Joe Rogan Experience #1512 - Ben Shapiro

Key Takeaway

Audit one area where you are running on impulse rather than intention—your phone use, diet, spending, or relationship habits—and make a pre-commitment today. The episode’s most transferable point is that meaningful change starts by deciding what you are building before the tempting moment arrives. Define the values or outcome you want, remove one predictable distraction, and make the next small action easier than the default.

Episode Overview

Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro discuss COVID-era social division, policing, poverty, racism, institutional reform, and the limits of ideological narratives. The conversation later turns to commitment, marriage, distraction, social media, image manipulation, and the importance of judging systems and choices by their real-world consequences rather than appealing appearances.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Joe Rogan Experience #1512 - Ben Shapiro from Joe Rogan Experience. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hello, Ben. Hey, how's it going, dude? We're here. We did it. We did. We're both alive. First of all, congratulations on your thinness. You look slender and healthy. You look good. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Turns out running away from my children for 4 months straight will do that to you. I literally took up running just to get away from my Really? Just going outside just for some mind space? LA, man. You can't get outside unless you're actively exercising or they come and arrest you.

Oh, oh, I could have looted a Foot Locker, Foot Locker, right? Then then they would have That would have been okay. Do you run with a mask on? No. Does anybody yell at you? No. No? No. What do you run Do you go to a track? Like what do you do? No, I literally just run around on the streets hoping that one day I'll be hunted down by the rioters. So I don't have to go deal with my children screaming at me. But yeah, that's that's the that's the goal.

Did you try to get healthier when COVID hit? Like were you worried and A little bit. Really wasn't about COVID. It was just I was eating out too much and when I was relegated to home, it was like I had to learn how to use the barbecue, which I I'd never learned how to use a barbecue, actually. And then it turned out it was actually not that hard. So I don't know I was doing for years. I got to give you some elk meat. Are you barbecuing right now?

Uh yeah. You still doing it? All right, I'll give you some elk sausages. It's very easy. I have to do kosher, right? So I have to Oh, that's not kosher at all. Well, I'll have to go get the elk and I'll have to actually like kill it myself and Is that what you have to do? You'd have to get the elk and then you'd have to slice its throat or something like that? it's good times. What How do What What's the logic behind that? So I mean not to get too fast into the biblical stuff, but uh the the original logic was that you were supposed to kill the animal in the most humane way was the idea.

Now, do I know if it's the most humane way now? I have no idea. It's most certainly not, Ben. Okay, well. Cuz you have to slice its throat. rabbis, man. I don't know. Yeah. I get it how back in the day a very sharp knife going through the throat would have been the most humane way cuz it's almost painless and then the blood just sort of pours out and that's a wrap. Right. You don't want the blood anyway cuz you're not allowed to eat blood in Judaism, so.

Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. So what do you do when you have a medium rare steak? I mean you you salt the steak really heavily. This is why kosher meat is pretty salty. So if you go to a steakhouse, are you allowed to go to a steakhouse? Uh kosher steakhouse. There are kosher steakhouses. God, you're so deep in that world. man. But you're a logical, intelligent guy. Does part of Does every now and then I like how you juxtapose those. But does every now and then it [ __ ] with your head?

You're like, "What is this?" I mean, of course. And then when I don't know there's a religious person alive. I mean, who who doesn't eventually go like, "Okay, it's a little weird, but all right. You got You got to embrace the system." But you you feel like for tradition and for just the whole Jewish culture, it's worth doing? Exactly. I mean, you you you live the lifestyle. And I feel like it ain't it ain't that big a sacrifice to eat at particular restaurants. The restaurants are still good.

They still got good kosher restaurants. One thing that we're seeing with society and 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 like a little these little incremental steps, they slide and people go, "Oh god, what's the big deal? What do you care?" And you're like, "I see where this is going." Like I see there's a This is a It's going down that way.

This is not going to stop. It's sliding. Oh yeah. And you you saw it in LA. I mean, I I lived in LA my whole life and the the move from LA being a pretty safe, fairly nice city, suburban in orientation to just overrun with with horror shows is really it it was a lot faster than I thought it would be, but it it sort of a grad You're right, it's a gradual decline and then it's just off a cliff. Well, you started to see tents and you didn't see them at all for decades.

And then all of a sudden I started seeing tents. I remember I was doing Fear Factor in Skid Row in the early 2000s. So we would film down there and I'd be like, "This is crazy. Like has anybody seen this? Has anybody know this?" Cuz there was these homeless streets. Like you would go down these gigantic 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." No. Downtown LA was a no man's land.

Nothing's going on in downtown LA. It is now. Like there's Well, it was pre-COVID. It was like there was some bars and there was some really cool upscale apartment buildings. It was kind of picking up. But uh I took my family there before COVID like a few 4 months before COVID or so. We went to We were We're going to go to a There's a famous donut place there. So we said just a one of the most goofy Sunday things. Like what do you guys want to do today?

Let's go get donuts. So we went to downtown LA. I'm like, "Holy shit." Literally [ __ ] Human [ __ ] On the streets. Everything smelled like piss. Bums everywhere and I'm like, "Okay, stay close to me. Stay over here. If anybody comes near you, move move closer to me." Like Jesus Christ. Like this is crazy. I don't want them to be freaked out, but I'm like, "This is nuts." thing is that that sort of disaster area stuff in LA was sort of localized, right? You really did like I I worked in the LA DA's office for a summer when I was in law school.

It's been like 2007, so it's a while ago. And I remember they had a giant tent city and you had to walk from the car they made you park a mile away and walk it. And so you're walking through Skid Row. And it's like, "Okay, well, this this is really terrible and honestly I feel bad for these people cuz I don't think the best solution for people who are drug addicted or mentally ill to live on the street and a heavy percentage of people who are homeless are drug addicted or mentally ill.

But, you know, is it For for people who are living in the suburbs, like this is at least localized. It's not like reaching into your life. And then over the past 13 years, like I live in a pretty decent suburban area. I've seen like open needles on the street. Walked out of my house one day, there's just a guy lying face down in the gutter like Edgar Allan Poe. Like And I thought, "Well, this is this is falling apart rather quickly." What do you think caused the slide or the expansion of the slide?

Because I agree with you that it was very isolated. Skid Row was very isolated. Downtown LA was very I I remember one time we were filming in downtown LA and we were on a gurney or I guess that's what you call One of those things called where you where it lifts up. Oh. Anyway, we're filming some Fear Factor stunt and as we got up, we could see people smoking crack. And I go, "Oh look, there's people smoking crack right there." And the the guests on the show, like a lot of them they fly from all over the country and they're like, "Is that real?

They're really smoking crack?" I'm like, "That's crack. That's a homeless person smoking crack. Welcome to LA. It's right there." But I didn't feel bad about it. I felt like, "Look, it's unfortunate, but this is not like indicative of all of LA. We're just in a shitty spot cuz it's really cheap to film here. So here you go. You know, you got a little gift. You get to see some weird [ __ ] while you're here." But I didn't I didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where you're on like Winnetka off the 101 and there's 80 [ __ ] tents and they put a port-a-potty there.

They put a port-a-potty there. we're doing we're doing real building and real development here in Los Angeles. Not apartment buildings. We got some port-a-potties. We put up Every underpass shall have a port-a-potty thanks to Mayor Eric Garcetti. You pay attention to politics far more than I do. And and and law enforcement and all that. What happened? How did it get to this? Well, on this particular problem, this actually started with a bunch of lawsuits. So the LAPD used to have the authority to move people's [ __ ] if it was on the sidewalk.

And if people had a bunch of stuff that was on the sidewalk and they were just camping out there, 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. And then the ACLU actually sued and they said that this is a violation of people's personal property. Oh, ACLU, you do such good work sometimes. And 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.

And then they got a ruling from a court that you're allowed to live in your car cuz for a while you weren't allowed to live in your car and then it was you're allowed to live in your car. 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. And then there was this sort of equity movement that said, "Okay, well, things are good in business districts, but why why can't they do it in like more suburban areas?

Why can't they just move into nicer areas? After all, there's misery, it should be equally spread across the city." And and that's kind of what you've seen. I mean, this is There've been so many breaking points over the last year in the city and for me for me and my wife, I mean, we looked at the rioting and they shut down the entire city at 6:00 p.m. It's a county of 12 million people and they shut down the entire county so that douchebags could run around shattering windows pretending that they were standing up for social justice.

They shut down Beverly Hills at 1:00 p.m. They shut down Rodeo Drive at 1:00 p.m. So that people could run up and down Rodeo Drive talking about how capitalism sucks while tweeting from their iPhone. While stealing stealing Nikes. You know, there was two moments where I was like, "This is a real opportunity for us to come together." And one of them was the moment the lockdown happened. It it felt to me very similar to right after 9/11 where everybody was confronted with their own mortality. Like holy [ __ ] Like we we might be on the verge of a pandemic like in a movie where a lot of the people we know die.

And here we we have to be kind to each other. We have to be This is what's important. Family is important. And I remember thinking, "I've never been closer to my family. Never been closer to my friends. We're calling each other all the time. We're we're It was like It was a There was There was real hope in that." I was like, "If we get through this, we're going to be tighter. We're going to know what means something, what counts. It doesn't [ __ ] stand-up comedy.

[ __ ] everything else, man. What What's important is love and friendship." Then it started to get angry. Mhm. It only took like 3 or 4 weeks where people started getting like they were scared, so people started getting shittier with each other online and then I basically swore off Twitter. I was like, "This is just too toxic and too hostile." The second moment where I thought we had the opportunity to come together was George Floyd. So George Floyd died and all of a sudden you have these Black Lives Pro Matter protests and and I'm like, "Maybe we can finally make a dent on racism.

Maybe we can finally make a dent in police brutality. Maybe this is a moment where we can come together and realize what's important. It's community, solidarity, that that we're we're we're all in this together. Like this is crazy. And then the cops need to be reformed. Like they can't live like that. maybe we should take into into account PTSD. Maybe we should take into account the fact that these [ __ ] guys are pulling up on people every day that might shoot them in the face.

They might never be able to see their family and their kids. Let's rework this. Let's think this [ __ ] through. Yeah. Nope. And then chaos. And then all of a sudden it became like what we saw yesterday where they're breaking into Amazon Go in Seattle. Like that [ __ ] guy owns the Washington Post. He owns the most left-wing newspaper in America. AND YOU'RE LIKE, "NOT GOOD ENOUGH." WELL, YOU SAW THEY SET UP A LIKE A FAKE guillotine outside of Bezos' house in Washington, D.C.

It's insane. And it's it's just it's madness. I I totally I totally agree with you, by the way. Like when when the when COVID happened, I thought, "I can't really see how we're going to split in partisan fashion over this thing." Right. Like everybody wants to live, and everybody would also like to eventually get back to regular life. And the better we can live, the better we can get back to regular life. So, it seems like okay, we're on board. When it came to the lockdowns, the original lockdowns, I was like, "Okay, I'm on board.

You know, I'm I'm taking this thing really seriously. I've got parents in their in their 60s. I feel like, you know, I'm in good health. I'm I'm fairly young. I'm 36. But for my parents, I don't I don't want my parents getting this thing. And so, we're still taking this thing real seriously. I mean, I'm still wearing a mask around in public places. And I think people should. I think that's a responsible thing to do. But it it immediately turned into who can we blame for this?

Who can we blame? Who's doing it wrong? And it seems like there were only like a couple of things that you really can do that are obviously wrong. Like nobody has a good solution on this thing. Okay, it ravaged Italy. It ravaged Spain. It it ravaged New York. Like there there are a couple things you shouldn't do. Don't take the olds and send them back into the nursing homes with COVID, right? I mean, that's like an obvious one. But beyond that, like just staying away from each other and socially distancing and wearing like this is all kind of common sensical stuff that people have known since the flu pandemic of 1918.

Yeah. Nothing nothing has really changed. And yet it immediately turned into who can we blame? Who's Who's to blame for all these dead people? Maybe it's Ron DeSantis or maybe it's Cuomo. Like who who can we blame? So, that was terrible. And then on the Floyd stuff, I had the same feelings. 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." Chauvin, right? The the officer in that case in the George Floyd case.

think that? Yeah. Everyone I know. Every single person was like, "Yeah, that's that's real bad. Like that's And cops, like I know tons of cops. I'm friendly with tons of cops. And not one of them was like, "Yeah, that's good police procedure. I'm glad he did that." Like no one thought that. And so, when people are like, "Okay, we're going to look at police brutality. Maybe we'll take a look at qualified immunity. Maybe we'll take a look at police unions and the kind of restrictive covenants that they have with the cities and and how we make sure that everybody knows who the bad cops are so they can't get hired at different places." Like all those are solutions.

But it quickly turned from "Well, we don't want to talk about solutions. Solutions are a bad idea. What we need to do is we need to shout about everything we can possibly imagine all at once. And you know what? Instead, let's have a conversation about like was George Washington a bad guy? Let's have a conversation instead about like just completely defunding the police. Want to have like a responsible conversation about things that make sense? We'll talk about like what if we just got rid of the police?

How crazy is that discussion? That discussion when when when people are really saying defund the police, I'm like, "Cooler heads will prevail." But they're going to realize. And I think they're realizing it now in New York City. I mean, New York City has had record crime, record homicide. Who would have thought? De Blasio is I mean, I would have never imagined I would look at Garcetti and go, "Well, he's better." That's exactly right. I look at Garcetti and I look at De Blasio, I'm like, "Garcetti, I'd have him over my house for dinner.

He's way better than De Blasio." De Blasio is murderer. so weird. He's so You can have protests, but only Black Lives Matter protests. That one That was That was a solid You know, that that was That may have been the moment when I realized that we were all effed. Yeah. That was the moment when like 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?

Then you were a racist and you're going to get people killed and you should wear a mask. And I was like, "Well, if you're I sort of agree with the mask thing. Like, yeah. Yeah. And then you get millions of people in the streets yelling at each other and breathing on each other and spitting on each other. And you got health professionals on TV being like, "Well, racism is a public health threat. I guess that you can do that now." It's like, "What the I know people who died in the hospital of COVID and their family could not visit them." Yeah.

Like they literally died alone in the hospital of COVID and family could not visit them. And you're telling me that it's deeply important that we have like dance lines. This was stuff happening at rallies. Like dance lines in the streets in New York to fight racism. That's deeply important, but a daughter being able to visit her dad before he dies, that's not important. Come on. What [ __ ] am for your freedom to protest. I'm 100% for your freedom to protest. I'm also for your freedom to go to the gym.

I'm also for your freedom to go to a comedy club if you so choose. I'm for your freedom to go to a restaurant. Look, they figured out how to do restaurants in a lot of places. The the servers wear masks and many of them wear face shields. You distance the tables apart from each other. You do temperature checks. You take people's names and addresses down when they enter so that if anybody gets sick, if there's any sort of kind And they And they've been able to do this.

No, this is right. The vectors of transmission are typically closed areas, people in solid proximity with each other for long periods of time. Yes. Right? That's the stuff where people are getting this stuff. And Yeah. I I I trust most Americans not like Some Americans can be dumbasses. Some people are just dumbasses. Oh, there's a lot of videos. I don't know if you watch YouTube. There's plenty of Karens out there. How sad is it if your name is Karen and you're a good person? Like you're All the good Karens out there, I I'm sorry, ladies.

I'm really sorry. But it's Like this is this is I made this point online. I got shellacked for it. But I was pointing out that most Americans are wearing masks right now. By polling data, 59% of Americans say that they always wear a mask when they leave the house. 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. That's not I wasn't saying masks don't work. I wear a mask. I think that the evidence shows that they do something.

We don't know that they're not like full protective. They're The cloth masks are not as effective as surgical masks, which are not as effective as N95s. But wear a mask, good. The 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. So, this this idea that Gavin Newsom knows best how you ought to live your life, like I got some trouble with that, especially because California saw the same uptick as Texas and Florida.

And California never opened. I mean, we've been here the whole time. California never really opened. Well, we were doing pretty good up until the protests. Yeah, that's right. Everything seemed like it was on an uptick. The Comedy Store was talking to them about becoming an essential business and 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. They they sort of 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?

Right. So, they're like, "Listen, we can do this. We can just have half capacity, temperature checks, do it right. They're doing it right in a lot of places all over the country. We can do this. The audience has to wear masks. This is totally doable." And so, they were right about to do that. And then post There's the other thing is we were trying to figure out like is it protest only? I think it's bars, too. The thing about bars is close talk. People are And loud talk, yeah.

Yeah, they're drunk and they're on top of each other. I think bars probably had a significant uptick. Lots lots of singing and lots of lots of vocalizing. Right? Churches and synagogues were were main vector for this. Yeah. but again, these are all things that are fairly common sensical and we can agree on. And yet we're beating the hell out of each other over this stuff. And there's the suggestion we know what to do. If only we just did it, this would stop. It's not going to stop.

Okay, it's not going to stop. It's it's a very transmissible disease. We don't have a vaccine. As long as people are out there, it's going to continue to pass. Wear a mask if you're in close proximity with others. And that's pretty much it. The hospitals are getting better at this, thank god. They Yes, they are. And the crazy thing was that they were saying Yeah. you can only protest if it's a Black Lives Matter protest. What about a protest for increasing your immunity? What about a protest for educating people to the the the techniques and the strategies for increasing your immune system?

It is They're out They're out there. And there's no discussion about this amongst health professionals. Excuse me, amongst politicians. If you listen to health professionals, people that really understand the human body, they'll tell you there's a lot of strategies. There's a lot of things you can do. First of all, eliminate alcohol. Eliminate caffeine. Eliminate sugar. Eliminate all the [ __ ] in your diet. Start taking vitamin supplements. Get outside. Get some vitamin D. Get get your body healthy. Exercise. Do Do all these things. And you will increase your immune system.

You increase your body's health. You don't hear a word of that. All of it is just stay inside. Lock You know, we have to stay apart to keep everybody safe. And god damn. The number one vector for transmission remains the home. Right? That's still the number one vector. society is the home. People going home and giving it to each other. And When they I remember for for me, one of the breaking points in L.A. was was when they decided they were going to shut down all open areas.

They're going to shut down all the parks. They're going to shut down all the beaches. And I was like, "What is this?" Well, not only that, it goes against science because there's been papers that have been studied that showed that the this virus dies almost instantaneously when it's exposed to sunlight or even artificial sunlight. Yeah, none of it makes any sense. 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.

It was 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. Well, people are panicking. You know, they're getting scared. And then the economy's collapsing. So, the economy collapsing at the same time as the George Floyd protests led people to start looting. And then people that didn't give a [ __ ] about George Floyd or Black Lives Matter were just stealing [ __ ] And then the police was letting them steal [ __ ] They were standing down in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, literally s- cops standing there while people are smashing media I got to say, the media coverage of this stuff is just awful.

The The media were cheering this stuff on. And they were simultaneously making two arguments that conflict with each other. One was, "These are mostly peaceful protests." First of all, mostly peaceful is the most is it's the loosest most loosely defined arbitrarily applied term in history. O.J. O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night. For like an hour 15, he It really not peaceful. But for the other hours between sunset and sunrise, he was unbelievably peaceful. Like I've never heard this term before where a protest turns into a vast riot, you know, wrecking all of Melrose, and everybody's like, "Well, it was mostly peaceful." Well, what the What is that?

So it So How about this? How about you either say that the protesters and the looters are two different groups of people, and we treat them differently. If you're protesting, that's first amendment activity. The minute you shatter a store window, you go to jail. Right? That's the way they should run. Or alternatively, if it's If you If you're saying they're the same group, then they need to be treated as lawbreakers. So I I believe the first. I believe if you're a protester, you should be protesting.

If you're a looter and a rioter, then you should go to jail. But the media refused to make that distinction, and then they act like the cops are the bad guys when they come in to to arrest people who are violating the law. I see this in Portland right now. They're trying to burn down the damn courthouse. And the And the feds come in and start arresting people, and people are like, "This is the Gestapo." It's like, okay. Speaking as one of the tribe, let me say, this is not like the Gestapo.

Okay? Like the 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. That wasn't like the Gestapo's thing. Like I'm sorry, but you decided that you wanted to throw a firebomb at the 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. Tough [ __ ] I mean, like I'm sorry, that's At some point, somebody's got to restore some semblance of law and order here.

Well, it's it's a weird situation because I don't exactly understand why they're attacking the courthouse. I don't exactly understand why they're smashing the windows at Amazon Go. It's Steve Martin, right? They They They must hate these paint cans. Right? From from The Jerk, right? But it's it's it it went from this to the literally tear down the structure of society. Well, this is where we get into sort of the deep philosophy point. And this is This is actually really the the the biggest problem right now on the racism point is the shifting definition of racism.

So I had the unfortunate experience of actually reading one of the best-selling books in the country, Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility. And let me just tell you, a greater pile of horse [ __ ] has never been produced by a bevy of horses. It is an awful book, and it is basically rooted in the same theory as Ibram Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist. The The basic definition of racism changes in this theory. So racism, you and I were sitting here discussing racism, and the way I define racism is probably the same way you define racism.

You believe in the inferiority or superiority of a group based on race. Of an individual based on their membership in that group, too, right? That would be racism. I believe that you're inferior or you're superior based on your race. End of story, right? That's That's racism. So Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi redefine racism to mean any societal structure that results in a racial inequality is itself racist. So any structure that results in a not exact proportion between whites and blacks in Does that make the NBA racist?

Exactly. Exactly. The answer is kind of yes, except that the NBA is not racist because obviously it benefits black people, right? I mean, now the NBA is not racist in except It's cuz the meritocracy is the reason the NBA is not racist. But Robin DiAngelo and Kendi both suggest that meritocracy is an aspect of whiteness. 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.

And so what they say is in order to be anti-racist, you have to want to tear down the entire system. They literally say this. I'm not I'm not really I know that I'm not misidentifying the argument because I've again I've read their books. The The basic notion that to be anti-racist, you have to tear down free market, or you have to tear down free speech, or you have to 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, and so it justifies that sort of stuff.

This is why you saw Nikole Hannah-Jones, the de facto editor of the New York Times 1619 Project lady, tweeting out that she appreciated that people were calling these the 1619 riots. Because once you say America is rooted in slavery and rooted in evil in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place, then robbing a shop is just the latest iteration of you fighting the system. Explain the 1619 correlation to people, if you would. Sure. So the 1619 Project is is something put forward by the New York Times.

It's not good history. There are four Pulitzer Prize-winning historians who said this is not good history. The basic argument is the United States was not founded in 1776 with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The count 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, and that all of the Declaration of Independence is basically a lie.

That the principles of all men are created equal, that was a lie when it was written, and it's a lie now. That the idea that we have rights that preexist government, that's a lie. All of these things are lies. The Constitution was built in order to enshrine white supremacy, and no evolution has taken place. So they don't They They They essentially make the argument that from 1619 to 2020 is a continuum. Racism has gone underground a little bit, but it's still there, and it's still It's still implicit in all of our systems.

So the 1619 Project has essays blaming literally everything on racism. 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. Traffic patterns in the United States is due to systematic American racism. Every racial disparity is attributable to a system that was rooted in slavery. 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.

And that is a great stain and a blot on America. But the story of America is trying to fulfill the promises of the Declaration of Independence over time, make those promises available to everybody. And this isn't my argument. This is Martin Luther King Jr.'s argument when he talks on in the March on Washington about fulfilling the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence. He says, "We're here to cash the check, right? You issued us the check, and then you didn't let black Americans be Americans. We're here to cash the check." Is the argument Frederick Douglass, the freed slave, makes in 1852.

Makes a famous speech before slavery is ended. He says July 4th doesn't mean anything to black Americans because we're not included in the bargain. Include us in the bargain. 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. Free speech, uh free assembly, all the things you see in the Constitution. That those things brought about greater freedom and prosperity than anything else and helped us overcome the sins that are present in all human societies and were present in the United States in extreme ways as well.

But that's the That's the counter narrative, right? The 1619 Project says that all that was basically nonsense and that America's just a a history of whites keeping blacks down, and that no progress has essentially been made. If there is progress, it's mostly a lie. And so every disparity now can be attributed to historic disparities between white and black. Is there middle ground? Do So if we look at 1776, and we look at the Declaration of Independence, and we look at America today in 2020, w- There clearly is some impact in the echoes of slavery, and then after that, Jim Crow.

There's clearly some impact in these deeply impoverished communities that don't seem to advance. Yes. So the To to to make the argument about institutional racism, there There's a couple ways you can read this. When people say systemic racism or institutional racism, I usually ask them to be a little more specific in what they mean cuz there are a few ways you can read that. One is history has impact. Of course, that's true, right? That's true for everybody. It's true in your family history. If you had 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?

People have histories, those histories are embedded in their life experiences, and that's true for societies as well. All of that is for sure true. Then there's the question as to whether the institutions today are racist. And that's not quite the same thing. Right? Because history has consequences is not the same thing as saying the rules today are racist. Because the rules today are not racist, actually. The rules today are quite not racist. So But historically, it's fairly recent. If you go from the Civil Rights Movement to 2020, we're really not talking about that much time.

We're talking three generations, but 50 plus years. 60 years, yeah. I mean, it's But Right, but in the world of, you know, In the best span of human history, it's not small amount of time. So clearly there's some impact of both racism and Jim Crow laws. So that That's where I'm saying there's a middle ground. Yeah, and and it's It is important for people on my side of the aisle, conservatives, to acknowledge and recognize the importance of of history in people's living situations now. 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 because Right, but there's always something like that.

There's always like extremes on each position, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Yeah, but I don't think that it lies as far in in the dead center of that as people I think want it to. Mhm. 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. Right? That is the problem That That's the way the those issues get alleviated.

When Jews arrived in the United States in the in the early 20th century, to talk of my people, when they when they came, they were impoverished, they didn't speak the language, they were banned from country clubs, there was open discrimination against them, they were banned from Harvard, right? Harvard Law School had quotas on Jews. The The way to fight against that is to make good decisions. And so the You fight against the system to make sure that the system has rules that apply equally to everyone.

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, gang-ridden, deeply impoverished communities. 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 pick up a gun and shoot somebody.

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 [ __ ] up environment where that's what he models, where everything around him is crime and gangs, and you imitate your atmosphere, which what all humans do. Right, but the answer is there's only one way to break that chain. What what way is that? That way is to not pick up a gun and shoot somebody. 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.

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. At some point personal agency has to come in. Some It does, but Because education, education, and and teaching them about personal agency and and letting them understand that there is 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, that wind up going to jail, that there are other options.

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. Well, I 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. And that's literally the worst thing you can say to a kid.

What you should be saying is look at how your grandfather was born behind the eight ball and look how hard he had to work in order to get ahead. And look at all the opportunities 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, the idea of saying to a kid like that, "Hey, don't pick up a gun and shoot somebody." It's way That's way too simplistic a version of of their future in my in my opinion.

Well, I mean I don't The problem is I don't see an alternative solution. I think the alternative solution I think an alternative solution is there has to be some sort of large-scale intervention in these communities to do something about what what what has already been set in motion and the momentum that keeps continuing decade after decade. I don't know what could be done. Well, but that that's the problem is that I think that a lot of the solutions that have been proposed have already been tried.

Meaning that what? Okay, so for example, LBJ thought that the way to alleviate a lot of these inequalities was the war on poverty. And he he openly talked about this. 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. 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.' Right? 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.

And so the idea was we're going to fight this war on poverty and alleviate poverty largely through transfer payments and and through the government taking a forcible step in favor of alleviating people's lives. 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 were living under the poverty line by the late '70s. The the the real issues that that are inter that are that are creating intergenerational poverty, everyone knows this but remains true.

The number one predictor of intergenerational poverty in the United States remains single motherhood. The single motherhood rate in the black community was 20% in 1960. It is upward of 70% today. That's not unique to the black community, by the way. It's true in the white community as well. The five percent of white kids were born out of wedlock in 1960. Today it's upward of 40%. That is not Something has happened and it is not a matter of increased racism. That's not happening because of increased racism.

Right? That that is happening because there's been a cultural change that does not place tremendous emphasis for black or white or for anybody on personal responsibility and personal agency. There needs to be a mindset change. We do this, by the way, in all other areas of American life except for the most important decisions. In the area of sports, nobody does this routine. In the area There's a point Shelby Steele makes. In the area of sports, if a kid is not does not have a good jump shot, nobody says to him, "You know what?

You don't have a good jump shot cuz 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." We say, "Okay, if you want to be on the team, you're going to have to learn to shoot a jump shot." Right? That That sounds harsh. That sounds bad. sports are different? Here's why sports are different cuz sports you enter them independently of your culture. You you you you base what you're trying to do on the parameters of the rules and the people that you're competing against.

That's how you look at it. So you whatever culture you're from, you you walk into this new thing with this very rigid set of rules. Right? I don't I don't think white people or Jews or Asians have a monopoly on valuing education or monopoly on hard work or punctuality or anything. I think that black people have exactly the the same capacity as any people of any other race to do all of these things and those are the preconditions for success. You either meet them or you don't.

I mean that that's true for everybody. But don't for success, 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 the lives that you imitate and the influences that you have around you. Someone has to do something to influence those kids in a different way. Look, 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 a bad kid.

Like it it gave me something to focus on. There's And and I didn't grow up in a bad environment, but it wasn't the best. There's a lot of people out there that grow up in horrific environments and they never have that thing. They never have something. They they don't have a father around or they don't have a mother around or whatever whatever bad influences they have are overwhelming. And they they don't It's it's very difficult for someone to just air quotes get their [ __ ] together.

It's very difficult. That's why to this day there's so many books about losing weight. Don't you think everybody wants to lose weight that's fat? They do. They Everybody who's fat wants to be thin. They do. But it's [ __ ] hard. And that's nothing For sure. to changing your whole life. 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. Like at a certain point, if you want to lose the weight, you got to figure out a way to lose the weight.

That's true, but this is based on the information that I have. I have this vast scope of information that I've been able to absorb. 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. Well, so totally true. Totally true. And that's why again, more information needs to get into areas. I agree with a lot of the opportunities that needed to be provided by education.

Getting people to be educated outside their local public school would be a good change. I mean Being able to like move outside your crap local public school and go somewhere else would be good. 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. Right. And tell them how to do it. But none of this has to do with 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.

Well, maybe not, but there there has been a very small amount of emphasis placed on taking these impoverished communities and figure out how to engineer them out of the situation. Well, I don't think that's true. So I don't think that's true. Yeah, I mean the amount that we've spent on a federal level and a state level on educational programs and poverty programs over time, but No, on a on a year-to-year level. I mean these are these are enormous quantities of money. This is not a This is not really a money problem.

It really is not a money problem in just terms of You could sign everybody a check tomorrow, right? The the predicate So the the predicate for the slavery reparations movement is exactly this. Sign everybody a $80,000 check and the problem will be alleviated. No, it won't. I don't think that's right. they'll spend the $80,000 and they'll be right back where they started from. I 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.

I So on that stuff, we totally agree. The only point that I'm making about the 1619 Project is when you teach people that they are the victims of a society, it makes it very difficult for them to succeed. The story of of black America should be a story of unbelievably brave people triumphing over systems that sucked. Right? I mean that that is the story of black America. Most black Americans do not live under the poverty line in the United States. There's a huge black middle class.

There's a black upper class. Yes, there is. Let's simplify this if we can. Sure. If Ben Shapiro is the king of the world, how do you fix Baltimore? How do you fix Detroit? How do you fix the south side of Chicago? Okay, so here's the unpopular view, but it happens to be empirically correct. The first thing you have to do is you have to load the place with police. You got to load the place with police because you have to stop crime. Once you stop crime, then businesses are happy to invest in those areas.

You're not going to get businesses to invest in those areas and provide jobs unless the crime is gone. You need In fact, one of the reasons that you have such differential in racial crime in the United States is because of white racism. And this is a point that Jean Lee writer for the LA Times made. She wrote 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? Enjoy." And so the crime rates ended up spiking because there were no police there. 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. You have to have a reestablishment of faith in churches, right? You need social institutions outside of government that are promoting things like family. You need You need more 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.

Right? You need opportunity the same way that opportunity is built anywhere else on Earth. You need to provide a safe space for business to work and for free speech to flourish and for education to be valued. You need to go in 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. If you're a black kid and you graduate high school with any level of achievement, you'll have a very solid shot of at least going to a community college.

And if you score even decently on the SATs of going to a very high-level college, right? Affirmative action programs are extraordinarily common across the United States. But the first message is, we are going to ensure that law and order prevail here, a safe space for life, liberty, and property. And 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.

It is in the moment, the drugs, the crime, the fact that there are no fathers in a lot of these areas. Roland Fryer, black professor at Harvard, he's done excellent work showing that actually the number one factor in allowing kids to to rise is not even having a father in the home. It's how many fathers there are generally in a community. Mhm. So you can you can have a single mom, but there are a lot of other male father figures around that helps fill in the gap, right?

These these are practical things. 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 would be a solution here. 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. I think you're 100% right on that, and I think although that might be an unpopular opinion, I agree with you.

I think that is very important. Now, what do you do in this environment when you look at the way people distrust the police now in particular? I mean I mean I've been reading stories about cops going to Five Guys Burgers and they they can't get served cuz people won't serve cops. And this idea that all cops are bad. And this is a very really disturbing perspective to me because you're seeing what's happening right now in Chicago. 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.

So how do you reaffirm the trust in in in law enforcement and what do you do to reform law enforcement? Because clearly there are some people that are cops that should not be cops. 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. And one of them is that you can abridge qualified immunity in certain areas. So qualified immunity is the idea that you're not liable to civil suit if you don't do something bad that has specifically had a precedent in law.

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. You could you could curb that. It's a little complicated. 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. The actual What if you do something bad? What if you shoot somebody while you're operating like Right. So so the the reason that qualified immunity as currently understood under Supreme Court doctrine is too broad is because that the standard used to be you would have to act as a reasonable police officer.

If you acted as a reasonable police officer and you took a a reasonable action, right? Somebody went for their waistband, they had an object in there, you didn't know if it was a gun, you shot them, right? You wouldn't presumably be suable because that's still reasonable. You track a guy down, you shoot him in the back, you know, and and then you plant a gun on him. That presumably would be suable, right? He'd be personally liable. So the the the way that Supreme Court has done this is they broadened 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.

So that needs to be curbed. That's one thing. Second, police union contracts need to be utterly redone across the country. Police union contracts right now protect a lot of bad cops. Right? But because the police unions are designed to protect the members the members of the union, just like any other union. And so what that means is that police unions I'm 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.

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 or something. Those are those are some easy things that you could do right off the bat. But the the biggest thing right now, the biggest factor in terms of lack of faith between police and and citizens really is the media because there's been a lot of talk about the racial constituency of a police forces. The the majority of the LAPD is minority.

The majority of the Baltimore PD is minority. I believe that a huge percentage of the of the Chicago PD is minority. So really it's not about, you know, lots of white cops in black neighborhoods. In Baltimore, it's a lot of black cops in black neighborhoods. And that has not solved the problem of people mistrusting the police on an endemic level. Well, it's an inherently difficult job. it's a rotten job, man. I mean I I have nothing but for for good cops, those they're heroes. And the vast majority of cops are good cops and they're heroes.

Yeah, I read a meme the other day that's very accurate. It said, if you have 130 good cops and 12 cops, you have or 12 cops that are bad, you have 12 bad cops. 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. Yeah. And I think that that's right. I think that's right, too. I think that it is also true that our standard of what constitutes a bad cop has in some ways become much more stringent.

So for example, there there are cases that have become national stories in which a cop was labeled a bad cop and he wasn't a bad cop. Right, but there are bad cops. For sure. Look look, here's a great example. The the cops that pushed down that old man in in where was it? Buffalo, New York? Is that where it was? Cracked his skull, yep. That's [ __ ] crazy. I mean and that's white on white crime, right? I mean is a white guy pushes this old man down and the most bonkers part about that was the way the president reacted.

Like oh, the way he fell seemed funny. Maybe he was Antifa. Maybe he was undercover. Like there was literally the worst possible reaction to watching an elderly senior citizen get pushed down by a young strong man. President Trump had the worst possible reaction to a thing to a thing? I can't believe it. Yeah, I mean Unknown. President Trump having bad reactions today. Look, I'm I'm a big supporter of law enforcement. I have a lot of friends that are cops. I know a lot of not a lot of people from martial arts that are cops from the UFC.

I know a lot of cops from jiu-jitsu. I knew a lot of cops growing up from all the different martial arts disciplines that I engaged in. A lot of cops get involved in that. There's a lot of good cops. There's a lot of good people out there, but it is a [ __ ] insane job and so many of them have PTSD. For sure. And 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.

It's just nonsense. It's not only nonsense, it's counterproductive nonsense. And you're seeing it play out. It is a threat often times. is on a data level an extraordinarily small threat. Mhm. Law enforcement Law enforcement as a threat to black life on a generalized level is extraordinarily small. 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. The problem is when it happens, it doesn't matter what the statistics are.

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. Well, and this is why I say that the media's treatment of this stuff is just horrific. It's not just the media. It's it's social media. Social social media has blown this stuff up and it's gotten to the point where if you say that's a horrible situation, that's also an anecdotal situation. Here's some data. If you present the data, it's like, well, you're are you ignoring people's lived experiences?

That's racist. How can you present the data? The data is the data doesn't take into account the full story. Nobody takes into account an awful lot of the story, which is why it's called data. Right? Like I I just don't anecdotal evidence is evidence of an anecdote. 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.

Well, I think we both agree that's a terrible idea. But when you look at these videos, the positive side, if there is any positive side, is that it's they're accountable now. And this has been going on forever. If you talk to people that are black that grew up in in poverty-stricken areas, they will tell you horrific stories about being abused by cops. And I I think the number's like 25% more likely a black person or brown person getting any sort of interaction with a cop is 25% more likely to become physical or for them to be abused.

That's that's real. I mean when you look at the statistics of them being killed, yeah, white people get killed more by cops than black people. But there's way more white people. No, no. Even on a percentage basis, you have to use the control group of crime. You can't use the control group of raw population. So you have to look at people who are in situations where a deadly interaction is likely. There have been multiple studies that show that black people are not in more danger of being shot by cops than than white people.

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? That's the Roland Fryer study. There are a few confounds that have yet to be sort of worked out. probably white people are less likely to believe that the cops going to kill them. Whereas black people are probably convinced that cops going to kill them. That might that might play a factor in why there's more white people being killed by cops that that may very well be true.

It may also be that low-level uses of force is maybe of force maybe disparate. If you think that the cop's likely to be a racist, then you might be more likely to resist the cop and then he might be more likely to rough you up. So it's it's very difficult to to rub out the confounds there. 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.

Like if you're talking about actual murders, white people are killed by white people. Black people are killed by black people. you know, mostly. Right. It's it's intra-racial, right? There's there's very little interracial crime, like black on white or white on black in the United States. There's a lot of intra-racial crime. So a lot of white people victimizing white people and black people victimizing black people. And the question is, how do you stop that? This is why I don't know if you saw this interview. It's kind amazing interview.

Terry Crews, the actor, Yeah. he was on with he was on Don Lemon. Right, and Don Lemon is doing the Black Lives Matter slogan in and Terry Crews says, well, all lives matter. And Don Lemon says, but no, Black Lives Matter doesn't mean all Black Lives Matter. Right, but Terry Crews said all Black Lives Matter and he said, no, no, no, not all Black Lives Matter, only Black Lives Matter. We're only talking about police brutality right now. And Terry Crews was like, well, why aren't we talking about all Black Lives Matter?

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? And this is where the slogan hearing gets in the way of actual progress because ideology hits facts. Right, exactly. It gets very weird. And Terry Crews was called some terrible names for that, but then a video surfaced of Don Lemon from 2013 chastising black people. on that, right? He sounds like me. He's talking about exactly like you. It's hilarious. Pull your pants up, get your [ __ ] together, you know, like He's literally saying things like, don't have babies out of wedlock, right?

Stay in school, which by the way, again, all of this is common sensical and true for all races. It is not just black people. Young white people in Appalachia need to get their [ __ ] together. Everybody needs to get their [ __ ] together. young white people in Appalachia are dealing with the same thing. What's around them all the time is crime, people taking pills, everyone having babies out of wedlock, people impoverished, no hope, no no potential for escape. I mean That that is but the first thing that has to change the first so my dad had a when when I was, you know, 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.

You decide to get married and then you find a girl. Meaning that you you have to sort of make up your mind that you're in the mode of This might be where we disagree the most. That's a good way to get hooked up with the wrong lady, bro. 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. get married when you love a girl so much you're willing to do something so [ __ ] stupid that you're willing to get married to her.

Because getting married to her is How else are we going to get married? less painful to you than the idea of losing that person. Because I I look, I think marriage, the good thing about it is that there's financial protection for the family, financial particularly when there's children involved. I think that's when it's the most important thing. You know, I think financial protection for the children I Look, I grew up without child support. My father was a deadbeat dad. So, I know what it's like to be poor because your father doesn't support you.

I think that's horrific. I've seen it in many situations. I I know many people that have been the victim of this. It's disgusting. There are a lot of shitty men out there that don't take care of their kids. White, black, Asian, it's universal. That needs 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. I think that's significant. When it comes to bringing the state in to somehow or another solidify your love, like, you know, I love you, you love me, but let's bring in a bunch of [ __ ] people we don't know and write it down on paper.

That's nonsense. totally agree with that, obviously. 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. Well, sometimes you meet someone, that's why you want to make a change. No, but okay, so not to get into marital advice here, but But I have some you know, I've been married for for 12 years at this point. Thank God, very happy marriage. We have three kids and the 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.

If you are if you make up your mind you want to get married, what you're going to look for is commonality of values. Who is the person you want to build your life with? Do you share interests? Do you share a vision for the future? 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. I don't think you fall in love with someone that you don't share values with.

I think you you think they're hot and you want to [ __ ] them. Well, people mix this stuff up pretty regularly. Well, people are silly. People are indeed silly. People do People tattoo their eyeballs, man. They do a lot of dumb [ __ ] You live in a world I don't, man. Well, that's not my world. I don't have any friends with eyeballs tattooed, but people make mistakes with they get attracted to someone physically and, you know, particularly men are and I guess women, too, I'm just not one of them are attracted often times by people they think are sexy, but are a bad choice in terms of a life partner.

Right. But I don't think you fall in love with those people. They just become How many Jews have married a girl just because they thought they were hot? There are a lot a lot a lot. So. period. It's not just Jews, like the drug of sexual attraction is the most sold drug in the United States. It it sells cars, it sells homes, it literally it sells lifestyles. Pornography. Yeah, but what what is that? I mean, when you're seeing a woman with a short skirt on and long legs walking like like lustfully around a car, what do you What is she What are you saying?

You're saying IF YOU BUY THIS CAR, maybe you can [ __ ] this girl. Well, of The worst [ __ ] false advertising we have in America. this is why when it comes to marriage, I think that it's important to actually put your large head before it before your other one. You know, that Jonathan Haidt in his book his book called The Happiness Hypothesis. Right, he and he talks about this, right? He talks about the fact that people make a very large scale mistake about marriage, which is they think that the passion you feel at the very beginning is what you're going to feel 40 years in and that's not the way this works.

It starts off where your passionate love level for somebody, meaning like lust and how much you want to get them in bed and how much you want to be with them all the time is at like 100 and your and your level of kind of committed love, right? That that that level of love where you have shared values, that matters to you like this much. And then over time, after about like two years, the passionate love starts to decline. And by the time you're 60, then you better have shared values cuz after 60 years, it ain't going to be like it was when you were 20.

Right? 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. That's sound advice, but well, I See, that's where I disagree cuz 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. Then that's where you and I probably disagree.

Yeah, I mean, I think that it is a bad idea generally. And again, I think that it is a bad idea because A lot of people out there that have had some really good times with those bad ideas, I'm sure. and it may be that when I die, I look back and that is one of my great regrets, my friend, but let me just say that that I think that the the the thing that that has been is in my life, at least, more than made up for by the relationship that I have with my wife.

So, I can I'll go anecdotal there, but I also will I'll go data driven, which is the longer you live together with somebody before you get married, the higher divorce rate after. So, that that is The higher the divorce rate after? Mhm. If you live with somebody a long time with somebody and then you get married, there is a a higher percentage chance you will end up divorced. That's interesting. I wonder why that is. Probably because of the open window syndrome. Like people feel like, okay, I lived with you for 3 years, why aren't we married yet?

Why aren't we married yet? Because the guy's like, oh, the window's still open. He doesn't feel completely committed. So, once the guy does sign off, she's like, why didn't you do this 5 years ago? Well, there's some of that and also it feels like everybody kind of settled. Mhm. Right? Like if it was I'm so committed to this I want to get married right now. Maybe they just did mushrooms together and realized they really love each other. Again, different world, man. Like I mean, but but listen, you know, you all I I have a different experience from everybody else.

I dated my wife for for 3 months, we got engaged, we were married within 10 months, we married for 12 years, we were both virgins when we married. So, we're old school. Clearly works for you. 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 I feel like that's complicated. I mean, I'll be honest, like I would think those people are trying to I I know people that do that.

And I almost universally believe that they are distracting themselves from their life. They distract themselves from either their career, their fulfilling their potential, whether it's as an artist or as a creative person or as a a person who's pursuing a discipline. 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 doing it to they're distracting themselves. And they don't realize it at the time. They just keep keep getting pulled into this direction, pulled in that direction.

It's because you don't have a primary focus on something that's very important to you. Yes. You know, and it doesn't mean that you have to be with this person for the rest of your life. It doesn't mean that you have to only be with one person, but when I see a guy that is, you know, involved in swinging or something like that and they they're balancing a bunch of different gals, trust me, that you that you're going to waste time, man. You don't There's not enough time in this life for that.

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. Yes. And so, that's true whether you're talking marriage, it's true whether you're talking educational success, whether you're talking career. And people, you know, making bad decisions because distractions are distractions. Distractions are distractions with every discipline and I think relationships are a discipline in a lot of ways. I totally agree. I mean, and and it is true that you know, you have to make the the pre-investment and you have to make the commitment that you're going to continue to invest in the relationship as as time goes on.

Yeah. And that's that's where people fall off the wagon. That's why you see a lot of divorces around year three. Right? As that passionate love kind of goes down and the companionate love is the name of the term. 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. And it's like, of course not. Of course not. That's just the way it works. Well, that's nature's biological trick. The ultimate biological trick is like, look, when we were monkeys hiding from eagles, okay?

You had to [ __ ] as much as you could and and spread that seed around cuz you likely only had five or six years on this earth, right? And you dead at age 32, man. Yeah, you were trying to just get as much of your DNA out there as you possibly could. That's still inside of us. That program is still inside of us. And that program is when you see a man and he's with a beautiful woman, but another beautiful woman walks by is like looking at her and thinking maybe I can do better.

That's a thing that is programmed into your DNA, but you have to understand what that is. If you're a man and you understand what that is, you go oh, this is nature and its dirty little trick. Dirty little trick trying to get me to spread my seed. Bret Bret Weinstein he uh illuminated this in a really interesting way. He was saying to me, "What's the difference between beautiful and hot?" And I said uh I don't know, what is the difference? He's like beautiful is someone who you look at and you're like, "Wow, that person looks beautiful.

That's lovely. They have a beautiful face or wonderful eyes. They look great. Hot is someone who's wearing like a short skirt and their tits are popping out. And you look at that person and you go, "This is an opportunity for to spread my DNA with no commitment." And that's what that is. That's That's the pull. And hot, that kind of hot is what sold that cheap quick fast food sort of thing. That's what porn is. Porn is all hot. Porn is not beautiful. It's not And I don't think porn's bad either.

But porn is all hot. It's all dirty girls. It's all your stepmom. Your dad's off playing golf. It's that kind of [ __ ] you know? It's It's like you you know you you you're the pizza guy. You show up and two girls are having a pillow fight. Yeah, exactly. That's it's it's your it's your lizard brain versus your prefrontal cortex. Exactly. Exactly. It's your monkey brain. Exactly. That monkey that wants to hide from the eagle. That's what it is. It's like It's like, "Huh, I could just do this real quick." the board you're going to have a a better life.

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. Yes, unless you're Hugh Hefner. I don't know if he he had a good life or not. He seemed I know some people who worked with him in near the end. Yeah. He seemed kind of miserable. Well, towards the end I'm sure he was miserable. He's an 80-year-old guy hanging out with 20-year-olds. What the [ __ ] do you have to say to these people?

Right? It's like you were talking about with O.J. Simpson. O.J. Simpson had a mostly peaceful life. mostly peaceful death. Well, his life is mostly annoying. The time that he gets to [ __ ] them, when you're 80 years old, you only get to [ __ ] those 24-year-olds for like How long can he last? Once every 6 weeks, what do you think? 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?

Right. At that age. So, how is he going to have sex for 20 minutes? So, if he 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 Tik Tok and all kinds of other stupid [ __ ] He's like He's like, "Remember when Frank Sinatra was here and we're banging everything in sight?" And he's like, "Those were the good old days." I was wearing a robe. I had a pipe. We were having fun. I had a TV show.

I had a I had my own channel. He had a Playboy channel for a while. Yeah, I think it's the image of it is way more interesting than the actual act of living that life. Yep. And I think that again, that that goes back to you know, every bad decision people make is is tied into this. Is the image of things looks way better than the actuality of things. It's true in politics. It's true in love. It's true in a lot of things. Yeah. And so you actually have to look at the actuality of things and You don't want to be an 80-year-old guy living with five 24-year-old girls.

You just don't. That guy lived in hell, I guarantee you. I bet his life is mostly annoying. But every now and then while he's having sex with those 24-year-olds, he's probably like, "I can't believe this is real." It's real. For like 30 seconds. 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 of a female human being. And then she's like, "Buy me stuff." And he's like, "Oh god." Exactly.

So, all you have to do make me famous. Yeah. Yep. Worked out great. Well, you know, The grotto the gro- By the end it seemed like it was pretty dingy. Dude, I went there. I I hosted a marijuana policy project uh thing there once. And uh of course Sounds like a lot of policy. Sounds like a lot of policy happening. But one of the things they did was like we were wandering around the grotto. an AI summit. You know, it's like when I go to Heritage Foundation, it's what it sounds like right there.

It was It was It was a fun night. Why? What I remember, you know, it was There was a lot of marijuana that was smoked. It was quite a blurry evening. But I remember thinking like, "My god, this grotto is so outdated." Like it had like a [ __ ] old ass phone there and like I'm like, "How many How many people [ __ ] in here? Like how weird is this?" There's generations of of human residue in here. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe not like the best times either, you know?

It's like a lot of it is It's just It's what you think it is versus what it is, you know? Yep. Well, you know, it's all working. It is. Let's work on on thinking about what things are rather than what we would like them to be because accepting reality is is a hard one. Accepting reality is a real tough one. Yeah, that's a problem. It's a problem with advertising too, right? Cuz advertising shows you And social media, right? Social media is Well, that's another the other Jonathan Haidt book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which is amazing.

And it is really illuminates and um I'm waiting for my kids to read it. I think maybe this year is a good time for my 12-year-old just to understand that this is this is a real issue with children that are comparing their lives to these Oh, here's a here's an example. I want to show you something. I haven't actually put this up anywhere, but this is actually important because this is so goddamn crazy. I want to show you something. Um this is something that my daughter did.

Uh this is My daughter is 10, okay? That's her. Look at that. god. That's not a 10-year-old. You're right. It's not a 10-year-old. That's like a 20-year-old right there. Exactly. How's that possible? How's that my 10-year-old daughter? she watch a YouTube makeup tutorial or something? No, she used a [ __ ] app. Ah. She used an app that turned her into It turned her into a woman. Like what the [ __ ] is that? So, like when you're you're seeing things like that, what is that?

How are they doing that? And who's doing that? So, if you're a girl and you are overweight or you have you don't like the structure of your face or you know, whatever that's bothering you. You have acne. And you see a girl like that and she's she's like, "Can't believe I'm graduating high school. LOL. What do I do now?" And you see this That's not even her. Right. This is my 10-year-old. She doesn't look anything like that. Like she showed She's like, "Daddy, look. This is what I look like." I go, "That is not what you look like." I don't know what the [ __ ] you just said.

That's not what you look like. And so I had her go through this with me and show me what she did. I'm like, "Show me how you did this. Like what are you doing?" She's using some weird app like like Was it Khloe Kardashian, the one who changed her whole head? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that. Like and yeah, this is it's such a recipe for failure. It really is. It's such a recipe for failure cuz you're always going to fall short of that. And it's one thing to shoot for better.

It's another thing to to shoot for the unobtainable and then be upset when you can never reach the unobtainable. But it's sick. It's It's sick because you're these people don't even look like that. And then you look at that and you go, "Why don't I look like that?" Like they don't even look like that. The amount of people that actually look like that that that image that I just showed you is so small. So unattainable. 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. Society values that look and that means society is flawed. And it's like, "Well, how about this? How about like people are flawed. Society's flawed. You're flawed. Do the best you can." Everything is flawed. But that's not even really what the problem is. What the problem is we've created a technology that we're not equipped to manage. We're not equipped to navigate social media. We didn't grow up with it. We didn't evolve with it. This is some new thing.

us now. No, it's true. It's 100% true. I mean, they've built these apps that are specifically designed to be addictive, right? I mean, they're specifically designed to prey on certain parts of your brain that are you're not really in control of that are mostly subconscious. And that is scary stuff for sure. I mean, you can be manipulated by by that stuff. It's You can make people aware of it very Very My kids aren't getting like I I seriously will not give them a smartphone until they're probably mid-teens, late teens.

Will they get a gun first? Probably. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. I feel I feel like it's better logic. I mean, I'd rather that my 13-year-old know how to shoot than my 13-year-old know how to browse porn. Yes, I think that is good logic. You know, what's it really That's a real issue with boys. Um boys that have access instantaneously I mean, if you give a boy a phone, you're basically saying, "Here, little fellow. Go watch people fuck." Cuz they're going to. That's the first thing they're going to do when you're not around.

are all sorts of studies that demonstrate that this leads to relationship and sexual insufficiency later and it's it ain't good. It ain't good. 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. Right. What percentage of American males do you think are addicted to porn at this It's a giant percentage. to be 50%, right? I mean, it's it's got it's got to be extraordinarily high percentage.

And none of that is good for relations between men and women. And then you 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. Now they're praising sex workers, It is weird. They they went completely the other direction. And I just thought in what what Hugh Hefner fantasy did women decide that all the women at Hugh Hefner's mansion were actually super duper empowered? Like that that does not seem like the most super empowering lifestyle.

Like you make your choices, man. It's a free country, but my wife's a doctor and I feel like that's more empowering than like getting screwed by an 80-year-old for for, you know, pocket change. on what kind of car you buy, Zera. My wife's a doctor. She can get whatever car she damn well pleases, my friend. What happened? What happened that that became like empowerment? Like how did What Where was the shift? I think there was a shift and it's it's a shift that's happened throughout American society that 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.

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? We don't want to be hypocrites. We're getting rid of all standards whatsoever. Everybody shouldn't have standards and if you believe that anybody should have standards, then you're a hypocrite. And when all the standards go, then everything goes. So like I actually kind of agree with the original feminist idea that men were kind of acting like sexist jackasses and they should stop that.

But the solution to that was not, okay, now women should imitate men at their worst and that's a freer or better society. Like 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. I look at it like sex sexual televangelists. That's what I look at like pornography like. I think that you should be allowed to rip people off with a really obvious ruse.

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." It's almost like a good little pitfall to have out there in society to teach people that some folks can be deceptive. 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 televangelists. Yeah, that's deserved. At a certain point you're like, "Okay, I sign off on this." Come on, stupid.

Yeah. You didn't see this coming? Listen, this is this is a great country. I mean it really is. Like you can make money doing pretty much anything. Like when people say it's hard to make money in this country, there there are a lot of people making money a lot of different ways in this country. And I mean for God's sake, Colin Kaepernick has made millions of dollars kneeling for the national anthem. It feels like and calling America racist while cashing the check. This is a this is a great damned country.

Well, we now we're getting into the weeds. I just wanted to talk about girls ripping dudes off. you did, but we we can go back there, man. That's okay. But the Colin Kaepernick thing, all right. 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? Just let it just put it to the forefront. Let people like let people understand that this is a problem. No. Not at all? No no no 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.

Right? So Martin Luther King said, "In the name of the flag, civil rights are necessary." Booker T. Washington said, "In the name of the flag, civil rights are necessary." They didn't say the American flag stands for racism and Jim Crow. They said the American flag stands for something beyond that. Live up to the American flag. But here's here's my thing. Trashing the American flag as like endemic of police brutality is First of all, it's [ __ ] but second of all, it's actually divisive on an issue that does not need to be divisive.

Like nobody is in favor of police brutality, nor should anyone be. Right. Here's a counterpoint. Why is it trashing the American flag to take a knee? Isn't that in in some ways just another gesture of respect? 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. You're not standing up and going, "Fuck the American flag. [ __ ] these people." You're actually taking it to another level of respect. You're taking a knee.

You're bending the knee. 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 it 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. This is how I treat racist police killing black people. I I take that moment to take a knee." Like how is that so disrespectful? Like how is that any It's a just a silent gesture.

It's not uniform. Like it's not doing this thing that everybody else is doing, but you're doing something that's very respectful. You're taking a knee. And well, that's certainly not the way that he intended when he first started that way. I mean if you if you want to interpret that way, you can. was? Because he literally talked about it. I mean he said that America is a He said he wanted to highlight that. Right. He said but he said America is a systemically racist country. He wore socks with pictures of cops as pigs on them.

He wore Oh, yeah. I didn't know Oh, yeah. And I mean Colin Kaepernick is a terrible spokesperson for this movement. Like again, like these are these should be one that have taken a knee and don't you think that but if you just look at the gesture itself, isn't taking a knee even more respectful than standing with your hand over your heart? I mean then I imagine millions of us would routinely take a knee for the American flag. I mean the idea of if that was the thing you had to do.

If the if the but again the idea decided to stand and put his hand over his heart. Really, it's just it's sort of a traditional thing we're we're arguing over. Well, it I mean it isn't the way that it was originally expressed. It sort of morphed over time to the point where it doesn't necessarily mean what he originally meant it to mean. you." while everybody else has their hand over their heart in silence. He's taking a knee. He he didn't mean it as an FU. I mean there's no question that's what he meant it as.

He And it wasn't even over something that actually made sense. 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. Right. Colin Kaepernick taking the knee 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. But he's not a statistician, right? So he's looking at things like the Eric Garner case or, you know, the which is a a terrible one, right?

There's there's cases that you see like when the guy's just selling loose cigarettes and they're strangling him in front of the store. It's terrible case. You see something like that and that motivates him to do that. And I know what you're saying that these are anecdotes and this is doesn't encompass the full statistics of cops versus black men and how it what what is exactly is happening, but that's not his area of expertise anyway. He has he has an issue that. So making him a spokesperson for a movement where he has no expertise is a weird thing to do.

There are plenty of people who talk about this with actual statistical Right. But if you're a knowledge a famous person and you you decide to take this big stand publicly like that, you become a martyr. for Blaine Gabbert, yeah. After you get benched for Blaine Gabbert and take millions of bucks from a major corporation currently Who's Blaine? Is that the guy that passed him? Yeah, the the immortal Blaine Gabbert, the Hall of Famer Blaine Gabbert who played like No, no, he's No, Blaine Blaine Blaine Gabbert was a an NFL quarterback who sucked.

I mean he was terrible and and they they benched Colin Kaepernick for him. And it was after he got benched that he started doing the kneeling for the for the American flag. It's a pretty good gig. a sports broadcaster who knows nothing about sports. Listen, people try to talk to me about athletes. Jamie Listen, if he had 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, Mhm. I wouldn't be arguing with it. He didn't explain it that way.

That That wasn't That wasn't the way it went down. But it's just him. What do you think about guy There's certain guys that like lock arms during the American flag? no problem with that. Okay. Locking arms is okay, but kneeling's bad? Well, no. Well, the way that he characterized his kneeling was bad. Meaning like I'm but what about other people that kneel? If they characterize it differently, it means a different thing. Okay. Right? I mean meaning meaning like what it originally was is what it was.

I'm not going to retcon He was the first to do it, right? Right. And then he and then he made millions of dollars for his bravery. Again, I don't think it takes a whole hell of a lot of bravery to be benched for Blaine Gabbert, take a knee, make millions of bucks from Nike I wish I knew who this Blaine Gabbert fellow was. Terrible QB rating is all you really need to know. Not not a good quarterback is the answer. So is Colin Kaepernick, I mean I don't as a an athlete, is he not good?

Like He's a terrific athlete. He's just not a very good quarterback. Okay. So I mean he he had one fantastic season. He led the 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. But I mean look, bottom line is that the making him the spokesperson of a movement where he really I I don't like the idea that you're 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.

You're doing it wrong. If you want to fight police brutality, say America is not living up to her promises. Say that the promise of America Like there is a way to Every successful social movement in American history has done this. The gay rights movement did this. 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. Right? The freedom to pursue happiness is not being guaranteed to us. We're just asking that we be left alone.

Leave us alone." And it took time, but most Americans came around to that perspective. The the same thing holds true on race. The same thing holds true on police brutality. 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." That's unifying. To say that the American flag is inherently non-unifying is is really bad. Like to the point where you now have college campuses where if you fly an American flag, there there have been cases where people are asked to take it down cuz it's too divisive.

Like that That's That's that's that's why seem crazy. When you say that it's anecdotal that, you know, you know, he's reacting to something that's anecdotal, but there's many of those anecdotes and and you see them over and over again. The problem is they're so they're so prevalent. There's so many videos. My friend Joe Schilling is 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. I mean yes, it's anecdotal, but goddamn there's a lot of anecdotes.

Well, there are 330 million police interactions every year. So yeah, I mean that's Now, what was the initial interaction that what what was his motivation to do that? Was there an a a single instance of police brutality that caused him to do that? to remember which season he did this. This would have been 3-4 years ago. So, I'm I'm trying to remember. I don't think it was the Michael Brown situation cuz I remember there were protests in the NFL over Michael Brown. Right, which was actually a bad anecdote.

Like that was a bad one for people to pick. People were doing the hands up, don't shoot. That didn't actually happen. Right, he actually tried to grab the gun from the cop. He the gun went off in the car. He charged the cop. By witness testimony, all the witnesses were black. You know, that The Eric Garner one is much cleaner, right? Well, the Eric Garner one is cleaner in terms of police brutality. It's not super clean in terms of racism or even cause of death. So, this is one of the problems.

police brutality. Police brutality for sure. It's kind of like it's actually, you know, I'm warning people now that what happens in the George Floyd case with Derek Chauvin, like they should be warned up front. I want this police officer punished. I think everyone wants the police officer punished. 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.

And that the autopsy the the initial autopsy tends to support that. 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 that's a hard charge to make just on a legal level. So, I'm warning people now of that because the move the next move will be obviously the system is racist if Derek Chauvin doesn't get convicted of first degree murder. It's going to be very hard to convict him. I think to charge him with second.

It's going to be very difficult to convict him on second. with second, right? Because if first would mean premeditated. Right, third Well, he was charged with third originally and then Keith Ellison the AG over there elevated it to second degree. I think it's very difficult to make the case for for second degree murder. What were you pulling up, Jamie? You had something you wanted to say? Yeah, I had the part of when this actually started in 2016. He started sit Why does he keep on doing that?

He started by sitting and people started getting video of him sitting as the preseason was starting. So, he then talked to a teammate. They discussed kneeling was the best thing for him to do at the time. Um Do you remember Do you know which incident kind of kicked it off? That's why I was going to play the video of it. That's why I had it here the actual first video of him talking about him donating a million dollars to the local community. I think he had guns drawn on him, which is probably what started Mm, okay.

But here's him talking about that. And I've been very blessed to be in this position and be able to make the kind of money I do and I have to help these people. I have to help these communities. It's not right that they're not put in the position to succeed or given those opportunities to succeed. And as far as taking a knee tonight, uh 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 and not take away from the military, not take away from pride in our country, but keep the focus on what the issues really are.

And as we talked about it, we came up with taking a knee because there are issues that still need to be addressed and it was also a way to try to show more respect to the men and women that fight for this country. Okay, so that's better, obviously. But that's him. Scroll down for a second cuz I think that there his That's 2016. That's his the first statement. Okay, look at the one right below that. Okay, this is the one I'm talking about. 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 to me.

So, that's a different The video we just watched was four or five days after these statements were made. So, he said he changed after talking to someone he made Oh, okay. Right. So, the initial explanation is the one that I was talking about. Okay, so he revised his feelings on it. And then Well, that's not super reasonable. He Kaepernick had guns drawn on him by cops for being one of the only black guys in his town. Yeah, that seems super reasonable what he said there about how having respect for the military or military rather.

Yeah. Although he he recently released a a video that sort of goes back to the original explanation suggesting that America is endemically and systemically racist, which is which is a problem. That's a hot take right now. It's good. It's very popular. Yeah, no, that's that's the big one. That's the big one. Yeah. Well, how do you think we get back on track? How How does How do we find balance? I always hope that things go really far in one direction and then really far in the other direction and sort of Listen, I I hope we I end up in the same place I always end up, which is we got to learn to leave each other the F alone.

I mean, seriously, like that's that's the only way this is going to work 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. Yeah. If we want to live together and share a country, then we have to stop basically making crazy demands of one another. And this is what the cancel culture is all about, but we we we got we got to stop that. We got to recognize that people may not agree with you.

People may do things differently than you and that's okay. Like as much as I dislike what Colin Kaepernick is 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. You know what kind of press I'd get for hiring Colin Kaepernick? I'd make a boatload off off Colin Kaepernick. That's a great deal. So, how come people aren't doing it? Um I mean, I assume because he's not that great a quarterback.

I mean, like if if he were Tom Brady, I think that he would you know, be getting a contract. He also I mean, there was that whole situation last year with Kaepernick where he 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, but I got I'd hire him as a backup quarterback because here's the thing, you're either going to please one half of the population or please the other.

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 of the country cheers. So, Controversy sells. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah. But how do we I mean, this is probably one of the most racially divisive times in my memory. In my lifetime, I I don't remember it things being Everybody's worried about everything being racist. Every single thing that anyone does. Syrup is racist. Pancakes are racist. Oh, it's it's evolved into all the You saw this Trader Joe's story, right?

You were telling me earlier. It's wild. It's a Trader Joe's. It's called Trader Joe's, right? Which is not racist, I guess. But apparently they they have Mexican products that they were calling Trader Jose's. And some bored person in their basement decided to create a petition that got signed by some 2,400 other bored people about why it shouldn't be called Trader Jose's because that's racist. Mhm. So, apparently it's cultural appropriation if you're Trader Joe's and you make a burrito. But if you call it Trader Jose's, then that's I I think they called it exoticizing.

Exoticizing? Yeah, it's making the them exotic and a So, Trader Joe's pulled it down. Trader Joe's going to is going to not use this anymore. 17-year-old called out Trader Joe's. Now the chain is dropping offensive labeling. Jose's Offensive to whom? Who Like how many Hispanics were were picketing outside Trader Joe's being Oh, now that I saw that Trader Jose beer. Right. Listen, I'm Italian. Do you think Papa Gino's Is that really, you know, I mean, is that really an Italian who made that company? Like how many how many different like different pizza companies and all these not owned by Honestly, honestly God, I'd love to see the racial breakdown of the people who signed this petition.

I would bet 90% of them are white. 90% right? White, live in the suburbs, hate their parents. Yeah. What did you say What was the word they used for it? Exoticizing, I think. Exoticizing. Oh my God, that is so adorable. Exoticizing. I was talking to you about Rick Bayless, who is a a famous chef of Mexican cuisine who is a white man who who adores Mexican food. I mean, I love the guy. I love listening to his videos. I love Mexican food. So, watching this guy's videos, it's like I love someone who's really into something, you know?

I just get I get a kick out of even like there's a guy I used to watch on PBS that would make furniture with ancient tools. Like he'd use like like ancient like um uh different old-timey saws and chisels and [ __ ] and he would make these wooden chairs and tables and furniture. This is called the Amish, right? I mean But he kind of looked like that. But he was 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. I don't give a [ __ ] about his shitty furniture. 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. And I feel the same way and I watch this guy Rick Bayless talk about Mexican cuisine. He loves it. He takes regular trips to Mexico and learns how to cook these dishes in the traditional way and then talks about it with this great passion. But the guy just got [ __ ] all over.

They were just like you're culturally appropriating. You shouldn't be doing this. You're a white man. me just say this generally. Cultural appropriation is a bunch of horse [ __ ] And the reason it's a bunch of horse [ __ ] is because you know what's the best in life? All the things that are good from ever everybody else's culture. Like the reason people live in major cities is to go to all the different restaurants from all of the different cultures. Why is cultural I'm so confused as to why cultural appropriation is bad.

Cultural appropriation is the greatest thing that has ever happened to planet Earth. Yeah. were all siloed off into our own little cultures, you know how much things would suck? They would just be terrible. So, this kind of yeah, this kind of stuff is just crazy, but Drives me nuts. I Look, I grew up teaching Taekwondo, which is a Korean martial art. I learned to count in Korean. I had to speak all the techniques in Korean. hates Koreans. That's clearly I mean, that's clearly the problem here.

appropriated the [ __ ] out of my childhood. Yeah, exactly. It's This is all crazy and there's no there's no apparent end to it. Like there's no limiting principle. no limit. There's no limit. 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. Like literally forever. We should just keep changing the name of everything. She said, you know, there was this town and I I think I found an non-offensive name for the town, but if I found something else that was offensive like 3 years from now, we should change the name of the town.

And I just thought, okay, so we are living in 1984, right? You Orwell talked about renaming everything because Yeah, people will find a way. They'll find a way to be mad. Well, here here's my here's my controversial statement, okay? Okay. If you my controversial statement is if you have to go this far to find things to to offended over, there's not that much to be offended over. If you have to get go so far that you have to be offended by Trader Joe's, you got nothing going on in your life.

There's a dramatic demand for being offended and acting like a victim. And there just ain't like there are actual victims in this country and internationally there are seriously actual victims, but we don't focus on any of those folks, right? We focus instead on like the dumbest bull crap you ever heard, you know, about about renaming libraries and listen, I'm fine with you want to move you want to take a Confederate statue and put it in a museum, fine. I mean those guys were jerks. They're they're terrible people, fine.

Go Yes. for it. But like you're talking about we're going to fix the world by renaming Washington D.C. because Washington was bad. It's like what did you do lately? Did you do what Washington did? Like I understand we don't put up statues to people for all the bad crap they did. Martin Luther King had a real bad record with the ladies. Okay, we don't put up statues to Martin Luther King because we are saying he was great with with women. I think everybody was bad with women back then.

Well, everyone is bad period. Human beings suck. Okay, so either get rid of all the statues or recognize that human beings suck. Obviously. For sure. And there are gradations of suck. Do you remember back when they were tearing down the Civil War statues and and Trump in all of his wisdom was like, what are they going to do next? What about Lincoln? What about they're going to take down George Washington? And everybody's like, oh, he's so crazy. Meanwhile, that's exactly what they were doing. That was what they were doing that what I mean in Chicago, well, that actually that was actually Christopher Columbus who was legitimately a bad guy.

He he I mean, yes. Also, everyone was bad. Like literally all the people were like enslavement, brutal brutal treatment of people. Right. Fairly commonplace. Do you think it's there's an argument to be said that maybe we shouldn't celebrate those bad people anymore that we know what they now that we know what they really were? Not really. I think we should just talk about the bad people. Like I don't think we're the only good people in history. Right. Do you think they should have a statue of Genghis Khan?

I don't know. What did Genghis Khan do that was good that had good results? Well, he opened up trade to China. Okay, if you want to put up a trade to China statue for Genghis Khan at the trade Federation. 10% of the population. Yeah, true enough. And and what? Impregnated the other 10% or something? It's something along the He literally raped his way through Asia. The the point of a Christopher Columbus statue is not all the bad things he did to the Arawaks. The point of a Christopher Columbus statue is we are glad that Western civilization came to the Western Hemisphere.

I kind of agree with that principle. I think it is a good thing that Western civilization came to the Western Hemisphere. And yes, there was a lot of brutality and yes, there was a lot of cruelty and we should talk about all those things. 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 Rousseaulian paradise before Christopher Columbus came, that Christopher Columbus doesn't deserve a statue in specific, that we should that that 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.

No one ever thought that we put up a statue to Christopher Columbus because he was really sweet to the natives on the other end of that. Right? That nobody So, what is the purpose of a statue? Like when you have a Christopher Columbus statue, like what is the purpose of that statue? We know we all know who he is. We all know what he did. Why do we have an an enormous bronze version of him in the middle of a park? I mean, presumably to say that Western civilization arriving here was a good thing, right?

Or to have the conversation. I mean, that's that's It's a monument to an historical event, right? Right. Or listen, Columbia University is named after Columbus, right? The idea of America as Columbia, right? Which was an alternative name for America was after Columbus because he was a discoverer. Well, that's a weird one, right? We're we're named after Amerigo Vespucci who nobody knows who the [ __ ] that guy is. Yeah, he's been lost in the time. He's totally been lost. But but there is this idea that has settled in that we and it's really of high irritation to me that we are now the only good people who have ever lived.

Everyone who came before us was just a horrible person and we are the only good humans who have ever like isn't the world lucky to have us? 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. 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.

Like I don't think that you living in 1770 are a better person than George Washington. I think you stand at the top of the legacy that George Washington had built. Well, I have news for those people that were trying to break into Amazon Go. History is going to look back at you like you're a piece of [ __ ] The people in the future that would never shatter property and never spray paint things and and and and never attack people for filming things with their cell phones, they're going to look back at these violent actions and they're going to look back and they're not going to be kind.

They're the the same I mean, it's 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. That's what we're hoping for. 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's what was wrong with Thomas Jefferson. Although he did, you know, draft the Declaration of Independence, he was a slave owner.

And this is one of the contradictions of our society and our culture that And fathered kids with a slave. I mean, yes, yes. 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. People are a little more complex than I think we want to think of them as. And it's and this is one of the arenas that this sort of gets back to the point about the system.

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 that of checks and balances that prevents people from gaining too much power to hurt other people. And what you also want to recognize is that the flaws of human beings are not necessarily the flaws of the system and that just changing the system is not going to change the underlying flaws of human beings, which means you actually have to think through the policies that you're promulgating before you implement them.

Clearly, if you say this, you're not paying attention to what happened at CHAZ or CHOP cuz they they had it nailed. It was paradise for a short period of time. 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. They wind up being the police. They wind up beating the [ __ ] out of people who did anything they didn't want them to do including film things.

They wind up see saw murder. You saw massive graffiti. You certainly saw borders. There were borders put up. They kept cops from coming in. They kept a lot of people from coming in. Beat up journalists. They took over private property. So, they appropriated private property. These are not buildings they built. They didn't make a deal. They didn't barter. They didn't have some sort of a beautiful mutually beneficial agreement with these people that own these buildings. No, [ __ ] you. They took them over. They took them over and started spray painting [ __ ] all over them.

It's crazy, but it it shows you like your childly childlike idea of what you can do that's better. You don't take into that you don't really understand that the Founding Fathers really did put into play into place all these checks and balances to keep someone from abusing power. And as much as Trump would like to overcome all that, you see time and time again, he's a great example in in many ways of how this system really is beautifully engineered from 300 [ __ ] years ago.

Because the because the founders did understand the the problem of human nature, which is people want power and they want to hurt other people very often. 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 a small majority of people can really hurt a a huge minority of people, right? This is what they call tyranny of the mob. Yeah. They were they were much afraid of this. And and that's stuff that is worth remembering, you know, the the tearing down that system because you want to build something more beautiful.

If it looks like CHAZ or CHOP, that ain't a thing. What's this idealistic they have blinders on. They have this this narrow tunnel vision view of what they think this utopian future could be. I think they think that human beings are going to be fundamentally transformed by a different system. So, they look at the problems. One of the biggest problems we have in American politics is the myopia with which we look at the United States. So, when you're dating somebody, it's very easy to see all the problems with the person you're dating.

When you're married to someone, it's certainly easy for my wife to see all the problems with me and there are plenty. But when she looks at all the other people and she's like, okay, well, he's less flawed than the others, right? 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. This is a society filled with humans, 330 million of them. 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 ain't quite that bad 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.

They're happening everywhere else. China right now is shipping Uighur Muslims on trains after shaving their heads to concentration camps where they are being forcibly sterilized. There are actual problems on planet Earth. 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. 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 that you will shape humanity such that we are all saints and no sinners, you're out of your mind.

I agree with you. And it's it's the Uighur situation is shockingly undercovered. Oh my god. Well, it just it demonstrates that when people say never again, they're full of crap. They're just full of crap. I mean, it's not true. And the the this is one area where the United States should absolutely be taking a leading role. It is obvious that China is a nefarious actor. China has been stealing our technology. China has The Chinese government is attempting to extend its rule of tyranny over Hong Kong.

They just subjected 7.5 million people to their direct tyranny in violation of treaty. And the response has basically been muted from the Western world. And did you see that video of the the Chinese ambassador in Britain being asked on the BBC about that tape? No, I didn't. It's fantastic. So, the the BBC interviewer shows him the tape of the people being pushed onto trains, right? And he says, what is this? And the Chinese ambassador says, I can't see it. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

He's literally saying the screen is huge. It's right behind him. Like he's looking right at it. And he acts as though he can't see it. And then he starts talking about the natural beauty of the region. Right? He he won't he won't deal with it. He won't he won't explain what it is. And the rest of the world is just like, well, you know, what This is where it you know, in the sporting world, the the whole the the story that's under covered in the sporting world is the is the blowback on that the NBA gave to Daryl Morey, the the Houston Rockets GM for saying free Hong Kong.

Right, you can't even get anybody in the NBA to condemn China while China's subjecting a million Uyghurs to abject slavery. Mark Cuban just had an exchange with Ted Cruz the other day where where he was going after Cruz for something and Cruz said well just you know, he he questioned Cruz Cruz's balls or something and and Cruz came back at him and said, well, do you have the balls to condemn China? And Cuban said something like, well, you know, I don't want to get involved in the internal affairs of another country.

And I thought, well, that's that is not an internal affairs question. It's one thing to say I don't want to get involved in the tax rates of other countries. 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. It seems like not an internal issue that you're not allowed to criticize, really. Yeah, that's a big one, but the the China thing is so crazy because so many so many business interests have this connection with them and so much of the the money that they generate is because of China.

I mean, the NBA films, there's there's so much so much of our culture that kowtows to China. We're so connected to them and 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. It also demonstrates the lie of the idea that if you trade with somebody, then they're going to liberalize. Yeah. That was that was something that was pushed over the last 30, 40 years real hard, which is we'll help them out economically, we'll have mutual trade, it'll be good for both of us 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.

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. I mean, he she is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. It's incredible. We don't have much time. You you have a hard out in 1 minute. I just want to know what what do you think goes down in November and how hopeful are you for the future? Cuz it seems to me like we're [ __ ] no matter who wins cuz the chaos that we're seeing, the civil unrest we're seeing, it's going to either accelerate or or or or spread one way or the other.

So, I think that if we're going to hold together, we have to make a decision. Either fundamentally the American system is good but flawed and 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. The latter is not really a a great recipe. So, we can have normal political arguments within the former or the country is toast. As far as what goes down in November, look, right now the polling data says Trump gets conked.

I mean, right now the polling data has got Biden up 10, 12 points in the polls. But didn't the polling data in 2016 say that Hillary was going to steamroll? On the national data, not to on the national data, they were kind of right. So, on the national data, the final RealClearPolitics poll average was like three points. Hillary won by three points in the popular vote. The state polls were really were were really wrong, particularly in Wisconsin, in Michigan, and Pennsylvania. 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.

Listen, Biden is running almost the ideal campaign. He's not alive. He's a not alive person. And as it turns out, beating a dead horse is actually kind of tough. Right? He's like that because he's not threatening. He's fundamentally non-threatening. You look at Biden and do you feel threatened by I don't feel threatened by Biden. The man's not alive. You can't threaten me with a corpse. Right? And so and so Trump, who is innately volatile and looking for something to kind of attack own worst enemy. is his own worst enemy.

Like with Hillary, the untold story of 2016 is that Trump didn't win, Hillary lost. People hated Hillary's guts. And the stat that proves it is that people who hated both Trump and Hillary broke for Trump pretty heavily. Yeah. Right now, people who don't like either Biden or Trump are breaking nearly universally for Biden because Trump is so off-putting. And he you know, I 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.

And Trump is fairly good at number one and he is awful. He is god-awful at number two. Making it easy to vote for him, that that's that's a toughy. That's a toughy. Well said. Thank you, Ben Shapiro. Always good time, man. I really enjoy it. Always enjoy seeing you. All right. That's it. Bye, everybody. That was great. Awesome. Thank you.