The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1512 - Ben Shapiro

00:00:00.000 Hello, Ben.

00:00:01.000 Hey, how's it going, dude?

00:00:02.000 We're here.

00:00:03.000 We did it.

00:00:04.000 We did.

00:00:04.000 We're both alive.

00:00:05.000 First of all, congratulations on your thinness.

00:00:07.000 Oh, thank you.

00:00:08.000 You look slender and healthy.

00:00:09.000 You look good.

00:00:09.000 Oh, thank you.

00:00:10.000 I appreciate it.

00:00:11.000 Turns out, running away from my children for four months straight will do that to you.

00:00:14.000 I literally took up running just to get away from my three children.

00:00:17.000 Just going outside just for some mind space?

00:00:19.000 It's L.A., man.

00:00:20.000 You can't get outside unless you're actively exercising or they come and arrest you.

00:00:23.000 Oh, I could have looted a footlocker.

00:00:25.000 That would have been okay.

00:00:27.000 Do you run with a mask on?

00:00:28.000 No.

00:00:28.000 Does anybody yell at you?

00:00:29.000 No.

00:00:30.000 No?

00:00:30.000 Do you go to a track?

00:00:32.000 Like, what do you do?

00:00:32.000 No, I literally just run around on the streets, hoping that one day I will be hunted down by the rioters so I don't have to go deal with my children screaming at me.

00:00:42.000 But yeah, that's the goal.

00:00:44.000 Did you try to get healthier when COVID hit?

00:00:46.000 Like, were you worried?

00:00:47.000 Yeah.

00:00:48.000 A little bit.

00:00:49.000 It really wasn't about COVID. It was just I was eating out too much.

00:00:51.000 And when I was relegated to home, it was like I had to learn how to use the barbecue, which I'd never learned how to use a barbecue, actually.

00:00:58.000 And then it turned out it was actually not that hard.

00:00:59.000 So I don't know what I was doing for years.

00:01:02.000 I gotta give you some elk meat.

00:01:03.000 Are you barbecuing right now?

00:01:05.000 Yeah.

00:01:05.000 You still doing it?

00:01:06.000 Yeah.

00:01:06.000 I'll give you some elk sausages.

00:01:07.000 It's very easy.

00:01:08.000 You have to do kosher, right? 0.84

00:01:09.000 Oh, that's not kosher at all. 0.99

00:01:10.000 Well, I'll have to go get the elk, and I'll have to actually kill it myself. 0.51

00:01:13.000 Is that what you'd have to do? 0.99

00:01:14.000 You'd have to get the elk, and then you'd have to slice its throat or something like that?

00:01:17.000 Oh, yeah.

00:01:17.000 It's good times.

00:01:19.000 What's the logic behind that?

00:01:21.000 So, I mean, not to get too fast into the biblical stuff, but the original logic was that you were supposed to kill the animal in the most humane way was the idea.

00:01:29.000 Now, do I know if it's the most humane way now?

00:01:31.000 I have no idea.

00:01:32.000 It's most certainly not, Ben. 0.99

00:01:35.000 Because you have to slice his throat. 0.97

00:01:36.000 Take it up with the rabbis, man. 0.98

00:01:37.000 I don't know.

00:01:38.000 I get it how back in the day, a very sharp knife going through the throat would have been the most humane way because it's almost painless.

00:01:47.000 And then the blood just sort of pours out and that's a wrap.

00:01:50.000 Right.

00:01:50.000 And you don't want the blood anyway because you're not allowed to eat blood in Judaism.

00:01:53.000 Oh, really?

00:01:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:54.000 So what do you do when you have a medium rare steak?

00:01:57.000 I mean, you salt the steak really heavily.

00:01:58.000 This is why kosher meat is pretty salty.

00:02:01.000 So if you go to a steakhouse, are you allowed to go to a steakhouse?

00:02:04.000 A kosher steakhouse.

00:02:05.000 There are kosher steakhouses.

00:02:05.000 God, you're so deep in that world.

00:02:07.000 I know, man.

00:02:07.000 But you're a logical, intelligent guy.

00:02:10.000 Does every now and then...

00:02:11.000 I like how you juxtapose those. 1.00

00:02:13.000 But does every now and then it fuck with your head? 0.98

00:02:15.000 You're like, what is this? 0.99

00:02:16.000 I mean, of course.

00:02:17.000 And then when I... I don't know there's a religious person alive, I mean, who doesn't eventually go like, okay, it's a little weird, but all right.

00:02:25.000 You gotta embrace the system.

00:02:26.000 But you feel like for tradition and for just the whole Jewish culture, it's worth doing? 0.98

00:02:32.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:02:33.000 I mean, you live the lifestyle.

00:02:35.000 And I feel like it ain't that big a sacrifice to eat at particular restaurants.

00:02:38.000 The restaurants are still good.

00:02:39.000 They've still got good kosher restaurants.

00:02:40.000 One thing that we're seeing with society and culture in general, and one thing that sort of does support the idea of maintaining these sort of rigid disciplines, is that when things start to slide just a little, you lose these little incremental steps.

00:02:56.000 They slide, and people go, oh God, what's the big deal?

00:03:00.000 What do you care?

00:03:01.000 And you're like, I see where this is going.

00:03:05.000 It's going down that way.

00:03:07.000 This is not going to stop.

00:03:08.000 It's sliding.

00:03:10.000 Oh yeah.

00:03:10.000 And you saw it in LA. I mean, I've lived in LA my whole life.

00:03:13.000 And the move from LA being a pretty safe, fairly nice city, suburban in orientation to just overrun with horror shows is really, it was a lot faster than I thought it would be.

00:03:26.000 But it's sort of a, you're right, it's a gradual decline and then it's just off a cliff.

00:03:30.000 Well, you started to see tents, and you didn't see them at all for decades.

00:03:35.000 And then all of a sudden, I started seeing tents.

00:03:37.000 I remember I was doing Fear Factor in Skid Row in the early 2000s.

00:03:42.000 We would film down there, and I'd be like, this is crazy.

00:03:45.000 Like, has anybody seen this?

00:03:46.000 Does anybody know this?

00:03:47.000 Because there was these homeless streets.

00:03:50.000 Like, you would go down these gigantic...

00:03:51.000 And downtown LA back then, for people who don't live in LA, you would think, oh, downtown's like downtown New York or downtown Cleveland.

00:03:58.000 No.

00:03:58.000 Downtown L.A. was no man's land.

00:04:00.000 Nothing's going on in downtown L.A. It is now.

00:04:03.000 A little bit, yeah.

00:04:03.000 Well, it was pre-COVID. It was like there was some bars and there was some really cool upscale apartment buildings.

00:04:10.000 It was kind of picking up.

00:04:12.000 But I took my family there before COVID, like four months before COVID or so.

00:04:18.000 We went to, we were going to go to, there's a famous donut place there.

00:04:21.000 So we said, just one of those goofy Sunday things.

00:04:24.000 Like, what do you guys want to do today?

00:04:25.000 Let's go get donuts.

00:04:26.000 So we went to downtown LA. Like, holy shit. 0.99

00:04:29.000 Literally shit. 1.00

00:04:30.000 Human shit. 1.00

00:04:31.000 On the streets. 1.00

00:04:33.000 Everything smelled like piss. 0.99

00:04:34.000 Bums everywhere. 0.97

00:04:35.000 And I'm like, okay, stay close to me. 0.64

00:04:37.000 Stay over here.

00:04:38.000 If anybody comes near you, move closer to me.

00:04:41.000 Like, Jesus Christ.

00:04:42.000 Like, this is crazy.

00:04:43.000 Like, I don't want them to be freaked out, but I'm like, this is nuts.

00:04:45.000 Well, the thing is that that sort of disaster area stuff in LA was sort of localized, right?

00:04:51.000 I worked in the LADA's office for a summer when I was in law school.

00:04:54.000 It's been like 2007, so it was a while ago.

00:04:56.000 And I remember they had a giant tent city and you had to walk from the car.

00:05:00.000 They made you park a mile away and walk it.

00:05:02.000 And so you're walking through Skid Row.

00:05:03.000 And it's like, okay, well, this is really terrible.

00:05:06.000 And honestly, I feel bad for these people because I don't think the best solution for people who are drug addicted or mentally ill is to live on the street.

00:05:11.000 And a heavy percentage of people who are homeless are drug addicted or mentally ill.

00:05:15.000 But, you know, for people who are living in the suburbs, like, this is at least localized.

00:05:18.000 It's not, like, reaching into your life.

00:05:20.000 And then over the past 13 years, like, I live in a pretty decent suburban area.

00:05:24.000 And I'm seeing, like, open needles on the street.

00:05:26.000 Walked out of my house one day, there's just a guy lying face down in the gutter like Edgar Allan Poe.

00:05:31.000 And I thought, well, this is falling apart rather quickly.

00:05:34.000 What do you think caused the slide or the expansion of the slide?

00:05:39.000 Because I agree with you that it was very, it was very isolated.

00:05:43.000 Skid Row was very isolated.

00:05:44.000 Downtown LA was very, I remember one time we were filming in downtown LA and we were on a gurney, or I guess that's what you call it, one of those things called where it lifts up.

00:05:53.000 Oh.

00:05:54.000 Anyway, we're filming some Fear Factor stunt, and as we got up, we could see people smoking crack.

00:06:00.000 And I go, oh look, there's people smoking crack right there.

00:06:02.000 And the guests on the show, like a lot of them, they fly from all over the country, and they're like, is that real?

00:06:07.000 They're really smoking crack?

00:06:08.000 I'm like, that's crack.

00:06:09.000 That's a homeless person smoking crack.

00:06:11.000 Welcome to LA. It's right there.

00:06:13.000 But I didn't feel bad about it.

00:06:14.000 I felt like, look...

00:06:16.000 It's unfortunate, but this is not indicative of all of LA. We're just in a shitty spot because it's really cheap to film here.

00:06:22.000 So here you go.

00:06:23.000 You got a little gift. 0.99

00:06:24.000 You get to see some weird shit while you're here. 0.98

00:06:26.000 But I didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where you're on Winnetka off the 101, and there's 80 fucking tents, and they put a port-a-potty there. 0.99

00:06:37.000 They put a port-a-potty there. 0.99

00:06:38.000 We're doing real building and real development here in Los Angeles.

00:06:42.000 Not apartment buildings.

00:06:43.000 We got some porta-potties.

00:06:44.000 Every underpass shall have a porta-potty, thanks to Mayor Eric Garcetti.

00:06:48.000 You pay attention to politics far more than I do, and law enforcement and all that.

00:06:54.000 What happened?

00:06:55.000 How did it get to this?

00:06:56.000 Well, on this particular problem, this actually started with a bunch of lawsuits. 0.93

00:06:59.000 So the LAPD used to have the authority to move people's shit if it was on the sidewalk. 0.51

00:07:03.000 People had a bunch of stuff that was on the sidewalk and they were just camping out there. 0.91

00:07:06.000 The LAPD could come and they could take their stuff away and they could rouse them or they could arrest them for trespass or for loitering.

00:07:12.000 And then the ACLU actually sued and they said that this is a violation of people's personal property.

00:07:16.000 Oh, ACLU. You do such good work sometimes.

00:07:19.000 And the courts ruled that you actually are not allowed to move people's stuff, that that's actually personal property, even though it's in a public area.

00:07:25.000 And then they got a ruling from a court that you're allowed to live in your car, because for a while you weren't allowed to live in your car, and then it was you're allowed to live in your car.

00:07:30.000 So now you're basically allowed to leave your stuff on the sidewalk, and the police are not allowed to move it, and you're allowed to live in your car.

00:07:36.000 And then there was this sort of...

00:07:39.000 Equity movement that said, okay, well, they do it in business districts, but why can't they do it in, like, more suburban areas?

00:07:45.000 Why can't they just move into nicer areas?

00:07:46.000 After all, if there's misery, it should be equally spread across the city.

00:07:49.000 And that's kind of what you see.

00:07:51.000 I mean, there have been so many breaking points over the last year in the city.

00:07:54.000 And for me, for me and my wife, I mean, we looked at the rioting, and they shut down the entire city at 6 p.m.

00:08:00.000 It's a county of 12 million people.

00:08:02.000 And they shut down the entire county so that douchebags could run around shattering windows, pretending that they were standing up for social justice. 1.00

00:08:08.000 They shut down Beverly Hills at 1 p.m.

00:08:10.000 They shut down Rodeo Drive at 1 p.m.

00:08:13.000 So that people could run up and down Rodeo Drive talking about how capitalism sucks while tweeting from their iPhones.

00:08:17.000 While stealing Nikes.

00:08:20.000 You know, there was two moments where I was like, this is a real opportunity for us to come together.

00:08:24.000 And one of them was the moment the lockdown happened.

00:08:28.000 It felt to me very similar to right after 9-11, where everybody was confronted with their own mortality. 0.99

00:08:35.000 Like, holy shit! 0.98

00:08:36.000 We might be on the verge of a pandemic, like in a movie, where a lot of the people we know die. 0.99

00:08:43.000 And here, we have to be kind to each other.

00:08:45.000 This is what's important.

00:08:46.000 Family's important.

00:08:47.000 And I remember thinking, I've never been closer to my family.

00:08:50.000 Never been closer to my friends.

00:08:52.000 We were calling each other all the time.

00:08:54.000 There was real hope in that.

00:08:57.000 I was like, if we get through this, we're going to be tighter.

00:09:00.000 We're going to know what means something, what counts. 1.00

00:09:02.000 Fuck stand-up comedy. 1.00

00:09:03.000 Fuck everything else, man. 1.00

00:09:05.000 What's important is love and friendship. 1.00

00:09:08.000 Then it started to get angry.

00:09:12.000 It only took like three or four weeks where people started getting, like they were scared.

00:09:17.000 So people started getting shittier with each other online.

00:09:19.000 And then I basically swore off Twitter.

00:09:22.000 I was like, this is just too toxic and too hostile.

00:09:25.000 The second moment...

00:09:27.000 I thought we had the opportunity to come together was George Floyd.

00:09:30.000 So George Floyd died and all of a sudden you have these Black Lives Matter protests and I'm like, maybe we can finally make a dent on racism.

00:09:41.000 Maybe we can finally make a dent in police brutality.

00:09:44.000 Maybe this is a moment Where we can come together and realize what's important.

00:09:48.000 It's community.

00:09:49.000 Solidarity.

00:09:51.000 We're all in this together.

00:09:52.000 This is crazy.

00:09:53.000 And then the cops need to be reformed.

00:09:55.000 They can't live like that.

00:09:56.000 And maybe we should take into account PTSD. Maybe we should take into account the fact that these fucking guys are pulling up on people every day that might shoot them in the face. 1.00

00:10:04.000 They might never be able to see their family and their kids. 1.00

00:10:06.000 Let's rework this. 1.00

00:10:07.000 Let's think this shit through. 1.00

00:10:09.000 Eh. 1.00

00:10:09.000 Nope. 1.00

00:10:10.000 And then chaos.

00:10:11.000 And then all of a sudden it became like what we saw yesterday where they're breaking into Amazon Go in Seattle. 1.00

00:10:17.000 Like, that fucking guy owns the Washington Post! 0.99

00:10:21.000 He owns the most left-wing newspaper in America! 1.00

00:10:25.000 And you're like, not good enough!

00:10:27.000 Well, you saw they set up by a fake guillotine outside of Bezos' house in Washington, D.C. It's insane.

00:10:32.000 It's madness.

00:10:33.000 He's too rich.

00:10:34.000 I totally agree with you, by the way.

00:10:35.000 When COVID happened, I thought, I can't really see how we're going to split in partisan fashion over this thing.

00:10:41.000 Everybody wants to live, and everybody would also like to eventually get back to regular life.

00:10:45.000 And the better we can live, the better we can get back to regular life.

00:10:47.000 So it seems like, okay, we're on board.

00:10:50.000 When it came to the lockdowns, the original lockdowns, I was like, Okay, I'm on board.

00:10:53.000 I'm taking this thing really seriously.

00:10:55.000 I've got parents in their 60s.

00:10:56.000 I feel like I'm in good health.

00:10:58.000 I'm fairly young.

00:10:59.000 I'm 36. But for my parents, I don't want my parents getting this thing.

00:11:02.000 And so we're still taking this thing real seriously.

00:11:04.000 I mean, I'm still wearing a mask around to public places, and I think people should.

00:11:07.000 I think that's a responsible thing to do.

00:11:08.000 But it immediately turned into, who can we blame for this?

00:11:11.000 Who can we blame?

00:11:12.000 Who's doing it wrong?

00:11:13.000 And it seems like there were only like a couple of things that you really can do that are obviously wrong.

00:11:18.000 Like nobody has a good solution on this thing.

00:11:20.000 Okay, it ravaged Italy.

00:11:21.000 It ravaged Spain.

00:11:23.000 It ravaged New York.

00:11:24.000 Like there are a couple of things you shouldn't do.

00:11:26.000 Don't take the olds and send them back into the nursing homes with COVID, right?

00:11:28.000 I mean, that's like an obvious one.

00:11:29.000 But beyond that, Like just staying away from each other and socially distancing.

00:11:34.000 Like this is all kind of commonsensical stuff that people have known since the flu pandemic event in 1918. Like nothing has really changed.

00:11:40.000 And yet it immediately turned into who can we blame?

00:11:43.000 Who's to blame for all these dead people?

00:11:44.000 Maybe it's Ron DeSantis or maybe it's Cuomo.

00:11:46.000 Like who can we blame?

00:11:48.000 So that was terrible.

00:11:48.000 And then on the Floyd stuff, I had the same feelings.

00:11:50.000 Like I don't know a single human being who watched that tape and didn't think, okay, that guy deserves to go to jail.

00:11:55.000 Chauvin, the officer in that case, in the George Floyd case.

00:11:57.000 Who didn't think that, yeah.

00:11:58.000 Everyone I know.

00:11:59.000 Everybody thought that.

00:11:59.000 Every single person was like, yeah, that's real bad.

00:12:02.000 And cops. 0.86

00:12:03.000 I know tons of cops.

00:12:04.000 I'm friendly with tons of cops.

00:12:05.000 And not one of them was like, yeah, that's good police procedure.

00:12:07.000 I'm glad he did that.

00:12:08.000 No one thought that.

00:12:09.000 And so when people are like, okay, we're going to look at police brutality.

00:12:12.000 Maybe we'll take a look at qualified immunity.

00:12:14.000 Maybe we'll take a look at police unions and the kind of restrictive covenants that they have with the cities and how we make sure that everybody knows who the bad cops are so they can't get hired at different places.

00:12:23.000 All those are solutions.

00:12:24.000 But It quickly turned from, well, we don't want to talk about solutions.

00:12:27.000 Solutions are a bad idea.

00:12:28.000 What we need to do is we need to shout about everything we can possibly imagine all at once.

00:12:33.000 And you know what?

00:12:34.000 Instead, let's have a conversation about, like, was George Washington a bad guy?

00:12:38.000 Let's have a conversation instead about, like, just completely defunding the police.

00:12:41.000 We want to have, like, a responsible conversation about things that make sense.

00:12:44.000 We'll talk about, like, what if we just got rid of the police?

00:12:46.000 How about that?

00:12:47.000 How crazy is that discussion?

00:12:48.000 That discussion, when people were really saying defund the police, I'm like, cooler heads will prevail.

00:12:54.000 But they're going to realize.

00:12:54.000 And I think they're realizing it now in New York City.

00:12:57.000 I mean, New York City has had record crime, record homicides.

00:13:00.000 Who would have thought?

00:13:01.000 Who would have thought?

00:13:02.000 De Blasio is, I mean, I would have never imagined I would look at Garcetti and go, well, he's better.

00:13:12.000 I look at Garcetti and I look at de Blasio.

00:13:15.000 I'm like, Garcetti, I'll have him over at my house for dinner.

00:13:17.000 He's way better than de Blasio. 0.97

00:13:19.000 Giant groundhog murderer. 0.99

00:13:20.000 So weird. 0.96

00:13:22.000 You can have protests, but only Black Lives Matter protests.

00:13:26.000 That was a solid...

00:13:28.000 That may have been the moment when I realized that we were all effed.

00:13:31.000 It was the moment when we're in the middle of a global pandemic with hundreds of thousands of people dead, and an entire swath of our media and health elites just decided, randomly, That if you were protesting against lockdown, you were very bad, right? 0.57

00:13:44.000 Then you were a racist and you were going to get people killed and you should wear a mask.

00:13:47.000 And I was like, well, I sort of agree with the mask thing. 0.99

00:13:49.000 Like, yeah.

00:13:50.000 Okay.

00:13:50.000 And then you get millions of people in the streets yelling at each other and breathing on each other and spitting on each other.

00:13:57.000 And you got health professionals on TV being like, well, racism is a public health threat.

00:14:00.000 I guess that you can do that now.

00:14:01.000 It's like, well, what the?

00:14:02.000 I know people who died in the hospital of COVID and their family could not visit them.

00:14:06.000 Like they literally died alone in the hospital of COVID and family could not visit them.

00:14:09.000 And you're telling me that it's deeply important that we have like dance lines.

00:14:12.000 This was stuff happening at rallies, like dance lines in the streets in New York to fight racism.

00:14:16.000 That's deeply important.

00:14:17.000 But a daughter being able to visit her dad before he dies, that's not important.

00:14:21.000 I am for your freedom to protest.

00:14:23.000 I'm 100% for your freedom to protest.

00:14:25.000 I'm also for your freedom to go to the gym.

00:14:28.000 I'm also for your freedom to go to a comedy club if you so choose.

00:14:31.000 I'm for your freedom to go to a restaurant.

00:14:34.000 Look, they figured out how to do restaurants in a lot of places.

00:14:36.000 The servers wear masks and many of them wear face shields.

00:14:40.000 You distance the tables apart from each other.

00:14:42.000 You do temperature checks.

00:14:43.000 You take people's names and addresses down when they enter so that if anybody gets sick, if there's any sort of...

00:14:50.000 And they've been able to do this.

00:14:51.000 No, this is right.

00:14:52.000 The vectors of transmission are typically closed areas, people in solid proximity with each other for long periods of time.

00:14:59.000 Yes.

00:14:59.000 That's the stuff where people are getting this stuff.

00:15:01.000 And I trust most Americans not – like some Americans are going to be dumbasses. 1.00

00:15:05.000 Some people are just dumbasses. 1.00

00:15:06.000 Oh, there's a lot of videos. 1.00

00:15:07.000 Oh, yeah.

00:15:07.000 I don't know if you watch YouTube.

00:15:08.000 There's plenty of Karens out there. 1.00

00:15:10.000 How sad is it if your name is Karen and you're a good person?

00:15:13.000 All the good Karens out there, I'm sorry, ladies. 0.99

00:15:16.000 I'm really sorry.

00:15:19.000 I made this point online, I got shellacked for it, but I was pointing out that most Americans are wearing masks right now.

00:15:25.000 By polling data, 59% of Americans say that they always wear a mask when they leave the house.

00:15:29.000 And if you look at the map of mask wearing, Across the board, in the places where there are the most cases, people are wearing masks.

00:15:35.000 I wasn't saying masks don't work.

00:15:36.000 I wear a mask.

00:15:37.000 I think that the evidence shows that they do something.

00:15:39.000 We don't know that they're not like full protective.

00:15:41.000 The cloth masks are not as effective as surgical masks, which are not as effective as N95s, but wear a mask, good.

00:15:47.000 The point that I was making is people are acting in fairly rational fashion, meaning if you think COVID is like around you, you're wearing a mask and you're socially distancing.

00:15:54.000 So this idea that Gavin Newsom knows best how you ought to live your life I got some trouble with that, especially because California saw the same uptick as Texas and Florida, and California never opened.

00:16:03.000 I mean, we've been here the whole time.

00:16:04.000 California never really opened.

00:16:06.000 Well, we were doing pretty good up until the protests.

00:16:08.000 Everything seemed like it was on an uptick.

00:16:10.000 The Comedy Store was talking to them about becoming an essential business and opening up, because they had opened up bars, and they had opened up restaurants, and they didn't really have a designation for comedy clubs.

00:16:21.000 They sort of We've talked about it as a live performance venue, but then that puts comedy clubs at the same place as the Staples Center, which sounds crazy, right?

00:16:31.000 So, like, listen, we can do this.

00:16:32.000 We can just have half capacity, temperature checks, do it right.

00:16:36.000 They're doing it right in a lot of places all over the country.

00:16:38.000 We can do this.

00:16:38.000 The audience has to wear masks.

00:16:40.000 This is totally doable.

00:16:41.000 And so they were right about to do that.

00:16:44.000 And then post...

00:16:45.000 There's another thing is, we were trying to figure out, like, is it protests only?

00:16:48.000 I think it's bars, too.

00:16:50.000 The thing about bars is close talk.

00:16:52.000 People are drunk and they're on top of each other.

00:16:56.000 I think bars probably had a significant update.

00:16:58.000 Lots of singing, lots of vocalizing.

00:17:01.000 Churches and synagogues were a main vector for this. 1.00

00:17:04.000 But again, these are all things that are fairly commonsensical and we can agree on and yet we're beating the hell out of each other over this stuff and there's this suggestion we know what to do.

00:17:12.000 If only we just did it, this would stop.

00:17:13.000 It's not going to stop.

00:17:14.000 Okay, it's not gonna stop.

00:17:15.000 It's a very transmissible disease.

00:17:16.000 We don't have a vaccine.

00:17:17.000 As long as people are out there, it's going to continue to pass.

00:17:20.000 Wear a mask if you're in close proximity with others.

00:17:22.000 And that's pretty much it.

00:17:24.000 The hospitals are getting better at this, thank God.

00:17:25.000 Yes, they are.

00:17:26.000 And the crazy thing was that they were saying, like, you can only protest if it's a Black Lives Matter protest.

00:17:32.000 What about a protest for increasing your immunity?

00:17:36.000 What about a protest for educating people?

00:17:38.000 To the techniques and the strategies for increasing your immune system.

00:17:43.000 They're out there.

00:17:44.000 And there's no discussion about this amongst health professionals, excuse me, amongst politicians.

00:17:49.000 If you listen to health professionals, people that really understand the human body, they'll tell you.

00:17:53.000 There's a lot of strategies.

00:17:54.000 There's a lot of things you could do.

00:17:55.000 First of all, eliminate Alcohol.

00:17:57.000 Eliminate caffeine.

00:17:58.000 Eliminate sugar. 1.00

00:17:59.000 Eliminate all the bullshit in your diet. 0.99

00:18:01.000 Start taking vitamin supplements. 1.00

00:18:03.000 Get outside.

00:18:04.000 Get some vitamin D. Get your body healthy.

00:18:07.000 Exercise.

00:18:08.000 Do all these things.

00:18:09.000 And you will increase your immune system.

00:18:11.000 You'll increase your body's health.

00:18:12.000 You don't hear a word of that.

00:18:14.000 All of it is just stay inside.

00:18:16.000 We have to stay apart to keep everybody safe. 0.99

00:18:19.000 God damn. 0.99

00:18:20.000 The number one vector for transmission remains the home. 0.99

00:18:23.000 That's still the number one vector in every society is the home.

00:18:25.000 People going home and giving it to each other.

00:18:28.000 I remember, for me, one of the breaking points in LA was when they decided they were going to shut down all open areas.

00:18:34.000 They're going to shut down all the parks.

00:18:35.000 They're going to shut down all the beaches.

00:18:36.000 And I was like, what is this?

00:18:38.000 Well, not only that, it goes against science because there's been papers that have been studied that show that this virus dies almost instantaneously when it's exposed to sunlight or even artificial sunlight.

00:18:48.000 Yeah, none of it makes any sense.

00:18:50.000 But it does feel like, bottom line, there were a bunch of gaps in American society, and then a bad thing happened, and everything just sort of fell apart.

00:18:56.000 It was sort of like a house of cards, and then there's a little bit of weight put right on top of the house of cards, and everything just collapsed in on itself.

00:19:02.000 Well, people are panicking.

00:19:03.000 You know, they're getting scared and then the economy's collapsing.

00:19:06.000 So the economy collapsing at the same time as the George Floyd protests led people to start looting. 0.99

00:19:12.000 And then people that didn't give a fuck about George Floyd or Black Lives Matter were just stealing shit. 1.00

00:19:17.000 And then this police was letting them steal shit. 1.00

00:19:20.000 They were standing down in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, literally cops standing there. 0.99

00:19:26.000 While people are smashing doors.

00:19:27.000 I gotta say, the media coverage of this stuff is just awful.

00:19:29.000 The media were cheering this stuff on.

00:19:31.000 They were simultaneously making two arguments that conflict with each other.

00:19:35.000 One was, these are mostly peaceful protests.

00:19:37.000 First of all, mostly peaceful is the most...

00:19:39.000 It's the most loosely defined, arbitrarily applied term in history.

00:19:44.000 O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night.

00:19:46.000 O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night.

00:19:48.000 For like an hour 15, he was really not peaceful.

00:19:51.000 But for the other hours between sunset and sunrise, he was unbelievably peaceful.

00:19:55.000 Like, I've never heard this term before where a protest turns into a vast riot wrecking all of Melrose and everybody's like, well, it was mostly peaceful.

00:20:03.000 What is that?

00:20:04.000 What is that?

00:20:05.000 That's so true.

00:20:05.000 So how about this?

00:20:07.000 How about you either say that the protesters and looters are two different groups of people and we treat them differently.

00:20:11.000 If you're protesting, that's First Amendment activity.

00:20:13.000 The minute you shatter a store window, you go to jail, right?

00:20:15.000 That's the way they should run.

00:20:16.000 Or alternatively, If you're saying they're the same group, then they need to be treated as lawbreakers.

00:20:22.000 So I believe the first.

00:20:23.000 I believe if you're a protester, you should be protesting.

00:20:25.000 If you're a looter and a rioter, then you should go to jail.

00:20:27.000 But the media refuse to make that distinction.

00:20:29.000 And then they act like the cops are the bad guys when they come in to arrest people who are violating the law.

00:20:34.000 I think it's in Portland right now. 0.99

00:20:35.000 They're trying to burn down the damn courthouse. 0.99

00:20:36.000 And the feds come in and start arresting people. 0.99

00:20:39.000 And people are like, this is the Gestapo.

00:20:41.000 It's like, okay.

00:20:42.000 Speaking as one of the tribe, let me say, this is not like the Gestapo.

00:20:46.000 Okay, like, the Gestapo was not famous for rolling up on people, and then charging them, and then if they didn't have a charge, releasing them.

00:20:51.000 That wasn't like the Gestapo's thing.

00:20:53.000 I'm sorry, but you decided that you wanted to throw a firebomb at the federal courthouse, and your local mayor said he wasn't going to let the police do anything, and so DHS came in and arrested you. 0.99

00:21:04.000 Tough shit. 0.97

00:21:05.000 I mean, like, I'm sorry, at some point, somebody's got to restore some semblance of law and order here. 0.99

00:21:09.000 Well, it's a weird situation because I don't exactly understand why they're attacking the courthouse.

00:21:16.000 I don't exactly understand why they're smashing the windows at Amazon Go.

00:21:20.000 It's Steve Martin, right? 1.00

00:21:21.000 They must hate these paint cans from the jerk, right? 1.00

00:21:27.000 But it went from this to literally tear down the structure of society. 0.99

00:21:35.000 Well, this is where we get into sort of the deep philosophy point.

00:21:37.000 And this is actually really the biggest problem right now in the racism point is the shifting definition of racism.

00:21:44.000 So I had the unfortunate experience of actually reading one of the best-selling books in the country, Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility. 0.95

00:21:49.000 And let me just tell you, a greater pile of horseshit has never been produced by a bevy of horses.

00:21:53.000 It is an awful book, and it is basically rooted in the same theory as Ibram Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist. 0.87

00:21:59.000 The basic definition of racism changes in this theory.

00:22:02.000 So racism, you and I were sitting here discussing racism, and the way I define racism is probably the same way you define racism.

00:22:07.000 You believe in the inferiority or superiority of a group based on race.

00:22:11.000 Of an individual based on their membership in that group too, right?

00:22:14.000 That would be racism. 0.57

00:22:15.000 I believe that you're inferior or you're superior based on your race. 0.97

00:22:17.000 End of story, right?

00:22:18.000 That's racism.

00:22:20.000 So Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi redefine racism to mean any societal structure that results in a racial inequality is itself racist.

00:22:29.000 So any structure that results in a not exact proportion between whites and blacks...

00:22:35.000 Does that make the NBA racist?

00:22:36.000 Exactly.

00:22:37.000 Exactly.

00:22:37.000 The answer is kind of yes, except that the NBA is not racist because obviously it benefits black people, right?

00:22:42.000 I mean, now, the NBA is not racist, except it's because the meritocracy is the reason the NBA is not racist.

00:22:48.000 But Robin DiAngelo and Kendi both suggest that meritocracy is an aspect of whiteness.

00:22:54.000 They say that meritocracy and individual are aspects of whiteness because these institutions, things like meritocracy and individualism and not seeing people's colors, these just reinforce hierarchies that end with disparate outcomes.

00:23:06.000 And so what they say is in order to be anti-racist, you have to want to tear down the entire system.

00:23:11.000 They literally say this.

00:23:13.000 I know that I'm not misidentifying the argument because, again, I've read their books.

00:23:17.000 The basic notion that to be anti-racist, you have to tear down free markets or you have to tear down free speech.

00:23:25.000 And what that means is, of course, that anytime there's rioting and looting, that's really just an expression of outrage at the broader American system.

00:23:31.000 And so it justifies that sort of stuff.

00:23:33.000 This is why you saw Nicole Hannah-Jones, the de facto editor of the... 1.00

00:23:36.000 New York Times 1619 Project lady tweeting out that she appreciated that people were calling these the 1619 riots.

00:23:41.000 Because once you say America is rooted in slavery and rooted in evil and a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place, then robbing a shop is just the latest iteration of you fighting the system.

00:23:51.000 Explain the 1619 correlation to people, if you would.

00:23:54.000 Sure.

00:23:54.000 So the 1619 project is something put forward by the New York Times.

00:23:57.000 It's not good history.

00:23:58.000 There are four Pulitzer Prize-winning historians who have said this is not good history.

00:24:01.000 The basic argument is the United States was not founded in 1776 with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

00:24:07.000 The country was actually founded in 1619 with the importation of African slaves to American shores because that's when the first African slave arrived in the United States was 1619. So the idea is that the entire history of America is a history of a system that is endemically white supremacist.

00:24:23.000 And that all of the Declaration of Independence is basically a lie.

00:24:26.000 That the principles of all men are created equal, that was a lie when it was written and it's a lie now.

00:24:30.000 That the idea that we have rights that pre-exist government, that's a lie.

00:24:33.000 All of these things are lies.

00:24:34.000 The Constitution was built in order to enshrine white supremacy.

00:24:37.000 And no evolution has taken place.

00:24:39.000 So they essentially make the argument that from 1619 to 2020 is a continuum.

00:24:44.000 Racism has gone underground a little bit, but it's still there and it's still implicit in all of our systems.

00:24:50.000 So the 1619 Project has essays blaming literally everything on racism.

00:24:53.000 So disparities in maternal mortality between black women and white women, which by the way exist in Europe and in Canada, that's due to American racism. 0.51

00:25:00.000 Traffic patterns in the United States is due to systematic American racism.

00:25:04.000 Every racial disparity is attributable to a system that was rooted in slavery.

00:25:10.000 Now, the traditional notion of America is that America was founded in 1776 and that the story of America is that America did tolerate the great original sin of slavery up until the Civil War and then tolerated Jim Crow up until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

00:25:24.000 And that is a great stain and a blot on America.

00:25:26.000 But the story of America is trying to fulfill the promises of the Declaration of Independence over time, make those promises available to everybody.

00:25:33.000 And this isn't my argument.

00:25:34.000 This is Martin Luther King Jr.'s argument when he talks in the March in Washington about fulfilling the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence.

00:25:40.000 He says, we're here to cash the check, right?

00:25:41.000 You issued us the check, and then you didn't let black Americans be Americans. 0.98

00:25:45.000 We're here to cash the check.

00:25:46.000 This is the argument Frederick Douglass, the freed slave, makes in 1852. He makes a famous speech before slavery has ended.

00:25:51.000 And he says July 4th doesn't mean anything to black Americans because we're not included in the bargain.

00:25:55.000 Include us in the bargain.

00:25:56.000 The story of America is the Declaration of Independence, those principles that we should all basically still agree on because they're pretty good principles.

00:26:03.000 Free speech, free assembly, all the things you see in the Constitution.

00:26:07.000 That those things brought about greater freedom and prosperity than anything else and helped us overcome sins that are present in all human societies and were present in the United States in extreme ways as well.

00:26:18.000 But that's the counter-narrative, right?

00:26:20.000 The 1619 Project says that all that was basically nonsense and that America is just a history of whites keeping blacks down and that no progress has essentially been made.

00:26:28.000 If there is progress, it's mostly a lie.

00:26:31.000 And so every disparity now can be attributed to historic disparities between white and black.

00:26:36.000 Is there middle ground?

00:26:37.000 So, if we look at 1776 and we look at the Declaration of Independence and we look at America today in 2020, there clearly is some impact in the echoes of slavery and then after that Jim Crow.

00:26:54.000 There's clearly some impact in these deeply impoverished communities that don't seem to advance.

00:26:59.000 Yes.

00:27:00.000 So to make the argument about institutional racism, there's a couple ways you can read this.

00:27:04.000 When people say systemic racism or institutional racism, I usually ask them to be a little more specific in what they mean because there are a few ways you can read that.

00:27:11.000 One is history has impact.

00:27:12.000 Of course that's true, right?

00:27:13.000 That's true for everybody.

00:27:14.000 It's true in your family history.

00:27:16.000 If you have a grandfather who went to prison on a particular charge, that leads to poverty for your parents, which led to more poverty for you, right?

00:27:23.000 People have histories.

00:27:24.000 Those histories are embedded in their life experiences, and that's true for societies as well.

00:27:28.000 All of that is for sure true.

00:27:29.000 Then there's the question as to whether the institutions today are racist.

00:27:33.000 And that's not quite the same thing, right?

00:27:35.000 Because history has consequences is not the same thing as saying the rules today are racist.

00:27:39.000 Because the rules today are not racist, actually.

00:27:41.000 The rules today are quite not racist.

00:27:43.000 But historically, it's fairly recent.

00:27:46.000 If you go from the civil rights movement to 2020, we're really not talking about that much time.

00:27:51.000 We're talking about 50-plus years.

00:27:54.000 60 years, yeah.

00:27:55.000 In the world of history, it's a very small amount of time.

00:28:01.000 So clearly, there's some impact of both racism and Jim Crow laws.

00:28:07.000 So that's where I'm saying there's a middle ground.

00:28:09.000 Yeah, and it is important for people on my side of the aisle, conservatives, to acknowledge and recognize the importance of history in people's living situations now.

00:28:19.000 And it's important for people on the other side of the aisle to, at the same time, not attribute every single thing to history.

00:28:24.000 Right, but isn't there always something like that?

00:28:27.000 There's always extremes on each position, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

00:28:32.000 Yeah, but I don't think that it lies as far in the dead center of that as people, I think, want it to.

00:28:37.000 What I mean by that is the problems that have plagued communities in the United States, not just the black community in the United States, but problems of racism or problems of sexism, the way those get alleviated is people making better choices over time.

00:28:48.000 That's the way that those issues get alleviated.

00:28:51.000 When Jews arrived in the United States in the early 20th century to talk of my people, when they came, they were impoverished.

00:28:56.000 They didn't speak the language.

00:28:58.000 They were banned from country clubs.

00:28:59.000 There was open discrimination against them.

00:29:00.000 They were banned from Harvard.

00:29:01.000 Harvard Law School had quotas on Jews.

00:29:05.000 The way to fight against that is to make good decisions.

00:29:09.000 And so you fight against the system to make sure that the system has rules that apply equally to everyone.

00:29:15.000 Right, but you clearly see that there's a big difference between people coming over here willingly and doing so in order to better their lives versus someone whose ancestors were dragged over here To be sold as property and then dealing with the repercussions of that being your family history and redline laws and all the other things that were put in place to sort of keep them in very specific areas which to this day remain crime-ridden,

00:29:43.000 gang-ridden, deeply impoverished communities.

00:29:46.000 Well, that's true, but the question is how much of that is historic redlining and how much of that is an 18-year-old kid today deciding to pep a gun and shoot somebody? 0.97

00:29:52.000 But how much of that 18-year-old kid today deciding to pick up a gun and shoot somebody is based on him growing up in this fucked up environment where that's what he models, where everything around him is crime and gangs and you imitate your atmosphere, which is what all humans do. 0.89

00:30:08.000 Right, but the answer is there's only one way to break that chain. 0.96

00:30:10.000 What way is that?

00:30:11.000 That way is to not pick up a gun and shoot somebody.

00:30:13.000 I think that's a simplistic way of looking at it if you're on the outside of that community and you're not one of those 18-year-old kids that grows up with the incredible influence of all the people around him and that's all you see and that's all you know.

00:30:26.000 Well, but the problem is the only way that's going to be the thing that your kid doesn't know is for you not to do it.

00:30:31.000 At some point, personal agency has to come in.

00:30:33.000 It does, but education and teaching them about personal agency and letting them understand that there's a way out of this and that the path that they see… Being replicated over and over again by these people that wind up dying young,

00:30:49.000 that wind up going to jail, that there are other options.

00:30:51.000 There's a lot of kids that never get that other information, or if they get it, they get little blips of it, but the vast majority of the information, the vast majority of the influence they get is terrible.

00:31:02.000 Well, I totally agree with this, and this is why I think the worst thing that you can say to a kid is you're born behind the eight ball, and no matter what you do, you're not going to succeed.

00:31:09.000 That's literally the worst thing you can say to a kid.

00:31:10.000 What you should be saying is, look at how your grandfather was born behind the aid fall, and look how hard he had to work in order to get ahead.

00:31:17.000 If that's true though, but if your grandfather wasn't ahead, didn't get ahead, if your grandfather was in and out of jail, if your father was in and out of jail, everyone around you is like that, if there's literally no influence that's positive in your life,

00:31:34.000 The idea of saying to a kid like that, hey, don't pick up a gun and shoot somebody, that's way too simplistic a version of their future, in my opinion.

00:31:44.000 The problem is I don't see an alternative solution.

00:31:47.000 I think an alternative solution is there has to be some sort of large-scale intervention in these communities to do something about what has already been set in motion and the momentum that keeps continuing decade after decade.

00:32:03.000 I don't know what could be done.

00:32:05.000 Well, but that's the problem is that I think that a lot of the solutions that have been proposed have already been tried.

00:32:09.000 Meaning that, for example, LBJ thought that the way to alleviate a lot of these inequalities was the war on poverty.

00:32:15.000 And he openly talked about this.

00:32:17.000 He talked about, he gave a speech very famously in which he said, we're trying to guarantee equality of outcome, not just equality of opportunity, equality of outcome.

00:32:24.000 And you can't hold the race where somebody is starting 20 yards behind and then fire the gun and say, okay, then it's an equal race.

00:32:30.000 Right?

00:32:31.000 So you have to get the person who's 20 yards behind to actually get up to the starting line so that they're equal.

00:32:35.000 And so the idea was we're going to fight this war on poverty and alleviate poverty largely through transfer payments and through the government taking a forcible step in favor of alleviating people's lives.

00:32:45.000 We've now spent $22 trillion in the war on poverty and we have about the same number of black Americans living under the poverty line as we're living under the poverty line by the late 70s.

00:32:54.000 The real issues that are creating intergenerational poverty, everyone knows this but remains true.

00:33:01.000 The number one predictor of intergenerational poverty in the United States remains single motherhood.

00:33:05.000 The single motherhood rate in the black community was 20% in 1960. It is upward of 70% today.

00:33:09.000 That's not unique to the black community, by the way.

00:33:11.000 It's true in the white community as well.

00:33:12.000 5% of white kids were born out of wedlock in 1960. Today it's upward of 40%.

00:33:19.000 Something has happened and it is not a matter of increased racism.

00:33:23.000 That's not happening because of increased racism.

00:33:24.000 That is happening because there's been a cultural change that does not place tremendous emphasis for black or white or for anybody.

00:33:33.000 On personal responsibility and personal agency.

00:33:35.000 There needs to be a mindset change.

00:33:37.000 We do this, by the way, in all other areas of American life except for the most important decisions.

00:33:41.000 In the area of sports, nobody does this routine.

00:33:43.000 This is a point Shelby Steele makes.

00:33:45.000 In the area of sports, if a kid does not have a good jump shot, nobody says to him, you know what, you don't have a good jump shot because your father didn't have a good jump shot, his grandfather didn't have a good jump shot, and the game is biased against you.

00:33:54.000 We say, okay, if you want to be on the team, you're going to have to learn to shoot a jump shot.

00:33:58.000 That sounds harsh.

00:33:59.000 That sounds bad.

00:34:00.000 But sports are different.

00:34:01.000 And here's why sports are different.

00:34:03.000 Because sports, you enter them independently of your culture.

00:34:06.000 You base what you're trying to do on the parameters of the rules and the people that you're competing against.

00:34:13.000 That's how you look at it.

00:34:14.000 So whatever culture you're from, you walk into this new thing with this very rigid set of rules.

00:34:22.000 I don't think white people or Jews or Asians have a monopoly on valuing education or a monopoly on hard work or punctuality or anything.

00:34:28.000 I think that black people have exactly the same capacity as any people of any other race to do all of these things, and those are the preconditions for success.

00:34:36.000 You either meet them or you don't.

00:34:37.000 I mean, that's true for everybody.

00:34:38.000 For success.

00:34:40.000 But don't you think that a lot of that is predicated on the environment that you develop in and the people that you're around and the lives that you imitate and the influences that you have around you?

00:34:51.000 Someone has to do something to influence those kids in a different way.

00:34:55.000 I was very fortunate when I was young that I discovered martial arts, and it kept me from being what I could have potentially been a bad kid.

00:35:04.000 It gave me something to focus on.

00:35:08.000 And I didn't grow up in a bad environment, but it wasn't the best.

00:35:12.000 There's a lot of people out there that grow up in horrific environments, and they never have that thing.

00:35:17.000 They never have something.

00:35:18.000 They don't have a father around, or they don't have a mother around, or whatever bad influences they have are overwhelming.

00:35:27.000 It's very difficult. 0.99

00:35:30.000 For someone to just, air quotes, get their shit together. 0.99

00:35:34.000 It's very difficult. 0.99

00:35:35.000 For sure.

00:35:35.000 That's why, to this day, there's so many books about losing weight.

00:35:39.000 Don't you think everybody wants to lose weight that's fat?

00:35:41.000 They do.

00:35:42.000 Everybody who's fat wants to be thin.

00:35:44.000 They do. 0.99

00:35:45.000 But it's fucking hard. 0.97

00:35:46.000 For sure. 0.98

00:35:47.000 And that's nothing in comparison to changing your whole life.

00:35:50.000 But you would say about somebody losing weight, you know what's not useful here is lamenting how bad your family has had it with regard to losing weight.

00:35:56.000 Like, at a certain point, if you want to lose the weight, you've got to figure out a way to lose the weight.

00:35:59.000 That's true, but this is based on the information that I have.

00:36:02.000 I have this vast scope of information that I've been able to absorb.

00:36:06.000 If you're in these isolated environments and everyone around you is involved in gangs and crime and drugs, it's very difficult to model yourself after something that you don't see in real life.

00:36:18.000 Totally true.

00:36:19.000 Totally true.

00:36:20.000 And that's why, again, more information needs to get into areas.

00:36:23.000 I agree with a lot of the opportunities that need to be provided by education.

00:36:27.000 Getting people to be educated outside their local public school would be a good change. 0.94

00:36:30.000 Being able to move outside your crap local public school and go somewhere else would be good.

00:36:34.000 The best influences for kids that grow up in these environments seem to be people that have gotten out and then come back and talk to them. 0.94

00:36:42.000 Right.

00:36:42.000 And tell them how to do it.

00:36:44.000 And this can be done.

00:36:45.000 But to go back to the original conversation, none of this has to do with telling kids that you live in an evil country that's seeking to keep you down.

00:36:51.000 Well, maybe not, but there has been a very small amount of emphasis placed on taking these impoverished communities and figuring out how to engineer them out of the situation.

00:37:02.000 Well, I don't think that's true.

00:37:04.000 So I don't think that's true.

00:37:05.000 Yeah.

00:37:05.000 I mean, the amount that we've spent on a federal level and a state level on educational programs and poverty programs.

00:37:11.000 Over time.

00:37:12.000 No, on a year-to-year level.

00:37:14.000 I mean, these are enormous quantities of money.

00:37:16.000 This is not really a money problem.

00:37:19.000 It really is not a money problem in just terms of, you could sign everybody a check tomorrow, right?

00:37:23.000 So the predicate for the slavery reparations movement is exactly this.

00:37:27.000 Sign everybody an $80,000 check and the problem will be alleviated.

00:37:31.000 No, it won't.

00:37:32.000 I don't think that's right.

00:37:33.000 I think they'll spend $80,000 and they'll be right back where they started from.

00:37:36.000 But I do think that there is an argument that there can be some way of engineering, whether it's community centers or education or doing something differently in these places to chip away at this problem.

00:37:48.000 So on that stuff, we totally agree.

00:37:51.000 The only point that I'm making about the 1619 Project is when you teach people that they are the victims of a society. 0.53

00:37:57.000 It makes it very difficult for them to succeed.

00:38:00.000 The story of black America should be a story of unbelievably brave people triumphing over systems that sucked. 0.71

00:38:07.000 I mean, that is the story of black America. 0.54

00:38:09.000 Most black Americans do not live under the poverty line in the United States.

00:38:12.000 There's a huge black middle class.

00:38:14.000 There's a black upper class too.

00:38:15.000 Yes, there is.

00:38:15.000 Let's simplify this if we can.

00:38:17.000 Sure.

00:38:17.000 If Ben Shapiro is the king of the world, how do you fix Baltimore?

00:38:21.000 How do you fix Detroit?

00:38:23.000 How do you fix...

00:38:24.000 South Side of Chicago.

00:38:25.000 Okay, so here's the unpopular view, but it happens to be empirically correct.

00:38:30.000 The first thing you have to do is you have to load the place with police.

00:38:33.000 You got to load the place with police because you have to stop crime.

00:38:36.000 Once you stop crime, then businesses are happy to invest in those areas.

00:38:39.000 You're not going to get businesses to invest in those areas and provide jobs unless the crime is gone.

00:38:43.000 In fact, one of the reasons that you have such a vast differential in racial crime in the United States is because of white racism.

00:38:48.000 And this is a point that Jane Levy, writer for the LA Times, has made, and she writes a book called Ghetto Side, and she points out that the reason that black crime was so high in the early 20th century and late 19th century is because basically white communities said to black communities, you're on your own, right?

00:39:01.000 Enjoy.

00:39:02.000 And so the crime rates ended up spiking because there were no police there.

00:39:05.000 You have to make sure that law-abiding people are protected, that law-abiding businesses are protected, that people want to live there, that people want to invest there.

00:39:12.000 You have to have a reestablishment of faith in churches, right?

00:39:16.000 You need social institutions outside of government that are promoting things like family.

00:39:20.000 One of the reasons you need more companies in these areas is they can offer educational opportunities to kids, internships, deals to go to college and then come back and work for us for a couple of years.

00:39:30.000 You need an opportunity, the same way that opportunity is built anywhere else on earth.

00:39:33.000 You need to provide a safe space for business to work and for free speech to flourish and for education to be valued.

00:39:40.000 You need to go and you need to make clear to every kid, if you graduate high school, then you will have a shot at college, which by the way is 100% true today.

00:39:48.000 If you're a black kid and you graduate high school with any level of achievement, you will have a very solid shot of at least going to a community college.

00:39:55.000 And if you score even decently on the SATs of going to a very high level college, right?

00:39:58.000 Affirmative action programs are extraordinarily common across the United States.

00:40:02.000 But the first message is...

00:40:04.000 We are going to ensure that law and order prevail here, a safe space for life, liberty, and property, and ownership of private property, and we are going to make sure that you as a law-abiding citizen have the opportunity to succeed, because the biggest obstacle to young black kids growing up in the inner city, again, is not history.

00:40:18.000 It is in the moment.

00:40:20.000 The drugs, The crime, the fact that there are no fathers in a lot of these areas.

00:40:24.000 Roland Fryer, black professor at Harvard, he's done excellent work showing that actually the number one factor in allowing kids to rise is not even having a father in the home.

00:40:33.000 It's how many fathers there are generally in a community.

00:40:35.000 So you can have a single mom, but if there are a lot of other male father figures around, that helps fill in the gap, right?

00:40:41.000 These are practical things.

00:40:42.000 Giving kids the ability to pick the school they go to so they don't have to go to the local crappy public school if it's a local crappy public school.

00:40:48.000 It would be a solution here.

00:40:49.000 But this all starts with the notion that it is not racist in the slightest to suggest that law and order have to prevail and that law-abiding people should be protected in their exercise of their rights.

00:41:00.000 I think you're 100% right on that.

00:41:02.000 And I think although that might be an unpopular opinion, I agree with you.

00:41:05.000 I think that is very important.

00:41:07.000 Now, what do you do in this environment when you look at the way people distrust the police now?

00:41:14.000 In particular, I mean, I've been reading stories about Cops go into Five Guys Burgers and they can't get served because people won't serve cops.

00:41:22.000 And this idea that all cops are bad.

00:41:24.000 And this is a really disturbing perspective to me because you're seeing what's happening right now in Chicago.

00:41:31.000 You're seeing what's happening right now in New York where you have this massive uptick in violent crime because it's perceived that the police presence has been diminished greatly.

00:41:42.000 So how do you reaffirm the trust in law enforcement and what do you do to reform law enforcement?

00:41:51.000 Because clearly, there are some people that are cops that should not be cops.

00:41:55.000 Yes, there are a few things that you can do right off the bat and that people right, left and center have sort of talked about.

00:41:59.000 And one of them is that you can abridge qualified immunity in certain areas.

00:42:03.000 So qualified immunity is the idea that you're not liable to civil suit.

00:42:05.000 If you don't do something bad that has specifically had a precedent in law.

00:42:10.000 So you could do something bad, but as long as nobody else has done the same exact bad thing before, you're not subjected to civil liability.

00:42:17.000 How so?

00:42:17.000 Can you explain that again?

00:42:18.000 It's a little complicated.

00:42:19.000 So qualified immunity generally means that if I do something bad, then as a police officer, if I act within the scope of my general reasonable authority, you can't sue me for it.

00:42:29.000 What if you do something bad?

00:42:30.000 What if you shoot somebody while you're operating?

00:42:33.000 Right.

00:42:33.000 So the reason that qualified immunity as currently understood under Supreme Court doctrine is too broad is because the standard used to be you would have to act as a reasonable police officer.

00:42:42.000 If you acted as a reasonable police officer and you took a reasonable action, somebody went for their waistband.

00:42:47.000 They had an object in there.

00:42:48.000 You didn't know if it was a gun. 0.99

00:42:49.000 You shot them. 0.87

00:42:50.000 Right? 0.68

00:42:51.000 You wouldn't presumably be suable because that's still reasonable. 0.93

00:42:55.000 You track a guy down, you shoot him in the back, you know, and then you plant a gun on him, that presumably would be suable, right?

00:43:00.000 He'd be personally liable.

00:43:01.000 So the way that Supreme Court has done this is they broaden qualified immunity to such an extent that you can still, bottom line, you can still get away with some bad stuff and not be sued for it.

00:43:11.000 So that needs to be curbed.

00:43:12.000 That's one thing.

00:43:13.000 Second, police union contracts need to be utterly redone across the country.

00:43:17.000 Police union contracts right now protect a lot of bad cops, right?

00:43:19.000 Because the police unions are designed to protect the members of the union, just like any other union.

00:43:24.000 And so what that means is that police unions, I'm not a fan of public sector unions generally, but police unions need to be abridged in their ability to protect cops who do something wrong.

00:43:35.000 Third, you need to have a national registry of cops who are disciplined for violation of procedure so that they can't just leave LAPD and then go work for a Ferguson PD. Those are some easy things that you could do right off the bat.

00:43:48.000 But the biggest thing right now, the biggest factor in terms of lack of faith between police and citizens really is the media because there's been a lot of talk about the racial constituency of police forces.

00:44:00.000 The majority of the LAPD is minority.

00:44:02.000 The majority of the Baltimore PD is minority.

00:44:05.000 I believe that a huge percentage of the Chicago PD is minority. 0.92

00:44:08.000 So it really is not about lots of white cops in black neighborhoods. 0.97

00:44:11.000 In Baltimore, it's a lot of black cops in black neighborhoods. 0.99

00:44:13.000 And that has not solved the problem of people mistrusting the police on an endemic level. 0.92

00:44:18.000 Well, it's an inherently difficult job.

00:44:21.000 It's a rotten job, man.

00:44:22.000 I mean, I have nothing but—for good cops, they're heroes.

00:44:26.000 And the vast majority of cops are good cops, and they're heroes.

00:44:28.000 Yeah, I read a meme the other day that's very accurate.

00:44:31.000 It said, if you have 130 good cops and 12 cops— 12 cops that are bad, you have 12 bad cops.

00:44:39.000 If you have 130 good cops and 12 bad cops, but the 130 won't do anything about the 12 bad cops, you've got 142 bad cops.

00:44:49.000 Yeah, and I think that that's right.

00:44:51.000 I think that it is also true that our standard of what constitutes a bad cop has, in some ways, Become much more stringent.

00:45:01.000 So, for example, there are cases that have become national stories in which a cop was labeled a bad cop and he wasn't a bad cop.

00:45:06.000 Right, but there are bad cops. 0.74

00:45:08.000 For sure.

00:45:08.000 Look, here's a great example.

00:45:10.000 The cops that pushed down that old man in, where was it?

00:45:14.000 Buffalo, New York?

00:45:14.000 Is that where it was?

00:45:15.000 Yeah.

00:45:15.000 Cracked his skull, yep.

00:45:17.000 That's fucking crazy. 1.00

00:45:18.000 And that's white-on-white crime, right? 1.00

00:45:21.000 A white guy pushes this old man down, and the most bonkers part about that was the way the president reacted.

00:45:28.000 The way he felt seemed funny. 0.66

00:45:30.000 Maybe he was Antifa.

00:45:31.000 Maybe he was undercover.

00:45:32.000 There was literally the worst possible reaction to watching an elderly senior citizen get pushed down by a young, strong man.

00:45:41.000 You mean President Trump?

00:45:42.000 President Trump had the worst possible reaction to a thing?

00:45:45.000 I can't believe it.

00:45:46.000 Unknown.

00:45:47.000 President Trump having bad reactions to things.

00:45:49.000 Look, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement.

00:45:50.000 I have a lot of friends that are cops.

00:45:52.000 I know a lot of people from martial arts that are cops from the UFC. I know a lot of cops from jujitsu.

00:45:58.000 I knew a lot of cops growing up from all the different martial arts disciplines that I engage in.

00:46:03.000 A lot of cops get involved in that. 0.52

00:46:05.000 There's a lot of good cops. 0.99

00:46:06.000 There's a lot of good people out there, but it is a fucking insane job. 0.98

00:46:08.000 And so many of them have PTSD. For sure. 0.98

00:46:11.000 But I will say that one of the great myths is that the big threat to the black community in the United States is law enforcement. 0.63

00:46:17.000 It's just nonsense. 0.97

00:46:17.000 It's not only nonsense, it's counterproductive nonsense. 0.97

00:46:20.000 And you're seeing it play out. 0.61

00:46:20.000 But it is a threat. 0.61

00:46:21.000 It is a threat oftentimes.

00:46:23.000 It is, on a data level, an extraordinarily small threat.

00:46:27.000 Law enforcement as a threat to black life on a generalized level is extraordinarily small.

00:46:32.000 The Washington Post database last year showed a grand total of 15 black Americans shot unarmed across the United States in a country of 42 million black people.

00:46:40.000 The problem is when it happens, it doesn't matter what the statistics are. 0.88

00:46:44.000 If people see that video and that video gets shared 200 million times, it looks like there's 200 million white cops killing a black guy. 0.56

00:46:53.000 And this is why I say that the media's treatment of this stuff is just horrific.

00:46:56.000 It's not just the media.

00:46:58.000 It's social media.

00:47:20.000 Anecdotal evidence is evidence of an anecdote.

00:47:23.000 It is not evidence of a broad national trend, nor is it evidence that taking a broad national policy like cutting back funding to the police in a time of rising crime is a good idea because you saw a video on YouTube.

00:47:33.000 Well, I think we both agree that's a terrible idea.

00:47:35.000 But when you look at these videos, the positive side, if there is any positive side, is that it's They're accountable now.

00:47:44.000 And this has been going on forever.

00:47:46.000 If you talk to people that are black that grew up in poverty-stricken areas, they will tell you horrific stories about being abused by cops.

00:47:56.000 And I think the number is like 25% more likely. 0.81

00:47:59.000 A black person or brown person getting any sort of interaction with a cop is 25% more likely to become physical for them to be abused.

00:48:10.000 That's real. 0.98

00:48:11.000 When you look at the statistics of them being killed, yeah, white people get killed more by cops than black people. 0.98

00:48:16.000 But there's way more white people. 0.98

00:48:17.000 No, no.

00:48:18.000 Even on a percentage basis, you have to use the control group of crime.

00:48:21.000 You can't use the control group of raw population.

00:48:23.000 So you have to look at people who are in situations where a deadly interaction is likely.

00:48:28.000 There have been multiple studies that show that black people are not in more danger of being shot by cops than white people.

00:48:32.000 But it is true that low-level uses of force between cops and black people are worse than low-level uses of force between cops and white people, right? 0.92

00:48:38.000 That's the Roland Fryer study.

00:48:39.000 There are a few confounds that have yet to be sort of worked out. 0.96

00:48:42.000 I think probably white people are less likely to believe that the cop's going to kill them, whereas black people are probably convinced the cop's going to kill them. 0.91

00:48:49.000 That might play a factor in why there's more white people being killed by cops. 0.93

00:48:53.000 I mean, that may very well be true.

00:48:54.000 It may also be that low-level uses of force may be disparate.

00:48:58.000 If you think that the cop's likely to be a racist, then you might be more likely to resist the cop, and then you might be more likely to rough you up.

00:49:04.000 So it's very difficult to rub out the confounds there. 0.97

00:49:08.000 The one thing that we know for sure is that the greatest threat to black life, just like the greatest threat to white life, is members of your own race killing you. 0.99

00:49:16.000 Like, if you're talking about actual murders, White people are killed by white people. 1.00

00:49:20.000 Black people are killed by black people. 1.00

00:49:21.000 It's conflict by people you know, mostly. 1.00

00:49:22.000 Right.

00:49:22.000 It's intraracial, right?

00:49:24.000 There's very little interracial crime, like black on white or white on black in the United States. 0.50

00:49:28.000 There's a lot of intraracial crimes, a lot of white people victimizing white people and black people victimizing black people. 0.65

00:49:33.000 And the question is, how do you stop that? 0.65

00:49:34.000 This is why...

00:49:35.000 I don't know if you saw this interview.

00:49:36.000 It was kind of an amazing interview.

00:49:37.000 Terry Crews, the actor, he was on with Don Lemon.

00:49:40.000 Don Lemon.

00:49:41.000 And Don Lemon is doing the Black Lives Matter sloganing. 0.72

00:49:45.000 And Terry Crews says, well, all lives matter.

00:49:47.000 And Don Lemon says, but no, Black Lives Matter doesn't mean all Black Lives Matter.

00:49:53.000 Terry Crews said, all Black Lives Matter.

00:49:55.000 And he said, no, no, not all Black Lives Matter.

00:49:56.000 Only Black Lives Matter. 1.00

00:49:57.000 We're only talking about police brutality right now.

00:49:59.000 And Terry Crews was like, well, why aren't we talking about all Black Lives Matter?

00:50:02.000 Because if Black Lives Matter means you withdraw cops, and withdrawing cops means more dead Black people, then why wouldn't those lives matter too?

00:50:10.000 And this is where the sloganeering gets in the way of actual progress.

00:50:14.000 Right, it's where ideology hits facts.

00:50:16.000 Right, exactly.

00:50:17.000 It gets very weird.

00:50:18.000 And Terry Crews was called some terrible names for that, but then a video surfaced of Don Lemon from 2013 chastising black people.

00:50:25.000 Sounds like me on that, right?

00:50:26.000 He sounds like me.

00:50:26.000 He sounds exactly like you.

00:50:29.000 It's hilarious.

00:50:29.000 Pull your pants up.

00:50:30.000 Get your shit together. 1.00

00:50:31.000 You know, like... 1.00

00:50:33.000 He's literally saying things like, don't have babies out of wedlock, right?

00:50:36.000 Stay in school.

00:50:37.000 Which, by the way, again, all of this is commonsensical and true for all races.

00:50:40.000 It is not just black people. 0.99

00:50:42.000 Young white people in Appalachia need to get their shit together. 1.00

00:50:44.000 Everybody needs to get their shit together. 1.00

00:50:46.000 But again, young white people in Appalachia are dealing with the same thing. 0.99

00:50:49.000 What's around them all the time is crime, people taking pills, everyone having babies out of wedlock, people impoverished, no hope, no potential for escape.

00:51:02.000 I agree, but the first thing that has to change – so my dad had a – when I was looking to get married, my dad said the way that you get married is it's not that you find a girl and then you decide to get married.

00:51:11.000 You decide to get married and then you find a girl, meaning that you have to sort of make up your mind that you're in the mode of – That's a good way to get hooked up with the wrong lady, bro.

00:51:24.000 Well, you make the life decision that you're at that point in your life when you want to make a decision along those lines. 0.99

00:51:28.000 Get married when you love a girl so much you're willing to do something so fucking stupid that you're willing to get married to her. 0.99

00:51:35.000 Because getting married to her is less painful to you than the idea of losing that person. 1.00

00:51:43.000 Because I think...

00:51:45.000 Marriage, the good thing about it is that there's financial protection for the family, particularly when there's children involved.

00:51:53.000 I think that's when it's the most important thing.

00:51:55.000 I think financial protection for the children...

00:51:58.000 Look, I grew up without child support.

00:52:01.000 My father was a deadbeat dad, so I know what it's like to be poor because your father doesn't support you.

00:52:06.000 I think that's horrific.

00:52:08.000 I've seen it in many situations.

00:52:10.000 I know many people that have been the victim of this. 0.83

00:52:13.000 It's disgusting. 1.00

00:52:15.000 There are a lot of shitty men out there that don't take care of their kids. 1.00

00:52:18.000 White, black, Asian, it's universal. 0.99

00:52:22.000 I think that is where the legal definition of marriage and protection of children and protection of the woman who has to take care of these children financially.

00:52:31.000 I think that's significant.

00:52:33.000 When it comes to bringing the state in to...

00:52:38.000 Somehow or another solidify your love. 0.99

00:52:41.000 Like, you know, I love you, you love me, but let's bring in a bunch of fucking people we don't know and write it down on paper. 0.99

00:52:46.000 That's nonsense. 0.99

00:52:47.000 Well, I totally agree with that, obviously.

00:52:48.000 But the point that I'm making is that when you want to make a change in your life, you first have to commit that you want to make the change before you make the change.

00:52:54.000 Well, sometimes you meet someone.

00:52:55.000 That's why you want to make a change.

00:52:57.000 Okay, so not to get into marital advice here, but I've been married for 12 years at this point.

00:53:05.000 Thank God.

00:53:06.000 Very happy marriage.

00:53:07.000 We have three kids.

00:53:07.000 And the reason that I say you have to make up your mind that you want to get married before you get married is because you look for a different set of factors then.

00:53:15.000 If you make up your mind you want to get married, what you're going to look for is commonality of values.

00:53:19.000 Who is the person you want to build your life with?

00:53:21.000 Do you share interests?

00:53:23.000 Do you share a vision for the future?

00:53:25.000 Whereas if you sort of fall into it, then you can fall in love with somebody you don't share any of these things with and it makes it a lot more difficult later on to actually build a life on that.

00:53:32.000 I don't think that's true.

00:53:33.000 I don't think you fall in love with someone that you don't share values with. 1.00

00:53:36.000 I think you think they're hot and you want to fuck them. 0.99

00:53:39.000 Well, people mix this stuff up pretty regularly. 1.00

00:53:41.000 Well, people are silly. 1.00

00:53:42.000 People are indeed silly. 1.00

00:53:43.000 People tattoo their eyeballs, Ben. 1.00

00:53:45.000 They do a lot of dumb shit. 1.00

00:53:47.000 You live in a world I don't, man. 1.00

00:53:49.000 Well, that's not my world.

00:53:51.000 I don't have any friends with eyeballs tattooed.

00:53:53.000 But people make mistakes when they get attracted to someone physically.

00:53:59.000 And, you know, particularly men are, and I guess women too, I'm just not one of them, are attracted oftentimes by people they think are sexy, but are a bad choice in terms of a life partner.

00:54:10.000 But I don't think you fall in love with those people.

00:54:12.000 They just become someone who's mad at you.

00:54:13.000 How many twos have married a girl just because they thought they were hot? 1.00

00:54:16.000 There are a lot, a lot, a lot.

00:54:19.000 But men, period. 0.71

00:54:20.000 It's not just Jews. 1.00

00:54:21.000 The drug of sexual attraction is the most sold drug in the United States. 0.96

00:54:27.000 It sells cars, it sells homes, literally it sells lifestyles. 0.92

00:54:33.000 Pornography.

00:54:35.000 But what is that? 0.55

00:54:36.000 I mean, when you're seeing a woman with a short skirt on and long legs walking like lustfully around a car, what are you saying? 1.00

00:54:45.000 You're saying if you buy this car, maybe you can fuck this girl. 1.00

00:54:48.000 That's what you're saying. 1.00

00:54:49.000 Well, of course. 0.99

00:54:51.000 Fucking false advertising we have in America. 0.99

00:54:53.000 This is why when it comes to marriage, I think that it's important to actually put your large head before your other one. 0.99

00:55:00.000 You know, Jonathan Haidt, in his book called The Happiness Hypothesis.

00:55:03.000 Great book.

00:55:04.000 Terrific, right?

00:55:05.000 And he talks about this, right?

00:55:06.000 He talks about the fact that people make a very large-scale mistake about marriage, Yes.

00:55:30.000 And then over time, after about like two years, the passionate love starts to decline.

00:55:33.000 And by the time you're 60, then you better have shared values because after 60 years, it ain't going to be like it was when you were 20, right?

00:55:39.000 So you have to have in mind what things are going to be like a few years down the road, which is why I say you should be thinking about what your life together is going to be like before you fall into bed together.

00:55:48.000 That's sound advice.

00:55:50.000 But, well, see, that's why I disagree.

00:55:53.000 Because I don't think there's anything wrong with falling into bed with someone that you're not going to live the rest of your life with.

00:55:58.000 That's where you and I probably disagree.

00:56:00.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that it is a bad idea generally.

00:56:03.000 And again, I think that it is a bad idea because...

00:56:05.000 There's a lot of people out there that have had some really good times with those bad ideas, Ben Shapiro.

00:56:09.000 And it may be that when I die, I look back and that is one of my great regrets, my friend.

00:56:12.000 But let me just say that I think that the...

00:56:17.000 The thing that has been foregone is, in my life at least, more than made up for by the relationship that I have with my wife.

00:56:25.000 So I'll go anecdotal there, but I'll go data-driven, which is the longer you live together with somebody before you get married, the higher the divorce rate after.

00:56:31.000 The higher the divorce rate after? 0.99

00:56:33.000 If you've lived for a long time with somebody and then you get married, there is a higher percentage chance you'll end up divorced.

00:56:39.000 That's interesting.

00:56:39.000 I wonder why that is.

00:56:41.000 Probably because of the open window syndrome.

00:56:42.000 Like, people feel like, okay, I lived with you for three years.

00:56:45.000 Why aren't we married yet?

00:56:46.000 Because the guy's like, oh, the window's still open.

00:56:48.000 Oh, so the woman doesn't feel completely committed.

00:56:50.000 So once the guy does sign off, she's like, why didn't you do this five years ago?

00:56:53.000 Well, there's some of that.

00:56:54.000 And also, it feels like everybody kind of settled.

00:56:57.000 Hmm.

00:56:58.000 If it was, I'm so committed to this, I want to get married right now.

00:57:01.000 Maybe they just did mushrooms together and realized they really love each other.

00:57:05.000 Again, different world, man.

00:57:07.000 I have a different experience from everybody else.

00:57:11.000 I dated my wife for three months.

00:57:13.000 We got engaged.

00:57:14.000 We were married within 10 months.

00:57:16.000 We've been married for 12 years.

00:57:17.000 We're both versions when we're married.

00:57:18.000 It's a world school.

00:57:19.000 It clearly works for you.

00:57:20.000 I've tried to be open-minded with basically every kind of way that people live their lives, including, like, couples that live with other couples and they wife swap, which is...

00:57:30.000 I feel like that's complicated.

00:57:32.000 I always think those people are trying to...

00:57:36.000 I know people that do that.

00:57:38.000 And I almost universally believe that they are distracting themselves from their life.

00:57:44.000 They distract themselves from either their career, they're fulfilling the potential, whether it's as an artist, or as a creative person, or as a person who's pursuing a discipline.

00:57:55.000 I really believe that a lot of times when people complicate their lives with multiple sex partners, and a lot of times what they're doing is they're distracting themselves.

00:58:05.000 And they don't realize it at the time.

00:58:07.000 It just keeps getting pulled into this direction, pulled into that direction.

00:58:10.000 It's because you don't have a primary focus on something that's very important to you.

00:58:14.000 And it doesn't mean that you have to be with this person for the rest of your life.

00:58:17.000 It doesn't mean you have to only be with one person.

00:58:20.000 But when I see a guy that is involved in swinging or something like that, and they're balancing a bunch of different gals, trust me, you're going to waste time, man. 1.00

00:58:30.000 There's not enough time in this life.

00:58:32.000 I mean, it's weird to tie this whole conversation together, but it is true that if you want to be good at a thing or be successful at a thing, you have to commit to the thing.

00:58:38.000 Yes.

00:58:38.000 And so that's true whether you're talking marriage, it's true whether you're talking educational success, or whether you're talking career.

00:58:43.000 And people, you know, making bad decisions because distractions are distractions.

00:58:47.000 Distractions are distractions with every discipline, and I think relationships are a discipline in a lot of ways.

00:58:52.000 I totally agree.

00:58:53.000 And it is true that you have to make the pre-investment and you have to make the commitment that you're going to continue to invest in the relationship as time goes on.

00:59:03.000 And that's where people fall off the wagon.

00:59:05.000 That's why you see a lot of divorces around year three. 0.83

00:59:07.000 As that passionate love It kind of goes down and the companionate love is the name of the term.

00:59:12.000 When the companionate love starts to rise, people are like, well, yeah, but the companionate love ain't as much fun as the passionate love.

00:59:17.000 But it's not.

00:59:18.000 Of course not.

00:59:19.000 That's just how it is.

00:59:20.000 That's just the way it works.

00:59:20.000 Well, that's nature's biological trick.

00:59:22.000 The ultimate biological trick is like, look, when we were monkeys hiding from eagles, okay, you had to fuck as much as you could and spread that seed around because you likely only had five or six years on this earth, right? 1.00

00:59:34.000 You were dead at age 32, man. 1.00

00:59:36.000 Yeah.

00:59:36.000 You were trying to just get as much of your DNA out there as you possibly could.

00:59:40.000 That's still inside of us.

00:59:41.000 That program is still inside of us.

00:59:43.000 And that program is when you see a man, and he's with a beautiful woman, but another beautiful woman walks by, he's like looking at her and thinking, maybe I can do better.

00:59:52.000 That's a thing that is programmed into your DNA. But you have to understand what that is.

00:59:56.000 If you're a man and you understand what that is, you go, oh, this is nature and it's a dirty little trick.

01:00:03.000 Dirty little trick trying to get me to spread my seed.

01:00:06.000 Brett Weinstein, he illuminated this in a really interesting way.

01:00:11.000 He was saying to me, what's the difference between beautiful and hot?

01:00:15.000 And I said, I don't know, what is the difference?

01:00:18.000 And he's like, beautiful is someone who you look at and you're like, wow, that person looks beautiful.

01:00:23.000 That's lovely.

01:00:24.000 They have a beautiful face or wonderful eyes.

01:00:27.000 They look great. 0.99

01:00:28.000 Hot is someone who's wearing like a short skirt and their tits are popping out. 1.00

01:00:33.000 And you look at that person, you go, this is an opportunity for... 0.99

01:00:37.000 To spread my DNA with no commitment.

01:00:41.000 And that's what that is.

01:00:42.000 That's the pull.

01:00:44.000 And hot, that kind of hot, is what's sold.

01:00:47.000 That cheap, quick, fast food sort of thing. 0.66

01:00:51.000 That's what porn is. 0.99

01:00:52.000 Porn is all hot. 0.98

01:00:54.000 Porn is not beautiful. 0.98

01:00:56.000 I don't think porn's bad, either. 0.98

01:00:58.000 But porn is all hot. 0.99

01:01:00.000 It's all dirty girls. 1.00

01:01:02.000 It's all your stepmom, your dad's off playing golf. 1.00

01:01:05.000 It's that kind of shit, you know? 1.00

01:01:07.000 It's like, you know, you're the pizza guy. 1.00

01:01:10.000 You show up and two girls are having a pillow fight. 0.53

01:01:12.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.62

01:01:13.000 It's your lizard brain versus your prefrontal cortex.

01:01:15.000 Exactly. 0.99

01:01:16.000 It's your monkey brain. 0.98

01:01:17.000 Exactly. 0.99

01:01:18.000 It's that monkey that wants to hide from the eagle.

01:01:20.000 That's what it is.

01:01:21.000 It's like, I could just do this real quick?

01:01:23.000 And across the board, you're going to have a better life.

01:01:26.000 It may not be a hotter life, but you're going to have a better life if you use the prefrontal cortex a little more often.

01:01:30.000 Yes, unless you're Hugh Hefner.

01:01:31.000 I don't know if he had a good life or not.

01:01:34.000 I know some people who worked with him near the end.

01:01:36.000 He seemed kind of miserable. 0.62

01:01:38.000 Well, towards the end, I'm sure he's miserable. 0.86

01:01:40.000 He's an 80-year-old guy hanging out with 20-year-olds. 0.99

01:01:42.000 What the fuck do you have to say to these people? 0.99

01:01:45.000 Right? 0.99

01:01:45.000 It's like you were talking about with O.J. Simpson. 0.99

01:01:47.000 O.J. Simpson had a...

01:01:49.000 Mostly peaceful night.

01:01:50.000 Mostly peaceful day.

01:01:51.000 Well, his life is mostly annoying. 1.00

01:01:54.000 The time that he gets to fuck them... 1.00

01:01:56.000 When you're 80 years old, you only get to fuck those 24-year-olds for, like, how long can he last? 1.00

01:02:01.000 Once every six weeks? 1.00

01:02:02.000 What do you think? 0.99

01:02:03.000 Well, he's on probably all kinds of drugs that keep his dick hard, but I would imagine, like, he couldn't run on a treadmill for 20 minutes, right? 0.99

01:02:11.000 Right. 0.99

01:02:11.000 At that age? 0.99

01:02:12.000 So how is he going to have sex for 20 minutes? 0.99

01:02:14.000 So even if he's having sex, like, it's probably exhausting, and the rest of the day, he's just listening to them talk about TikTok and all kinds of other stupid shit, and he's like, He's like, remember when Frank Sinatra was here and we were banging everything in sight? 0.99

01:02:27.000 And he's like, those were the good old days. 0.99

01:02:29.000 I was wearing a robe.

01:02:30.000 I had a pipe.

01:02:31.000 We were having fun on a TV show.

01:02:34.000 I had my own channel.

01:02:35.000 He had a Playboy channel for a while.

01:02:37.000 Yeah.

01:02:37.000 I think it's the image of it is way more interesting than the actual act of living that life.

01:02:45.000 Yep.

01:02:46.000 And I think that, again, that goes back to every bad decision people make is tied into this.

01:02:51.000 The image of things looks way better than the actuality of things.

01:02:55.000 It's true in politics.

01:02:55.000 It's true in love.

01:02:56.000 It's true in a lot of things.

01:02:58.000 And so you actually have to look at the actuality of things.

01:03:01.000 You don't want to be an 80-year-old guy living with five 24-year-old girls.

01:03:04.000 You just don't.

01:03:05.000 You just don't.

01:03:07.000 That guy lived in hell, I guarantee you.

01:03:09.000 I bet his life was mostly annoying. 0.98

01:03:11.000 But every now and then, while he's having sex with those 24-year-olds, he's probably like, I can't even believe this is real. 0.59

01:03:15.000 It's true, for that 30 seconds. 0.99

01:03:17.000 Yeah, I can't believe this perfect body and I get to, with this wrinkly sack of rocks that he has as a body, he gets to have sex with this beautiful, perfect specimen of a female human being. 1.00

01:03:30.000 And then she's like, buy me stuff. 0.99

01:03:31.000 And he's like, God, this is the worst.

01:03:32.000 That's all he has to do.

01:03:33.000 Make me famous.

01:03:35.000 Worked out great.

01:03:38.000 By the end, it seemed like it was pretty dingy.

01:03:40.000 Dude, I went there.

01:03:41.000 I hosted a marijuana policy project thing there once.

01:03:48.000 Sounds like a lot of policy.

01:03:49.000 Sounds like a lot of policy happening.

01:03:50.000 But one of the things he did was we were wandering around the grotto.

01:03:53.000 It's like an AEI summit.

01:03:54.000 When I go to Heritage Foundation, that's what it sounds like right there.

01:03:57.000 It was a fun night.

01:04:00.000 What I remember, you know, there was a lot of marijuana being smoked.

01:04:04.000 It was quite a blurry evening.

01:04:06.000 But I remember thinking, like, my God, this grotto is so outdated. 0.99

01:04:09.000 Like, it had like a fucking old-ass phone there. 0.99

01:04:13.000 And I'm like, how many people fucked in here? 1.00

01:04:16.000 Like, how weird is this place? 0.98

01:04:17.000 They're just generations of people.

01:04:18.000 Of human residue in here.

01:04:19.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:04:20.000 And maybe not like the best times either, you know?

01:04:23.000 A lot of it is, it's just, it's what you think it is versus what it is, you know?

01:04:28.000 Yep.

01:04:29.000 Well, you know, let's all work on.

01:04:30.000 It's a lot of life.

01:04:31.000 It is.

01:04:31.000 Let's work on thinking about what things are rather than what we would like them to be because accepting reality is a hard one.

01:04:38.000 Accepting reality is a real tough one.

01:04:40.000 Yeah, that's a problem.

01:04:41.000 It's a problem with advertising, too, right?

01:04:43.000 Because advertising shows you...

01:04:45.000 And social media, right?

01:04:46.000 Social media is...

01:04:47.000 Well, that's another Jonathan Haidt book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which is amazing.

01:04:51.000 And it really illuminates, and I'm waiting for my kids to read it.

01:04:56.000 I think maybe this year is a good time for my 12-year-old just to understand that this is a real issue with children that are comparing their lives to these...

01:05:06.000 Oh, here's an example.

01:05:07.000 I wanted to show you something. 0.77

01:05:08.000 I haven't actually put this up anywhere, but this is actually important because this is so goddamn crazy.

01:05:15.000 I want to show you something.

01:05:18.000 This is something that my daughter did.

01:05:23.000 This is...

01:05:25.000 My daughter is 10, okay?

01:05:29.000 That's her. 0.88

01:05:31.000 Look at that.

01:05:32.000 Oh my god.

01:05:33.000 That's not a 10-year-old.

01:05:34.000 You're right.

01:05:35.000 It's not a 10-year-old.

01:05:35.000 That's like a 20-year-old right there.

01:05:37.000 Exactly.

01:05:37.000 How's that possible?

01:05:39.000 How's that my 10-year-old daughter? 0.95

01:05:40.000 Yeah, but she would watch a YouTube makeup tutorial or something? 1.00

01:05:42.000 No, she used a fucking app. 1.00

01:05:44.000 She used an app that turned her into... 1.00

01:05:48.000 It turned her into a woman. 1.00

01:05:50.000 What the fuck is that? 1.00

01:05:52.000 So when you're seeing things like that, what is that? 0.99

01:05:55.000 How are they doing that?

01:05:56.000 And who's doing that?

01:05:57.000 So if you're a girl and you are overweight or you don't like the structure of your face or whatever is bothering you, you have acne, and you see a girl like that, and she's like, can't believe I'm graduating high school,

01:06:14.000 LOL, what do I do now?

01:06:16.000 And you see this...

01:06:17.000 That's not even her! 1.00

01:06:19.000 This is my ten-year-old!

01:06:21.000 She doesn't look anything like that!

01:06:23.000 She's like, Daddy, look!

01:06:24.000 This is what I look like!

01:06:25.000 I go, that is not what you look like! 1.00

01:06:27.000 I don't know what the fuck you just did! 1.00

01:06:29.000 That's not what you look like! 1.00

01:06:30.000 And so I had her go through this with me and show me what she did.

01:06:34.000 I'm like, show me how you did this.

01:06:35.000 Like, what are you doing?

01:06:36.000 She's using some weird app like, was it Khloe Kardashian?

01:06:41.000 The one who changed her whole head?

01:06:42.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:06:44.000 It's such a recipe for failure.

01:06:46.000 It really is.

01:06:47.000 It's crazy.

01:06:47.000 It's such a recipe for failure because you're always going to fall short of that.

01:06:50.000 It's one thing to shoot for better.

01:06:51.000 It's another thing to shoot for the unobtainable and then be upset when you can never reach the unobtainable.

01:06:56.000 But it's sick.

01:06:57.000 It's sick because these people don't even look like that and then you look at that and you go, why don't I look like that?

01:07:06.000 They don't even look like that.

01:07:08.000 The amount of people that actually look like that image that I just showed you.

01:07:13.000 He's so small and so unattainable.

01:07:16.000 And then it has broader societal ramifications because then it turns into stories about, well, okay, well, society doesn't accept me for the way that I am.

01:07:23.000 Society values that look and that means society is flawed.

01:07:26.000 And it's like, well, how about this?

01:07:27.000 How about like, people are flawed, society's flawed, you're flawed, do the best you can.

01:07:31.000 Everything is flawed.

01:07:32.000 Everything is flawed.

01:07:32.000 But that's not even really what the problem is.

01:07:34.000 What the problem is, we've created a technology that we're not equipped to manage.

01:07:40.000 We're not equipped to navigate social media.

01:07:43.000 We didn't grow up with it.

01:07:44.000 We didn't evolve with it.

01:07:46.000 It's involving us now.

01:07:47.000 No, it's true.

01:07:47.000 It's 100% true.

01:07:48.000 I mean, they've built these apps that are specifically designed to be addictive, right?

01:07:50.000 I mean, they're specifically designed to prey on certain parts of your brain that you're not really in control of, that are mostly subconscious.

01:07:56.000 And that is scary stuff, for sure.

01:07:58.000 I mean, you can be manipulated by that stuff.

01:08:01.000 You can make people aware of it.

01:08:02.000 Very, very easily.

01:08:03.000 Very easily.

01:08:04.000 My kids aren't getting – like, I seriously will not give them a smartphone until they're probably mid-teens, late teens.

01:08:10.000 Will they get a gun first?

01:08:11.000 Probably.

01:08:17.000 Yeah.

01:08:17.000 I feel like it's better logic.

01:08:19.000 I mean, I'd rather that my 13-year-old know how to shoot than my 13-year-old know how to browse porn.

01:08:23.000 Yes, I think that is good logic.

01:08:25.000 You know, that's a real issue with boys.

01:08:28.000 Boys that have access instantaneously. 1.00

01:08:30.000 I mean, if you give a boy a phone, you're basically saying, here, little fella, go watch people fuck. 1.00

01:08:34.000 Correct. 1.00

01:08:35.000 Because they're gonna.

01:08:35.000 That's the first thing they're gonna do when you're not around.

01:08:37.000 And there are all sorts of studies that demonstrate that this leads to relationship and sexual insufficiency later, and it ain't good.

01:08:43.000 It ain't good.

01:08:44.000 I mean, this is not an argument to ban porn or anything, but like, the way that it has integrated into so many really young people's lives, I'm talking like young teens.

01:08:51.000 Right.

01:08:52.000 What percentage of American males do you think are addicted to porn at this point?

01:08:54.000 It's a giant percentage.

01:08:55.000 It's got to be 50%, right?

01:08:56.000 I think you're probably right.

01:08:57.000 It's got to be an extraordinarily high percentage, and none of that is good for relations between men and women. 0.54

01:09:01.000 And then you've got this weird dynamic where it used to be that the feminist movement sort of recognized what social conservatives did, that this is pretty objectifying and not necessarily great for women.

01:09:10.000 Now it's like raising sex workers, which is weird.

01:09:13.000 It is weird.

01:09:13.000 They went completely the other direction.

01:09:15.000 And I just thought, in what Hugh Hefner fantasy did women decide that all the women at Hugh Hefner's mansion were actually super-duper empowered?

01:09:23.000 That does not seem like the most super empowering lifestyle.

01:09:26.000 Make your choices, man.

01:09:27.000 It's a free country.

01:09:27.000 But my wife's a doctor, and I feel like that's more empowering than getting screwed by an 80-year-old for pocket change.

01:09:34.000 Depends on what kind of car he buys her. 0.99

01:09:37.000 My wife's a doctor.

01:09:37.000 She can get whatever car she damn well pleases, my friend.

01:09:39.000 What happened that became empowerment?

01:09:45.000 Where was the shift? 0.96

01:09:46.000 I think there was a shift, and it's a shift that's happened throughout American society that went from the notion that men were acting like pigs and they should stop acting like pigs to what if everybody acted like pigs?

01:09:59.000 And so instead of just saying that standards exist and people don't live up to them, but the standards are actually not a bad thing, we just decided, you know what? 0.96

01:10:04.000 We don't want to be hypocrites.

01:10:05.000 We're getting rid of all standards whatsoever.

01:10:07.000 Everybody shouldn't have standards. 0.99

01:10:08.000 And if you believe that anybody should have standards, then you're a hypocrite. 0.96

01:10:11.000 And when all the standards go, then everything goes. 0.99

01:10:13.000 So I actually kind of agree with the original feminist idea that men were kind of acting like sexist jackasses and they should stop that. 0.78

01:10:20.000 But the solution to that was not, okay, now women should imitate men at their worst and that's a free or better society. 0.97

01:10:26.000 I just don't think that that's Again, it's a free country, do what you want on a legislative level, but as a cultural matter, I don't think that leads to a lot of human happiness.

01:10:32.000 I look at it like sexual televangelists. 0.94

01:10:36.000 That's what I look at pornography like. 0.86

01:10:38.000 I think that you should be allowed to rip people off With a really obvious ruse.

01:10:48.000 Like, if you're one of those late night people that can put hands on people and raise them from the dead, if you're one of those people, I feel like, God, that's so obvious.

01:10:56.000 It's almost like a good little pitfall to have out there in society to teach people that some folks can be deceptive.

01:11:02.000 And I feel like really manipulative women that trick old guys into marrying them and then take all their money, I feel like that's sexual televangelism. 1.00

01:11:11.000 Yeah, that's deserved.

01:11:12.000 At a certain point, you're like, okay, I sign off on this. 1.00

01:11:14.000 Come on, stupid. 1.00

01:11:14.000 You didn't see this coming? 1.00

01:11:16.000 This is a great country.

01:11:17.000 I mean, it really is.

01:11:18.000 You can make money doing pretty much anything.

01:11:20.000 When people say it's hard to make money in this country...

01:11:23.000 There are a lot of people making money a lot of different ways in this country.

01:11:26.000 I mean, for God's sake, Colin Kaepernick has made millions of dollars kneeling for the national anthem.

01:11:30.000 It feels like calling America racist while cashing the check. 0.99

01:11:33.000 This is a great damned country. 0.99

01:11:34.000 Well, now we're getting into the weeds. 0.99

01:11:37.000 I just wanted to talk about girls ripping dudes off. 1.00

01:11:40.000 I know you did, but we can go back there, man.

01:11:42.000 That's okay.

01:11:42.000 But the Colin Kaepernick thing.

01:11:45.000 All right.

01:11:46.000 Don't you think that at least some good has come out of him doing that where it sort of raised awareness for police brutality?

01:11:58.000 Just put it to the forefront.

01:12:01.000 Let people understand that this is a problem.

01:12:05.000 No.

01:12:06.000 Not at all?

01:12:07.000 No, because I think that he made a serious error, which is that the most positive movements in American social history have been ones that don't kneel for the flag but say, in the name of the flag, you should do X. Martin Luther King said, in the name of the flag, civil rights are necessary.

01:12:22.000 Booker T. Washington said, in the name of the flag, civil rights are necessary.

01:12:25.000 They didn't say the American flag stands for racism and Jim Crow.

01:12:28.000 They said the American flag stands for something beyond that.

01:12:30.000 Live up to the American flag.

01:12:32.000 Trashing the American flag is like endemic of police brutality. 1.00

01:12:35.000 First of all, it's bullshit. 0.98

01:12:36.000 But second of all, it's actually divisive on an issue that does not need to be divisive. 0.99

01:12:40.000 Like nobody is in favor of police brutality, nor should anyone be.

01:12:42.000 Right.

01:12:43.000 Here's a counterpoint.

01:12:44.000 Why is it trashing the American flag to take a knee?

01:12:47.000 Isn't that in some ways just another gesture of respect?

01:12:52.000 Like you're not doing what everybody wants you to do, which is put your hand over your heart, but you're doing something that's also respectful and silent. 1.00

01:13:02.000 You're not standing up and going, fuck the American flag, fuck these people. 0.99

01:13:07.000 You're actually taking it to another level of respect. 1.00

01:13:09.000 You're taking a knee.

01:13:10.000 You're bending the knee.

01:13:12.000 Whether you're doing it For something that you want to talk about later, saying, I'm not going to stand up because this is my way of acknowledging the fact that there have been a lot of people that have been mistreated by police and murdered by police, and this is how I do it. 0.98

01:13:28.000 This is how I treat racist police killing black people. 0.96

01:13:32.000 I take that moment to take a knee. 0.99

01:13:34.000 How is that so disrespectful?

01:13:36.000 How is that It's a silent gesture.

01:13:40.000 It's not uniform.

01:13:42.000 It's not doing this thing that everybody else is doing.

01:13:45.000 But you're doing something that's very respectful.

01:13:47.000 You're taking a knee.

01:13:48.000 Well, that's certainly not the way that he intended when he first started that way.

01:13:52.000 I mean, if you want to interpret it that way, you can.

01:13:54.000 How do you know what his intention was?

01:13:55.000 Because he literally talked about it.

01:13:56.000 But he said he wanted to highlight that.

01:13:59.000 Right, but he said America is a systemically racist country. 0.99

01:14:02.000 He wore socks with pictures of cops as pigs on them. 0.99

01:14:05.000 Did he? 0.97

01:14:06.000 Oh, yeah.

01:14:06.000 I didn't know that.

01:14:06.000 Oh, yeah.

01:14:07.000 I mean, Colin Kaepernick is a terrible spokesperson for this movement.

01:14:10.000 Like, again, like...

01:14:11.000 But there's many people that have taken a knee.

01:14:14.000 And don't you think that...

01:14:15.000 If you just look at the gesture itself, isn't taking a knee even more respectful than standing with your hand over your heart?

01:14:23.000 I mean, then I imagine millions of us would routinely take a knee for the American flag.

01:14:27.000 I mean, the idea of— If that was the thing you had to do, and this guy decided to stand and put his hand over his heart, really?

01:14:35.000 It's sort of a traditional thing we're arguing over.

01:14:38.000 I mean, it isn't the way that it was originally expressed.

01:14:41.000 It sort of morphed over time to the point where it doesn't necessarily mean what he originally meant to me. 0.99

01:14:45.000 It's not like he's going, fuck you, while everybody else has their hand over their heart in silence. 0.99

01:14:49.000 He's taking a knee. 1.00

01:14:50.000 He did mean it as an FU. I mean, there's no question that's what he meant it as.

01:14:54.000 And it wasn't even over something that actually made sense.

01:14:56.000 Like, you understand during the civil rights movement, when people are raising the black power fist at the Olympics to say, like, we're fighting for civil rights, Jim Crow is still in operation around the country.

01:15:04.000 Right.

01:15:05.000 Colin Kaepernick taking the need to symbolize that America's police are systemically brutal and racist is just – it's factually untrue, and to attribute that to the American flag is really kind of nasty.

01:15:15.000 But he's not a statistician, right?

01:15:17.000 So he's looking at things like the Eric Gardner case or – which is a terrible one, right?

01:15:23.000 There's cases that you see like when the guy's just selling loose cigarettes and they're straining them in front of the store.

01:15:28.000 It's a terrible case.

01:15:29.000 You see something like that, and that motivates him to do that.

01:15:33.000 And I know what you're saying, that these are anecdotes, and this doesn't encompass the full statistics of cops versus black men and what exactly is happening.

01:15:44.000 But that's not his area of expertise anyway.

01:15:47.000 He has an issue— Well, I mean, I agree with that. 1.00

01:15:49.000 So making him a spokesperson for a movement where he has no expertise is a weird thing to do.

01:15:52.000 There are plenty of people who talk about this with actual statistical— Right.

01:15:55.000 But if you're a famous person and you decide to take this big stand publicly like that, you become a spokesperson.

01:16:00.000 After you get benched for Blaine Gabbert, yeah.

01:16:02.000 After you get benched for Blaine Gabbert and take millions of bucks from a major corporation currently- Who's Blaine?

01:16:06.000 Is that the guy who passed him?

01:16:07.000 Yeah, the immortal Blaine Gabbert, the Hall of Famer Blaine Gabbert.

01:16:10.000 I know nothing about sports. 0.99

01:16:12.000 No, Blaine Gabbert was an NFL quarterback who sucked. 0.95

01:16:15.000 I mean, he was terrible. 0.97

01:16:15.000 And they benched Colin Kaepernick for him. 0.97

01:16:17.000 And it was after he got benched that he started doing the kneeling for the American flag.

01:16:20.000 Which is a pretty good gig.

01:16:21.000 I am a sports broadcaster who knows nothing about sports.

01:16:25.000 People try to talk to me about it.

01:16:26.000 Jamie makes fun of me all the time.

01:16:28.000 If he'd explained it the way that you're explaining it, meaning we're not living up to the American flag, which is why I'm kneeling, I wouldn't be arguing with it.

01:16:34.000 He didn't explain it that way.

01:16:35.000 That wasn't the way it went down.

01:16:36.000 But it's just him.

01:16:37.000 What do you think about there's certain guys that lock arms?

01:16:41.000 During the American flag.

01:16:42.000 I have no problem with that.

01:16:43.000 Okay.

01:16:43.000 Locking arms is okay, but kneeling is bad?

01:16:45.000 Well, no.

01:16:45.000 The way that he characterized his kneeling was bad.

01:16:47.000 Okay.

01:16:48.000 But what about other people that kneel?

01:16:49.000 If they characterize it differently, it means a different thing.

01:16:51.000 Okay.

01:16:52.000 I see what you're saying.

01:16:52.000 Meaning, like, what it originally was is what it was.

01:16:55.000 I'm not going to retcon what he meant at the time.

01:16:57.000 He was the first to do it, right?

01:16:58.000 Right.

01:16:59.000 And then he made millions of dollars for his bravery.

01:17:01.000 Again, I don't think it takes a whole hell of a lot of bravery to be benched for Blaine Gabbert.

01:17:05.000 Take a knee.

01:17:06.000 Make millions of bucks from Nike.

01:17:07.000 I wish I knew who this Blaine Gabbert fellow was.

01:17:10.000 Terrible QB rating is all you really need to know.

01:17:12.000 Not a good quarterback is the answer.

01:17:13.000 So is Colin Kaepernick, I mean, as an athlete, is he not good?

01:17:19.000 He's a terrific athlete, he's just not a very good quarterback.

01:17:21.000 Okay.

01:17:21.000 So, I mean, he had one fantastic season.

01:17:23.000 He led the 49ers to the Super Bowl, and then like a lot of kind of one-hit wonders in sports, people kind of figured him out season two, and his QB rating started to decline.

01:17:31.000 But, I mean, look, bottom line is that making him the spokesperson of a movement where he really...

01:17:38.000 I don't like the idea that you are going to attribute to all of America a sin that is, number one, anecdotal in nature, and number two, cannot be attributed to America's highest ideals.

01:17:48.000 You're doing it wrong.

01:17:49.000 If you want to fight police brutality, say America is not living up to her promises.

01:17:53.000 Say that the promise of America...

01:17:55.000 Like, there is a way to convince...

01:17:57.000 Every successful social movement in American history has done this.

01:18:00.000 The gay rights movement did this. 0.91

01:18:01.000 The gay rights movement said, listen, everybody in America has been guaranteed a certain level of freedom, and we're not being guaranteed that level of freedom.

01:18:06.000 The freedom to pursue happiness is not being guaranteed to us.

01:18:10.000 We're just asking that we be left alone.

01:18:11.000 Leave us alone.

01:18:12.000 And it took time, but most Americans came around to that perspective.

01:18:15.000 The same thing holds true on race. 0.70

01:18:17.000 The same thing holds true on police brutality.

01:18:19.000 If you make an invocation and you say to Americans, as Americans, I know that over time my fellow Americans are going to come to realize that they need to live in accordance with the fundamental principles that founded the country.

01:18:29.000 That's unifying.

01:18:30.000 To say that the American flag is inherently non-unifying is really bad.

01:18:35.000 Like to the point where you now have college campuses where if you fly an American flag, there have been cases where people are asked to take it down because it's too divisive.

01:18:42.000 That does seem crazy.

01:18:43.000 When you say it's anecdotal, that he's reacting to something that's anecdotal, but there's many of those anecdotes, and you see them over and over again.

01:18:52.000 The problem is they're so prevalent.

01:18:56.000 There's so many videos.

01:18:57.000 My friend Joe Schilling...

01:18:59.000 He's a kickboxer, and his entire Instagram has been dedicated to bad cops over the last few months, just showing all these videos of bad cops. 0.96

01:19:07.000 I mean, yes, it's anecdotal, but goddamn, there's a lot of anecdotes. 0.59

01:19:11.000 Well, there's 330 million police interactions every year, so yeah, I mean, that's What was the initial interaction? 0.78

01:19:18.000 What was his motivation to do that?

01:19:20.000 Was there a single instance of police brutality that caused him to do that?

01:19:24.000 I'm trying to remember which season he did this.

01:19:26.000 This would have been three, four years ago.

01:19:28.000 So I'm trying to remember.

01:19:29.000 I don't think it was the Michael Brown situation.

01:19:31.000 Because I remember there were protests in the NFL over Michael Brown, which was actually a bad anecdote.

01:19:35.000 That was a bad one for people to pick.

01:19:36.000 People were doing the hands up, don't shoot, that didn't actually happen.

01:19:38.000 Right, he actually tried to grab the gun from the cop.

01:19:40.000 The gun went off in the car, he charged the cop by witness testimony, all the witnesses were black.

01:19:45.000 The Eric Gardner one is much cleaner, right?

01:19:47.000 Well, the Eric Garner one is cleaner in terms of police brutality.

01:19:49.000 It's not super clean in terms of racism or even cause of death.

01:19:53.000 So this is one of the problems.

01:19:54.000 Police brutality.

01:19:55.000 Police brutality, for sure.

01:19:56.000 It's kind of like...

01:19:57.000 Actually, I'm warning people now that what happens in the George Floyd case with Derek Chauvin...

01:20:02.000 Like, they should be warned up front.

01:20:04.000 I want this police officer punished.

01:20:05.000 I think everyone wants the police officer punished.

01:20:07.000 The defense is going to make a case that the police officer is not responsible for George Floyd's death in exactly the same way that the New York police officers made the case that they were not responsible for Eric Garner's death.

01:20:18.000 And the autopsy, the initial autopsy tends to support that.

01:20:22.000 So what that suggests is not that Derek Chauvin is good or clean or decent, but if you're going to charge him with murder, that's a hard charge to make, just on a legal level.

01:20:30.000 So I'm warning people now of that because the next move will be, obviously the system is racist if Derek Chauvin doesn't get convicted of first degree murder.

01:20:38.000 It's going to be very hard to convict him.

01:20:40.000 I think to charge him with second.

01:20:41.000 It's going to be very difficult to convict him with second.

01:20:42.000 Well, he has to be charged with second, right?

01:20:43.000 Because at first would mean premeditated.

01:20:45.000 Right.

01:20:45.000 Well, he was charged with third originally.

01:20:47.000 And then Keith Ellis and the AG over there elevated it to second degree.

01:20:49.000 I think it's very difficult to make the case for second degree murder.

01:20:52.000 What were you pulling up, Jamie?

01:20:53.000 You had something you want to say?

01:20:56.000 I had the part of when this actually started in 2016. He started by sitting, and people started getting video of him sitting as the preseason was starting.

01:21:07.000 So he then talked to a teammate.

01:21:09.000 They discussed kneeling was the best thing for him to do at the time.

01:21:13.000 Do you remember, do you know which incident kind of kicked it off?

01:21:15.000 That's why I was gonna play a video of it.

01:21:16.000 That's why I had here the actual first video of him talking about him donating a million dollars to the local community.

01:21:21.000 I think he had guns drawn on him, which is probably what started.

01:21:25.000 Mmm, okay.

01:21:26.000 But here's him talking about that.

01:21:29.000 And I've been very blessed to be in this position and be able to make the kind of money I do.

01:21:36.000 I have to help these people.

01:21:37.000 I have to help these communities.

01:21:39.000 It's not right that they're not put in the position to succeed or given those opportunities to succeed.

01:21:47.000 And as far as taking a knee tonight, Eric, as well as myself, had a long conversation with Nate Boyer, who is a military vet, and we were talking to him about how can we get the message back on track.

01:22:04.000 And not take away from the military.

01:22:07.000 Not take away from fighting our country.

01:22:11.000 But keep the focus on what the issues really are.

01:22:15.000 And as we talked about it, we came up with taking the knee.

01:22:20.000 Because there are issues that still need to be addressed.

01:22:25.000 It was also a way to try to show more respect to the men and women that fight for this country.

01:22:29.000 Okay, so that's better, obviously.

01:22:30.000 But that's him.

01:22:32.000 Scroll down for a second.

01:22:33.000 But that's 2016. Look at this one.

01:22:37.000 Okay, look at the one right below that.

01:22:38.000 Okay, this is the one I'm talking about. 0.78

01:22:39.000 Okay, I'm not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.

01:22:45.000 That's the sentence right there. 0.67

01:22:46.000 So that's a different...

01:22:47.000 The video we just watched was four or five days after these statements were made.

01:22:52.000 So he said he changed after talking to someone he made...

01:22:54.000 Oh, okay.

01:22:55.000 Right, so the initial explanation is the one that I was talking about.

01:22:58.000 Okay, so he revised his feelings on it.

01:23:02.000 Well, that's super reasonable.

01:23:04.000 So it started with this.

01:23:05.000 Kaepernick had guns drawn on him by cops for being one of the only black guys in his town.

01:23:09.000 Yeah, that seems super reasonable, what he said there, about having respect for law enforcement.

01:23:15.000 Yeah, that's better.

01:23:16.000 Military rather, yeah.

01:23:17.000 Although he recently released a video that sort of goes back to the original explanation, suggesting that America is endemically and systemically racist, which is a problem.

01:23:24.000 That's a hot take right now.

01:23:25.000 It's good.

01:23:26.000 It's very popular.

01:23:27.000 Yeah, that's the big one.

01:23:30.000 How do you think we get back on track?

01:23:33.000 How do we find balance?

01:23:35.000 I always hope that things go really far in one direction and really far in the other direction and sort of Listen, I end up in the same place I always end up, which is we gotta learn to leave each other the F alone.

01:23:48.000 I mean, seriously, that's the only way this is gonna work.

01:23:50.000 Because we either have to decide we want to share a country and live together with each other, or we have to decide we don't.

01:23:55.000 If we want to live together and share a country, then we have to stop...

01:23:59.000 Basically making crazy demands of one another.

01:24:01.000 And this is what the cancel culture is all about.

01:24:03.000 But we got to stop that.

01:24:04.000 We got to recognize that people may not agree with you.

01:24:07.000 People may do things differently than you.

01:24:08.000 And that's okay.

01:24:09.000 As much as I dislike what Colin Kaepernick's doing, I don't think that he should be blackballed from the NFL. If I were an NFL owner, by the way, I'd hire him in a second.

01:24:15.000 You know the kind of press I'd get for hiring Colin Kaepernick?

01:24:17.000 I'd make a boatload off of Colin Kaepernick.

01:24:20.000 That's a great deal.

01:24:21.000 So how come people aren't doing it?

01:24:23.000 I mean, I assume because he's not that great a quarterback.

01:24:27.000 I mean, like, if he were Tom Brady, I think that he would, you know, be getting a contract.

01:24:31.000 He also, I mean, there was that whole situation last year with Kaepernick where he wanted to do tryouts for the NFL and then he sort of broke the NFL's rules in doing the tryouts and he wanted it filmed in a certain way and all this sort of stuff.

01:24:42.000 I'd hire him as a backup quarterback because here's the thing.

01:24:44.000 You're either going to please one half of the population or please the other.

01:24:47.000 Either he's amazing, in which case you've got a winning team and a great story, or he gets sacked every other down, in which case half the country cheers.

01:24:54.000 Controversy sells.

01:24:55.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

01:24:55.000 Yeah.

01:24:56.000 But how do we...

01:24:57.000 I mean, this is probably one of the most racially divisive times in my memory.

01:25:03.000 In my lifetime, I don't remember things being...

01:25:05.000 Everybody's worried about everything being racist.

01:25:09.000 Every single thing that anyone does.

01:25:11.000 Syrup is racist. 0.56

01:25:13.000 Pancakes are racist. 0.62

01:25:14.000 Oh, it's evolved into all the...

01:25:16.000 You saw this Trader Joe's story, right?

01:25:17.000 You were telling me earlier.

01:25:18.000 It's wild.

01:25:18.000 So Trader Joe's is called Trader Joe's, right?

01:25:21.000 Which is not racist, I guess.

01:25:22.000 But apparently they have Mexican products that they were calling Trader Jose's.

01:25:27.000 And some board person in their basement decided to create a petition that got signed by some 2,400 other board people about why it shouldn't be called Trader Jose's because that's racist.

01:25:38.000 So apparently it's cultural appropriation if you're Trader Joe's and you make a burrito.

01:25:41.000 But if you call Trader Jose's, then that's...

01:25:44.000 I think they called it exoticizing.

01:25:47.000 Exoticizing?

01:25:48.000 Yeah, it's making them exotic and other.

01:25:50.000 So Trader Joe's pulled it down.

01:25:51.000 Trader Joe's is going to not use this anymore.

01:25:53.000 17-year-old called out Trader Joe's.

01:25:58.000 Now the chain is dropping offensive labeling.

01:26:01.000 Offensive to whom?

01:26:02.000 How many Hispanics were picketing outside Trader Joe's being, now that I saw that Trader Jose beer... 0.96

01:26:07.000 Right.

01:26:07.000 Listen, I'm Italian.

01:26:08.000 Do you think Papa Gino's, is that really, you know, I mean, is that really an Italian who made that company?

01:26:13.000 Like, how many different, like, different pizza companies and all these, not run by Italians at all?

01:26:21.000 Honestly, I'd love to see the racial breakdown of the people who signed this petition.

01:26:23.000 I would bet 90% of them are white.

01:26:26.000 90%, right? 0.99

01:26:26.000 White, live in the suburbs, hate their parents. 0.99

01:26:28.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:26:29.000 What did you say?

01:26:30.000 What was the word they used for it?

01:26:31.000 Exoticizing.

01:26:32.000 Exoticizing.

01:26:33.000 Oh, my God.

01:26:34.000 That is so adorable.

01:26:36.000 Exoticizing.

01:26:37.000 I was talking to you about Rick Bayless, who's a famous chef of Mexican cuisine, who is a white man, who adores Mexican food.

01:26:46.000 I mean, I love the guy.

01:26:47.000 I love listening to his videos.

01:26:49.000 I love Mexican food, so...

01:26:51.000 Watching this guy's videos, it's like, I love someone who's really into something.

01:26:55.000 You know, I just get a kick out of it.

01:26:57.000 There's a guy I used to watch on PBS that would make furniture with ancient tools.

01:27:03.000 Like, he'd use, like, ancient... 0.90

01:27:08.000 Different old-timey saws and chisels and shit, and he would make these wooden chairs and tables and furniture. 0.97

01:27:15.000 This is called the Amish, right? 0.99

01:27:16.000 But he kind of looked like that, but he was really dressed like an old-timey guy, and he had this old-timey shop, and he would make this stuff, and I loved watching him, and I don't give a fuck about his shitty furniture. 0.93

01:27:28.000 I don't, but what I cared about was the fact that this guy was really passionate about his thing, and it was very attractive to me.

01:27:34.000 And I feel the same way when I watch this guy, Rick Bayless, talk about Mexican cuisine.

01:27:38.000 He loves it.

01:27:39.000 He takes regular trips to Mexico and learns how to cook these dishes in the traditional way and then talks about it with his great passion. 0.99

01:27:46.000 But the guy just got shit all over. 0.98

01:27:48.000 They were just like, you're culturally appropriating. 0.99

01:27:51.000 You shouldn't be doing this.

01:27:52.000 You're a white man. 0.99

01:27:53.000 Let me just say this generally. 1.00

01:27:54.000 Cultural appropriation is a bunch of horseshit. 0.97

01:27:55.000 And the reason it's a bunch of horseshit is because, you know what's the best in life? 0.98

01:27:58.000 All the things that are good from everybody else's culture.

01:28:01.000 Like, the reason people live in major cities is to go to all the different restaurants from all of the different cultures.

01:28:07.000 Why is cultural...

01:28:08.000 I'm so confused as to why cultural appropriation is bad.

01:28:11.000 Cultural appropriation is the greatest thing that has ever happened to planet Earth.

01:28:14.000 If we're all siloed off into our own little cultures, you know how much things would suck? 0.88

01:28:17.000 It would just be terrible.

01:28:19.000 So this kind of stuff is just crazy.

01:28:21.000 It drives me nuts.

01:28:22.000 Look, I grew up teaching Taekwondo, which is a Korean martial art.

01:28:27.000 I learned to count in Korean.

01:28:29.000 I had to speak all the techniques in Korean. 0.97

01:28:32.000 Because you hate Koreans. 0.90

01:28:33.000 That's it. 0.99

01:28:33.000 Clearly. 0.99

01:28:33.000 I mean, that's clearly the problem here. 0.99

01:28:34.000 I culturally appropriate the shit out of my childhood. 0.83

01:28:36.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.96

01:28:37.000 This is all crazy.

01:28:39.000 And there's no apparent end to it.

01:28:41.000 Like, there's no limiting principle.

01:28:42.000 No, there's no limit.

01:28:43.000 There's no limit.

01:28:44.000 I read a column this morning by somebody, I think it was in the Washington Post, saying that we should just keep changing the name of everything.

01:28:49.000 Like, literally, forever.

01:28:50.000 We should just keep changing the name of everything.

01:28:52.000 She said, you know, there's this town, and I think I found a non-offensive name for the town.

01:28:55.000 But if I found something else that was offensive, like, three years from now, we should change the name of the town.

01:28:59.000 I just thought, okay, so we are living in 1984, right?

01:29:02.000 Orwell talked about renaming everything.

01:29:04.000 Man, people will find a way.

01:29:06.000 They'll find a way to be mad.

01:29:08.000 Here's my controversial statement, okay?

01:29:10.000 Okay.

01:29:10.000 My controversial statement is if you have to go this far to find things to be offended over, there's not that much to be offended over.

01:29:17.000 If you have to go so far that you have to be offended by Trader Jose's, you got nothing going on in your life.

01:29:23.000 There's a dramatic demand for being offended and acting like a victim.

01:29:26.000 And there are actual victims in this country.

01:29:28.000 And internationally, they're seriously actual victims.

01:29:31.000 But we don't focus on any of those folks. 0.99

01:29:33.000 We focus instead on the dumbest bullcrap you ever heard about renaming libraries. 0.99

01:29:39.000 Listen, I'm fine. 1.00

01:29:40.000 You want to take a Confederate statue and put it in a museum?

01:29:42.000 Fine. 1.00

01:29:42.000 Those guys were jerks. 1.00

01:29:43.000 They're terrible people. 1.00

01:29:44.000 Fine.

01:29:44.000 Go for it.

01:29:45.000 But you're talking about, we're going to fix the world by renaming Washington, D.C. because Washington was bad.

01:29:51.000 It's like, what did you do lately?

01:29:52.000 Did you do what Washington did?

01:29:53.000 Like, I understand. 0.99

01:29:54.000 We don't put up statues to people for all the bad crap they did. 0.98

01:29:56.000 Martin Luther King had a real bad record with ladies. 0.99

01:29:58.000 Okay, we don't put up statues to Martin Luther King because we are saying he was great with women.

01:30:02.000 I think everybody was bad with women back then. 1.00

01:30:04.000 Everyone is bad, period. 1.00

01:30:06.000 Human beings suck. 1.00

01:30:07.000 Okay, so either get rid of all the statues or recognize that human beings suck. 1.00

01:30:09.000 Well, some of them suck worse, obviously. 1.00

01:30:10.000 For sure. 1.00

01:30:11.000 And there are gradations of suck. 0.96

01:30:12.000 Do you remember back when they were tearing down the Civil War statues and Trump, in all of his wisdom, was like, what are they going to do next? 0.96

01:30:18.000 What about Lincoln?

01:30:19.000 What about they're going to take down George Washington? 0.98

01:30:22.000 And everybody's like, oh, he's so crazy.

01:30:24.000 Meanwhile, that's exactly what they were doing. 0.57

01:30:26.000 That was what they were doing.

01:30:27.000 I mean, in Chicago, well, that was actually Christopher Columbus, who was legitimately a bad guy.

01:30:33.000 I mean, yes.

01:30:34.000 Also, everyone was bad.

01:30:37.000 Like, literally all the people were like, enslavement, brutal treatment of people.

01:30:42.000 Fairly commonplace.

01:30:42.000 Do you think there's an argument to be said that maybe we shouldn't celebrate those bad people anymore, now that we know what they really were?

01:30:51.000 Not really.

01:30:51.000 I think we should just talk about the bad people.

01:30:53.000 I don't think we're the only good people in history.

01:30:54.000 Do you think they should have a statue of Genghis Khan?

01:30:58.000 I don't know.

01:30:58.000 What did Genghis Khan do that was good?

01:31:00.000 That had good results?

01:31:01.000 Well, he opened up trade to China.

01:31:03.000 Okay, if you want to put up a trade to China statue for Genghis Khan at the Trade Federation.

01:31:06.000 But he also killed 10% of the population.

01:31:08.000 True enough.

01:31:09.000 And what?

01:31:10.000 Impregnated the other 10% or something? 1.00

01:31:12.000 Yeah, he fucked everybody. 1.00

01:31:13.000 He literally raped his way through Asia. 1.00

01:31:15.000 The point of a Christopher Columbus statue is not all the bad things he did to the Arawaks. 1.00

01:31:19.000 The point of a Christopher Columbus statue is we are glad that Western civilization came to the Western Hemisphere.

01:31:23.000 I kind of agree with that principle.

01:31:25.000 I think it is a good thing that Western civilization came to the Western Hemisphere.

01:31:27.000 And yes, there's a lot of brutality.

01:31:29.000 And yes, there's a lot of cruelty.

01:31:30.000 And we should talk about all those things.

01:31:31.000 But this notion that the only cruelty that has ever existed in human history came at the behest of Western civilization, that everything was a Russellian paradise before Christopher Columbus came, that Christopher Columbus doesn't deserve a statue in specific.

01:31:43.000 That we should, like, either make the argument that everybody was a product of their time and therefore no one deserves a statue, or recognize that when there's a statue of Christopher Columbus, we are not honoring how he treated the Arawaks. 0.95

01:31:54.000 No one ever thought that we'd put up a statue to Christopher Columbus because he was really sweet to the natives on the other end of that statue.

01:32:01.000 So what is the purpose of a statue?

01:32:03.000 Like when you have a Christopher Columbus statue, what is the purpose of that statue?

01:32:07.000 We all know who he is.

01:32:09.000 We all know what he did.

01:32:10.000 Why do we have an enormous bronze version of him in the middle of a park?

01:32:15.000 Presumably to say that Western civilization arriving here was a good thing.

01:32:19.000 Or to have the conversation.

01:32:21.000 It's a monument to an historical event, right?

01:32:25.000 Right.

01:32:26.000 Listen, Columbia University is named after Columbus, right?

01:32:28.000 The idea of America as Columbia, right, which was an alternative name for America, was after Columbus because he was a discoverer.

01:32:34.000 Well, that's a weird one, right? 0.99

01:32:35.000 We're named after Amerigo Vespucci, who nobody knows who the fuck that guy is. 0.96

01:32:39.000 Yeah, he's been lost in the time. 0.98

01:32:40.000 He's totally been lost.

01:32:42.000 But there is this idea that has settled in, and it's really of high irritation to me, that we are now the only good people who have ever lived.

01:32:49.000 Everyone who came before us was just a horrible person, and we are the only good humans who have ever...

01:32:53.000 Like, isn't the world lucky to have us? 0.93

01:32:55.000 We're the only people who have ever lived who are completely sinless, and we can look from our perch at the top of morality at everyone who came before us and say that those people were all garbage compared to us. 0.97

01:33:04.000 Now, there were people who were garbage compared to us, but I really don't think that Washington was among the people who you can say was garbage compared to you. 0.69

01:33:10.000 Like, I don't think that you living in 1770 are a better person than George Washington. 0.96

01:33:14.000 I think you stand atop the legacy that George Washington helped build.

01:33:17.000 Well, I have news for those people that were trying to break into Amazon Go. 1.00

01:33:20.000 History is going to look back at you like you're a piece of shit. 0.99

01:33:23.000 The people in the future that would never shatter property and never spray paint things and never attack people for filming things with their cell phones, they're going to look back at these violent actions. 0.99

01:33:35.000 And they're going to look back and they're not going to be kind.

01:33:39.000 Every single generation, hopefully, if society doesn't implode, we don't have nuclear war, Every single generation is going to learn from the mistakes of the past and hopefully improve.

01:33:53.000 That's what we're hoping for.

01:33:54.000 And we should be happy that we can look back on a lot of these people and say, we understand now how deeply flawed they were and what was wrong with George Washington or what was wrong with Thomas Jefferson.

01:34:08.000 Although he did draft the Declaration of Independence, he was a slave owner. 0.96

01:34:13.000 And this is one of the contradictions of our society and our culture.

01:34:16.000 And fathered kids with a slave. 0.60

01:34:17.000 I mean, yes, yes.

01:34:18.000 I mean, you don't have to shortchange the evils of human beings in order to recognize either the direction of American history or recognize the good things about people.

01:34:25.000 People are a little more complex than I think we want to think of them as.

01:34:28.000 And this is one of the arenas that sort of gets back to the point about the system.

01:34:33.000 If you recognize that human beings are capable of great sin and also capable of doing great things, what you really want is a system that Of checks and balances that prevents people from gaining too much power to hurt other people.

01:34:46.000 And what you also want to recognize is that the flaws of human beings are not necessarily the flaws of the system.

01:34:52.000 And that just changing the system is not going to change the underlying flaws of human beings.

01:34:56.000 Which means you actually have to think through the policies that you're promulgating before you implement them.

01:35:00.000 Clearly, if you say this, you're not paying attention to what happened at CHAZ or CHOP. Because they had it nailed.

01:35:06.000 It was paradise for a short period of time.

01:35:09.000 That's one of my favorite stories of this year because these people basically took over this gigantic chunk of Seattle and said, we're going to show you how it's done.

01:35:19.000 They wind up being the police.

01:35:21.000 They wind up beating the fuck out of people who did anything they didn't want to do, including film things. 0.86

01:35:26.000 You saw murder.

01:35:28.000 You saw massive graffiti.

01:35:29.000 You certainly saw borders.

01:35:31.000 There were borders put up.

01:35:33.000 They kept cops from coming in.

01:35:34.000 They kept a lot of people from coming in.

01:35:36.000 Eating up journalists.

01:35:36.000 They beat up journalists.

01:35:37.000 They took over private property.

01:35:40.000 So they appropriated private property.

01:35:41.000 These are not buildings they built.

01:35:42.000 They didn't make a deal.

01:35:43.000 They didn't barter.

01:35:44.000 They didn't have some sort of a beautiful, mutually beneficial agreement with these people that own these buildings. 1.00

01:35:49.000 No, fuck you. 1.00

01:35:50.000 They took them over. 1.00

01:35:51.000 They took them over and started spray painting shit all over them. 0.99

01:35:53.000 It's crazy. 0.99

01:35:54.000 But it shows you, like, you're...

01:35:58.000 There's a childlike idea of what you can do that's better.

01:36:04.000 You don't really understand that the Founding Fathers really did put into place all these checks and balances to keep someone from abusing power.

01:36:14.000 And as much as Trump would like to overcome all that, you see time and time again, he's a great example. 0.93

01:36:21.000 In many ways, of how this system really is beautifully engineered from 300 fucking years ago.

01:36:27.000 Because the founders didn't understand the problem of human nature, which is people want power, and they want to hurt other people very often.

01:36:33.000 And you still need government in order to do things, but there better be broad-scale agreement on the things you want to do, or a small majority of people can really hurt a huge minority of people, right?

01:36:43.000 This is what they call tyranny of the mob.

01:36:44.000 They're much afraid of this.

01:36:46.000 And that's stuff that is worth remembering.

01:36:49.000 Tearing down that system because you want to build something more beautiful, if it looks like Chaz or Chop, that ain't a thing.

01:36:54.000 What's this idealistic...

01:36:56.000 They have blinders on.

01:36:57.000 They have this narrow tunnel vision view of what they think this utopian future could be.

01:37:03.000 I think they think that human beings are going to be fundamentally transformed by a different system.

01:37:07.000 So they look at the problems.

01:37:08.000 One of the biggest problems we have in American politics is the myopia with which we look at the United States.

01:37:12.000 So when you're dating somebody, it's very easy to see all the problems with the person you're dating.

01:37:17.000 When you're married to someone, it's certainly easy for my wife to see all the problems with me, and there are plenty.

01:37:20.000 But when she looks at all the other people, then she's like, okay, well, he's less flawed than the others, right?

01:37:24.000 When you look at the United States, it's very easy to see all the different flaws in the United States because, of course, they exist.

01:37:29.000 This is a society filled with humans, 330 million of them.

01:37:32.000 But when you look abroad and you look at other examples of civilizations over time, and then you look back at the United States, you think maybe the system isn't quite that bad.

01:37:39.000 Because the fact is that for all the problems we got, the biggest problems that humanity faces and has faced are not happening in the United States.

01:37:46.000 They're happening everywhere else.

01:37:47.000 China right now is shipping Uyghur Muslims on trains after shaving their heads to concentration camps where they are being forcibly sterilized.

01:37:54.000 There are actual problems on planet Earth.

01:37:56.000 That is not to say there aren't problems in the United States, but they are not the same in terms of degree, and they are not the same in terms of scope.

01:38:02.000 And to pretend that the system of the United States needs to be ripped down from the inside, and that if you build a beautiful new system, you will shape humanity such that we are all saints and no sinners, you're out of your mind.

01:38:12.000 I agree with you.

01:38:13.000 And the Uyghur situation is shockingly undercovered.

01:38:17.000 Oh my God. 0.99

01:38:18.000 Well, it demonstrates that when people said never again, they were full of crap. 1.00

01:38:21.000 They're just full of crap. 1.00

01:38:21.000 I mean, it's just not true. 1.00

01:38:23.000 This is one area where the United States should absolutely be taking a leading role.

01:38:26.000 It is obvious that China is a nefarious actor. 0.98

01:38:29.000 China has been stealing our technology. 0.96

01:38:30.000 The Chinese government is attempting to extend its rule of tyranny over Hong Kong.

01:38:35.000 They just subjected 7.5 million people to their direct tyranny in violation of trading.

01:38:39.000 And the response has basically been muted from the Western world.

01:38:42.000 Did you see that video of the Chinese ambassador in Britain being asked on the BBC about that tape?

01:38:49.000 No, I didn't.

01:38:49.000 It's fantastic.

01:38:50.000 So the BBC interviewer shows him the tape of the people being pushed onto trains, right?

01:38:54.000 And he says, what is this?

01:38:56.000 And the Chinese ambassador says, I can't see it.

01:38:58.000 I'm not sure what you're talking about.

01:38:59.000 He's literally saying that the screen is huge.

01:39:01.000 It's right behind him.

01:39:01.000 Like he's looking right at it.

01:39:02.000 And he acts as though he can't see it.

01:39:04.000 And then he starts talking about the natural beauty of the region.

01:39:08.000 He won't deal with it.

01:39:09.000 He won't explain what it is.

01:39:12.000 And the rest of the world is just like, well, you know, this is where, you know, in the sporting world, the story that's undercover in the sporting world is the blowback that the NBA gave to Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets GM, for saying free Hong Kong.

01:39:27.000 You can't even get anybody in the NBA to condemn China while China's subjecting a million Uyghurs to abject slavery. 1.00

01:39:32.000 Mark Cuban just had an exchange with Ted Cruz the other day where he was going after Cruz for something and he questioned Cruz's balls or something and Cruz came back and said, well, do you have the balls to condemn China?

01:39:45.000 And Cuban said something like, well, you know, I don't want to get involved in the internal affairs of another country.

01:39:51.000 I thought, well, that's...

01:39:52.000 That is not an internal affairs question.

01:39:54.000 It's one thing to say I don't want to get involved in the tax rates of other countries.

01:39:57.000 It's another thing to say shaving people's heads, shipping them on trains to concentration camps where you force them into labor and or sterilize them. 0.58

01:40:03.000 That seems like not an internal issue that you're not allowed to criticize, really.

01:40:06.000 Yeah, that's a big one.

01:40:08.000 But the China thing is so crazy because so many business interests have this connection with them and so much of...

01:40:16.000 The money that they generate is because of China.

01:40:20.000 I mean, the NBA, films, there's so much of our culture that kowtows to China. 0.96

01:40:26.000 We're so connected to them.

01:40:27.000 That's one of the things that we really found out from this pandemic is how many things are built there, how much of our medicine, how much we rely on China.

01:40:34.000 It also demonstrates the lie of the idea that if you trade with somebody, then they're going to liberalize.

01:40:38.000 That was something that was pushed over the last 30, 40 years real hard, which is we'll help them out economically.

01:40:43.000 We'll have mutual trade.

01:40:44.000 It'll be good for both of us.

01:40:45.000 And they'll liberalize because once they realize it's good to be part of the world economy, then they won't be tyrants anymore.

01:40:50.000 And instead, they just took all the chips off the table and said, no, actually, I'm going to double down on this and we're going to get more tyrannical, not less.

01:40:55.000 I mean, Xi is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao.

01:40:58.000 It's incredible.

01:40:59.000 We don't have much time.

01:41:00.000 You'll have a heart out in one minute.

01:41:02.000 I just want to know, what do you think goes down in November?

01:41:05.000 And how hopeful are you for the future? 0.99

01:41:07.000 Because it seems to me like we're fucked no matter who wins. 0.96

01:41:09.000 Because the chaos that we're seeing, the civil unrest that we're seeing, it's going to either accelerate or spread. 0.98

01:41:17.000 One way or the other.

01:41:18.000 So I think that if we're going to hold together, we have to make a decision.

01:41:21.000 Either fundamentally the American system is good but flawed, we need to work on the flaws within the system, or fundamentally the American system sucks and was rooted in slavery and bigotry and we need to rip down the entire system.

01:41:31.000 The latter is not really a great recipe.

01:41:33.000 So we can have normal political arguments within the former or the country is toast.

01:41:37.000 As far as what goes down in November, Look, right now the polling data says Trump gets skunked.

01:41:43.000 I mean, right now the polling data's got Biden up 10, 12 points in the polls.

01:41:46.000 But didn't the polling data in 2016 say that Hillary was going to steamroll him? 0.65

01:41:49.000 On the national data, they were kind of right.

01:41:52.000 So on the national data, the final RealClearPolitics poll average was like three points.

01:41:56.000 Hillary won by three points in the popular vote.

01:41:58.000 The state polls were really wrong, particularly in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania.

01:42:03.000 On this one, because Trump is universally losing in like all the swing states and is in spitting distance in Texas, he's got a lot of ground to make up right now.

01:42:11.000 Listen, Biden is running almost the ideal campaign.

01:42:13.000 He's not alive.

01:42:14.000 He's a not alive person.

01:42:15.000 And as it turns out, beating a dead horse is actually kind of tough, right?

01:42:18.000 He's like...

01:42:21.000 Because he's not threatening.

01:42:22.000 He's fundamentally non-threatening.

01:42:24.000 You look at Biden and do you feel threatened by?

01:42:25.000 I don't feel threatened by Biden.

01:42:26.000 The man's not alive.

01:42:26.000 You can't threaten me with a corpse, right?

01:42:28.000 And so Trump, who is innately volatile and looking for something to kind of attack- Is his own worst enemy.

01:42:33.000 Is his own worst enemy.

01:42:34.000 Like with Hillary, the untold story of 2016 is that Trump didn't win, Hillary lost.

01:42:38.000 People hated Hillary's guts. 1.00

01:42:40.000 And the stat that proves it is that people who hated both Trump and Hillary broke for Trump pretty heavily.

01:42:44.000 Right now, people who don't like either Biden or Trump are breaking nearly universally for Biden because Trump is so off-putting.

01:42:50.000 And I've said for a long time, politics is about the art of making it hard to vote for your opponent and easy to vote for you. 0.91

01:42:56.000 And Trump is fairly good at number one, and he is awful. 0.72

01:42:59.000 He is god-awful at number two, making it easy to vote for him. 0.90

01:43:02.000 That's a toughie.

01:43:04.000 Well said.

01:43:05.000 Thank you, Ben Shapiro.

01:43:06.000 Always a good time, man.

01:43:07.000 Good to see you, dude.

01:43:08.000 Always enjoy seeing you.

01:43:09.000 Alright, that's it.

01:43:10.000 Bye, everybody.

01:43:13.000 That was great.

01:43:13.000 Awesome.

01:43:14.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 22, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1512 - Ben Shapiro

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Summary

Transcript