Clay Travis is the host of the Nationwide Morning Show for Fox Sports Radio and the author of the new book, "Republicans Buy Sneakers: How to Have Left His Winning Sports With Politics," which will be released on September 25th. In this special episode, Clay talks about the current state of politics in sports, and why he thinks it's time for athletes to start getting involved in politics. He also talks about why he doesn't think sports should be treated as a mere spectator sport anymore, and how athletes should have a say in what happens on the field and in the locker room. He also discusses why it's important to have life insurance if you're going to die, and what you should do if you don't have it. The best place to buy is now. Go to policygenius.co/get quotes, apply in minutes, and it's that easy! It's the easy way to compare and buy life insurance online, and you'll save money! When you compare quotes from the top insurers to find the best policy for you, you save money, and that simple! Go to PolicyGenius.com/get-insurance and you can save money in minutes! The rates are the lowest in 20 years! Get quotes, applied in minutes. It s that easy, it s that simple. And if you've been putting off getting life insurance, there's no reason to put it off any longer. You should do it right now! - It s going to be the best option for you! . - The best time to buy a policy? - RateGenius by comparing quotes, you can be your best chance to compare quotes, and save you the best rate for you. - that's the best time of the day to buy it in the next five minutes! - that easy to compare rates, you should be the most efficient way to get the best deal possible, and the most affordable option for your life insurance and you get the most bang for your best shot at getting the most of everything you can get in life insurance in the best place possible. -- Rate Genius? Rate Genius's Rate Genius is the best possible deal possible! Rate Genius: Rate Genius! Rate Genius is the highest possible rate on your best deal on the cheapest rate possible, the most competitive rate possible. Rate Genius - the best way to score the most amazing deal possible?
00:00:01.000You know, the most talented person in sports wins, and I'm afraid that we're trying to turn sports into another version of politics, as opposed to the best thing that I think politics can aspire to.
00:00:19.000Well, here we are on the Sunday special with Clay Travis.
00:00:22.000Clay is the host of the nationwide morning show for Fox Sports Radio.
00:00:25.000He's author of the book Republicans Buy Sneakers To Have Left His Ruining Sports With Politics, which will be released on September 25th.
00:00:31.000We're going to get right to it in just a second.
00:00:33.000First, let us talk about you're going to die.
00:00:35.000I mean, let's just talk about your death.
00:01:44.000One of the reasons that I've been fond of your commentary is because you take a politically diverse point of view.
00:01:49.000For a person who, like me, cancelled Sports Illustrated years ago over their political coverage, it's been interesting to watch as you've gained a lot of fame and credibility off of speaking to a different side of the coverage.
00:02:00.000I've obviously been aware of your site, outkicked the coverage for a long time.
00:02:03.000I want to get started by asking you sort of where your politics developed and how this sort of political sports merger happened for you.
00:02:10.000It's a great question, and first of all, I love the show.
00:02:13.000I'm a fan of everything that you're doing, so keep up the good work.
00:02:17.000Secondly, so I was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, K-12 public school.
00:02:23.000As I was growing up, huge history buff, huge sports buff, like huge politics buff, all those different things.
00:02:30.000And I think a lot like you, I would wake up every morning, and as I ate breakfast before I'd go to school, I'd put on SportsCenter, and I would wait and see what happened the night before, after I'd gone to bed, whatever else.
00:02:39.000Along the way I went away to GW for undergrad and then I came back for law school.
00:02:45.000And to me, and this is a big part of the book, most of the 1980s and 90s when I was growing up, I'm 39, in the early 2000s, I don't remember an athlete ever having a political opinion.
00:02:55.000I say in the book, I had three posters on the wall when I was a kid growing up.
00:03:35.000Simpson trial, which was political in many different ways, was involving a former athlete.
00:03:42.000None of the athletes that we grew up with ever got political.
00:03:44.000And I went back and went through Jordan's history, and the Republicans buy sneakers to quote, or shoes, depending on who you want to give attention to, for the Harvey Gantt versus Jesse Helms 1990 election in the Senate in North Carolina.
00:03:58.000That was what Jordan said when he didn't choose a side, a black guy running against a white guy in a sort of racially fraught political climate at that time.
00:04:08.000And I think Jordan was right, you know.
00:04:11.000So to answer your question, I graduated from law school.
00:04:16.000And like a lot of 25-year-old lawyers, probably some who are listening right now, I had a quarter-life crisis where I said, my God, I can't imagine sitting around and doing litigation like this for the rest of my life.
00:04:29.000And that grew and grew, wrote a couple of books.
00:04:32.000And in this book, the Missouri protest, and I know you spoke at the University of Missouri, the Missouri protest in 2015 was my red pill moment.
00:04:41.000The way that I saw myself and other sports media members responding to that story, I said, we're covering fundamental untruths here.
00:04:50.000The actual facts and the actual story is not being covered.
00:04:53.000This is an illegitimate protest with no rooting in reality whatsoever.
00:04:58.000And yet, you were seeing all of these protesters lionized and treated as if they were modern-day civil rights activists.
00:05:05.000So for people on this stage, do you want to kind of recapitulate what exactly happened there?
00:05:10.000Yeah, so the story was at the University of Missouri, there was a protest started by some graduate students, and their goal was pretty outlandish.
00:05:19.000Like, they were like, we want the university president
00:05:21.000to climb up on a cafeteria table and denounce his white privilege publicly and then resign.
00:05:29.000We want the faculty to suddenly be, and I don't remember the percentages, but like 28% African American.
00:05:37.000And as a result, if you have to fire other people, we don't care.
00:05:39.000Like fundamentally illogical, illegal, certainly, you know, things that could not happen.
00:05:45.000And so they started a protest in the center of the campus quad.
00:05:48.000And as the protest grew, there was a hunger striker.
00:05:51.000Now, the Hunger Strikers' dad was like an executive, I think, at Norfolk Southern who made like $20 million a year.
00:05:56.000I mean, like, he was insanely wealthy, but he was saying, oh, we can't afford health insurance anymore.
00:06:01.000And there were three incidents, they said, that demonstrated extreme racism that was going on in the campus.
00:06:07.000One of them was a poop swastika, remember?
00:06:13.000And I've said before, and I'm sure this will be the case for you, if somebody said, oh, Ben Shapiro, I'm a huge fan, and they showed up with you, like a portrait that they had done of you in feces, you wouldn't be like, oh, that's a huge endorsement of me.
00:06:51.000It's awful, but you have no idea how that's connected to Missouri.
00:06:54.000And then one person who was a non-student walked through campus and said a racial slur, like as an African-American group was meeting on campus.
00:07:02.000And for that, that was the locus, the reason why they started the protest.
00:07:08.000And so I went and I looked at all this and I said, the University of Missouri at this time was embracing Michael Sam.
00:07:14.000They had a gay black man who had been elected as student body president.
00:07:17.000I can't speak to the hearts and minds of every single student at the University of Missouri, but I had spent a lot of time there as they got integrated into the SEC, became members of the Southeastern Conference.
00:07:28.000Inclusion and diversity did not seem to be an issue at Missouri.
00:07:31.000And so the protest eventually spread from this hunger striker to the football team saying, we will not take the field and play unless the demands of these protesting students are acquiesced to.
00:07:42.000And I said, my God, this is a big story, right?
00:07:47.000Well, I looked in and found out the three incidents that they were complaining about.
00:07:51.000And I said, there's no legitimacy for this protest.
00:07:54.000But the head of the football team, Gary Pinkle, the athletic director, everybody was afraid to call out the students and in any way fight back.
00:08:03.000The chancellor ended up losing his job.
00:08:05.000The president of the overall Missouri University lost his job.
00:08:11.000And so, and then the, this was amazing when I looked at the data, the overall enrollment of the university
00:08:19.000I don't have the numbers in front of me right now, but it was more crippling to Missouri, this protest, than Hurricane Katrina was to Tulane.
00:08:29.000So you think about this Hurricane Katrina, which basically shut down the city of New Orleans and crippled the entire region.
00:08:36.000Had less of a significant impact on the enrollment and I went and looked at the enrollment numbers at Tulane than the Missouri protest did.
00:08:45.000And so as I examined all the details surrounding this story, I just said, my God, the media is not doing their job.
00:08:50.000Our job to me in sports media is to speak truth to power sometimes, right?
00:08:55.000And the students were the powerful people here who were protesting and they were the ones who were winning in the court of public opinion.
00:09:01.000And their protest was completely illegitimate.
00:09:05.000And something happened to me that I'd never seen happen before, which was immediately, everybody attacked me and said, oh, you're racist, you're sexist.
00:09:13.000And I had never seen that happen before.
00:09:15.000Because up to that point, I worked on Al Gore's presidential campaign.
00:09:36.000My eyes started to open and I said, my God.
00:09:39.000Maybe I have been missing and slowly the sports media has turned into politics by any other name.
00:09:45.000And from there, I really do just think it's continued to grow in a rapid fashion.
00:09:49.000So what the hell happened to the sports media?
00:09:51.000Because many years ago, now it's probably six, seven years ago, maybe longer, I was a Sports Illustrated subscriber from the time that I was probably 13 years old to the time that I was probably 27, 28 years old and read it cover to cover every single week.
00:10:03.000And then I unsubscribed because they decided to put Caitlyn Jenner on the cover.
00:10:08.000Because I just felt like this is not athletically relevant.
00:10:10.000What does this have to do with anything?
00:10:12.000And I began to notice that ESPN was doing the same thing.
00:10:14.000I had the same experience that you did, which I would get up at six o'clock in the morning, West Coast time, so I could be the first person to see all the highlights.
00:10:20.000And then it became, I don't want to watch any of this stuff anymore because I'm going to get a human interest story on Hands Up, Don't Shoot, which has nothing to do with sports itself.
00:10:27.000So why do you think that it was that the athletes started to get more political, so the media got more political?
00:10:32.000Do you think it was that the media got more political and so the athletes rushed to sort of meet that moment?
00:10:38.000It's a tremendous question and one of the things that I really grapple with in the book that I wrote.
00:10:43.000So I've spent a ton of time thinking about this issue exactly and I think there are several threads at play.
00:10:49.000One is, I would say this, social media.
00:10:58.000The court is fraying the number of kids who are subscribing.
00:11:02.000The old cable subscribers are dying off.
00:11:05.000And I think ESPN, I had this interesting conversation back in 2012 when Alabama played Notre Dame.
00:11:11.000I remember having a conversation with a lot of top ESPN executives, because I used to have and still do have a really good relationship with a lot of people there, despite the fact that we've kind of gone at loggerheads at times.
00:11:20.000And their discussion at that point was, do we pay attention to what people say about our talent on social media, on Twitter in particular, or do we pay attention to the public reaction we see?
00:11:32.000And I remember having this conversation specifically about Chris Berman and Lou Holtz.
00:11:37.000And they said, everywhere Chris Berman and Lou Holtz go, they get mobbed and people love them.
00:11:43.000If you go on social media and you read what people say about them on Twitter, they're old white guys and they get crushed.
00:11:49.000And at the time, ESPN was making the argument, we think we need to pay more attention to what we see in face-to-face interaction over social media.
00:11:57.000I think as ESPN's business collapsed, they looked for salvation on social media and believed that if they made Twitter happy, if we promote the wokest people who are getting the most attention on Twitter, that will lead to success on television as well.
00:12:27.000And you certainly have seen the radical polarization of politics along sports lines.
00:12:31.000And it's been really devastating for sports fans because I don't want to watch sports anymore unless I'm at a live event, specifically because I'm afraid of the political coverage that I'm going to see.
00:12:39.000And it doesn't seem to matter the sport, although the ones that seem least political are the ones that are also least covered by ESPN.
00:12:45.000If it's very political, they'll cover football, which has now become a political football.
00:12:49.000But they won't cover hockey and they won't cover baseball.
00:12:51.000Yeah, and I think that ESPN decided Salvation would come through social media, and then I think they promoted everybody who was, you know, left-wing in terms of mixing sports and politics.
00:13:02.000I think what also tied in there was the athletes.
00:13:05.000This is amazing stat, and this is in the book, too.
00:13:08.000Everybody talks about how biased the political media is.
00:13:11.000And if you go look at the numbers, I think it was something like 27 times as much money was given to Hillary Clinton by people employed in, quote, media circles, right, as opposed to Donald Trump.
00:13:22.000ESPN in the 2016 presidential election, their employees gave 270 times as much money to Hillary Clinton as they did Donald Trump.
00:13:30.000So 10 times as much a bias that was existing right there in terms of what they were sending their money on.
00:13:37.000And so I think what happened is you had a total mix between what was real news and what was opinion.
00:13:44.000And ESPN in particular, and I think a lot of other sports media people followed it, used quote unquote real news to advocate for their political opinions.
00:13:54.000And so I think what ended up happening was, instead of saying, like, I use as an example in the book, Kid Rock gets named as the performer at the All-Star Game, right?
00:14:09.000Front page story on ESPN was, oh, controversy arises over Kid Rock's selection.
00:14:15.000Well, you can't use social media as a barometer of controversy because if I check my phone right now, every single decision that's made is controversial, right?
00:14:22.000You think about in the world of sports.
00:14:24.000When your team makes a draft pick, it's controversial because not everybody agrees, right?
00:14:29.000So, they use objective journalism, example like that.
00:14:35.000I'm curious what you think about this.
00:14:56.000I don't think that we should be in a business today, regardless of what your business is.
00:15:01.000When you are outside of the office, if you are tweeting your political opinions or you are sharing your Facebook opinions, I don't think you should get fired based on those for outside of our opinions, right?
00:15:11.000Whether you agree or disagree with Curt Schilling on transgender bathroom issues, he has a right to have that opinion in my mind.
00:15:18.000And so ESPN fired him over sharing a Facebook meme about the North Carolina transgender bathroom dispute.
00:15:25.000And then when Jamelle Hill came out and called the president a white supremacist, they didn't punish her at all.
00:15:30.000And so I think we've entered into this kind of scary time where if your opinion is different than the company you work for,
00:15:38.000You either keep your mouth shut, or you don't necessarily know that you're going to be able to have that job.
00:15:42.000So I think all those things have coalesced together, and I think they've created a mess.
00:15:47.000Because sports used to be the place that united us, used to be the place where when your team scores, you turn and give a high five to somebody in the arena, in the stadium.
00:15:55.000And their ethnicity, their religion, whether they were born in this country, whether they're an immigrant, it doesn't matter.
00:16:01.000Sports was the ultimate big tent, right?
00:16:03.000Your tribe was connected regardless of your race, your gender, your ethnicity, your sexual orientation.
00:16:08.000And I think that ESPN has been so desperate to save their business that they've kind of prayed to a false idol.
00:16:13.000Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with this.
00:16:14.000I mean, it's one of the reasons why I say I'll still attend live events of various sporting events.
00:16:19.000I went to the Super Bowl last year and it was exactly that.
00:16:21.000It was a bunch of people who I'm sure disagreed about politics, but we were all in the stadium to just enjoy the game and it was fantastic.
00:16:26.000But the minute you leave the stadium and you turn on TV or you turn on Twitter, it's going to be whatever is the latest controversy.
00:16:31.000I absolutely agree with regard to Schilling and Jemele Hill.
00:16:35.000Look, I think that there are certain opinions that if you express them on Twitter, you say, I'm an absolute Nazi, right?
00:16:39.000Like, I actually endorse Adolf Hitler.
00:16:41.000I think the company has a right to fire you.
00:16:42.000But what these companies have done is they've shrunk the Overton window, the window of acceptable discourse, so narrowly that Jamel Ahola is inside of it, but Kurt Schilling is not, for expressing
00:17:33.000And so, I think ESPN set a really bad precedent with Curt Schilling, and I don't think they can follow it, but I think that your average listener out there, your average viewer, they don't think Caitlyn Jenner is a hero for deciding to become a woman.
00:17:44.000Do whatever makes you happy, but you're not heroic, right?
00:17:47.000I don't think the average NFL fan cared at all who Michael Sam slept with.
00:17:52.000And making the argument, oh, this is a modern-day Jackie Robinson issue, is fundamentally not true, right?
00:17:57.000Everybody could see what race Jackie Robinson was.
00:18:00.000Unless Michael Sam waved his arm around and said, hey, I like to sleep with guys.
00:18:14.000But I think covering Michael Sam as if he were Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, you know, beat writers who are following him around all day, you talk to his people in his locker room, what was the shower like today, right?
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00:20:34.000I don't think that that should be that controversial to say, but I'm not sure that we can go back because it seems like everything is so polarized now that to even make those arguments puts you in a, in a kind of nasty category.
00:20:54.000The attacks are going to be already racist, sexist, homophobic, like whatever they're going to, they're going to be all labels that people try to put on me.
00:21:00.000And what they're not going to do is actually look at the merit of the argument, because I think
00:21:03.000Even most reasonable people, if they look at the merits of the argument, would have to say, oh, you know what?
00:21:08.000Like, you're more likely to be, five times as likely to be, like LeBron James is a great example.
00:21:13.000LeBron, and this is in the book, but I think it's a really kind of instructive moment in the way that sports is covered.
00:21:18.000LeBron James said, the way America is today, when his son leaves the house, he's not afraid that he's going to come back if he gets pulled over by a cop.
00:21:41.000If LeBron James had said, when my son leaves the house, I'm not sure if he's going to come home because there's a lot of bees, wasps and hornets out there.
00:21:48.000People would have said, it seems a little protective of LeBron, right?
00:21:51.000People probably would have made fun of him.
00:21:53.000Assuming LeBron's son left the house unarmed, he is more likely to be killed by a bee, wasp, or a hornet in America today than he is by a police officer.
00:22:03.000And what troubles me is, we got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of police officers out there working as hard as they can every day, and there's a fundamental untruth that sports is helping to propagate, which is, if somebody gets pulled over by a police officer,
00:22:17.000You should be expecting that violence is going to ensue, and that mutual disconnect, because it translates into body language, it translates into the interaction between the police officer and the minority youth there.
00:22:29.000I think LeBron James is actually making things worse with a statement like that, right?
00:22:34.000And I think it would be the duty of a robust sports media to speak truth to LeBron James' power and say, actually, this isn't true.
00:22:43.000But very few people are willing to do that, and so I think there's a couple of things that would be substantial.
00:22:49.000I think one, sports figures, whether it's Greg Popovich, LeBron James, Steve Kerr, whoever it is, have the right to give their political opinions.
00:22:58.000The media doesn't have to give those opinions a megaphone.
00:23:01.000There are plenty of people out there making great critiques of Donald Trump, much better than Greg Popovich is, because it's what they do for a living.
00:23:09.000They can go on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News maybe sometimes, wherever it is.
00:23:13.000We don't, in the sports media, need to make the number one headline on our programming, Greg Popovich ripped Donald Trump.
00:23:26.000But let's not pretend that what they are saying is so perceptive and unique and without parallel that we need to treat it as if they're all modern day Muhammad Ali's, right?
00:23:36.000Muhammad Ali, and this is in the book too, fought against Vietnam.
00:24:32.000If I'm CBS, NBC, Fox or ESPN and I'm paying for the NFL, why would I want to cut out?
00:24:38.000I'm paying billions of dollars a year.
00:24:40.000Why would I want to cut the legs out from underneath that brand by covering the protests and the anthem as much as we are?
00:24:47.000And then I think another aspect of it is, if you're going to cover politics, you need to have people to come on and set the parameters of the debate.
00:24:54.000Instead of saying, how heroic is Colin Kaepernick, which is the kind of debate show that I have seen for like the last three years?
00:25:02.000Well, I think he's only, you know, a quadruple hero, right?
00:25:05.000It's like, how heroic is he as an artificial frame?
00:25:08.000You need to have somebody come on and say, actually, I think Colin Kaepernick's a moron and his protest made no sense and he doesn't have a legal right to do it.
00:25:45.000Because I think what would happen is people would say, you know what, I can watch CNN.
00:25:48.000If I want to see two guys argue about Donald Trump, I want to see somebody argue about sports.
00:25:53.000This is totally right, and bringing up the Muhammad Ali example is a great example, because at the time, Muhammad Ali got crushed by the press, or at least by half of the press, for what he was doing with regard to changing his name, or being against the Vietnam War.
00:26:05.000And by the time he fought Frasier the first time, there was a serious political war over whether Ali was right or not.
00:26:10.000It wasn't just, let's praise Ali to the high heavens for everything he did, that sort of revisionist history that we know.
00:26:35.000They were doing independent federal investigations of every suspect police shooting already, right?
00:26:41.000So Barack Obama, I think, if he had been really honest here, he would have said, I appreciate what Colin Kaepernick is protesting, but what he's protesting for, we are already doing.
00:26:50.000We're doing rigorous federal oversight to ensure that the blue wall of silence or local communities are not covering up
00:26:57.000Improper shootings that should be prosecuted.
00:26:59.000The analogy I like to use is, it's like Colin Kaepernick went into McDonald's at 1105 and took a knee and the manager walked out and he said, like, why are you taking a knee?
00:27:06.000He's like, oh, I want to get breakfast all day.
00:27:08.000It's like, we serve breakfast all day here already, right?
00:27:12.000And the analogy I love to toss out that drives people insane is, imagine the response if Colin Kaepernick had taken a knee to protest the national anthem because he disagreed with gay marriage being legalized.
00:27:24.000The same people who are like, oh, it's so great that he's exercising his First Amendment rights would have insisted that the San Francisco 49ers had to cut him immediately.
00:27:31.000But that would have made sense because the Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage.
00:27:34.000And when you protest the United States flag, you're actually protesting a tangible federal action.
00:27:39.000What he was doing made no logical sense.
00:27:43.000A lot of your listeners and viewers will.
00:27:45.000I bet that if we had Colin Kaepernick sitting here right now, his understanding of the separation of powers between federal and state governments is probably not that in-depth.
00:27:53.000And I think it speaks to what you're saying, which is athletes are entitled to their political opinions.
00:27:57.000What they aren't entitled to is a presumption that they're incredibly well understanding of those political opinions.
00:28:04.000Justify it like we would ask anybody else.
00:28:06.000Can the leagues do anything about this?
00:28:08.000Because the NFL allowed this to run out of control.
00:28:28.000If the NFL had cracked down on this, as they should have at the very beginning, would that have stopped it?
00:28:31.000And is there any way for it to stop now, considering that now that the President of the United States has gotten involved, it looks like if the NFL tries to crack down, now it looks like they're surrendering to Trump, as opposed to just making a case for the viability of their product.
00:28:45.000A lot of people want to say that Kaepernick is a modern-day Muhammad Ali, and I think I destroy that argument in my book.
00:28:51.000I mean, I really kind of dive into it and explain why it doesn't work.
00:28:53.000The better argument for Kaepernick, I think, is Mahmoud Abdul-Raouf, who a lot of people will remember as Chris Jackson.
00:28:59.000And I believe it was 1996, Chris Jackson refused to stand for the national anthem as a member of the Denver Nuggets.
00:29:05.000And the reason why he said it was because the United States government oppresses, you know, different communities.
00:29:09.000I mean, it's basically the exact same logic as calling Kaepernick 20 years before.
00:29:13.000And David Stern, then the commissioner of the NBA, immediately nipped it in its bud.
00:29:17.000He suspended him, he fined him, the entire game check, and the protest lasted for one game.
00:29:22.000I think if Roger Goodell had made a smart strategic decision, he would have done the same thing to Colin Kaepernick, and he would have cited the NBA's example.
00:29:29.000Now, the NBA requires that every player stand at attention for the national anthem before its games.
00:29:59.000And I think the big flaw here is the players believe that their salaries are always going to go up.
00:30:04.000Well, if 20% of your market disappears and continues to not show up, then sooner or later your revenue is going to go down, which means the players are going to make less money.
00:30:13.000And I think if I were Roger Goodell, I'd have every player come in for a big meeting, all 1,500, 1,600 NFL players, and I would say, look guys, you're entitled to whatever political opinion you want.
00:30:21.000Use your Instagram accounts, use your platforms as you see fit, use your Twitter accounts, everything else.
00:30:29.000Millions of people are choosing to consume our product less.
00:30:32.000Are you so committed to your politics that you have to do it at work in uniform if it's going to make everybody in here lose 20% of their paychecks?
00:30:40.000And I think almost everybody out there would say, no, you know, like you're capitalist.
00:30:45.000So I think the business side is actually one where you could appeal to players because players like to think, oh, I'm not labor.
00:30:54.000So if I were Roger Goodell, that's the line that I would try to hit.
00:30:59.000The other thing is, I would just say, look,
00:31:02.000Like any other business, we're looking at the metrics.
00:31:04.000And if the metrics start to decline in this insanely competitive entertainment world, we need to figure out why and we need to combat them, because ultimately all of us are going to make less money.
00:31:14.000So I think that there's an economic argument that takes it outside of politics and just says, regardless of what you think about abortion or gay marriage or, you know, police misconduct,
00:31:23.000Is that really something that people come into our stadiums or turn on our games for?
00:31:27.000A great example, my father-in-law is a lifelong, poor, suffering Detroit Lions fan.
00:32:36.000So there is a fundamental disconnect between people who don't understand how much of the base of the very foundation of the NFL's business is being impacted by this,
00:32:45.000There's a cottage industry of people out there that want to pretend these people are not real, that there aren't a lot of people with entertainment options who decide on Sunday morning, am I going to watch the game or not?
00:32:54.000The numbers reflect that they're leaving.
00:32:56.000I don't think that cord cutting suddenly hit two years ago.
00:32:59.000I don't think that suddenly people said, I love Netflix or Amazon or anything else.
00:33:03.000I think the NFL's core fabric of their audience is being attacked here by getting political.
00:33:46.000If you knew that 20% of your paycheck was coming off because your co-worker had an opinion about abortion,
00:33:52.000Would you say like, hey, shut up about abortion at work, do whatever you want elsewhere.
00:33:56.000We're not going to talk about abortion at work because people, this is not our business.
00:33:59.000So I just, I think it's substantial and I think it's seismic.
00:34:03.000And I don't think that the NFL can tiptoe up to this.
00:34:06.000I think they needed strong leadership.
00:34:08.000And I don't think that Roger Goodell is providing it.
00:34:10.000Okay so let's talk a little bit about meritocracy in sports.
00:34:13.000So one of the reasons I think that the sports media are getting it so wrong when it comes to who watches sports is they're forgetting that the reason people actually watch sports is because sports is in some ways the most conservative of all institutions in the United States.
00:34:25.000It's a meritocracy in which if you suck at basketball you're not playing in the NBA and if you suck at baseball you're not playing in the MLB and yet leftist politics is so much about
00:34:34.000sympathy for the person who's not able to make it on merit, that it cuts against the very fabric of sports itself.
00:34:42.000And so you end up in bizarre battles, for example, over transgenderism in sports.
00:34:46.000For two years, ESPN has done nothing but talk about transgenderism in sports, and you get ridiculous arguments where people like Jimmy Connors will say, well, you know, it turns out that Serena Williams is the greatest female player ever, but she's not necessarily the greatest player ever, because that's ridiculous.
00:35:03.000And suddenly, he's getting just shellacked over it.
00:35:06.000You know, how is it that folks in the sports media don't understand that when they make these arguments, they're actually undercutting the reason we watch sports in the first place?
00:35:46.000And so, even the most talented women's tennis player of all time would be a pinprick of a men's player against the greatest men's player in the world.
00:35:55.000Now, she would crush your average metal tennis player who plays for fun and might be really good, right?
00:36:20.000If you were in a locker room and your coach walked in and he said, guys, we're probably going to lose this game because those kids go to a better high school, better facilities.
00:36:30.000Their weight room's a lot nicer than ours is.
00:36:34.000They haven't had a broken rim in their gym.
00:36:38.000They don't have single parenthood issues.
00:36:41.000So, we should get 20 extra points before this game starts.
00:36:45.000Every single person who likes sports would say, wait a minute, what in the world are you talking about?
00:36:49.000Like, the great thing about sports is the meritocracy.
00:36:52.000When you step on that field, or court, or into that arena, or wherever you are, everybody is equal.
00:36:59.000It's literally the perfect place to allow the meritocracy to exist.
00:37:03.000And who your dad was, where you went to school, how much money your parents made, where you grew up, none of it matters.
00:37:10.000All that matters is, are you better than the guy or girl across from you?
00:37:14.000And I think what happens is, there is an element of not wanting to acknowledge that.
00:37:22.000And so, when you talk about the transgender issue, the transgender issue was amazing to me because when you really break it down,
00:37:30.000The city of Charlotte decided they were going to be uber inclusive and make sure that something that wasn't an issue was not going to be an issue, right?
00:37:38.000And this ends up tying in the NBA and the ACC, right?
00:38:09.000People can use whatever public bathroom they want.
00:38:11.000Charlotte politicians decide they need to protect Charlotte from making sure that something that isn't an issue doesn't ever become an issue, right?
00:38:18.000And then the Republican legislature says, wait a minute, why is Charlotte doing this?
00:38:21.000The amazing thing about Charlotte was they were being uber-inclusive, and as a result, they lost the All-Star game and the ACC title game, which the irony on that is amazing, right?
00:38:31.000But so I think that there is a recognition that
00:38:36.000Really, what we're fighting over isn't that significant, right?
00:38:41.00099.9 whatever percent of people are whatever gender they are.
00:38:44.000And the idea that we need to be fighting over this, this is a great question for you.
00:38:56.000Like, let's say that I am the most uber-inclusive person imaginable on the planet right now.
00:39:02.000The reason why I'm a First Amendment absolutist is because I think we need to have all marginalized opinions able to debate, because a marginalized opinion 20 years ago might become one that's very commonplace now.
00:39:13.000So I'm like, what would you argue in favor of?
00:39:15.000Can you even think of one that is considered societally unacceptable in 2018, that in 2038, when we are grandparents potentially, our grandkids will be like, I can't believe Grandpa in 2018.
00:39:42.000And you may think that's ugly or not, but I've said before, like, if you follow the logic of the Supreme Court's decision in allowing... Oberstdahl.
00:39:49.000Then theoretically, if consenting adults decide, if three women for their poor decision decided they wanted to be married to me, or if I wanted to marry the same woman that three other men did, in theory there is not a prohibition to that happening under the same logic, right?
00:40:03.000But I think that's a tiny minority opinion.
00:40:05.000A percentage of people in America today would like 4% of people or 1% or something would be like in favor of polygamy.
00:40:11.000It's almost impossible to even think of what's next, right?
00:40:15.000And so what I would say is there's this belief that things can't be good.
00:40:25.000Regardless of what race you are, regardless of what gender you are, there's a reason why by and large people come over here and they think they're going to be radicalized.
00:40:33.000And most of the time they're like, I could go blow myself up or I could get a job and go buy a 50 inch flat screen television and go watch Stranger Things.
00:40:52.000And that's to me what's so great about sports in general.
00:40:54.000Why I love my kids playing now, regardless of what the other backgrounds of the kids are, you learn that you all have a lot more in common than you do different.
00:41:03.000And I think what's happened is there's been a desire to try to make us all think that we have a lot more not in common than we do.
00:41:10.000And it used to be, you know, if you think about Jordan, and I would even include Barack Obama in this, but Jordan, Oprah, Will Smith, if you think about Bill Cosby, The Cosby Show, all of those, you know, sort of the rise of the African-American meritocracy.
00:41:24.000We're not about saying like, oh, I'm black, I'm raising my fist in the sky, you're a lot different than me.
00:41:29.000It was about we're all pretty similar, right?
00:41:31.000The Cosby Show was about trying to make us think, man, you know what?
00:41:34.000We're not that much different after all.
00:41:36.000And so what I love about sports is anybody can win.
00:41:41.000Right, like your kid could end up being the greatest heavyweight champion of all time.
00:41:47.000Probably not genetically going to happen, but in theory it's one of those great questions like, you know, what do we say like that every time a man has sex like there's like four billion sperm or whatever.
00:41:56.000I would love if I could get my four billion sperm and look at them.
00:41:59.000Is there a Clay Travis produces LeBron James level athlete sperm?
00:42:20.000Tiger at the PGA Championship was a great example.
00:42:22.000Tiger has had all sorts of issues in his past, right?
00:42:25.000And the last decade for Tiger has been really bleak.
00:42:28.000But when you watched him walk around, I looked at the crowd, all white dudes, right, almost at the PGA Championship, when Tiger Woods walked up onto that
00:42:54.000And so, I just think the great thing about sports in Michael Jordan's era was, I rooted for Michael Jordan when he stepped back and pushed off on Brian Russell and drained that jumper.
00:43:04.000I rooted for him because I was a Jordan guy.
00:43:06.000The fact that he was black was inconsequential.
00:43:09.000The fact that Tiger Woods is a Kaplan Asian is inconsequential relative to his dominance.
00:43:16.000And, you know, I have this great section in the book, I think, where I say, can you imagine if the most uber-inclusive person bought an NFL team?
00:43:23.000And what if you followed the logic of diversity inclusion so far that you said, okay, half this team is going to be, 51% of this team is going to be female, and it's going to be the most representative football team that's ever existed.
00:43:35.00049% will be male, 63% will be white, 12% will be black, 6% will be Asian, whatever the math is of the latest census.
00:43:43.000You'd have a beautiful kaleidoscope of a football team for the team photo, and you might never score a touchdown.
00:43:55.000You know, the most talented person in sports wins, and I'm afraid that we're trying to turn sports into another version of politics, as opposed to the best thing that I think politics can aspire to.
00:44:05.000All right, so I want to talk about some of the non-political problems with sports.
00:44:12.000If you had to invest in a sport right now, you've just got a hundred bucks, you've got to invest it in a sport, you get to be an owner in one of the sports, which is the sport where you invest and why?
00:44:34.000I think their television dollars are so out of whack relative to what the brand is actually producing an audience that I wouldn't want to buy into the NBA with the valuations that current teams are getting down in Houston and Clippers and everything else.
00:44:49.000Major League Baseball I wouldn't be very comfortable in either.
00:44:51.000I mean, I'm bearish in general in the world of sports because I think there's a television sports rights bubble, which is a fascinating business kind of proposition to examine.
00:45:01.000But if I were going to buy one, it's funny, I would probably buy something like lacrosse or something crazy like Ultimate Frisbee, which is so undervalued that I think you could put on television and people would care about and they don't make any money now.
00:45:43.000But I mean, if I had to give up the NFL or Fortnite, I would give up the NFL.
00:45:46.000So I think some of these e-games, the challenges with the e-games, I've tried to look into it in investing, is I feel like you might buy in to the USFL.
00:45:55.000You know, you don't know what the league is going to be that's going to be successful.
00:45:58.000In retrospect, you're like, oh, of course the NFL was going to end up huge, but you could have bought into the USFL or the AFL.
00:46:04.000You can be wrong on, you can be right about the industry and wrong about the way that you choose to invest in the industry.
00:46:09.000So I would go like a lower tier sport.
00:46:12.000I mean, I would go, like, it may seem crazy to say answer, but like lacrosse or ultimate Frisbee or something that's almost off the radar.
00:46:18.000Yeah, no, I've thought about that before, like a paintball league.
00:46:31.000I could probably do a whole show, I bet, on awesome sports video games as kids growing up.
00:46:37.000But yeah, I'm not bullish on buying big, successful sports teams right now.
00:46:42.000And it seems like a lot of these sports are experiencing severe problems that have nothing to do with politics either.
00:46:47.000So the NFL has a serious concussion problem.
00:46:50.000And it seems to me that there are more and more parents, like I wouldn't let my kids play football for love or money at this point because just the level of head damage is too high.
00:46:58.000And also because there's a basic lie at the root of the NFL, which is that it's safe.
00:47:20.000Nobody pays attention to horse racing except for the Triple Crown.
00:47:23.000Boxing, you talked about not letting your kid play football.
00:47:26.000Nobody, like who has a college, I mean the number of people who have college degrees and let their kid box, there's like four in all of America.
00:47:35.000It's almost unheard of because you're like, I've seen what happens with the syndromes and everything else.
00:47:39.000I'm not letting somebody get hit my son or my daughter or whoever in the head.
00:47:43.000And so I think there's going to be a lot of that in the NFL.
00:47:45.000My theory on the NFL, this is another reason why I wouldn't want to buy it, is where's that impact going to hit first?
00:48:41.000Everybody is assuming the risk now, and they're making millions of dollars a year, and if these guys weren't doing this, they might make $60,000 a year.
00:48:50.000My grandfather, long before I was born, worked in a coal mine in Kentucky.
00:48:55.000The reason why he did that, and everybody else around him did that, was because they had no other options.
00:49:05.000If I'm the NFL right now, I'm saying, look, it ain't pretty, but these guys are making millions of dollars, and in exchange for allowing their legs and their bodies and potentially their brains to be beaten up,
00:49:16.000That's what the UFC is doing, and it's working for the UFC.
00:49:18.000As far as baseball, the big problem now, obviously, is the strikeout ratio, that nobody knows how to put a ball in play, and nobody can lay down a bunt.
00:49:28.000I mean, as a lifelong baseball fan, I was always fond of teams that knew how to steal a base and knew how to manufacture a run, and manufacturing runs has gone completely the way of the dodo bird.
00:49:36.000Is there any way to fix baseball other than lowering the mound, basically, at this point?
00:50:15.000They intentionally walked out three times.
00:50:16.000Yeah, I think the sport is what's crazy.
00:50:18.000As you watch the game now, I think baseball has changed more than any other sport.
00:50:22.000Because you look at the way the guys line up on the field, right?
00:50:25.000When we were kids growing up and we were tearing open the Ken Griffey Jr.
00:50:29.0001989, you know, upper deck card, like, oh, number one card, you know, like, that was amazing.
00:50:33.000There's a left fielder, there's a center fielder, there's a right.
00:50:34.000Like nowadays you look at the shifts and everything else and it's a totally different game.
00:50:39.000I think you need to diminish the power of the pitcher, but I think you simultaneously can't diminish the power of the pitcher too much because the other thing about that is the home run rate is staggering.
00:50:48.000So you're basically like home runs or strikeouts and there's very little middle of the ground, middle of the road, which is where all of the strategy comes into play and everything else.
00:51:06.000Nobody can even figure out what happened with NASCAR in the last 13 years.
00:51:09.000The sport has almost disappeared, right?
00:51:12.000So, I think the one thing we've got to keep in mind, and the reason why maybe I mentioned using the football, Ultimate Frisbee, or what sport I would invest in, is things happen really quickly now.
00:51:25.000So you can go from some being the top of the world, which I think the NFL was to two years ago, to being significantly in an issue in 10 years in a way that you couldn't have 50, 60, 80 years ago where you had to build for a long time and things didn't change that much from year to year.
00:51:40.000With regard to basketball, what do you think is the problem with basketball?
00:51:44.000Putting aside the politics, is there a problem with basketball?
00:51:46.000Because it seems like the sport itself is pretty robust.
00:51:56.000When we were kids, everybody wanted to be Michael Jordan.
00:51:58.000My kids now, everybody wants to be Steph Curry.
00:52:01.000The problem with basketball, I think, right now, and I'm not sure if it's cyclical or if it's a more substantial issue, is if you make the playoffs in the NBA, you don't know that your team has any chance.
00:52:10.000There are 16 teams that make the playoffs.
00:52:11.000There's about three or four teams that can win a championship every year.
00:52:14.000Major League Baseball, you make the playoffs, you can win the World Series.
00:52:16.000NFL, in theory, you can win the Super Bowl.
00:52:19.000Certainly hockey, God forbid, anybody can win hockey if they make the playoffs.
00:52:23.000The 8th seed in the East or West can win.
00:52:25.000I think the biggest issue that the NBA has is long regular season, 82 games.
00:52:37.000There's like three or four teams that can actually win a championship.
00:52:41.000When you've got 30 teams, I think in this really sort of complicated era where there's so many different things to compete for your entertainment dollar and your entertainment time, as Reed Hastings says, we compete against sleep now.
00:52:54.000If you're competing against sleep, why do 27 teams want to pay attention when their team has no chance to win a championship?
00:52:59.000Okay, so back to the sports media for a second and the media in general.
00:53:02.000So obviously you made a big splash several months ago when you used your slogan on CNN and everybody lost their mind.
00:53:08.000I wanted to get your reaction to that.
00:53:11.000So the book starts, I always say when your wife texts you inside the house and you don't have like tiny babies that are sleeping, it's probably not a good sign, right?
00:53:21.000So I did that, so it's funny, on that Friday
00:53:24.000It was September, and I was doing a bunch of hits talking about Jemele Hill, the politicization of sports, everything else.
00:53:30.000I told my wife, hey, I'm going to do this last hit on CNN, and then we're done, let's go get pizza, we'll take the boys out, and we'll get ready for a weekend of football, just kind of chill.
00:53:46.000And I finish the interview and they basically kick me off the air and shortly thereafter my wife texts me from inside the house and it says, just this one line, do I need to put the house on the market?
00:53:58.000Because my wife's fear, and this kind of goes to what we started talking about, is my goal every day is to tell you exactly what I think.
00:54:06.000And so my wife's fear from the get-go is, like we're talking right now and everybody's listening, if this camera went off, what I'm saying to you and hopefully our conversation would be no different if we were sitting down and just relaxing and watching a game together.
00:54:18.000So when I talk for three hours every morning on the radio, I try to talk like I'm sitting at a bar watching games with guys, right?
00:55:37.000And first of all, I've been saying that the First Amendment and boobs is a funny line to me, because if I just say I'm a First Amendment absolutist, it goes over everybody's head.
00:55:44.000Right, because it's such a cliche to say that really it's when you unpack it that it makes sense.
00:55:49.000So I thought, you know, it's like the great line from Sling Blade back in the day, like, and I'll probably get in trouble for this, but I think like the character said, I got an issue with midgets and antiques.
00:57:05.000Again, I mean, these are people who were, like, Kathy Griffin was simulating oral sex on national television on New Year's Eve with members of the CNN crew, and they were getting on your case for spelling out the word booze.
00:57:15.000Well, they were smoking weed live on the air at the most recent, and Brooke Baldwin said, like, that she has bigger balls than Don Lemon.
00:57:23.000I'm fine, like, if you want to, outrage culture in general drives me insane, but that was just such, frankly, bulls**t. I mean, there was no truth to it at all.
00:57:51.000I am big and increasingly have become more so every year on the idea of I like to have conversations with people from a variety of different perspectives, right?
00:58:00.000And so having a lot of people who look different and think the same is very much in vogue in media.
00:58:05.000I think it needs to be the exact opposite.
00:58:06.000I think we need to focus less on what people look like and more on what they say.
00:58:10.000And so in my book, and I keep referencing the book because I've spent so much time thinking about this,
00:58:14.000I say, the idea that you preface your opinion by what your identity is, is to me insane.
00:58:20.000Like, if I said to you every opinion that I got, I look in the camera and I say, as a white man with green eyes, I believe, you'd be like, why do I care that Clay Travis has, you know, like, is a white guy with green eyes or brown hair or whatever else?
00:58:32.000My opinion is what it is, so the idea that my opinion has more validity if I'm female or trans or whatever else, I think this cosmetic diversity,
00:59:08.000Like Dak Prescott came out and said that he was going to stand for the National Anthem, and they tried to turn him into, you know, like a modern day Uncle Tom, right?
00:59:16.000And the article on ESPN that I read about it said, a couple days later, it says, Dak Prescott sticks to Anthem Stan, despite the fact that he has been almost universally criticized, right?
00:59:26.000And it uses all these examples of, like, Get Out.
00:59:30.000Like, they're like, oh, this is the guy from Get Out.
00:59:31.000It has all these different— And Sunken Place and all that.
01:00:39.000That's not a, and I know by the way, a lot of the people that you see on the air who would have voted for Donald Trump.
01:00:44.000And so whether you like Trump or not, I think it's scary that we, you hit on this a lot, and this is why we're so simpatico on many of these things.
01:00:51.000I think there's a big difference between, you talked about like the,
01:00:55.000The sort of atmosphere of what's allowed to be said.
01:00:58.000The reason why I found myself moving more right wing, and right wing is the wrong thing, but towards the middle, like whatever you want to say.
01:01:25.000That's the most threatening thing, I think, in our country today, alongside of identity politics, is this idea, like you said, there are some opinions you could have, like Adolf Hitler is a great human being.
01:01:35.000Somebody will probably pull that and they'll be like, look what Clay Travis said.
01:01:38.000If you wanted to have that opinion, I think that's so far outside the bounds of acceptable opinions that that's okay.
01:01:44.000But even still within that scope, this we have expanded what is acceptable and unacceptable to the point where it's like a pinprick, right?
01:01:52.000Like so that Kurt Schilling cannot believe that North Carolina has the right to pass a law responding to Charlotte.
01:02:43.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro, audio is mixed by Mike Caromina, hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
01:02:57.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.