right, and again, be your authentic self.
01:29:46.000 I don't give a shit.
01:29:47.000 Do whatever you want.
01:29:48.000 More power to you, but...
01:29:50.000 It is no longer about your freedom to be your authentic self when you're talking about either legislation that impacts how I run my business or how I raise my child, or you are suggesting that it is my duty to humor your authentic self.
01:30:00.000 Like, I think there are a lot of people who do stupid crap their entire lives.
01:30:02.000 It's not my job to humor their authentic self.
01:30:04.000 I mean, I'm pro-drug legalization, but I've never done drugs, and I think that drugs are stupid.
01:30:10.000 You know, don't tell me that I have to, like, cheer when somebody smokes a joint.
01:30:13.000 Like...
01:30:14.000 Do what you want, but don't tell me that I have to redefine what I think is good and bad behavior.
01:30:18.000 That's silly.
01:30:19.000 Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.
01:30:21.000 And the other thing that it became this weird political hot point where we're talking about bathrooms.
01:30:27.000 Yeah.
01:30:27.000 And then it become like the number one topic.
01:30:29.000 Because it's easy for people to sort of boil down the argument into that, I think.
01:30:31.000 Right, of course.
01:30:32.000 Like this, what about my children?
01:30:34.000 My children are going to the bathroom and a man with a dress is going to come in.
01:30:36.000 He's going to claim that he's identifying as a woman.
01:30:39.000 And it got to the point where so many people were upset about it, that people were boycotting South Carolina.
01:30:45.000 Remember that?
01:30:46.000 Oh, yeah.
01:30:46.000 And the one I thought was amazing was the NCAA saying they were going to remove the Final Four from North Carolina because they passed the bathroom bill in North Carolina.
01:30:55.000 And I asked online, okay, so when are you going to abolish the separate male and female divisions of the NCAA? I mean, you've said that we can't have separate male and female bathrooms where biological males play and, you know, where biological males go to one bathroom and biological females go to another.
01:31:09.000 So why do you have separate divisions?
01:31:11.000 Why do you have an NCAA women's division and an NCAA men's division?
01:31:15.000 Yeah, where does this go?
01:31:17.000 I mean, eventually...
01:31:18.000 How does this boil down?
01:31:19.000 I mean, eventually it goes to one place or another.
01:31:22.000 Like, either we just say, this is a step too far, give me a break.
01:31:25.000 You know, science says no.
01:31:27.000 Or we say, anyone can be anything at any time.
01:31:30.000 A man is a woman, and a woman is a man, and, you know, just pick.
01:31:34.000 Have you ever seen any of the videos of people that are gender fluid?
01:31:37.000 I have seen those videos.
01:31:38.000 Those videos are fascinating.
01:31:40.000 They wake up one day, and they're a woman, and the next day they're a man.
01:31:44.000 There was a guy on NPR, on Radiolab, on a podcast, who transitions at times of stress.
01:31:52.000 Makes perfect sense to me.
01:31:53.000 In the middle of having a conversation, I just switched.
01:31:56.000 I'm Paul now.
01:31:57.000 I'm a man now.
01:31:57.000 So when he's more stressed, does he switch into a woman?
01:31:59.000 Because that'd be really sexist, right?
01:32:01.000 I mean, I think that if he was stressed at work and he switched into a woman and started crying, that seems kind of sexist to me.
01:32:05.000 That's implying that women are the people who cry at work.
01:32:07.000 That is sexist.
01:32:08.000 Also, this raises a bunch of other weird questions.
01:32:10.000 Like, okay, there's been this...
01:32:13.000 Again, you want to talk about weird.
01:32:14.000 There's been this weird push in parts of the trans community to suggest that a male who doesn't want to have sex with a biological male who says he's a female is now a sexist against women.
01:32:27.000 Transphobe.
01:32:27.000 Is a transphobe, right?
01:32:28.000 You're a bad person if you're a man who doesn't want to have sex with a man, a biological man.
01:32:32.000 And it doesn't make you gay to do that, right?
01:32:33.000 If you have sex with a biological man who says he's a woman, that's straight sex.
01:32:36.000 But if you were to have sex with a biological woman who says she's a man, you're gay.
01:32:40.000 Mm.
01:32:42.000 Yeah.
01:32:42.000 Kind of weird.
01:32:43.000 It's definitely weird, but I have seen the arguments in the blog posts and the tweets about men who discriminate against trans women, who do not want to date trans women.
01:32:53.000 And people keep saying, well, it's culturally defined.
01:32:55.000 It's like, no, that's called evolution.
01:32:57.000 Well, you can have a baby together.
01:32:59.000 Correct.
01:33:00.000 Yeah.
01:33:00.000 Correct.
01:33:00.000 It turns out that evolution wants men to have sex with women.
01:33:03.000 Like, I'm sorry to break it to everybody, but evolution relies on human reproduction.
01:33:09.000 Okay?
01:33:10.000 If you put that thing in the wrong place, it ain't gonna reproduce.
01:33:12.000 Like, that's just...
01:33:13.000 Sorry!
01:33:14.000 I don't know why I have to keep apologizing for science.
01:33:17.000 And then they say that my party is the party of non-science.
01:33:21.000 What?
01:33:22.000 You're the ones who say that two minutes before my baby is born, it's not a baby, and a man can be a woman, but I'm anti-science?
01:33:28.000 I'm wildly confused by this.
01:33:30.000 Well, the whole thing is wildly confusing, but it's such a strange subject.
01:33:34.000 It's such a strange subject that's been brought to the forefront.
01:33:37.000 Again, I think it's about more the moral posturing than it is about people who actually think this is a major issue.
01:33:41.000 I think you're absolutely right, and I think people love to be virtuous.
01:33:44.000 They love to be on that side.
01:33:45.000 They love to virtue signal.
01:33:47.000 How dare you?
01:33:48.000 Yeah, how dare you.
01:33:49.000 It is the how dare you with dicks.
01:33:51.000 Or lack of.
01:33:53.000 Fake dicks.
01:33:53.000 But they don't really have a lot of fake dicks.
01:33:55.000 They don't really go that far.
01:33:56.000 They just sort of take testosterone and see what's up.
01:34:00.000 But it's just...
01:34:02.000 It's a weird facet of our society today that is unexpected.
01:34:06.000 I mean, you go back 20, 30 years, and it was an oddity.
01:34:10.000 And, you know, even during the Renee Richards thing, it was more of an oddity than anything, and people just sort of accepted it.
01:34:16.000 Well, this is why I say I think that a lot of people who are virtue signaling are still treating it as an oddity.
01:34:20.000 They just won't admit that.
01:34:21.000 Right.
01:34:22.000 I think that they're watching it because it's a circus to them.
01:34:24.000 And I think that's actually cruel.
01:34:25.000 I don't think that you should, like, put people who suffer from mental illness on the cover of magazines.
01:34:29.000 I just don't.
01:34:29.000 I think that that's bad strategy.
01:34:31.000 What about bodybuilders?
01:34:33.000 I mean, I'll be honest with you.
01:34:35.000 I don't know that much about bodybuilding.
01:34:36.000 Do I look like I know that much about bodybuilding?
01:34:38.000 No, but the argument that I've heard is that...
01:34:40.000 I'm a CrossFit guy.
01:34:41.000 I'm ripped but small.
01:34:43.000 I'm more of a marathon runner.
01:34:45.000 What I've heard of the argument about bodybuilding is that they suffer from it as well, is that in order to get that big, you almost have to have some sort of a body dysmorphia.
01:34:55.000 You have to not understand how insanely huge you are.
01:34:59.000 Or be really into it.
01:35:01.000 Their argument is they're really into it, which makes sense to me.
01:35:03.000 But I've heard people say that it's almost like a reverse anorexia.
01:35:07.000 Like, they never feel like they're big enough.
01:35:09.000 Yeah, I've seen that.
01:35:10.000 People say that before, yeah.
01:35:11.000 Well, it's weird that the human mind is suspect, or subject, rather.
01:35:16.000 It's really variable, and it's really open to suggestion.
01:35:17.000 Really open to suggestion.
01:35:19.000 Which is what scares people about children transitioning.
01:35:22.000 For sure.
01:35:22.000 For sure.
01:35:23.000 I mean, listen, you see it in everything, including fashion.
01:35:25.000 Like, how many dudes wax their chest now?
01:35:27.000 30 years ago, nobody waxed their chest.
01:35:29.000 Are they waxing?
01:35:30.000 Dudes are waxing?
01:35:31.000 They shave their chest, wax their chest, whatever it is.
01:35:33.000 Whenever I have questions about the youth, I turn to young Jamie.
01:35:35.000 Yeah, but I mean, you watch TV now, and every dude on TV has a chest as bare as my 14-month-old son's.
01:35:41.000 I hear you.
01:35:42.000 And it's like, where did this come from?
01:35:44.000 And this came from TV. The one who ripped.
01:35:45.000 They won't look chiseled.
01:35:46.000 And it also came from TV. Like TV, it was going to be, men are going to be hairless now.
01:35:50.000 This is the new trend, men are going to be hairless.
01:35:52.000 You don't even get the Burt Reynolds-like, you know, bear chest anymore.
01:35:56.000 So if people are susceptible to even that with regard to fashion, like people have, for five years, people convinced themselves that skinny jeans were a thing.
01:36:04.000 People are open to virtually any sort of suggestion.
01:36:07.000 Bell-bottoms.
01:36:07.000 They come in, they come out.
01:36:08.000 Remember when they tried to bring bell-bottoms back a few years ago?
01:36:10.000 I did remember that.
01:36:11.000 Not a good call.
01:36:12.000 They tried.
01:36:13.000 And people are like, nah, not this one.
01:36:15.000 Platforms?
01:36:15.000 I mean, they used to wear platform shoes?
01:36:17.000 That's why I'm just keeping around all my dad's old clothes, because eventually they're going to come back in again.
01:36:21.000 You never know.
01:36:22.000 Yeah, the idea of fashion and culture also being...
01:36:29.000 Like the same sort of mechanism that allows people to be variable when it comes to their gender.
01:36:34.000 I mean, you actually said there's a study, I thought this was fascinating, there's a study in Britain, or a poll in Britain, about sexual orientation.
01:36:41.000 And what it found was 95% of people over the age of 60 identified as exclusively heterosexual.
01:36:46.000 Of people who are under the age of 30, only 42% identified as exclusively heterosexual.
01:36:50.000 And it's like, okay, well, in two generations, it's not that half the population became bisexual, right?
01:36:56.000 That is not a scientific thing.
01:36:58.000 That means that people are open to suggestion about their sexual behavior, which you would assume.
01:37:01.000 Hmm.
01:37:02.000 So assuming that culture has no impact, and this goes against the whole born this way aspect of even the homosexual rights movement, the gay rights movement, that says, oh, you were born this way.
01:37:11.000 I agree that there's a genetic component to sexual behavior, but the idea that that's why 50% of the UK population has shifted toward, you know, I'm open to anything.
01:37:23.000 Is it 50%?
01:37:25.000 As I say, 95% of people over the age of 60, and then 42% of people under the age of 30. Wow.
01:37:32.000 42% bisexual in the UK? No, 42% people say they're extremely heterosexual.
01:37:39.000 Extremely heterosexual.
01:37:40.000 Say exclusively heterosexual.
01:37:41.000 So 60%, nearly 60%.
01:37:43.000 58% say that they're on the spectrum, but not exclusively heterosexual.
01:37:46.000 That's fascinating.
01:37:47.000 I wonder if they only talk to women who are drunk.
01:37:50.000 You know?
01:37:54.000 Like, young, drunk girls, they get crazy.
01:37:56.000 But I think also it's like they're trying to impress people.
01:37:58.000 You know, there's an Adam Carolla thing, right, where Adam has a whole shtick about, like, in the future, there's going to be a point where guys are considered gay if they won't kiss another dude.
01:38:06.000 Like, what are you gay?
01:38:07.000 You afraid that you're gay?
01:38:08.000 Kiss another dude and show me you're not gay.
01:38:11.000 We've gone around the bend a little bit.
01:38:13.000 We have.
01:38:15.000 There's also this thing that I think happens when you have two very clear sides, you know, where you have teams, and you sort of have a line in the sand that you're not supposed to cross, and there's the right side, and there's the left side.
01:38:26.000 And we have that in this country.
01:38:27.000 We really don't have a third-party option.
01:38:29.000 No.
01:38:30.000 All our third parties are kind of a joke.
01:38:33.000 Whenever you have two opposing viewpoints, people dig in.
01:38:37.000 Have you seen this new documentary about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal and the debates they had?
01:38:44.000 No, I've heard about it.
01:38:44.000 Is it any good?
01:38:45.000 It's great.
01:38:45.000 It's really interesting.
01:38:47.000 The debates they had during the 1968 election, it's fascinating.
01:38:51.000 I mean, I've watched some of those debates, but yeah.
01:38:53.000 It's intense.
01:38:54.000 Yeah, particularly the one where Buckley threatens to punch Vidal.
01:38:56.000 He calls him a queer and says, I'll sock you in the face and you'll stay plastered.
01:39:02.000 He'll stay plastered.
01:39:02.000 It's weird because it's so...
01:39:03.000 Stay plastered.
01:39:04.000 It's spectacular.
01:39:06.000 And it's such a...
01:39:07.000 It's so in the speak of the day, you know, like 1968. He's got the Brahmin accent.
01:39:12.000 It's great.
01:39:13.000 Like, it's almost British accent.
01:39:14.000 Yeah, it's fantastic.
01:39:15.000 It's really interesting.
01:39:17.000 And then...
01:39:18.000 But these...
01:39:20.000 I mean, it's that thing, my team versus that team.
01:39:25.000 And I think the left is guilty of it as much as the right is guilty of it.
01:39:29.000 It seems like it's a real issue where there's a lot of people that have ideas and opinions that sort of cross party lines.
01:39:37.000 But they vote on one side or another and they vote for their team.
01:39:41.000 I think that's right.
01:39:42.000 I think that, especially in this last election, I think that was true.
01:39:45.000 I think that people felt so alienated by the other side.
01:39:47.000 Like, to understand a lot of people who voted Trump, you have to understand that there are a lot of people in the country who felt insulted by the left.
01:39:53.000 They were just sick of being called racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes every time someone wanted to advance a policy on the left.
01:39:59.000 And so they said, okay, screw that.
01:40:01.000 At least Trump's not calling me that.
01:40:02.000 So I'll do that.
01:40:03.000 And then there are a bunch of people on the left who now feel insulted by Trump's even presence, and they think all the people who voted for Trump are those people, and so they're fighting racism, sexism, bigotry, and homophobia by voting against Trump.
01:40:14.000 Again, we go back to this, and there's a hardening of, there's not one bubble in the country, there's two.
01:40:19.000 You know, the right likes to accuse the left of being in a bubble in the coast.
01:40:23.000 There's a bubble on the right, too, which is the idea that everybody on the, every piece of the media is lying to you.
01:40:28.000 The New York Times is always fake news.
01:40:29.000 Everything is fake news.
01:40:30.000 You don't like it, it's fake news.
01:40:31.000 These bubbles are not healthy for the Republic.
01:40:33.000 I mean, we can't have conversations with each other if we do this routine.
01:40:36.000 No, deception is not healthy across the board.
01:40:39.000 And there's another thing that's going on where everybody's a Nazi.
01:40:42.000 I've never heard people called a Nazi more than I have over the last six months.
01:40:48.000 I mean, it's been crazy.
01:40:49.000 If you support Trump, you're a Nazi.
01:40:51.000 You're a neo-Nazi.
01:40:53.000 Somehow or another, you're a fascist.
01:40:55.000 If you didn't vote for Hillary, you're a Nazi.
01:40:57.000 Some people have boiled it down to the purest form.
01:41:02.000 Yeah, I agree.
01:41:03.000 I mean, first of all, it demonstrates tremendous historical ignorance.
01:41:06.000 Forget the Holocaust.
01:41:06.000 Like, you just look at who Hitler was and the policies he promulgated.
01:41:10.000 Like, he was basically—he was all over the place.
01:41:12.000 When he wanted to talk to socialists, he was a socialist.
01:41:14.000 When he wanted to talk to capitalists, he was a capitalist.
01:41:16.000 He was a top-down government guy, for sure.
01:41:18.000 But he would speak the language of, you know, what would be considered the European far-right today on a lot of issues.
01:41:26.000 But then he would talk about redistribution of resources and universal health care and all this kind of stuff and removing guns.
01:41:32.000 But he's just a convenient club.
01:41:34.000 I mean it's just a convenient club because then and then there's this part that scares me.
01:41:38.000 Once you say that somebody is Hitler, then it actually becomes obligatory to physically resist them.
01:41:43.000 Then you can't have a conversation with Hitler.
01:41:45.000 Once you say somebody's Hitler or the KKK, what are you gonna do?
01:41:49.000 Have a conversation with them?
01:41:50.000 At the very least you won't talk with them and at the most you might try to punch them.
01:41:53.000 That is really a problem with that.
01:41:57.000 The nomenclature, right?
01:41:58.000 That's really a problem with identifying someone in that way.
01:42:02.000 That they are someone that you have to resist.
01:42:04.000 And they are someone who cannot be reasoned with.
01:42:07.000 They are someone who is absolutely evil.
01:42:09.000 There's no variables or variance in their behavior.
01:42:13.000 And listen, I like fiery political rhetoric.
01:42:15.000 I find it fun.
01:42:16.000 But I think that once you label somebody completely evil, You have a responsibility not to debate with them.
01:42:23.000 You have a responsibility not to talk with them.
01:42:25.000 Even the conversation legitimizes them.
01:42:28.000 Listen, I'm sure you're going to get a bunch of shit from people for even having me on because the idea is going to be, well, how could you have on somebody like Shapiro?
01:42:35.000 You're legitimizing his point of view by having him on.
01:42:37.000 I know a lot of people who I politically disagree with who have had that experience will have me on their show and it's like, how dare you have Shapiro on because you're just granting him cover.
01:42:47.000 Or we can just have a conversation and maybe we'll disagree and maybe we'll agree.
01:42:49.000 Yeah, I really don't give a fuck about those people.
01:42:52.000 I think that's a silly conversation.
01:42:54.000 I feel like you should talk to everybody.
01:42:56.000 And if you disagree or agree, I have friends on that.
01:42:59.000 My friend yesterday on Eddie Bravo, he believes in everything's a fucking conspiracy.
01:43:03.000 I disagree with him wildly and I love him like a brother.
01:43:06.000 I don't think you have to agree with people and I don't think you have to...
01:43:10.000 The idea that you can't just have a conversation with someone about something and see if you can find middle ground or see if you could clearly define their point of view or find their perspective, that's missing today in a weird way.
01:43:21.000 And one of the weirdest things about the election was the ping pong match between the left and the right as played out on national television by the media.
01:43:29.000 I would watch, especially cable news, I would watch Fox News and then go to CNN and go back and forth and flip channels.
01:43:36.000 You know you have that previous channel button on the DirecTV?
01:43:38.000 I would just put it on both of them and go, what?
01:43:41.000 What's really happening?
01:43:42.000 It's two different worlds.
01:43:42.000 My mom said this in 2012 with Romney and Obama.
01:43:45.000 If you read the right-wing media, there was no way Romney was going to lose.
01:43:48.000 And if you read the left-wing media, there was no way Romney was going to win.
01:43:51.000 And she said, which one of these do I believe?
01:43:53.000 And I said, it's probably somewhere in the middle.
01:43:54.000 Like, I have a basic rule, which is that if you have a New York Times report, and then you have a report from my site, The Daily Wire, and they share the facts, you can probably assume the facts are true.
01:44:02.000 But the opinions that are, you know, embedded with the facts...
01:44:05.000 Those are opinions.
01:44:06.000 And that's what's so hard about, I think, the modern media landscape is trying to separate the facts from the opinion.
01:44:11.000 And so this is why when Trump says fake news, he's not wrong that CNN hates him and the New York Times hates him.
01:44:18.000 He's right about that.
01:44:18.000 But just labeling it all fake news is inaccurate also because most of what they're reporting is true, right?
01:44:24.000 It's just that it's biased.
01:44:25.000 Something can be both true and biased.
01:44:27.000 I'm true and biased, right?
01:44:28.000 I say things that I think are factual, but I'm obviously conservative.
01:44:32.000 That's my point of view.
01:44:33.000 You know, tough shit.
01:44:34.000 So that's And you're a commentator.
01:44:36.000 Right.
01:44:36.000 And that's what you do.
01:44:37.000 I mean, half of it is, you know, riling people up, saying provocative things.
01:44:41.000 I mean, that's...
01:44:42.000 And this is where I think the right is correct about CNN and the New York Times and some of the other networks.
01:44:47.000 Like, if you ask the right, what pisses you off more, CNN or MSNBC? Most people on the right will say CNN, not MSNBC. Because MSNBC is honest enough to say we're on the left, and CNN pretends we have no bias.
01:44:58.000 We're above all that.
01:44:59.000 Right.
01:44:59.000 Same thing with the New York Times.
01:45:01.000 You know, we're above all that.
01:45:02.000 And then they run the most egregiously biased headlines.
01:45:04.000 And we go, well, if they're lying about that, they're lying about everything.
01:45:07.000 You know, one of my most fascinating characters of this whole play was Scott Adams.
01:45:13.000 And particularly because Scott Adams, when I had him on my podcast, he was saying he doesn't even vote.
01:45:18.000 And he's like, what I am paying attention to, he goes, I am a trained hypnotist, and I'm paying attention to the powers of persuasion, and I'm looking at trends, and I'm making some predictions that turned out to be accurate.
01:45:30.000 And he's like, he's looking at Trump, and he's not talking about Trump in these glowing terms.
01:45:34.000 He's talking about him as being an effective persuader.
01:45:38.000 And he lost millions of dollars because of that opinion.
01:45:42.000 Talking about a guy that he's not even going to vote for.
01:45:45.000 I mean, this is all leading up to the election where people were fucking furious at him.
01:45:49.000 Yeah.
01:45:50.000 And even more furious at him after Trump won, because he would do those coffee with Scott things that he does on Periscope, where he wakes up and he just starts asking questions.
01:45:59.000 And he's so measured and calm.
01:46:03.000 He had a podcast recently with Sam Harris where I think he was just like...
01:46:08.000 A little too far over the edge of apologizing for some of Trump's behavior and sort of attributing some of Trump's behavior to that you could say was incompetence and attributed to some sort of a master plan.
01:46:21.000 This is my only quarrel with Scott, I think, is that he tends to believe that everything Trump does is 987 degree underwater, upside down, hungry, hungry hippos.
01:46:28.000 Like, everything is just, it's all just acts of genius and it's three steps down the road.
01:46:33.000 Instead of, like, stumbling his way to victory.
01:46:36.000 Okay, I knew everyone involved in the campaign.
01:46:39.000 Like, every single person who was involved in the campaign I knew.
01:46:42.000 This was a stumble their way to victory.
01:46:44.000 Like, it is amazing.
01:46:46.000 Human beings are, we need to think, it's sort of like the Joker says in The Dark Knight, we need to think there's a plan.
01:46:51.000 We always need to think there's a plan.
01:46:53.000 And so if Trump won, it must be because there was some master plan that he unveiled over the course of the campaign.
01:46:58.000 Three weeks before the election, he was caught on tape saying that he wanted to grab women by the P word.
01:47:03.000 No, there was no master plan.
01:47:05.000 It's just that Hillary was an awful candidate and no one liked her.
01:47:12.000 Even the idea that there was a broad national movement for Trump that wasn't there for other candidates, he won fewer votes in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney did and he won the state.
01:47:21.000 And that's because no one liked Hillary.
01:47:23.000 I mean, the untold story of the election is this was not a referendum on Donald Trump.
01:47:26.000 This was a referendum on Hillary Clinton, particularly in the heartland, and people hated her guts.
01:47:30.000 Barack Obama won Ohio walking away.
01:47:32.000 Everyone talks about Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
01:47:35.000 Nobody talks about Ohio.
01:47:36.000 Trump won Ohio walking away.
01:47:38.000 One of the reasons he won Ohio walking away is because in 2012, Barack Obama really drove out the black vote.
01:47:43.000 The percentage of the black vote, typically in Ohio, it's like 10% of the general vote.
01:47:48.000 In 2012, it was like 13% to 15% of the general vote.
01:47:51.000 And that was the entire margin of victory for Obama in the state of Ohio.
01:47:54.000 Hillary got closer to sort of the traditional percentages, and she lost in a whopping blowout in Ohio.
01:48:01.000 No one likes Hillary Clinton.
01:48:02.000 And the left was so arrogant that they thought, we can take the most unpopular, unlikable...
01:48:07.000 Unqualified, nasty, boring human being anyone has seen for 20 years.
01:48:12.000 And we'll run her.
01:48:13.000 She's the one we'll run.
01:48:14.000 But do you understand how incompetent you have to be to lose to a celebrity game show host?
01:48:21.000 Like, you have to suck at this in a royal manner.
01:48:24.000 Well, I don't know now.
01:48:25.000 Now that I think the floodgates are open.
01:48:27.000 But don't you think...
01:48:28.000 Senator Kid Rock, man.
01:48:29.000 Yeah.
01:48:30.000 Kid Rock is gonna win!
01:48:31.000 Apparently he's, like, way ahead.
01:48:33.000 Well, so he's gonna win the primary.
01:48:35.000 If he didn't win the primary, then he would have to run as an independent.
01:48:38.000 Then he'd be indie rock, right?
01:48:41.000 Kid Rock is gonna win the primary.
01:48:44.000 Well, we can only hope that once he's in the office, he grows into it and he becomes adult rock.
01:48:48.000 How has Ted Nugent not run for office yet?
01:48:50.000 That's what I want to know.
01:48:51.000 How's he not?
01:48:52.000 I saw him giving a conversation about running for president, you know, and that, you know, if the people really wanted it, he would do it.
01:48:59.000 I was like, oh, good Jesus.
01:49:03.000 I just can't wait for The Rock-Oprah, you know?
01:49:06.000 The Rock might win.
01:49:07.000 The Rock might win.
01:49:08.000 He's a beautiful man.
01:49:09.000 If Oprah ran in 2020...
01:49:11.000 Yeah.
01:49:11.000 The Rock with Oprah.
01:49:13.000 It's a fucking slam dunk.
01:49:15.000 Oh, man.
01:49:15.000 Yeah.
01:49:16.000 The Rock and Oprah together...
01:49:17.000 So I have this weird idea that we should actually reinstitute a monarchy, and it should just be ceremonial, and they can be a celebrity, right?
01:49:23.000 We'll just make a celebrity monarch, and that person will just be there to look pretty and be popular.
01:49:26.000 Sort of like the Queen of England.
01:49:27.000 Exactly.
01:49:28.000 But don't really have anything to affect on policy.
01:49:29.000 No power.
01:49:30.000 No power, because we keep conflating the presidency with, like, who actually has to do things.
01:49:34.000 Right.
01:49:34.000 With, like, people who we want to represent the country.
01:49:36.000 Yeah, we have a popularity contest to see who gets to control the nukes, which is insane.
01:49:40.000 That's pretty wild.
01:49:41.000 That's pretty wild.
01:49:42.000 I think that, you know, this is...
01:49:44.000 We all think in cinematic terms now, and, you know, Hollywood is run by the dopiest jackasses.
01:49:51.000 Like, I grew up with all these people.
01:49:52.000 Right.
01:49:53.000 These are not people who you want controlling the narrative, and then we're like, you know what, let's take...
01:49:56.000 If Tom Hanks would only run...
01:49:59.000 What makes you think Tom Hanks would be a good president?
01:50:01.000 Did you look at Trump and went, God, he's doing such a brilliant job.
01:50:04.000 What we really need now is the guy from Castaway.
01:50:06.000 What we need is an actor again.
01:50:07.000 We did well with Reagan.
01:50:09.000 We need another actor.
01:50:10.000 We did great with Schwarzenegger as the governor.
01:50:13.000 At least Reagan was governor for 20 years before he was the president of the United States.
01:50:18.000 Let's put him through the ringer.
01:50:20.000 Schwarzenegger proved in eight years that he was not capable of doing anything except kind of sucking.
01:50:24.000 Well, you ever heard him talk about it?
01:50:25.000 From his perspective, he's like, you don't really understand how much red tape and bullshit you have to go through.
01:50:30.000 He goes, I would meet with people and they would agree with me that it's a good idea.
01:50:34.000 However, they would say, my voters are never going to agree with it, so I'm going to oppose it.
01:50:38.000 So even though I know you're right, there's a bunch of farmers that are going to be mad at me for doing that, so I'm not going to do that.
01:50:44.000 Well, this is the other thing in politics that really drives me nuts.
01:50:46.000 So there are two promises that politicians make that are complete bullshit.
01:50:48.000 The first promise they make is, I'm going to go to Washington, D.C., and I'm going to get things done.
01:50:53.000 No, you're not.
01:50:54.000 Okay?
01:50:54.000 The system is built for gridlock.
01:50:56.000 It's built for gridlock.
01:50:57.000 It's why we have two separate houses of Congress.
01:50:58.000 It's why we have a president who can veto.
01:51:00.000 It's why we have a Supreme Court that rules on cases.
01:51:02.000 It's built for gridlock.
01:51:03.000 It's why we have states that are supposed to be able to check the federal government.
01:51:06.000 All this is in the Federalist Papers.
01:51:07.000 It was built for gridlock.
01:51:08.000 And some people are happy with that because that's how Trump is being, like, sidelined at every time he tries to make something really important.
01:51:14.000 I think we all should be happy with that because the only way things were supposed to get passed was with wide public support, right?
01:51:19.000 Which is probably a good thing.
01:51:20.000 We don't want the government shifting wildly and veering on its axis every four years or every two years.
01:51:25.000 I like the gridlock.
01:51:26.000 My big problem is that the gridlock now protects a huge system that I don't like that's been built up over 100 years in the case of growth of government.
01:51:33.000 But I like the gridlock.
01:51:34.000 But that's one promise that's made.
01:51:36.000 And then people are disappointed.
01:51:37.000 Oh, if we get in there, we're going to repeal Obamacare.
01:51:39.000 It's like, no, you're not.
01:51:40.000 You're not.
01:51:41.000 I mean, like, you can promise it, but now you're not gonna do it because you were full of crap when you said it, and now you're not gonna do it.
01:51:47.000 And the gridlock is there, and it's hard to change things.
01:51:50.000 You know, it takes a tremendous effort of will and electoral power to actually change things in a big way.
01:51:55.000 So this idea, we'll elect Trump, and Trump would say, it's all gonna be so easy.
01:51:58.000 It's like...
01:51:59.000 No, it's not.
01:52:00.000 It wasn't easy for Obama.
01:52:01.000 Obama passed Obamacare and that was it for his presidency.
01:52:04.000 He can do anything for the next six years.
01:52:06.000 There were no major pieces of legislation.
01:52:08.000 Nothing happened after that.
01:52:10.000 He lost Congress and that was it.
01:52:11.000 Okay, so that's promise number one.
01:52:13.000 The other promise is your anger is justified.
01:52:15.000 And this is the one I hate even more.
01:52:16.000 And that is the idea that, you know, in regular life, when you have kids, I have kids, when your kid is angry, the first thing you have to teach your kid is maybe you're wrong to be angry sometimes.
01:52:25.000 Your anger is not justified.
01:52:27.000 If you want to make good human beings, You have to determine whether they are right to be angry.
01:52:31.000 Is your anger correct?
01:52:33.000 Politicians are in the business of justifying people's anger.
01:52:35.000 Oh, you heard this about the Trump voter a lot, right?
01:52:37.000 They're so angry.
01:52:38.000 They're so angry.
01:52:39.000 Okay, well, I'm angry too about things, but are they angry about the right things?
01:52:43.000 And Trump would say, you're right to be angry because you've lost your job in Podunk, Ohio, because it's being stolen by the Chinese or by the Mexicans or something.
01:52:51.000 And it's like, well, is that factually true or are you just...
01:52:54.000 Are you just pandering to the anger?
01:52:56.000 And on the left, you hear people say this to black folks in the inner city.
01:52:59.000 It's the system that's keeping you down.
01:53:00.000 It's a racist, white supremacist system that's keeping you down.
01:53:03.000 Say, well, is that true?
01:53:04.000 Or are you just pandering to the voter?
01:53:05.000 Because it's hard to tell people hard truths, like you're not right to be angry, get off your ass and do something with your life.
01:53:10.000 And this is true regardless of race.
01:53:12.000 You know, go out there.
01:53:13.000 No one cares enough to stop you in your life.
01:53:15.000 Your life is your own.
01:53:15.000 No one in the United States cares about you, wants to stop you, wants to throw obstacles up in your own way.
01:53:21.000 I'm not sure you can win an election on the basis of go live your own life, even though everyone keeps claiming they want to live their own life.
01:53:27.000 I think most people are full of it.
01:53:28.000 I think most people don't want to live their own life.
01:53:29.000 They want a politician to tell them that all of their complaints about life being unfair are justified, and the politician's going to solve all that.
01:53:35.000 We don't want people who stay out of our way.
01:53:37.000 We want people to be mommy.
01:53:38.000 And, you know, that's a tempting...
01:53:42.000 Proposition for politicians.
01:53:43.000 Well, there's certainly a lot of that when you're talking to adults because you're dealing with people that have the momentum of all their failures in their life and all the different things that are not going right.
01:53:51.000 And then here they are at this moment today, right now.
01:53:55.000 And they want to figure out why and why they're not on track and how to get on track.
01:54:01.000 And the easiest way is to point the finger or blame someone else.
01:54:04.000 And everybody has their own hand.
01:54:05.000 I'm not saying that people's hands are fair and that, you know, one person doesn't have it easy.
01:54:10.000 A lot of people have it easy.
01:54:11.000 I have it easier than a lot of people, for sure.
01:54:13.000 For sure.
01:54:13.000 Absolutely.
01:54:14.000 But the reality is there's a tremendous amount of psychological factors that go into why someone does or does not succeed and to placate them or to play on those psychological factors as not being their own fault.
01:54:32.000 It's very tempting because it works with people.
01:54:34.000 People love to hear that.
01:54:36.000 They love to hear that it's not your fault.
01:54:38.000 Yep.
01:54:38.000 And I think that's what politicians have become in the business of doing.
01:54:40.000 And it's both right and left.
01:54:42.000 It's people saying that it's not your fault because you're being screwed by some foreign country.
01:54:47.000 It's not your fault because the immigrants are doing it to you.
01:54:50.000 It's not your fault...
01:54:52.000 Maybe some of that's true, but you have to show me why it's true.
01:54:55.000 Did you lose your job because of China, or did you lose your job because you're in an industry that is being crowded out because of technological change and because your union struck and created wages too high to be globally competitive?
01:55:09.000 Let's look at the actual logic here, and then how can we change it?
01:55:12.000 How can we make it better?
01:55:13.000 Is it something we have to do, or is it a matter of you need to broaden your skill set?
01:55:17.000 You see a lot of people now who are stuck in the mindset of 30 years ago that you're going to work a job and stay there for 20 years, and then you're going to leave with a gold watch.
01:55:25.000 That's not the way the job market works anymore.
01:55:27.000 If you're entering the job market right now as a college student, you can expect that in the next 10 years you'll probably work four jobs.
01:55:33.000 The turnover is too great, and you have to be constantly increasing your skill set.
01:55:36.000 Also, with every new innovation, there's businesses that branch out and become new, and then there's also businesses that die, and there's no bringing them back.
01:55:47.000 You're not going to bring back the printing press.
01:55:49.000 Exactly.
01:55:50.000 There's a lot of stuff that...
01:55:51.000 But for the guy in the printing press industry, you tell him that, trying to get elected from the printing press guy.
01:55:55.000 Right now, they're trying to stop automated cars.
01:55:59.000 There was a vote, right?
01:56:01.000 Wasn't there a vote within the last day or two to try to block automated trucks?
01:56:09.000 Yeah.
01:56:09.000 Because there's a tremendous amount of people that that's what they do for a living.
01:56:13.000 But it's going to be a lot more efficient when it's not people.
01:56:16.000 And, you know, this is the great fallacy that people have been trying to fight since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, is this idea, okay, well, the new technology is going to kill jobs, and then no one will ever work again.
01:56:26.000 So we've had the same unemployment rate in this country for the last hundred years, and the technology is a little bit better.
01:56:31.000 Teamsters convince Congress to block driverless trucks.
01:56:34.000 Yeah, that's crazy.
01:56:35.000 That's crazy.
01:56:36.000 Seems crazy.
01:56:37.000 It seems like you're fighting an inevitable tide.
01:56:40.000 Well, I mean, imagine that...
01:56:41.000 Like, how is that going to work for all the other industries that are affected?
01:56:44.000 Let's say that you now have...
01:56:46.000 You're artificially raising the prices of all the goods that now have to be brought in by the Teamsters, and now it's more expensive, so it's more money out of your pocket and my pocket.
01:56:53.000 That's money that...
01:56:54.000 Maybe I was willing to buy American, but now I'm going to buy Chinese because I have to feed my family.
01:56:58.000 Like, this is...
01:56:59.000 That's not how economics works.
01:57:00.000 It's just not how economics works.
01:57:01.000 Is there any argument that they're not ready yet?
01:57:03.000 That these trucks aren't viable?
01:57:04.000 So that's one of the issues, is that with a lot of the...
01:57:07.000 So the automated trucks, basically, in order for them to work, you need dedicated lanes.
01:57:11.000 Because otherwise, human error is such that if there's a Google car on the road, and you're a bad driver, the Google car is probably going to get in a crash, or might be more likely to get in a crash than if it were human driving.
01:57:22.000 Have you ever seen people freak out those Tesla cars?
01:57:25.000 Have you ever seen what they could do to them?
01:57:26.000 I haven't seen those tests.
01:57:28.000 I actually saw somebody do it to a Google car.
01:57:30.000 When a car is on that automated thing, if you just swerve at it, they slam on the brakes and back up on you.
01:57:37.000 People have done it to people and filmed it when they see people using automated cars.
01:57:44.000 It's not done.
01:57:45.000 It's not 100% ready.
01:57:47.000 Yeah, it's the mix again.
01:57:49.000 It's sort of like how there's a lot of fuel-efficient lighter cars on the road, but they're a lot more dangerous than the heavier cars, because the heavier cars, the clunkers, are still around from 1970, and they're tanks.
01:57:58.000 Yeah.
01:57:58.000 They just run through three Priuses.
01:58:00.000 How do you feel about universal basic income?
01:58:03.000 Because that's a subject that comes up a lot lately.
01:58:05.000 When Elon Musk is talking about these driverless cars, one of the things he's saying is that one thing that we're going to need is universal basic income.
01:58:14.000 He said we're going to have to figure out some way to feed all these people that are going to get taken out of the job market because their jobs have become irrelevant.
01:58:22.000 So I think that universal basic income is for when the technology gets so good that there legitimately are no jobs.
01:58:27.000 I don't think that we're there yet.
01:58:28.000 So if you have a machine that can make everything basically for free, and then there's a bunch of people who you don't need anymore to do work, then you can talk about a universal basic income because there's no scarcity.
01:58:37.000 Scarcity is what creates a need for labor.
01:58:39.000 So if there's scarcity in any industry, then there's going to be a need for labor.
01:58:43.000 There's going to be a need for new labor.
01:58:44.000 People are going to still have to work on these trucks and deal with technology.
01:58:48.000 And the computer industry didn't destroy jobs all over the United States when typewriters went out.
01:58:52.000 So I think it's a little premature.
01:58:53.000 I'm not sure there will ever be a day when the machine society is so well-developed that it can take over all jobs.
01:59:00.000 I do think you're seeing a bifurcation in the labor market.
01:59:02.000 So I think people who are in jobs like yours and mine, we're lucky.
01:59:04.000 This is a creative job.
01:59:06.000 It's hard for machines to create.
01:59:08.000 But for jobs that are single-task jobs, a lot more of those are going to be technologically driven.
01:59:14.000 And so people are going to have to, you know, work the right side of their brain a little bit.
01:59:16.000 We're going to have to train people in a different way.
01:59:18.000 But my perspective on universal basic income is when you have a 4% unemployment rate, it's very difficult to say you need a universal basic income.
01:59:25.000 It's, again, 96% of people in the labor market who can work are working.
01:59:29.000 So that's not...
01:59:30.000 That's not suggesting to me that there's this vast underclass of people who are totally incapable of working.
01:59:36.000 And once you do that, you see what you've seen actually with the disability programs in the United States, right?
01:59:40.000 Where now everybody's on disability.
01:59:41.000 Like the fastest growing government program in America is the disability program, where people declare themselves disabled so that they can get government pensions, basically.
01:59:49.000 Once you have a universal basic income, is there an incentive to work?
01:59:52.000 And also, I'm not sure that you've solved a lot of people's problems.
01:59:55.000 Like people still need something to do with their day.
01:59:58.000 How many 60-year-olds do you see who retire and they're dead within three years?
02:00:01.000 The utopian idea is that somehow or another you're going to open up these people's inherent creativity and they'll find something they actually enjoy.
02:00:09.000 Yeah, that's a bunch of hooey.
02:00:11.000 I love that you said hooey.
02:00:12.000 What are you, like 32?
02:00:13.000 How old are you, man?
02:00:14.000 I'm 33, yeah.
02:00:16.000 When you're 33 and you're using the term hooey.
02:00:18.000 Yeah.
02:00:19.000 I love it.
02:00:20.000 Again, I hope I never retire because I just know too many people who retire and they're, oh, I'm going to retire and I'm going to golf and I'm going to paint.
02:00:28.000 I'm going to create.
02:00:29.000 And six months later, they're dead.
02:00:30.000 They're dead.
02:00:31.000 Yeah.
02:00:31.000 Well, people enjoy doing things and feeling like they're valuable.
02:00:35.000 And I don't know if that necessarily has to be a job, but it's a very clear, definitive test of whether or not you're valuable.
02:00:42.000 If somebody gives you money, and you get that money, and you're like, look, I'm valuable, I'm doing something, I'm contributing, I've got a check for my week's worth.
02:00:49.000 Exactly.
02:00:50.000 There's a lot of hours in the day, and it's going to be hard to fill that with watercolor painting and beat poetry classes.
02:00:54.000 Ha!
02:00:55.000 I don't know, man.
02:00:56.000 I'd find shit to do.
02:00:57.000 But I see...
02:01:00.000 I've been fairly self-employed most of my life.
02:01:04.000 Some people are driven.
02:01:05.000 I would find stuff to do, too.
02:01:06.000 But there is a difference.
02:01:08.000 Not all human beings are the people who would actually go out and take classes and find things to do.
02:01:12.000 Do you have aspirations outside of commentary when it comes to politics?
02:01:16.000 Maybe some point down the road.
02:01:17.000 Do you think you run for president or something like that?
02:01:19.000 I mean, apparently anyone can.
02:01:21.000 And this is what I'm finding out.
02:01:22.000 For sure.
02:01:23.000 But you're a reasonable guy.
02:01:25.000 I don't know.
02:01:26.000 I mean, I like what I'm doing in the sense that I get to work on what people believe, which I think is sort of the root of politics.
02:01:33.000 I'm not sure implementing is the same thing.
02:01:35.000 As I said, I'm not sure that the president can get...
02:01:38.000 Like, I'm more focused on getting people to think in the terms that I'd like them to think, you know, about limited government and you taking control of your own life.
02:01:46.000 And I might be able to do more good We're promulgating that message using a growing medium.
02:01:51.000 We're very lucky.
02:01:51.000 The podcast went from having 3,000 listeners 300 episodes ago to now we have 300,000 listeners a day.
02:01:59.000 It continues to grow.
02:02:01.000 As that crowd continues to grow, it's actually harder for me to say I want to jump into politics, not easier, I think.
02:02:06.000 The limited government thing to me has always been a fascinating subject because the people that don't want limited government, that is the utopian ideal in my mind, that somehow or another the government's going to be effective if you give them more money.
02:02:19.000 I had an argument with a friend where he wanted...
02:02:22.000 People to be taxed more because he felt like that money could be distributed to people and you would get more funding for the arts was one of his arguments.
02:02:33.000 But my thought was like, first of all, the arts, when people like them, they pay for them.
02:02:39.000 That's not good.
02:02:40.000 And funding for the arts means you're going to have fucking LACMA. You go to the LA County Museum of Art and you have a fucking box on the ground that someone's calling a piece of art.
02:02:48.000 Did you see that guy, I think he went to, it was either in San Francisco or LACMA where he went there and he took off his glasses and he just put them on the floor and then he stood next to them going, you know, kind of standing there and kind of stroking his chin.
02:02:58.000 Seeing there were 30 people all around him staring at the glasses on the floor.
02:03:01.000 It's like, it's amazing.
02:03:02.000 Yeah, it's fucking horseshit, right?
02:03:04.000 The modern art exhibits, like there was another one recently where someone like left behind a pineapple or something like that.
02:03:11.000 Yeah, I remember this, yeah.
02:03:12.000 It's crazy.
02:03:14.000 It really is crazy.
02:03:15.000 And it's also pretentious.
02:03:16.000 And it's also stoking those fires of pretension and making something that's not legitimately creative, making it celebrated because you don't really have the ability to create something that's legitimately creative.
02:03:28.000 Yeah, I was pointing this out today with regard to...
02:03:30.000 It's funny how a lot of people who want bigger government, they embrace states that start to grow the government, and then when things go to shit, they're like nowhere to be found.
02:03:37.000 So Venezuela is the most obvious example, right?
02:03:39.000 Venezuela has turned from what was the richest country in South America and had the best oil reserves of anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, basically.
02:03:47.000 They've turned it into just a garbage heap.
02:03:48.000 People waiting in lines.
02:03:49.000 I have a friend named Nami Horwitz who went down there, did some documentary stuff down there.
02:03:53.000 And he was, I think his cameraman got shot.
02:03:55.000 He was watching people like literally shooting dogs in the streets for food.
02:03:59.000 And this is, I mean, Caracas is the most violent city in the Western Hemisphere now.
02:04:03.000 And all of this is because Hugo Chavez was a piece of garbage who centralized all power to himself, redistributed the wealth to all of his friends and cronies, and then supposedly uplifted the poor, except that now everyone is poor.
02:04:17.000 Wait a minute.
02:04:18.000 Wasn't he friends with Sean Penn?
02:04:19.000 I don't even know what you're saying.
02:04:20.000 Exactly.
02:04:21.000 Exactly.
02:04:21.000 So on my show today, I played like Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson and that freak Jeremy Corbyn, who's the head of the Labor Party in Great Britain, and they're all just praising Chavez, right?
02:04:32.000 He's a great guy.
02:04:33.000 He was a hero to the poor.
02:04:35.000 And now, Venezuela's going to shit, and where are all these people?
02:04:38.000 Would someone stick a camera in Sean Penn's face, like now, and just ask Sean Penn?
02:04:43.000 So like five minutes ago, you were saying this was awesome.
02:04:45.000 Well, there's got to be some sort of a left response for that.
02:04:48.000 Like, what is their take on why it all went bad?
02:04:50.000 The no true Scotsman fallacy, right?
02:04:52.000 Oh, well, you know, this is them living on...
02:04:54.000 It's because they never really got rid of enough private industry.
02:04:56.000 If they'd just gone further, it would have been better.
02:04:58.000 It's like, well, the Soviet Union didn't work out that great either.
02:05:01.000 But I actually got a response.
02:05:03.000 It was really funny.
02:05:04.000 Today, I tweeted out that, according to the World Bank, Venezuela has one of the least income unequal societies on Earth.
02:05:09.000 So it's actually pretty income equal.
02:05:12.000 Right, because nobody has anything, right?
02:05:13.000 And it's garbage.
02:05:15.000 And so the official Socialist Party tweeted me, and they said, this is because socialism has never truly been tried.
02:05:24.000 Okay, dude.
02:05:25.000 All right.
02:05:26.000 Sure.
02:05:26.000 Why not?
02:05:29.000 Well, the wonderful idea of socialism is that it's going to even everything out and that you shouldn't get paid more.
02:05:36.000 That no one should get paid more.
02:05:38.000 And that everyone should have some sort of a peak that you could reach, right?
02:05:42.000 Like there's some sort of competition involved.
02:05:44.000 There's got to be some.
02:05:46.000 There's got to be some sort of incentive, but only so much.
02:05:48.000 Right.
02:05:48.000 This is like the Bernie Sanders.
02:05:49.000 This is democratic socialism.
02:05:50.000 Yeah.
02:05:50.000 Normal socialism is the state owns the whole thing, but democratic socialism is there's private industry, but only to a certain point, and then we tell people no, no more.
02:05:57.000 But then you find out about Bernie and his wife, and his wife's idea was to buy up a bunch of land and expand the college, and then the fucking college went under, and now they're being sued and investigated.
02:06:06.000 Two vacation homes.
02:06:07.000 Yeah, come on, man.
02:06:09.000 It's all based on a lot of myth-making about, like, Western Europe and the Netherlands, right?
02:06:15.000 So there's all this, oh, these democratic socialist countries, they're working great.
02:06:18.000 First of all, a car in Denmark has a 60% import tax.
02:06:21.000 It costs literally twice what it would cost in the United States.
02:06:24.000 Tax rates in Denmark are insane, except...
02:06:26.000 For corporate taxes, which the left in the United States really, you know, they love corporate taxes.
02:06:31.000 They want those higher.
02:06:32.000 Denmark has some of the lowest corporate taxes and regulations in the industrialized world.
02:06:35.000 So everybody is coming in and investing in Denmark.
02:06:37.000 It's only the citizens who are getting screwed by paying for this giant welfare state.
02:06:40.000 Then their GDP tanked, and now they've had to elect right-wing governments to slash back the level of government.
02:06:45.000 I mean, it turns out that capitalism is the great engine that drives, like, Singapore is, there's nothing on Singapore, right?
02:06:51.000 Singapore is like a rock.
02:06:53.000 There's nothing there.
02:06:54.000 Singapore has one of the most powerful economies on earth because they basically have no business regulations, no taxes, and no tariffs.
02:07:00.000 So you can do whatever you want.
02:07:01.000 And when people can do whatever they want, they make a lot of mutually beneficial exchanges.
02:07:04.000 End of story.
02:07:05.000 This is not that difficult.
02:07:06.000 But it is difficult if you think that life is unfair, right?
02:07:09.000 So what would you propose?
02:07:11.000 Like, what would you propose for the United States?
02:07:13.000 Like, the United States, obviously, what Trump wants to do is reinvigorate manufacturing, make things in America again, bring back the labor force, take away the jobs that are going overseas and other countries in South America.
02:07:28.000 So I think that that's a bunch of slogans from him, and I don't think it means anything.
02:07:31.000 So, number one, I don't think a manufacturing job is more important than a tech job.
02:07:36.000 A job is a job, and in industries that are thriving, you actually need more jobs.
02:07:40.000 And in industries that are not doing as well, if the jobs disappear, that's just the wages of a global economy.
02:07:46.000 And I know it sounds harsh to people who are in those industries, but it's not a referendum on you or your value.
02:07:50.000 It's just saying that certain industries over time always are outsourced.
02:07:53.000 Like, we used to make T-shirts in the United States.
02:07:55.000 We don't make T-shirts.
02:07:56.000 We make them in Vietnam, and it costs us like five bucks.
02:07:59.000 So my view is, I'm not going to privilege one...
02:08:02.000 I understand that a lot of this is politics.
02:08:03.000 You want to favor manufacturing bases because there are a lot of manufacturing hubs in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin.
02:08:08.000 And they vote.
02:08:09.000 But since I don't care, right, since I'm not a politician, my view is that if you want a thriving economy, you relieve as much regulation as possible, you lower the taxes for everyone, personal and corporate, you attract as much foreign investment as possible, and you allow people to build businesses with as little risk as possible, And then you allow them to compete,
02:08:25.000 and if they succeed, they succeed, and if they fail, they fail.
02:08:27.000 And you get rid of tariffs as well, because I want cheap inputs for my products, and I want cheap products on the shelves at the store so I don't have to pay a bajillion dollars for a pair of shoes.
02:08:35.000 So my view of this is that economics is an element of freedom.
02:08:40.000 I am a free person.
02:08:41.000 I get to do with my money what I damn well please, and you don't get to stand in my way unless there is some sort of moral thing, right?
02:08:46.000 Like, if you want to say, let's put sanctions on Iran, let's put sanctions on China, right?
02:08:51.000 China's funding North Korea right now.
02:08:53.000 It hurts our national security.
02:08:54.000 We want to put sanctions on China to try and pressure them into ending North Korea.
02:08:57.000 That's a national security thing.
02:08:58.000 But the idea that, like today, Trump rolled out this new plan on immigration, and he says, I want to cut down on legal immigration, but the reason is because I want to raise wages of people in the United States.
02:09:09.000 And I think, well, that's not productive, because what you're actually doing is you're restricting the supply of labor, artificially increasing the wages, which artificially increases prices, which means it's not competitive on a global scale, which means the companies outsource.
02:09:23.000 It's the exact same thing as minimum wage.
02:09:26.000 You create a minimum wage, you're artificially increasing wages, that increases prices, that makes it non-competitive, people outsource.
02:09:31.000 So it actually achieves the opposite of what you're trying to achieve.
02:09:34.000 All government intervention in the economy, save for interventions that are designed to prevent externalities, you know, things that I do that hurt you, all of those are unjustified in my view.
02:09:43.000 What about environmental protection?
02:09:45.000 So those are externalities, right?
02:09:46.000 So like if I were to pollute a river, it's not my river, I don't get to pollute it.
02:09:49.000 I don't get to throw my trash over my fence into your yard, right?
02:09:52.000 That's a different thing.
02:09:53.000 Yeah, that's one of the most disturbing things about this administration is the cutting the funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and the changing of their standards, removing some of the funding for things like satellites that they're using to track the climate change and things along those lines.
02:10:10.000 That scares the shit out of me.
02:10:12.000 It scares the shit out of me that they're going to ignore the environment in favor of the economy.
02:10:18.000 So I think that some of the environmental regulations are badly drawn.
02:10:21.000 And some of them are overwrought when it comes to, for example, fracking.
02:10:25.000 Obama pushed a lot of environmental regulations on fracking or the Keystone XL pipeline, that kind of thing.
02:10:30.000 How do you feel about fracking?
02:10:32.000 I'm very much in favor of fracking.
02:10:33.000 But what do you think about when you hear stories about more earthquakes happening and instable water supplies and water tables?
02:10:43.000 From what I've seen, the earthquake evidence is extraordinarily weak.
02:10:47.000 Is it?
02:10:48.000 Yeah, from what I've seen.
02:10:50.000 Again, if you present me evidence that I find convincing, I'm happy to change my mind on this.
02:10:54.000 And as far as water pollution, again, the evidence has been pretty weak.
02:10:57.000 So if that changes, then I'm happy to regulate.
02:11:02.000 When you say it's been weak, there has been instances of fracking leading to pollution, right?
02:11:08.000 Sure.
02:11:08.000 But that's not every fracking leads to pollution.
02:11:11.000 And so the question is how broad is the regulation?
02:11:13.000 Or how many are you willing to accept?
02:11:15.000 Right, which is the truth for all business, right?
02:11:17.000 We all drive cars.
02:11:19.000 We all drink water bottles.
02:11:21.000 Somewhere there's a seagull choking on a cap.
02:11:23.000 Correct.
02:11:24.000 So how much are you willing to accept?
02:11:26.000 What I don't appreciate is when people kind of futz the evidence, when it's like, oh, well, I set my water on fire because of fracking.
02:11:32.000 It's like, well, no, that's not because of fracking.
02:11:33.000 That's because of the groundwater.
02:11:34.000 But in any case, as far as the satellites and global warming, listen, I think that...
02:11:41.000 It's pretty clear that the climate is warming.
02:11:44.000 I mean, the greenhouse gas effect is a thing.
02:11:46.000 The question to me is less whether it's happening and more what are you going to do about it?
02:11:52.000 Because even the left seems to have no real solutions as to what to do except for massively cutting economic growth.
02:11:59.000 And it seems to me that if we're talking about an increase according to the IPCC of something like 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of the next century, then on average, right, not universally on average, then it seems to me that it's easier to just say that the climate changes over time and maybe cities that are on the coast are going to have to pull back a little bit over time.
02:12:17.000 Like 100 years is a long time.
02:12:19.000 100 years ago we would have said that the pollution was the chief...
02:12:26.000 Yeah, exactly.
02:12:28.000 And now, not really even through regulation, but just through market competition, you've gotten better environmental products.
02:12:35.000 So I think that the market does take care of a lot of these things.
02:12:38.000 People don't actually want to live in human waste, you know, like, we actually don't want to do that, so.
02:12:43.000 You know what's been disturbing me recently is how many times I see Bill Nye on TV talking about climate change.
02:12:49.000 Well, he's...
02:12:50.000 Again, he has the same qualifications I do.
02:12:52.000 I mean, he has, like, a mechanical engineering degree.
02:12:54.000 Yeah.
02:12:55.000 Isn't he kind of a comedian?
02:12:56.000 Yeah, I mean...
02:12:57.000 I think he is.
02:12:58.000 From my childhood, yes.
02:12:59.000 I believe he was, like, a comedian.
02:13:00.000 He's a stand-up guy, yeah.
02:13:01.000 Yeah.
02:13:02.000 And...
02:13:04.000 Did you ever see his thing with Tucker Carlson?
02:13:06.000 Yes.
02:13:07.000 Which was great.
02:13:07.000 Tucker Carlson kept saying, okay, but you're talking about science, so tell me how much of an effect do human beings have on climate change, and what's the science?
02:13:18.000 Show me.
02:13:19.000 And all he wanted to say was that, you know, are you a climate?
02:13:22.000 Consensus settled.
02:13:23.000 Yeah, exactly.
02:13:23.000 What is the difference?
02:13:25.000 Or give me a range.
02:13:27.000 It doesn't even have to be an exact number, but give me a range, and then tell me, okay, what do we have to do, in your opinion, in order to stop the climate change where it stands, or if we can't do that in order to minimize it, what's the actual risk also?
02:13:39.000 People keep giving these catastrophic scenarios where it looks like the day after tomorrow, and Dennis Quaid running into subways and shit.
02:13:45.000 But one of the weirder ones, he said, was that we were supposed to have an ice age, now that's not going to happen.
02:13:49.000 Like, Jesus Christ, man, that's good.
02:13:52.000 Yeah.
02:13:52.000 You know, Randall Carlson, who's been on my podcast a few times, and he's an expert in collisions, in asteroidal collisions, and one of the things he said is, like, he goes, global warming is not great.
02:14:02.000 He goes, but it's way better than global cooling.
02:14:05.000 This is true.
02:14:05.000 This is true.
02:14:06.000 Global cooling kills everybody.
02:14:08.000 Right.
02:14:08.000 The Little Ice Age was not a good thing for the world.
02:14:11.000 I mean, the global warm period was actually a pretty good thing for the world.
02:14:14.000 So, I mean, this is the other thing, is that there are costs and benefits to the climate changing, which it has throughout time.
02:14:20.000 What are we willing to sacrifice in order to make that seven degrees into six degrees?
02:14:24.000 Right, and just losing some coastline is not the real issue.
02:14:28.000 Pollution is far more devastating than losing coastline.
02:14:32.000 So I think that if you're going to worry about the emissions problem, worry about the sea absorption of emissions, like the toxification of the oceans.
02:14:40.000 That seems to me to be a bigger problem than the climate changing over time.
02:14:44.000 We're pretty adaptable.
02:14:45.000 There's a lot of land.
02:14:46.000 Okay, so we move.
02:14:49.000 We have historically.
02:14:50.000 Right.
02:14:51.000 I mean, Venice, the sea level rises in Venice every year.
02:14:53.000 People are going to move.
02:14:54.000 I mean, that's the way it works.
02:14:56.000 There's this weird idea, and it's true in economics, it's true with global warming, that where you were born is where you must die, right?
02:15:03.000 And that you can never move.
02:15:04.000 And it's like, well, this is the most mobile society in human history.
02:15:07.000 We can get on a plane and be on the other coast in six hours.
02:15:10.000 It's easier to move than ever before.
02:15:12.000 So if you really think that the climate is that bad, first of all, I'd like to ask Barbara Streisand, if she's that deeply concerned about global warming, why she doesn't sell her coastline estate.
02:15:19.000 Yeah.
02:15:20.000 But it's like, am I going to lose a lot of sleep if a bunch of Hollywood stars lose, you know, five feet off their coastline because we didn't kill the industry of the United States and lose $4 trillion a year?
02:15:31.000 Like, no.
02:15:31.000 Yeah.
02:15:32.000 And I'm not really sure that that would have worked that way one way or another.
02:15:35.000 It has been absolutely proven that human beings are having an effect on the carbon dioxide levels.
02:15:42.000 Of course.
02:15:42.000 Of course, yeah.
02:15:43.000 And there's a greenhouse gas effect, sure.
02:15:45.000 100%.
02:15:46.000 But the modeling's been so wrong that, like...
02:15:50.000 There's no level of certitude, and then there's no level of solution that I know for sure is going to do this.
02:15:55.000 So you're talking about human beings suffering in the now for the later.
02:15:58.000 And let's be real about this.
02:15:59.000 Like, yes, there are a lot of emissions from the United States, but the leading emitters on the planet right now are China and India.
02:16:04.000 And they're not going to stop this shit anytime soon.
02:16:06.000 Like, that's not going to happen.
02:16:07.000 Well, there's also this thing that happens where if you even discuss it, you become like a Hitler or a Nazi.
02:16:14.000 You become a climate change denier.
02:16:16.000 And once you get locked into one of those labels, you know, you're a piece of shit.
02:16:21.000 And nobody wants to be locked into those labels, so they don't even want to have the discussion or the debate.
02:16:27.000 And that's one of the things that I felt like Bill Nye was not prepared for.
02:16:31.000 Because I felt like he's so lazy with this conversation because so many people just appease him and agree with it.
02:16:36.000 Yeah, I think that's right.
02:16:36.000 That when Tucker Carlson was challenging him on it, he didn't have any data to support this argument.
02:16:42.000 He just wanted to sort of, like, play word games and have this, you know, saying, well, you know, you guys on CNN, there was one time when they had some guy on who was saying exactly what we were saying, that the models, they have not been proven to be accurate,
02:16:58.000 and that Al Gore's movie predicted that we'd be underwater in 2014. Like, didn't it?
02:17:04.000 Yeah, I mean his predictions in that movie are not correct, yeah.
02:17:06.000 They're not correct at all.
02:17:07.000 And he's made like some insane amount of money off of it.
02:17:10.000 There's a sequel too, yeah.
02:17:10.000 He's got a sequel out this week.
02:17:12.000 Isn't he like the first billion dollar green guy?
02:17:14.000 Yeah.
02:17:14.000 Like, he's made a shitload of money off of giving these speeches and...
02:17:20.000 The whole thing is very strange because it becomes this untouchable subject like what we're talking about before with transgender people or with many other subjects become you can't discuss them They're not even open to debate or scrutiny they they become locked down and when Tucker Carlson was pressing Bill Nye,
02:17:40.000 like, what are the numbers?
02:17:42.000 Like, what is happening?
02:17:43.000 Tell me how much of an effect are we having?
02:17:45.000 And Bill Nye had nothing on it, and he just became stammered and started getting angry, and it's like, wow, this is weird.
02:17:52.000 This is weird to see.
02:17:53.000 I mean, if this is the cause of your life, you should know a little bit more about it than everyone who disagrees is a denier.
02:17:58.000 And I think the way Tucker handled it was brilliant.
02:18:00.000 It was Tucker's best moment, I think, on his show, yeah.
02:18:02.000 I think so too, because he was saying, essentially, he was like, I'm not denying it.
02:18:06.000 I'm not saying, I just want you to tell me how much of an effect.
02:18:09.000 Tell me.
02:18:09.000 Tell me.
02:18:10.000 And he had nothing.
02:18:11.000 So maybe Bill Nye's the wrong guy to have there.
02:18:14.000 But Bill Nye shouldn't be selling himself.
02:18:16.000 You can't have me come on a fucking show and talk about global warming, because I don't know anything about it.
02:18:21.000 Or at the very least, Bill Nye should say, listen, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did this study.
02:18:27.000 You can look up the numbers there.
02:18:28.000 I don't have them off the top of my head.
02:18:30.000 Or have the numbers.
02:18:31.000 Have the fucking numbers.
02:18:32.000 You're going to be on one of those shows?
02:18:33.000 You're going to be on for seven minutes.
02:18:35.000 So everybody in the media is lazy.
02:18:36.000 There's a lot of that.
02:18:37.000 Nobody actually does their prep for debate or for TV appearances.
02:18:41.000 Because the truth is, having done a thousand TV hits at this point, most people think, okay, I'm going to be on for five minutes.
02:18:47.000 I can get through five minutes, right?
02:18:48.000 It won't be that bad if I'm on for ten minutes.
02:18:50.000 How bad can it be?
02:18:52.000 And the answer is you can get pantsed on national TV in five minutes if the person knows what they're doing.
02:18:56.000 Well, you've done that to many people.
02:18:57.000 One of the things that I think is, do you talk fast always?
02:19:00.000 Yes.
02:19:00.000 It's like, you're born this way?
02:19:02.000 Yeah, everyone in my family talks this way.
02:19:04.000 Your family just talks fast.
02:19:05.000 Yeah.
02:19:05.000 Because I always wondered if this was a strategy to develop to be really good at those shows.
02:19:09.000 No, no.
02:19:10.000 It's been fortunate that it fits that way.
02:19:13.000 But yeah, even my kids talk this way.
02:19:16.000 Even the three-year-olds.
02:19:17.000 We see some people that are just really good at, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, and you get them in the podcast, and after, like, Peter Schiff's a great example of that.
02:19:25.000 After, like, 20 minutes, I'm like, you want a drink?
02:19:27.000 Let's have some whiskey.
02:19:28.000 We had a couple of glasses of clink, cheers, and we settled down, and then he settled into, like, a normal way of talking, but he's just so used to, like, force-feeding you facts and opinions and...
02:19:38.000 It's such an ineffective way to communicate with those three heads and the one person who's the host, Megyn Kelly throwing a question, and then this person's talking over that person.
02:19:50.000 It's such an ineffective way to communicate.
02:19:52.000 Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that I do like about long-form podcasts like this one or like mine.
02:19:57.000 I like the ability to actually expand on a point.
02:20:00.000 On TV, it's like, okay, you have 30 seconds of a point?
02:20:03.000 Excellent.
02:20:03.000 We can make that work for us.
02:20:05.000 It's the only place left that you can do this, unless you're making YouTube videos, and you know, Jordan Peterson is obviously finding out that that's a problem, but unless you're doing something along those lines where no one's there but you, and you get to expand and express yourself,
02:20:20.000 there's no other form of conversation like podcasts where you're not getting interrupted by a commercial, you're just talking, and you know, as well as I know, that conversations sort of evolve and move and They, you know, when I get to know you better, I see how you're thinking better, and I kind of have more questions to ask,
02:20:37.000 and you expand more, and you get to know a person for real, and that's just, those television shows are so, it's so divisive in that way.
02:20:46.000 I mean, honestly, it's hard for me to watch cable television because of that.
02:20:48.000 I don't feel like I'm getting tons of information that way.
02:20:50.000 Well, CNN had nine fucking people on the other day.
02:20:53.000 It's crazy.
02:20:53.000 The panel on CNN, it's Hollywood Squares now.
02:20:56.000 Yeah, Anderson Cooper's sitting there in the middle, and there's people, and then there's people that are just- It's like, ooh, I made a diagonal, cool.
02:21:02.000 And they're interrupting each other and said, excuse me while I talk, you mind not interrupting me for a moment?
02:21:06.000 Like, they're grandstanding and trying to have this point they think is going to be a zinger because they wrote it last night, and it's just like, ugh.
02:21:14.000 The best you can hope for is that you have 30 seconds where you say something that goes viral.
02:21:18.000 That's basically the- Yes.
02:21:19.000 That's the extent of it.
02:21:20.000 Yeah.
02:21:21.000 Well, you've done a lot of those.
02:21:22.000 Yeah.
02:21:23.000 I won't say I'm not good at it.
02:21:24.000 I'm good at it.
02:21:24.000 No, you're good at it.
02:21:25.000 But it's like we were talking about before, that a lot of the people that have debated you, they're really fucking lazy.
02:21:33.000 Like, they have this supposed passion for something, but when it comes to preparing for this sort of interaction, they're not really doing that.
02:21:42.000 For sure.
02:21:42.000 And I think that, you know, part of that is, there are people who are experts on particular topics who could, I'm sure, know more about their specialty than I do on a lot of topics.
02:21:51.000 Of course.
02:21:52.000 Like, if I were to discuss climate change with a person who was, like, an expert on climate change, I would not know as much as that person.
02:21:56.000 Sure.
02:21:56.000 But, you know, there are a lot of people who think they're generalists and have never read a book.
02:22:00.000 Right.
02:22:00.000 You know, like, I know one fact about one thing, and it's that you're a denier.
02:22:03.000 Yeah.
02:22:04.000 And I, well, I mean, if I know two, then I'd beat you.
02:22:06.000 Right.
02:22:07.000 Well, that's the climate denier thing seems to me one of the laziest things about the left.
02:22:13.000 And this is not saying that there's not some sort of a real issue with human waste.
02:22:17.000 Because I think there is.
02:22:18.000 I think there's a giant issue with plastic in the ocean.
02:22:21.000 There's a giant issue with pollutants in our water system, in our air.
02:22:26.000 And there's a lot of issues with the side effects of being a person in an industrialized civilization.
02:22:32.000 We burn things, we create poisons, and we've got to figure out a way to be sustainable.
02:22:38.000 I don't think there's any denying that by anybody.
02:22:40.000 I think it's also worth noting the market makes these things better in many cases.
02:22:43.000 I mean, the fact is that if you look at the areas where, for example, everyone is down on carbon-based fuels, okay, fair enough, but if you go to places that don't have carbon-based fuels, they're burning animal dung and wood.
02:22:53.000 There's nothing worse for particulate than animal dung and wood.
02:22:57.000 And if we did even better than this, we would get to nuclear power, which, unfortunately, a lot of people have banned because of unbased fears.
02:23:05.000 Most of France's electricity is provided by nuclear power, and that's about as clean as it gets.
02:23:10.000 Until it goes dark.
02:23:12.000 Until it goes Fukushima.
02:23:14.000 Even in worst case scenario at Fukushima, I mean, if you're talking about global warming and environmental damage, the amount of environmental damage supposedly done by carbon emissions is a lot larger than Fukushima.
02:23:26.000 Right, but the local damage is devastating.
02:23:29.000 That's the disturbing thing that they don't have a way to stop that.
02:23:34.000 They've figured out a way to put a wall of ice around the containment area and that didn't work.
02:23:39.000 It seems so fucking science fiction-y.
02:23:42.000 They really don't know what to do.
02:23:44.000 Yeah, I don't know enough about nuclear containment to take off on that one.
02:23:47.000 Nor do I. Let's just say that one disaster in...
02:23:51.000 Basically, there have been three major disasters, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima.
02:23:55.000 Yeah.
02:23:55.000 The only one that's happened...
02:23:57.000 Two of those three have happened in the first world, right?
02:23:59.000 Fukushima and Three Mile Island.
02:24:01.000 Three Mile Island basically ended up having no long-term impact.
02:24:04.000 So Fukushima is really the only major disaster in 40 years of industrialized countries using nuclear power.
02:24:09.000 Well, apparently they had some weird meltdowns here at Rocketdyne that weren't really discussed.
02:24:14.000 You don't tell about it?
02:24:15.000 Well, you know, it was all during the 60s, 50s or the 60s, when they were involved in the rocket program.
02:24:23.000 But the Rocketdyne stuff, my friend's dad is a scientist, and he was explaining to me the half-life of whatever was released in the atmosphere.
02:24:32.000 It's nothing a concern.
02:24:33.000 But there's a bunch of...
02:24:35.000 Rocketdyne was like right down the street.
02:24:36.000 There was a bunch of...
02:24:39.000 Articles that were written about it, like worrying about people that have higher cancer rates in this area.
02:24:46.000 I think there's a website called The Sins of Rocketdyne.
02:24:50.000 Really?
02:24:51.000 Yeah, see if you can find that.
02:24:52.000 I think there's a website dedicated to that, that people, but there's a lot of cancer just living in cities, man.
02:24:59.000 Like, they say that one of the worst environments for a human being is living in a place that has a lot of brake dust.
02:25:04.000 Like, if you're living in Manhattan and you got your window open, you're just inhaling particulates from people.
02:25:10.000 There it is, the sins of rocket time.
02:25:12.000 But the thing is, like, I mean, how much more cancer are these people?
02:25:16.000 This is from 2003. Yeah, sometimes the statistics on cancer are hard to correlate, because you'll have groupings that are sort of weird, and that's just because random statistical grouping happens.
02:25:27.000 So how much of it is due to X factor or Y factor?
02:25:30.000 If we knew that, then presumably the cancer rates would be going down a lot, and they haven't really in most cases.
02:25:35.000 It's pretty rare you have like a lung cancer situation where smoking obviously causes lung cancer.
02:25:39.000 Right.
02:25:40.000 Most cancers, like breast cancer, we have no idea why it happens.
02:25:43.000 Also the valley itself, like anything that happens in the valley, like when you drive from like Thousand Oaks over the hill and you look down at the valley and you're like, Jesus, that can't be good.
02:25:53.000 Yeah.
02:25:54.000 I hear you.
02:25:54.000 I've been flying into the valley my entire life.
02:25:56.000 And every time you fly into the brown gunk, Yeah.
02:25:59.000 I mean, that is one area where, obviously, we have gotten better.
02:26:04.000 I mean, the smog alerts have gone down tremendously in the last 30 years.
02:26:07.000 Yeah, it's gotten a lot better.
02:26:08.000 It's gotten a lot better.
02:26:10.000 But that's also one of the things that Donald Trump has relaxed some of the...
02:26:16.000 The standards.
02:26:16.000 The CAFE standards?
02:26:17.000 Wasn't it emission standards he changed?
02:26:21.000 The car emission standards?
02:26:22.000 Yeah.
02:26:22.000 Maybe.
02:26:23.000 Again, I wonder how much of the car emission standards...
02:26:26.000 There's actually a pretty thriving debate in the libertarian community, particularly, about whether CAFE standards are what drove greater fuel efficiency or whether it was the price of gas that drove greater fuel efficiency.
02:26:36.000 And as the price of gas has risen and fallen, you see people change their buying habits.
02:26:40.000 In the 90s, everybody bought an SUV, and then the prices went up and everybody bought a Prius.
02:26:45.000 Well, the Prius thing is interesting too, particularly the Tesla thing, because then you look at the environmental disasters of creating these batteries.
02:26:52.000 Yes.
02:26:52.000 And you're like, oh, this is not totally green.
02:26:56.000 Yeah.
02:26:56.000 Like, there's some weird gray area too.
02:26:58.000 It's pretty complex, and I think that...
02:27:01.000 The one thing we know is that there are millions of people all over the world for all of human history who've been living in absolute penury and misery.
02:27:06.000 And we now support 7 billion people on the planet.
02:27:09.000 And the rate of global poverty has dropped by 50% in the last 30 years.
02:27:13.000 A lot of that is technological change.
02:27:14.000 A lot of that is fossil fuel use.
02:27:16.000 And so before we...
02:27:17.000 These are two things that are worth thinking about balancing.
02:27:21.000 And this is what's...
02:27:23.000 Again, a little frustrating is that sometimes you see people on the environmental left who will say, well, this has to be done, or it's the end of the world.
02:27:29.000 And it's like, well, how about those people in developing countries?
02:27:31.000 How many of those people are you going to say have to live in poverty in order for this to happen?
02:27:34.000 And then on the right, you'll see people say, well, no environmental regulations at all, just let it all hash out.
02:27:40.000 And, you know, sometimes the market hashes it out, and sometimes the market doesn't hash it out.
02:27:45.000 And so, you know, I think a little caution is warranted.
02:27:47.000 I think that's a very reasonable point of view.
02:27:49.000 And that's one of the things that I really like about your commentary.
02:27:52.000 I know you're a right-leaning guy, but you're very reasonable.
02:27:56.000 You make arguments that are sound and easy to trace.
02:27:58.000 It makes sense.
02:28:00.000 Well, thank you.
02:28:00.000 I appreciate it.
02:28:01.000 I think we need more of that.
02:28:03.000 And I think it's rare that you find that in a 33-year-old guy.
02:28:06.000 That's some strange sort of conservative character that travels around clowning people at universities.
02:28:12.000 Pissing people off, exactly.
02:28:14.000 So the Berkeley thing is going to happen.
02:28:15.000 When is it going to happen?
02:28:16.000 September 14th is the date it's supposed to happen.
02:28:18.000 Dude, good luck with all that.
02:28:20.000 Yeah, well, you know, if they cancel it, we'll still go.
02:28:22.000 Are you going to go on a bulletproof Popemobile?
02:28:24.000 Yeah, hey, he wears a funny hat and so do I, so I think we can both...
02:28:30.000 Yours is a little low profile, though.
02:28:32.000 Yeah, we keep it on the DL around here.
02:28:34.000 When you do show up at these places and you see the Antifa people and they're screaming and yelling and cheering, that's got to be a surreal thing.
02:28:43.000 That it's just you and your thoughts and your opinion.
02:28:46.000 I mean, you're not selling babies.
02:28:47.000 You're not there slaughtering dogs in the Yulin Festival.
02:28:50.000 Exactly.
02:28:51.000 It's weird.
02:28:52.000 You know, I'm not arrogant quite enough to think that a lot of those people know who I am.
02:28:56.000 I think that what happens is that there's sort of a call that goes out from a select few saying, this KKK member's coming to campus, go stop him.
02:29:04.000 And that's what happened to Cal State LA. Like, when I spoke there, there were actually a couple professors were telling their students that I was a closeted member of the KKK. Meanwhile, you show up wearing a yarmulke.
02:29:11.000 I'm their favorite person, the KKK. I'm like a charter member.
02:29:14.000 It's my thing.
02:29:15.000 I was literally, in 2016, it was hilarious.
02:29:18.000 That year, 2016 was a wild year.
02:29:20.000 So David Duke accused me of being a far leftist.
02:29:24.000 Black Lives Matter accused me of being a member of the KKK. And I was the number one recipient of anti-Semitism from the, according to the Anti-Defamation League, I was the number one recipient of Twitter anti-Semitism in the United States for journalists last year.
02:29:36.000 Whoa!
02:29:37.000 I do, I have a little trophy in my house.
02:29:39.000 It's the most hated Jew in America, which is a hell of a title.
02:29:41.000 Is it a green frog?
02:29:42.000 It is.
02:29:43.000 It is.
02:29:45.000 It's a green frog and then a little model of a gas chamber.
02:29:47.000 It's perfect.
02:29:48.000 You were number one?
02:29:48.000 Yeah, by a huge margin, by the way.
02:29:50.000 Wow.
02:29:50.000 Blowout.
02:29:51.000 It was like 40% of all anti-Semitic tweets on the internet directed at journalists in 2016 were directed at me personally.
02:29:56.000 Holy shit!
02:29:58.000 It was a good year.
02:29:59.000 It was a good year, you know?
02:30:00.000 Some years are more productive than others.
02:30:02.000 What did that feel like?
02:30:03.000 Well, I mean, it felt like my Twitter feed was just a...
02:30:06.000 A dumpster fire.
02:30:09.000 Any time I retweeted anybody, I'd get people emailing me, please don't retweet me.
02:30:13.000 Because as soon as I retweet someone, they'd just be hit by waves of these people.
02:30:18.000 And that's died off?
02:30:19.000 Yeah, since the election, it's really gone down a fair bit.
02:30:22.000 But, you know, there were some pretty serious death threats.
02:30:25.000 Like, I got people calling my cell phone.
02:30:27.000 I had to up my security.
02:30:28.000 I already had a shotgun.
02:30:30.000 Jesus Christ.
02:30:31.000 Well, what started it off?
02:30:33.000 Probably me quitting Breitbart.
02:30:35.000 I was not a Trump supporter.
02:30:39.000 I didn't vote for either candidate in this year's election or last year's election.
02:30:42.000 Who did you support?
02:30:43.000 In the primaries?
02:30:44.000 Cruz.
02:30:44.000 Cruz.
02:30:45.000 I supported his positions.
02:30:47.000 He was the closest to me politically.
02:30:49.000 I was not pro-Trump during the primaries.
02:30:52.000 He didn't earn my vote during the general election.
02:30:55.000 There's two ways to look at your vote, and this is what I always said to people.
02:30:58.000 I said, vote for who you want to, but...
02:31:00.000 For me, there's two ways to look at your vote.
02:31:02.000 It's a coupon that expires November 9th, right?
02:31:04.000 And so you either use it or you lose it.
02:31:06.000 Or it says something about what you are willing to accept.
02:31:10.000 And it's possible that there can be an election where both candidates suck and you just don't want either of them.
02:31:14.000 So what did you do during the election?
02:31:15.000 I voted down ticket.
02:31:16.000 I skipped the top of the ticket.
02:31:18.000 Wow.
02:31:19.000 So, which is the first time I've ever done that.
02:31:20.000 So, I didn't think either of these people was qualified to be president of the United States.
02:31:24.000 Wow.
02:31:24.000 Once Trump was elected, then it was like, okay, if he does good stuff, I'll praise him, and if he does bad stuff, I'll hit him, as I would any other president.
02:31:30.000 So, I've been sort of, you know, calling balls and strikes with him, and some of the stuff like Gorsuch I love, and some of the stuff like Mikko Brzezinski's bloody face I'm not so hot on.
02:31:37.000 But, yeah, so I think what led off was, it was a combination of three things.
02:31:42.000 One, I'm Jewish.
02:31:43.000 And obviously so.
02:31:45.000 Two, I was working at Breitbart and then I quit in the middle of the election cycle.
02:31:49.000 Do you remember the Michelle Fields incident?
02:31:52.000 Where Corey Lewandowski grabbed a reporter from Breitbart by the arm hard enough to bruise her.
02:31:56.000 Did he actually bruise her?
02:31:58.000 He bruised her.
02:31:59.000 She took pictures.
02:32:00.000 She reported to the cops.
02:32:02.000 Unless you believe she bruised herself.
02:32:04.000 It didn't look much like a...
02:32:05.000 When I watched the videos, it looked like he just kind of grabbed her arm.
02:32:09.000 Didn't look like he...
02:32:10.000 Her body didn't move like she was being injured.
02:32:14.000 Yeah, I mean, she...
02:32:15.000 Let's put it this way.
02:32:16.000 That was her account.
02:32:17.000 That was also the account of Ben Terrace at the Washington Post, right?
02:32:19.000 Was that she was grabbed hard enough to bruise, and then she had bruises.
02:32:22.000 Well, you know what?
02:32:22.000 As a fight commentator, there's a lot of things that I see live that look a lot worse than when you watch them on video.
02:32:28.000 You know, when people get knocked out.
02:32:29.000 Like, that wasn't much of a punch.
02:32:30.000 I'm like, oh, you had to be there.
02:32:31.000 Yeah, I mean, the example that comes to mind is the Ali Liston punch, right, in fight number two, right?
02:32:36.000 That was probably a fake punch, though.
02:32:38.000 That's probably a bad example, but...
02:32:42.000 Bottom line is that there were a bunch of different excuses that Breitbart went through on that one.
02:32:47.000 One was that she was never grabbed at all.
02:32:49.000 The second was that it was a Secret Service guy.
02:32:51.000 And then the third was that Trump thought she was a security threat and Corey Lewandowski had to protect Trump from this 90-pound soaking wet girl.
02:32:58.000 And so once Breitbart did that, then the real question for me was not what a horrible thing had happened to her.
02:33:04.000 It was much more about, as a journalistic entity, do you stand by your reporters or do you stand by the candidate who you support?
02:33:11.000 And once Breitbart made clear to me that, like, I already knew they supported Trump.
02:33:15.000 That wasn't any great shock.
02:33:16.000 But I was kind of their token non-Trump guy.
02:33:19.000 And once it became clear that they were willing to sort of sacrifice journalistic credibility on the altar of getting close to Trump, then I was out.
02:33:26.000 And then it's no longer a journalistic outlet.
02:33:27.000 So I quit.
02:33:28.000 And that sort of started the ball rolling.
02:33:32.000 So you really didn't get anti-Semitic responses on Twitter before that?
02:33:37.000 Not too much.
02:33:38.000 Not too much.
02:33:38.000 So I won't say that Breitbart directed it at me, because I don't think they did, but I think that there are a lot of people who follow Breitbart and Milo Yiannopoulos, and they were pissed at me, and they'd seen me as an ally, and now they saw me as an enemy, and this kind of thing.
02:33:52.000 Comes a fun little war for them, right?
02:33:55.000 Oh yeah, I mean, people enjoyed it, obviously.
02:33:57.000 That's a weird thing about the online hate is how much people enjoy it.
02:34:01.000 Well, it's anonymous.
02:34:02.000 You never get tagged for it.
02:34:03.000 For now.
02:34:04.000 It's anonymous for now.
02:34:05.000 For now.
02:34:05.000 I mean, I've said this to a bunch of college students about, you know, the alt-right.
02:34:09.000 First of all, I think it's important to mention, a lot of people who say they're alt-right aren't actually alt-right.
02:34:13.000 Just because you like a meme doesn't make you alt-right.
02:34:15.000 But, like, there's a group of people who actually like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor and the race-based identity politics of white supremacy.
02:34:22.000 And those people are actually alt-right.
02:34:24.000 When the alt-right is coming after you, then it's not a lot of fun.
02:34:29.000 But there are a lot of young students who will retweet things from, like, things that are obviously nasty and are going to hurt them in their future career.
02:34:37.000 Yeah.
02:34:38.000 Right?
02:34:38.000 Where they'll, like, be joking around on Facebook and using the N-word.
02:34:40.000 And I'll say to them, like, guys, you may think it's funny.
02:34:43.000 And ten years from now, your employer's gonna find that, and you're gonna be toast.
02:34:47.000 And there are a lot of people who sort of fall into this idea that what you do online is anonymous, and it is not.
02:34:52.000 It is not going to remain anonymous.
02:34:54.000 It's just a matter of time before it blows.
02:34:56.000 Yeah, I mean...
02:34:57.000 I don't think there's gonna be any anonymity in ten years.
02:35:00.000 I agree.
02:35:01.000 I think that we're moving in that direction.
02:35:02.000 And this is actually a thing that bothers me in general.
02:35:05.000 Did you follow the Donald Sterling saga?
02:35:08.000 Yeah, sure.
02:35:09.000 So it really bothered me.
02:35:10.000 Yeah, me too.
02:35:11.000 That everybody was willing to take Donald Sterling's team away from him because he said something shitty to his girlfriend about Magic Johnson when there's no evidence that there's actual discrimination among clients at the Clippers.
02:35:22.000 Again, if there are actual evidence of discrimination, then sure, boycott his team and do what the NBA has to do.
02:35:27.000 But like...
02:35:28.000 I'm pretty certain that every human being says crappy things to their intimate loved ones about groups of people and other people.
02:35:34.000 And if this now becomes the standard, then I think that we're all toast.
02:35:37.000 Oh, for sure.
02:35:38.000 And his defense of it was like very reasonable.
02:35:40.000 He's like, I was just trying to get laid.
02:35:42.000 He's like, I was just saying, shut the fuck up.
02:35:45.000 He thought he was alone.
02:35:46.000 He thought he was with her and no one was recording him.
02:35:49.000 And she was trying to say that she had recorded all of their conversations, that it was a part of her job.
02:35:55.000 He's like a senile old guy and he's obviously not with V. Staviano because she's a Nobel Prize winning physicist.
02:36:00.000 Exactly.
02:36:00.000 He bought her a condo and a Bentley and a Ferrari and he's just trying to fuck her.
02:36:05.000 His interview with Anderson Cooper was one of the classic interviews of all time.
02:36:08.000 I never saw it.
02:36:08.000 Oh my goodness.
02:36:09.000 The moment where he says, because there's a moment where he turns to Anderson Cooper and says, Anderson, have you ever fallen in love with a woman?
02:36:15.000 And Anderson Cooper, who is, you know, super gay.
02:36:18.000 Gay as fuck.
02:36:18.000 Yeah, Anderson Cooper goes, he starts laughing, he goes, no, I've never had that experience.
02:36:22.000 Well, Anderson, when you do fall in love with a woman, and he's so unaware, and it's like, I'm sorry, like, I can't consider this guy, like, he's a KKK threatening figure.
02:36:31.000 Like, the guy can't even, like, find the toilet in the mornings.
02:36:34.000 He's, like, stumbling over his ottoman, like, Dick Van Dyke.
02:36:36.000 I had a bit I did about him defending him, where I was like, because if you look at what he actually said, everybody's like, he's a racist, he's a terrible person.
02:36:41.000 He said...
02:36:44.000 He goes, don't take pictures of black guys.
02:36:48.000 In the next sentence he said, I don't care if you fuck them.
02:36:51.000 Just don't take pictures of them.
02:36:53.000 I go...
02:36:55.000 In my world, that's pretty reasonable.
02:36:57.000 Like, you got a girl, you're buying her a Ferrari, all you say is just don't take any pictures.
02:37:01.000 You can fuck them.
02:37:02.000 She should just, like, leave well enough alone.
02:37:04.000 You're getting a Ferrari out of the deal.
02:37:06.000 No, I think that was, that whole thing was just like, it was our capacity to get ourselves outraged so we could show everybody how outraged we were.
02:37:13.000 Well, the president of the NBA, whatever the fuck his name is.
02:37:17.000 Adam Silver, no.
02:37:18.000 Adam Silver.
02:37:18.000 The guy that got on TV and was talking about it like it was the most horrific thing that's ever been said by any human being.
02:37:23.000 Like he's reinstituting Jim Crow at Clipper at Staples Center.
02:37:26.000 He should have gotten on TV and said, look, this is obviously, we know what this was.
02:37:30.000 This is a gold digger and an old man.
02:37:33.000 It's a story as old as time.
02:37:34.000 He said some stupid shit.
02:37:35.000 Old people say stupid shit.
02:37:37.000 He's a small old guy.
02:37:37.000 Here's the thing.
02:37:38.000 Don't take his advice when it comes to race.
02:37:41.000 And he probably should have said, look, but on the bright side, he told us she can go fuck black guys.
02:37:45.000 So, hey, everybody's happy.
02:37:47.000 Would have been a better presser.
02:37:49.000 Would have been the greatest press conference.
02:37:50.000 The ratings would have been amazing.
02:37:51.000 Instead, he was like self-righteous and Well, I mean, a lot of that, again, is I think that if you look at the NBA statistics and who watches the NBA, the outsized number of people who watch the NBA are black, and they spend an outsized amount of time watching it.
02:38:03.000 And so, you know, Donald Sterling pissed off a lot of black folks with that, understandably.
02:38:07.000 And so a lot of people were like, I think the NBA was like, we're not going to lose our fan base over it.
02:38:10.000 It was a money decision, in other words.
02:38:12.000 I don't think it was a values decision as much as money was.
02:38:14.000 I agree with you 100%, but I don't think they had to make that decision that way.
02:38:17.000 I think they could have suspended him.
02:38:18.000 They could have divested him and put his kids or his wife in charge of the team.
02:38:22.000 This idea that you're going to force him to sell his team.
02:38:24.000 It's crazy.
02:38:25.000 Or you're going to disband the Clippers because there was a tape of an old man saying stupid ass things to a gold digger.
02:38:31.000 Didn't he sue anyway?
02:38:33.000 And he wound up making more money from that team than he ever would have.
02:38:35.000 It became much more valuable.
02:38:38.000 It became much more valuable.
02:38:40.000 The whole thing is bizarre.
02:38:42.000 Yeah.
02:38:44.000 That's it, dude.
02:38:44.000 We just did three hours.
02:38:45.000 Isn't that crazy?
02:38:46.000 I appreciate it.
02:38:47.000 Flew by.
02:38:47.000 That was great.
02:38:48.000 Well, listen, people have been asking for a long time for you to come on, so I'm glad we finally got together.
02:38:52.000 Yeah, me too.
02:38:53.000 Thanks for having me.
02:38:53.000 My pleasure.
02:38:54.000 Let's do it again.
02:38:54.000 Sounds good.
02:38:55.000 Thank you.
02:38:55.000 Thanks, Ben.
02:38:56.000 See you guys.
02:38:57.000 See you next week.
02:38:58.000 Or girls, too.
02:38:59.000 Non-binary folks, too.
02:39:00.000 Everybody.
02:39:01.000 All-inclusive.
02:39:02.000 Bye.