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. Oh, thank you. You look slender and healthy. You look good. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Turns out running away from my children for four months straight. We'll do that too. I literally took up running just to get away from my three children. Really? Just go outside, just for some minds place. It's LA, man. You can't get outside unless you're actively exercising or they come and arrest you. Oh, I could have looted a footlocker. Right. Then there would have been OK.
Do you run with a mask on? No. Does anybody yell at you? No. No. No. 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 will be hunted down by the rioters. So I don't have to go deal with my children screaming at me. But yeah, that's the goal. Did you try to get healthier when COVID hit? Like were you worried?
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 had 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 gotta give you some elk meat. Are you barbecuing right now? Oh, yeah, I'm still doing it. Oh, I'll give you some elk sausages. We'll have to do kosher, right? Oh, that's not cool. We'll have to go get the elk and I'll have to actually like kill it myself 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. Oh, yeah, it's good times
What's the logic behind that? So I mean, not to get too fast into the biblical stuff, but the original logic was that you were supposed to kill the animal in the most humane way. It was the idea. Now, do I know if it's the most humane way now? I have no idea. It's most certainly not them.
because you have to slice his throat. Take it up with the wrap, guys, 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, because 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, because you have a lot of deep blood and Judaism, so. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. So what do you do when you have a medium rare steak? I mean, the 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? A kosher steakhouse. There are kosher steakhouses. God, you're so deep in that world. I know, man. But you're a logical, intelligent guy. Does every now and then... I'm like, hey, juxtapose those. But every now and then, it fuck with your head. You're like, what is this? I mean, of course.
I don't know, there's a religious person alive. I mean, who doesn't eventually go like, okay, it's a little weird, but all right. Yeah, you have a racist system. But you feel like for tradition and for just the whole Jewish culture, it's worth doing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you live the lifestyle and I feel like 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 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 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. It's going down that way. This is not going to stop. It's sliding.
Oh, yeah. And you saw an LA. I mean, I've lived in LA my whole life. And the move from LA being a pretty safe, fairly nice city, suburban, and orientation to just overrun with horror shows is really, it was a lot faster than I thought it would be. But it's sort of 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. We were filmed down there. And I'd be like, this is crazy. Like, has anybody seen this? Has anybody know this? Because 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 Yorker, downtown Cleveland.
No, downtown LA was no man's land. Nothing's going on in downtown LA. It is now like there's what 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 I took my family there before COVID, like four months before COVID or so. We went to, we were going to go to, there's a famous doughnut place there. So we said, just one of those goofy Sunday things, like what do you guys want to do today? Let's go get doughnuts.
So I went to downtown LA, like, holy shit, literally shit, human shit 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 him to be freaked out, but I'm like, this is nuts.
Well, the thing is that that sort of disaster area stuff in LA was sort of localized. I worked in the LA DA's office for a summer when I was in law school that spent like 2007, so it was a while ago. And I remember they had a giant tent sitting and you had to walk from the car. They made you part a mile away and walk it. And so you're walking through Skid Row. And it's like, OK, well, this is really terrible. And honestly, I feel bad for these people because I don't think the best solution for people who are drug addicted or mentally ill is to live on the street. And a heavy percentage of people who are homeless are drug addicted or mentally ill.
But for people who are living in the suburbs, this is at least localized. It's not like reaching into your life. And then over the past 13 years, I live in a pretty decent suburban area. And I'm seeing open needles on the street, walking out of my house one day. There's just a guy lying face down in the gutter like Edgar Allen Poe. And I thought, well, 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, it was very isolated. Skid Row was very isolated. Downtown LA was very, I remember one time we were filming in Downtown LA and we were on a gurney, or I guess that's what you call, one of those things called where it lifts up.
Anyway, we're filming some Fear Factor stunt and as we got up we could see people smoke and crack and I go, look, there's people smoking crack right there and the guests on the show, like a lot of them, they fly from all over the country and they're like, is that real? They're really smoking crack going, 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 because it's really cheap to film here. So here you go. Yeah, you got a little gift. You get to see some weird shit while you're here. But I didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where you're on like Winneka off the 101 and there's 80 fucking tents and they put a porta potty there. They put a porta potty there.
We're doing real building and real development here in Los Angeles. Not apartment buildings. We got some port-of-potties. Every underpass shall have a port-of-pottie thanks to Mayor Eric Garcetti. You pay attention to politics far more than I do 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 shit if it was on the sidewalk.
If people had a bunch of stuff that was on the sidewalk and they're 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, and the courts. You do such good work sometimes.
And the court's rule 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, because for a while you weren't allowed to live in your car, and then it was you're allowed to live in your car. 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 went in business districts, but 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 that's kind of what you're seeing. I mean, there have 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 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 p.m. They shut down Rodeo Drive at 1 p.m. So that people could run up and down Rodeo Drive talking about how capitalism sucks while tweeting from their iPhones. While stealing, stealing Nike's. 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 felt to me very similar to right after 9-11 where everybody was confronted with their own mortality. Like holy shit, like 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 have to be kind to each other. This is what's important, family's important. And I remember thinking, I've never been closer to my family.
Never been close to my friends. We're calling each other all the time. It was like, 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. Fuck stand up comedy. Fuck everything else, man. What's important is love and friendship.
then it started to get angry. It only took like three or four weeks where people started getting, 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,
What 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 Matter protests 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 we're all in this together. Like this is crazy. And then the cops need to be reformed. Like they can't live like and maybe we should take into account PTSD. Maybe we should take into account the fact that these fucking guys are pulling up on people every day that might shoot them in the face. They might never be able to see their family and their kids. Let's rework this. Let's think this shit through.
Yeah. Nope. And 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 fucking 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 fake guillotine outside of Bezos's house in Washington, DC. It's insane. It's madness. I totally agree with you, by the way. When COVID happened, I thought, I can't really see how we're going to split in partisan fashion over this thing. 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, OK, we're on board. When it came to the lockdowns, the original lockdowns, I was like,
OK, I'm on board. I'm taking this thing really seriously. I've got parents in their 60s. I feel like I'm in good health. I'm fairly young. I'm 36. But for my parents, I don't want my parents getting this thing. And so we're still taking this thing real seriously. And I'm still wearing a mask around to public places. And I think people should. I think that's a responsible thing to do. But it immediately turned into, who can we blame for this? Who can we blame? Who's doing it wrong?
And it seems like there are only a couple of things that you really can do that are obviously wrong. Nobody has a good solution on this thing. OK, it ravaged Italy. It ravaged Spain. It ravaged New York. There are a couple of things you shouldn't do. Don't take the old and send them back into the nursing homes of the COVID. That's an obvious one. But beyond that,
Like, just staying away from each other and socially distancing and wearing it. Like, this is all kind of common sensical stuff that people have known since the flu pandemic event 1918. Like, nothing is really changed. And yet it immediately turned into, who can we blame? Who's to blame for all these dead people? Maybe it's Ron DeSantis or maybe it's Cuomo. Like, 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, OK, that guy deserves to go to jail.
Chauvin, the officer in that case, and the George Floyd. We didn't think that, yeah. Everyone, I know. Everyone, I know. Every single person was like, yeah, that's real bad. And cops, 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. No one thought that. And so when people were like, OK, 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 how we make sure that everybody knows who the bad cops are so they can't get hired at different places. All those are solutions.
They quickly turn from, well, we don't want to talk about solutions. Solutions are a bad idea. What we need to do is we need to just 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. We 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 about that? How crazy is that discussion? That discussion, when people were really saying defund the police, I'm like, cooler heads are prevail.
But they're gonna realize and I think they're realizing it now in New York City. I mean New York City has had record crime record homicides Who would have thought who would have thought? De Blasio is I mean I would have never I would have never imagined I would look at Garcetti and go well, he's better
I look at Garcetti and I look at Diplasia, I'm like Garcetti, I have him over my house for dinner, he's way better than Diplasia. He's a groundhog murderer. He's so weird. You can have protests, but only Black Lives Matter protests. That was a solid, that may have been the moment when I realized that we were all effed. 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 healthy leads just decided randomly.
that if you're protesting against lockdown, you're very bad, right? Then you're a racist, and you're gonna get people killed, and you're sure a mask. And I was like, well, if you're probably, I sort of agreed to mask thing, like, yeah, okay. 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, 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
I 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 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'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 I trust most Americans not, like some Americans would meet dumbasses. Some people are just dumbasses. Oh, there's a lot of videos. I wish you watched YouTube. There's plenty of Karens out there. How sad is it if your name is Karen and you're a good person?
but you're all the good parents out there i was i'm sorry ladies i'm really sorry but it's that like this is that i made this point online i got shellac for it but i was pointing out that most americans are wearing masks right now by polling data fifty nine percent 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. 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. The cloth masks are not as effective as surgical masks, which are not as effective as N95s. But wear a mask. Good. 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 idea that Gavin Newsom knows best how you ought to live your life.
I got some trouble with that, especially because California saw the same uptick as Texas and Florida and California never opened. We've been here the whole time. California never really opened. Well, we were doing pretty good up into the protests. Everything seemed like it was on an uptick. The Comedy Store was talking to them about becoming an essential business and opening up because they had opened up bars and they had opened up restaurants and they didn't really have a designation for comedy clubs.
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? So 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 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 drunk. Yeah, they're drunk, and they're on top of each other. I think bars probably have a significant opportunity. Right, lots of singing, lots of vocalizing churches and synagogues who are main vector for this. But again, these are all things that are fairly commonsensical, and we can agree on it, 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.
OK, it's not going to stop. 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. Yes, they are. And the crazy thing was that they were saying, like, 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 techniques and the strategies for increasing your immune system. There are, 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 could do. First of all, eliminate
alcohol, eliminate caffeine, eliminate sugar, eliminate all the bullshit in your diet, start taking vitamin supplements, get outside, get some vitamin D, get your body healthy, exercise, 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 it. The number one vector for transmission remains the home.
That's still the number one vector in every society is the home. People go on home and giving it to each other. I remember for me, one of the breaking points in LA 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 show that 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 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 fuck about George Floyd or Black Lives Matter were just stealing shit. And then this police was letting them steal shit. They were standing down in Beverly Hills in Santa Monica, literally cops standing there.
while people are saying that the media coverage of the stuff is just awful the media we're cheering the stuff on and that they were simultaneously making to arguments the conflict with each other one was these are mostly peaceful protest first of all mostly peaceful is the most
It's the most loosely defined, arbitrarily applied term in history. O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night. O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night. For like an hour 15, he was really not peaceful, but for the other hours between sunset and sunrise, he was unbelievably peaceful. I've never heard this term before where a protest turns into a vast riot wrecking all of Melrose, and everybody's like, well, it was mostly peaceful.
well what the what is that what is that so it's so it's a how about you either say that the protesters and looters are two different groups of people and we treat them differently if you're protesting that's first amendment activity the mini-shatter store when you go to jail right yeah that's the way they should run green or alternatively
If you're saying they're the same group, then they need to be treated as lawbreakers. So 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 refuse to make that distinction. And then they act like the cops are the bad guys when they come in to arrest people who are violating the license in Portland right now. They're trying to burn down the damn courthouse. And the feds come in and start arresting people. And people are like, this is the Gestapo. It's like, OK.
Speaking as one of the tribe, let me say this is not like the Gestapo. Okay, like the Gestapo was not famous for rolling up on people and then charging them and then if they didn't have a charge releasing them, that wasn't like the Gestapo's thing. I'm sorry, but you decided that you wanted to throw a fire bomb 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 shit. 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 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 must hate these paint cans, right? From the jerk, right?
But it went from this to literally tear down the structure of society. Well, this is where we get into sort of the deep philosophy point. And this is actually really 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 D'Angelo's White Fragility. And let me just tell you, a greater pile of horseshit 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 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 racist. So Robin D'Angelo and Ibram Kendi redefined 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... Does that mean 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, no. The NBA is not racist, except it's because it's a meritocracy, is the reason the NBA is not racist. But Robin, D'Angelo, 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 that of course that any time there's writing in looting that's really just an expression of outrage at the broader american system and so it justifies that sort of stuff is why it's on a cold hand jones the defacto 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 and a terrible horrible, no good, very bad place, then robbing a shop is just the latest iteration of you fighting the system.
explain the sixteen nineteen correlation to people for sure so the sixteen nineteen project is is something put forward by the new york times it's not good history therefore Pulitzer prize-winning historians who said this is not good history the basic argument is the united states was not founded in seventeen seventy six with the principles of the declaration of independence
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 with 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 pre-exist 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 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 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 motion 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 in the March in 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. This is the argument Frederick Douglass, the freed slave, makes in 1852, makes a famous speech before slavery is ended. And he says July 4 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, 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 that sins that are present in all human societies and were present in the United States in extreme ways as well. But that's the counter narrative, right? The 1619 Project says that all that was basically nonsense and that America is just a history of whites keeping blacks down and that no progress has essentially been made. If there is progress, it's mostly a lie. And so every disparity now can be attributed to historic disparities between white and black.
So, if we look at 1776 and we look at the Declaration of Independence and we look at America today in 2020, there clearly is some impact in the echoes of slavery and then after that Jim Crow. There's clearly some impact in these deeply impoverished communities that don't seem to advance.
Yes, so to make the argument about institutional racism, 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, because 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. That's true in your family history. And if you have a grandfather who went to prison on a particular charge, that leads to poverty for your parents, which led to more poverty for you. 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 historically, it's fairly recent. If you go from the civil rights movement to 2020, we're really not talking about that much time. Three generations, 50 plus years. 60 years, yeah. 50 plus. In the world of history. In the vast band of human history, it's not a very 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 it's, it's, it is important for people on my side of the L conservatives to acknowledge and recognize the importance 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 people are 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 the dead center of that as people I think want it to. What I mean by that is the problems that have played 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 that those issues get alleviate when jews arrived in the united states in the in the early twentieth century to talk of my people when they when they came they were impoverished they didn't speak the language they're banned from country clubs there's open discrimination against them they were banned from harvard right harvard law school had quotas and choose
the way to fight against that is to make good decisions and so 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 red line 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 pep 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 fucked up environment where that's what he models, where everything around him is crime and gangs and you imitate your atmosphere, which all humans do. Right, but the answer is there's only one way to break that chain.
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. It does, but education, education, and teaching them about personal agency and letting them understand that there's a way out of this and that the path that they see
being replicated over and over again by these people that wind up dying young, 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 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.
That's literally the worst thing to say to a kid. What you should be saying is, look at how your grandfather was born behind the eight fall and look how hard he had to work in order to get ahead. And look at all the offers. 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. That's way too simplistic a version of their future. The problem is I don't see an 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 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's the problem is that I think that a lot of the solutions that have been proposed have already been tried, meaning that for example,
LBJ thought that the way to alleviate a lot of these inequalities was the war on poverty. And 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 is so you have to get the person who's twenty yards behind actually get up to the starting lines 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 twenty two trillion dollars in the war on poverty and we have about the same number of black americans living under the poverty line is we're living under the poverty line by the late seventies the the
The real issues 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 5% 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 is happening because there has 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 and there is a point shall be steel mix in the area of sports if a kid is not does not have a good jump shot nobody says to me you know what you don't have a good jump shot because your father did not jump shot is grandfather to have a good jump shot in the game is biased against you we say okay if you want to be on the team you have to learn to shoot a jump shot
Right? That sounds harsh. That sounds bad. But sports are different. And here's why sports are different. Because sports, you enter them independently of your culture. 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 whatever culture you're from, you walk into this new thing with this very rigid set of rules.
I don't think that white people or Jews or Asians have a monopoly on valuing education or a monopoly on hard work or punctuality or anything. I think that black people have exactly the same capacity as any people of any other race to do all of these things. And those are the preconditions for success. You either meet them or you don't. I mean, 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 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.
I was very fortunate when I was young that I discovered martial arts and it kept me from being what I could have potentially been a bad kid. It gave me something to focus on. 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 don't have a father around or they don't have a mother around or whatever bad influences they have are overwhelming. It's very difficult.
for someone to just, air quotes, get their shit together. It's very difficult. For sure. 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. Everybody who's fat wants to be thin. They do. But it's fucking hard. For sure. And that's nothing in comparison to changing your whole life.
But you would say about somebody losing weight, you know, it'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. 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 need to be provided by education, getting people to be educated outside their local public school would be a good change. Being able to 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 this has to be done 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 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 but 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
No, on a year-to-year level. I mean, these are enormous quantities of money. 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? So the predicate for the slavery reparations movement is exactly this. Sign everybody a $80,000 check and the problem will be alleviated.
not well i don't think that's i don't think they'll spend eighty thousand dollars and they'll be right back where they start 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 so on that stuff we totally agree the only point i'm making about the sixteen nineteen 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's all 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 killers black upper class yes there is let's let's simplify this if we can't sure it bench appears in the world how do you fix baltimore how do you fix detroit how do you fix
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've 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. In fact, one of the reasons that you have such a vast differential in racial crime in the United States is because of white racism.
And this is a point that Jane Levy, writer for the LA Times, is made, you should write 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. 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.
You need an 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, you need to make clear to every kid, if you graduate high school, then you will have a shot at college, which by the way is 100% true today.
If you're a blackhead 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, 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 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 rise is not even having a father in the home, it's how many fathers there are generally in a community. So you can have a single mom, but if there are a lot of other male father figures around, that helps fill in the gap. 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.
There'd 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've been reading stories about
cops go into five guys burgers and they can't get served because people won't serve cops. And this idea that all cops are bad. And this is a 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 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.
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. 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 way they do something bad what if you shoot somebody while you're operating like right so so the what 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 you took a reasonable action right somebody went for their waistband they had an object in their you know who's gone you shot them
right you wouldn't presumably be suitable because that's still reasonable you track a guy down you shoot him in the back you know and and then plan to go on him that presumably would be suitable right you personally i'm still so that the the way that supreme court has done this is a broad and qualified immunity to such an extent that you can still but i want to still get away with some bad stuff and not be sued for it so that needs to be curved 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 ad cops, right? Because the police unions are designed to protect the members of the unions, like any other union. And so what that means is that police unions, I'm not a fan of public sector unions generally, but police unions need to be abridged in their ability to protect cops who do something wrong. 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 like that those are some easy things that you could do right off the bat but that the biggest thing right now the biggest factor in terms of lack of faith between police and citizens really is the media because there's been a lot of talk about the racial constituency of police forces the majority of the l.a.p.d. is minority the majority of the baltimore p.d. is minority
I believe that a huge percentage of the Chicago PD is minority. So it really is not about 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, Ben. I mean, I have nothing but for good cops, 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 twelve cops that are bad you have twelve bad cops if you have a hundred and thirty good cops and twelve bad cops but the hundred and thirty won't do anything about the twelve bad cops you've got a hundred and forty two bad cops yeah and i think that that's right i think that's right i think that it is also true that are standard of what constitutes a bad cop has in some ways
become much more stringent. So for example, there are cases that have become national stories in which a cop was labeled a bad cop and he wasn't a bad cop. Right, but there are bad cops for sure. Look, here's a great example. The cops that pushed down that old man, and where was it? Buffalo, New York, has ever was?
That's fucking crazy. And that's white-on-white crime, right? I mean, a white guy pushes this old man down, and the most bonkers part about that was the way the president reacted. Like, the way he felt some 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. You mean President Trump had the worst possible reaction to a fake?
thing, I can't believe it. I mean, unknown, President Trump having bad reactions to that. Look, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement. I have a lot of friends that are cops. I know a lot of people from martial arts that are cops from the UFC. I know a lot of cops from Jiu Jitsu. I've knew a lot of cops growing up from all the different martial arts disciplines that I engage 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 fucking insane job. And so many of them have PTSD. For sure. 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. But it is a threat? It is a threat all the time. It is on a data level, an extraordinarily small threat.
Law enforcement and 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 the stuff is just horrific. It's not just the media. It's social media. 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, are you ignoring people's lived experiences? That's racist. How can you present the data? 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 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 but i'm sorry no that's 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 poverty, stricken areas, they will tell you horrific stories about being abused by cops. And I think the number is 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 for them to be abused.
That's real. When you look at the statistics of them being killed, 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. 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 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 role in Friar's study. There are a few confounds that have yet to be sort of worked out. I think probably white people are less likely to believe that the cops going to kill them, whereas black people are probably convinced the cops going to kill them.
That might play a factor in why there's more white people being killed by cops. I mean, that may very well be true. It may also be that low level uses of force is maybe, a force may be disparate. If you think that the cops likely to be a racist, then you might be more likely to resist the cop, then you might be more likely to rough you up. So it's very difficult 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 people you know mostly right it's it's interracial right there is there there is very little interracial crime like black on white or white on black in the united states there's a lot of intra racial crimes 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 interviews kind of amazing interview terry cruises the actor yeah he was on with uh... is on time limit and on lemon uh... is doing the black lives matter slogan and terry cruises well all lives matter
and don leman has says but no black lives matter doesn't mean all black lives matter right but turicrew said all black lives matter and he said no no not all black lives matter only black lives matter we're only talking about police brutality right now and terry cruises like why are 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 to
And this is where the slogan nearing gets in the way of actual progress. Right, where ideology hits facts. Right, exactly. It gets very weird. And Terry Cruz was called some terrible names for that, but then a video surfaced of Don Lemon from 2013 chastising black people. Sounds like me on that, right? He sounds like me talking about it. He sounds exactly like you. It's hilarious. Pull your pants up, get your shit together.
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 commonsensical and true for all races. It is not just black people. Young white people in Appalachia need to get their shit together. Everybody needs to get their shit together. But again, 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 potential for escape.
I mean, I agree, but the first thing that has to change, so my dad had a, when I was looking to get married, my dad said the way that you get married is it's not that you find a girl and then you decide to get married, you decide to get married and then you find a girl. Meaning that you have to sort of make up your mind that you're in the mode of- 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 fucking stupid that you're willing to get married to her. Because getting married to her is less painful to you than the idea of losing that person. Because I think
Marriage, the good thing about it is that there's financial protection for the family, particularly when there's children involved. I think that's one of the most important things. I think financial protection for the children, 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 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 another solidify your love. Like, you know, I love you, you love me, but let's bring in a bunch of fucking people we don't know and write it down on paper. That's nonsense. Well, I 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 tell them before then. Okay, so not to get into marital advice here, but like that.
But I've been married for 12 years at this point. Thank God, very happy marriage. We have three kids. And the reason that I say you have to make up your mind that you want to get married before you get married is because you look for a different set of factors then. 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 the lights on it. I don't think that's true. I don't think you fall in love with someone that you don't share values with. I think you think they're hot and you want to fuck them.
People make this stuff up pretty regularly. Well, people are silly. People are indeed silly. People tattoo their eyeballs when they do a lot of dumb shit. 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 oftentimes 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 someone who's married a girl just because they thought they were hot.
There are a lot, a lot, a lot. But men, period, it's not just Jews, like the drug of sexual attraction is the most sold drug in the United States. It sells cars, it sells homes, it literally, it sells lifestyles. Pornography, yeah.
But what is that? I mean, when you're seeing a woman with a short skirt on and long legs walking lustfully around a car, what are you saying? You're saying if you buy this car, maybe you can fuck this girl. That's what you're saying. Of course.
fucking 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 your other one. You know, Jonathan Hight in his book, his book called The Happiness Hypothesis. Great book. Terrific, right? 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 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 it like a hundred? And your level of kind of committed love, right? 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 because 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 while at seat, that's why I disagree.
Because I don't think there's anything wrong with falling into bed with someone that you're not going to live the rest of your life with. 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. 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 I think that the
The thing that has been foregone is, in my life at least, more than made up for by the relationship that I have with my wife. 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 right after. So that is... To hire the divorce right after, really. If you live for a long time with somebody and then you get married, there is 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, OK, I lived with you for three years. Why aren't we married yet? Why aren't we married yet? Because the guy's like, oh, the window is still open. Oh, so the window is completely committed. So once the guy does sign off, she's like, why didn't you do this five years ago? Well, there's some of that. And also, it feels like everybody kind of settled.
If it was, I'm so committed to this one and get married right now. Maybe they just did mushrooms together and realized they really love each other. Again, different world, man. I have a different experience from everybody else. I did it my way for three months. We got engaged. We were married within 10 months. We've been married for 12 years. We're both versions. We're married. It's a world scream. It 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 than they wife swap which is
I feel like that's complicated. I mean, I'll be honestly complicated. I always think those people are trying to, I know people that do that and I almost universally believe that they are distracting themselves from their life. They're distracting themselves from either their career, they're fulfilling the potential, whether it's as an artist or as a creative person or as a person who's pursuing a discipline.
I really believe that a lot of times when people complicate their lives as multiple sex partners, and a lot of times what they're doing is they're distracting themselves. And they don't realize that at the time, they just keeps getting pulled into this direction, pulled into that direction. It's because you don't have a primary focus on something that's very important to you. 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
involved in swinging or something like that, and they're balancing a bunch of different gals. Trust me, you're going to waste time, man. 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. That's true whether you're talking marriage, it's true whether you're talking educational success, or whether you're talking career. People making bad decisions because distractions are distractions.
distractions, distractions with every discipline and I think relationships are a discipline in a lot of ways. I totally agree. It is true that you have to make the pre-investment and you have to make the commitment that you're going to continue to invest in the relationship as time goes on. That's where people fall off the wagon. That's why you see a lot of divorces around year three. Has that passionate love?
It kind of goes down and the companion at love is the name of the term. When the companion at love starts to rise, people are like, well, yeah, but the companion at love ain't as much fun as the passionate love. And it's like, of course not. Of course not. And it'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, OK, you had to fuck as much as you could and spread that seed around because you likely only had five or six years on this earth, right? You're dead at age 32. 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, he's 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 it's dirty little trick.
dirty little trick, trying to get me to spread my seed. Brett Weinstein, he illuminated this in a really interesting way. He was saying to me, what's the difference between beautiful and hot?
And I said, 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, you go, this is an opportunity.
for to spread my DNA with no commitment. And that's what that is. That's the pull. And hot, that kind of hot is what's 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, 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 shit. It's like you're the pizza guy. You show up and two girls are having a pillow fight. Exactly. It's your lizard brain versus your prefrontal cortex. Exactly. It's your monkey brain. Exactly. It's that monkey that wants to hide from the eagle. That's what it is. It's like, I could just do this real quick. And across the board, you're going to have 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 had a good life or not. I know some people who worked with him near the end. He seemed kind of miserable. Well, towards the end, I'm sure he's miserable. He's an 80-year-old guy hanging out with 20-year-olds. What the fuck do you have to say to these people? It's like you were talking about with O.J. Simpson. O.J. Simpson had a mostly peaceful day. Well, his life is mostly annoying. The time that he gets to fuck them,
When you're 80 years old, you only get to fuck those 24-year-olds for like, how long can you last? I don't want every six weeks, what do you think? Well, he's on probably all kinds of drugs that keep his dick hard, but I would imagine he couldn't run on a treadmill for 20 minutes, right? At that age. So how is he gonna have sex for 20 minutes? So even if he's having sex, it's probably exhausting. And the rest of the day, he just listen to them talk about TikTok and all kinds of other stupid shit.
He's like, we weren't Frank Sinatra was here and we were banging everything inside. And he's like, those were the good old days. I was wearing a robe. I had a pipe. We were having fun at a TV show. I had my own channel. He had a Playboy channel for a while.
I think the image of it is way more interesting than the actual act of living that life. I think that goes back to every bad decision people make is tied into this. 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. You actually have to look at the actuality of things.
You don't want to be an 80-year-old guy living with five 24-year-old girls. You just don't. I can't live 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. For that 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 female human being.
And then she's like, buy me stuff. And he's like, god, this is all he has to do. Make me famous. Yeah. Yeah. Worked out great. Well, you know. The grotto, by the end, it seemed like it was pretty dingy. Dude, I went there. I really stood a marijuana policy project thing there once. And of course. Sounds like a lot of policy. Sounds like a lot of policy happening. But one of the things he did was like we were wandering around. It's like an AEI summit. You know, it's like when I go to Heritage Foundation, that's what it sounds like right there.
It was a fun night. Whatever. Remember, you know, there was a lot of marijuana smoke. It was quite a blurry evening. But I remember thinking like, my God, this grotto is so outdated. Like it had like a fucking old ass phone there. And like, how much how many people fucked in here? Like how weird is this? Generations of human residue.
in here. Yeah, yeah. And maybe not like the best times either, you know. 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, what's all worth on life. It is. Let's work on thinking about what things are rather than what we would like them to be because accepting reality is a hard one. Accepting reality is a real tough one. Yeah, that's a problem.
It's a problem with advertising, too, right? Because advertising shows you... And social media, right? Social media is... Well, that's another Jonathan Hitebook, The Coddling of the American Mind, which is amazing. And it really illuminates, and 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 a real issue with children that are comparing their lives to these... Oh, here's an example.
I wanted 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. This is something that my daughter did. This is, my daughter is 10, okay? That's her.
Look at that. Oh, my God. That's not a 10-year-old. You're right. It's not a 10-year-old. It's like a 20-year-old right there. Exactly. How's that possible? How's that my 10-year-old daughter? Yeah, but you are watching YouTube makeup tutorial or something. No, she used a fucking app. She used an app that turned her into a woman.
Like what the fuck is that? So like when 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 don't like the structure of your face or whatever that was bothering you, you have acne and you see a girl like that. And 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. This is my 10-year-old. She doesn't look anything like that. 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 fuck you just did. 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, was it Chloe Kardashian, the one who changed her whole head? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That.
It's such a recipe for failure. It really is. It's such a recipe for failure because you're always going to fall short of that. It's one thing to shoot for better. It's another thing to shoot for the unobtainable and then be upset when you can never reach the unobtainable. But it's sick. It's sick because these people don't even look like that. And then you look at that and you go, why don't I look like that? They don't even look like that. The amount of people that actually look like that image that I just showed you.
is so small, so unattainable. And then it has broader societal ramifications, because then it turns into stories about, well, okay, well society doesn't accept me for the way that I am. 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. It's evolving 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 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 that stuff.
You can make it aware of it. Very easily, very easily. My kids aren't getting, like I seriously will not give them a smartphone until they're probably mid teens, late teens. Will they get a gun first? Probably.
Yeah. 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. That's a real issue with boys. Boys that have access instantaneous, I mean, if you give a boy phone, you're basically saying, here, little fella, go watch people fuck.
because they're gonna. That's the first thing they're gonna do when you're not around. And they're all sorts of studies that demonstrate that this leads to relationship and sexual insufficiency later. And 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 point?
It's gotta be 50%, right? It's gotta 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. And then it's like now it's in sex workers, which is weird. It is weird. They went completely the other direction. And I just thought in what, what you Hefner fantasy did women decide that all the women at Hugh Hefner's mansion were actually super duper empowered?
That does not seem like the most super empowering lifestyle. Make your choices, man, it's a free country. But my wife's a doctor, and I feel like that's more empowering than getting screwed by an 80-year-old for pocket change. Depends on what kind of car you buy, sir.
i was a doctor she can get whatever car she damn well please my friend what happened what happened that that became like empowerment like how did what where's the i think that there was a shift and it's a shift that 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 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 free or better society. I just don't think that that's, again, it's free country, do what you want on legislative level, but as a cultural matter, I don't think that leads to a lot of human happiness.
I look at it like 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 in to marrying them and then take all their money. I feel like that's sexual. That's deserved. Yeah, that's deserved. At a certain point, you're like, OK, sign off on this. Come on, stupid. Yeah, you didn't see this coming. It's like, this is a great country. It really is. You can make money doing pretty much anything. Like when people say it's hard to make money in this country.
There are a lot of people making money a lot of different ways in this country. I mean, for God's sake, Colin Kaepernick has made millions of dollars kneeling for the national anthem. It feels like in calling America racist while cash in the check, this is a great damned country. Well, now we're getting into the weeds. I just want to talk about girls ripping dudes off. I know you did, but 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's sort of raised awareness for police brutality? Just put it to the forefront. Let people understand that this is a problem.
no i don't know that 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 know for the flag but say in the name of the flag you should do x right so to 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 my question. Trashing the American flag is like endemic of police brutality. First of all, it's bullshit. 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 the counterpoint. Why is it trashing the American flag to take a knee?
Isn't that 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, fuck 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 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 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 i'm well that's certainly not the way that he intended when it first started that way i mean if you want to know how do you know what is intention because he literally talked about it i mean he said that america is a highlight that right he said but he said america is a systemically racist country he worked socks with pictures of cops is pigs on them
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Colin Kaepernick is a terrible spokesperson for this movement. Like, again, these are the two main people that have taken a knee. And don't you think that 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 new for the american flag in the idea of if that was the thing you had to do if the if the idea but again this guy decided stand and put his hand over his heart really it's just it's sort of a traditional thing where we're arguing over well it
I mean, it isn't the way that it was originally expressed. It's sort of morphed over time to the point where it doesn't necessarily mean what he originally meant it to me. It's not like he's going fuck you while everybody else has their hand over their heart and silence. But he's taking a knee. He did mean it as an FU. I mean, there's no question that's what he meant it is. 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.
Colin Kaepernick taking the need to symbolize that America's police are systemically brutal and racist is just, it's factually untrue and to attribute that to the American flag is really kind of nasty. But he's not a statistician, right? So he's looking at things like the Eric Gardner case or, you know, which is a terrible one, right? There's cases that you see, like when the guy's just selling loose cigarettes and they're straight out in the right front of the store.
It's a terrible case. You see something like that, and that motivates him to do that. And I know what you're saying. These are anecdotes, and this doesn't encompass the full statistics of cops versus black men, and what exactly is happening. But that's not his area of expertise anyway. He has an issue. Well, I mean, I agree with 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
But if you're a famous person and you decide to take this big stand publicly like that, you become a spokesperson. After you get benched for Blaine Gabbard, after you get benched for Blaine Gabbard and take millions of bucks from a major corporation, currently a president. Is that the Gabbard has to him? Yeah, the immortal Blaine Gabbard, the Hall of Famer Blaine Gabbard, who played like nothing about him. No, Blaine Gabbard was an NFL quarterback who sucked. I mean, he was terrible. And they benched Colin Kaepernick for him. And it was after he got benched that he started doing the kneeling for the American flag. It's a pretty good gig. Sports broadcaster who knows nothing about sports.
Listen people try to talk to me about if you explain it the way that you're explaining it Meaning we're not living up to the American flag, which is why I'm kneeling mm-hmm I wouldn't be arguing with it. He didn't explain it that way 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 for a problem that okay lock-in arms okay but kneeling's bad well no what the way that he characterizes kneeling was bad okay but what about other people that need if they characterize it differently means a different thing okay right in the series meaning like what it originally was is what it was i'm not going to retcon what he meant at the time he was the first to do it right right and then he and then he made millions of dollars for his bravery again i i don't think it takes a whole hell of a lot of bravery to be bench for blaine gabbard taken the make millions of bucks from nikey i wish i knew this blaine gabbard fella was
terrible QB rating is all you really need to know not not a good quarterback is the answer so is calling Kaepernick i mean i don't know as an athlete is he not good but he's a terrific athlete he's not a very good quarterback okay so i mean he he had won fantastic season he led the the forty-nineers 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 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 convince 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 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 really bad. Like to the point where you now have college campuses where if you fly an American flag, there have been cases where people are asked to take it down because it's too divisive like that.
That's why. That does seem crazy. When you say it's anecdotal, that he's reacting to something that's anecdotal, but there's many of those anecdotes. And you see them over and over again. The problem is they're so prevalent. There's so many videos. So this is 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 god damn there's a lot of anecdotes there's three hundred thirty million police interactions every year yes i mean that's
Now, what was the initial interaction that, what was his motivation to do that? Was there a single instance of police brutality that caused him to do that? I'm trying to remember which season he did this. This would have been three, four years ago. So I'm trying to remember. I don't think it was the Michael Brown situation.
cuz i remember there are protests in the NFL over michael brown mmm which was actually a bad anecdote like that was a bad one for people to pick people were doing hands up don't shoot that didn't actually happen right he actually tried to grab the gun from the cop he the for gun went off in the car he charged the cop by witness testimony all the witnesses were black you know that the air gardener one is much cleaner right
well the air 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 please put out police brutality for sure it's kind of like it's actually i'm warning people now what happens in the george floyd case with direct shaven
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 aritha
And 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 a hard charge to make, just on a legal level. So I'm warning people now of that because the next move will be obviously the system is racist if Derek Chauvin doesn't get convicted of first degree murder.
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 with second. Well, he has to be charged with second, right? Because it first would mean premeditated. Right. Well, he was charged with third originally. And then Keith Allison, the AG over there, elevated it to second degree. I think it's very difficult to make the case for second degree murder. What were you pulling up, Jamie? You had something you want to say?
Yeah, well, I had the part of when this actually started in 2016. He started, let's keep 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. But that's why I had 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 him. 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 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, 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 five 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.
It was also a way to try to show more respect to the men that went in that fight for this country. OK, so that's better, obviously. But that's him. Scroll down for a second, because I think that there is. That's 2016. So here's a look at this one. OK, look at the one right below that. OK, this is the one I'm talking about. OK, 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. That's the sentence right there. 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 initial explanation is the one that i was talking about okay so he revised his feelings on it and then well that's not a super reasonable it started with the scapernake had guns drawn him by cops for being one of the only black eyes in his town
Yeah, that seems super reasonable, what he said there about having a military military rather. Yeah, although he recently released a video that sort of goes back to the original explanation, suggesting that America is endemically and systemically racist, which is a problem. That's a hot take right now. It's good. It's very popular.
Yeah, that's the big one. How do you think we get back on track? How do we find balance? I always hope that things go really far in one direction and really far in the other direction.
Listen, I end up in the same place I always end up, which is we gotta learn to leave each other to the F alone. I mean, seriously, that's the only way this is gonna work. Because we either have to decide we wanna share a country and live together with each other, or we have to decide we don't. If we wanna 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've got to stop that. And we've got to recognize that people may not agree with you. People may do things differently than you. And that's OK. As much as I dislike what Colin Kaepernick's doing, I don't think that he should be blackballed from the NFL. If I were an NFL owner, by the way, I'd hire him in a second. You know the kind of press I'd get for hiring Colin Kaepernick? I'd make a boatload of Colin Kaepernick. That's a great deal. So how come people aren't doing it? I mean, I assume because he's not that great a quarterback. I mean, if he were Tom Brady, I think that he would be getting a contract.
He also, I mean, there was that whole situation last year with Kaepernick where he wanted to do tryouts for the NFL and then he sort of broke the NFL's rules and doing the tryouts and he wanted to film it a certain way and all this sort of stuff. But 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 have got a winning team and a great story or he could sack every other down in which case have the country cheers. So controversy sells. Yeah, that's for sure.
But how do we, I mean, this is probably one of the most racially divisive times in my memory, in my lifetime. I don't remember 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 you were telling me earlier is wild to trader joe's is called trader joe's right which is not racist i guess but apparently they they have mexican products that they were calling trader hoseys
And some board person in their basement decided to create a petition that got signed by some 2,400 other board people about why it shouldn't be called Trader Jose's because that's racist. 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 think they called it exoticizing. Mexican people. Yeah, it's making them exotic and other. So Trader Joe's pulled it down. Trader Joe's is going to not use this anymore. 17 year old called out Trader Joe's. Now the chain is dropping offensive labeling. How many Hispanics were picking outside Trader Joe's being out? Now that I saw that Trader Jose beer,
All right, listen, I'm Italian. Do you think Papajinos, 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? I would love to see Italians. 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. Yeah. 90%, right? White live in the suburbs, hate their parents.
Yeah. What did you say? What was the word they used for it? Exoticizing. Exoticizing. Oh my God. That is so adorable. Exoticizing. I was talking to you about Rick Bayless, who's a famous chef of Mexican cuisine, who is a white man, who adores Mexican food. 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.
I get a kick out of it. There's a guy I used to watch on PBS that would make furniture with ancient tools. I could use ancient, different old-timey saws and chisels and shit, and he would make these wooden chairs and tables and furniture. This is called Beyond Mesh, right?
But he kind of looked like that, but he was really dressed like an old-timey guy, and he had this old-timey shop, and he would make this stuff. And I loved watching him, and I don't give a fuck about his shitty furniture. 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 shit all over. They were just like, you're culturally appropriating. You shouldn't be doing this. You're a white man. Let me just say this generally. Cultural appropriation is a bunch of horseshit. And the reason it's a bunch of horseshit is because you know what? The best in life, all the things that are good from everybody else's culture. The reason people live in major cities is to go to all the different restaurants from all of the different cultures. And 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. If we're all siloed off into our own little culture, you know how much things would suck? It would just be terrible. So this kind of stuff is just crazy. It drives me nuts. 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. Because you hate Koreans.
I mean, that's clearly the problem here. I culturally appropriate the shit out of my childhood. Yeah, exactly. This is all crazy. And there's no apparent end to it. Like, there's no limiting principle. No, there's no limit. There's no limit. I read a column this morning by somebody, I think it was in the Washington Post, saying that we should just keep changing the name of everything. Literally, forever. We should just keep changing the name of everything. She said, you know, there is this town. And I think I found a non-offensive name for the town. But if I found something else that was offensive, like three years from now, we should change the name of the town.
There's not okay, so we are living in 1984, right? Or we'll talk about renaming everything. People will find a way, they'll find a way to be mad. Here's my controversial statement, okay? Okay. My controversial statement is, if you have to go this far to find things to be offended over, there's not that much to be offended over. If you have to go so far that you have to be offended by Trader Jose's, you got nothing going on in your life.
There's a dramatic demand for being offended and acting like a victim. And they're actual victims in this country. And internationally, they're seriously actual victims. But we don't focus on any of those folks. We focus instead on the dumbest bull crap you ever heard about renaming libraries. Listen, you want to take a Confederate statue and put it in a museum? Fine. Those guys were jerks. They're terrible people. Fine, go for it. But you're talking about we're going to fix the world by renaming
Washington DC because Washington was bad. It's like, what did you do lately? Did you do Washington then? 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 were saying he was great with women. I think everybody was bad with women back then.
Everyone is bad, period. Human being suck. Okay, so either get rid of all the statues or recognize the human being suckers. Obviously. For sure. And there are gradations of suck. Do you remember back when they were tearing down the Civil War statues and Trump in all his wisdom? It's 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're doing. That was what they were doing. I mean, in Chicago, well, that was actually Christopher Columbus, who was legitimately a bad guy.
He was, I mean, yes. Also, everyone was bad. Like literally all the people were like, enslavement, brutal, brutal treatment of people. Fairly commonplace. But do you think 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. I think there's- If 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. But he also traded 10% of the population. True enough, and what, impregnated the other 10% or something, it's something like that. Yeah, everybody. He literally raped his way through Asia.
The point of a Christopher Columbus statue is not all the bad things he did to the airlocks. 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's a lot of brutality. And yes, there's 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 originally in paradise before Christopher Columbus came, that Christopher Columbus doesn't deserve a statue in specific.
that we should, like, either make the argument that everybody was a product of their time and therefore no one deserves a statue, or recognize that when there's a statue of Christopher Columbus, we are not honoring how he treated the arrow walks. No one ever thought that we put up a statue of Christopher Columbus because he was really sweet to the natives on the other end of that.
Right? 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 all know who he is. We all know what he did. Why do we have 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... It's a monument to a 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 named after Amerigo Vespucci, who nobody knows who the fuck that guy is. Yeah, he's been lost in the time. He's totally been lost. But there is this idea that has settled in, and it's really of high irritation to me, that we are now the only good people who have ever lived.
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 atop the legacy that George Washington helped build.
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 shit. The people in the future that would never shatter property and never spray paint things and never attack people for filming things with their cell phones. They're going to look back at these violent actions and they're going to look back and they're not going to be kind. They're the same way. 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 was wrong with Thomas Jefferson. Although he did draft the Declaration of Independence, he was a slave owner.
And this is one of the contradictions of our society and our culture. Father and kids with us live. 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 this is one of the arenas that 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
of checks and balances that prevents people from getting 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 what happened at chas or chop because 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 fuck out of people who did anything they didn't want to do, including film things. They wind up, you saw murder. You saw massive graffiti. You certainly saw borders. They were borders put up. They kept cops from coming in. They kept a lot of people from coming in. Enough journalists.
The 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, fuck you. They took them over. They took them over and started spray painting shit all over them. It's crazy, but it shows you like your
childlike idea of what you can do that's better. You don't really understand that the Founding Fathers really did put into place all these checks and balances to keep someone from abusing power. And as much as Trump would like to overcome all that, you see time and time again. He's a great example in many ways of how this system really is beautifully engineered from 300 fucking years ago.
Because the founders didn't understand the problem of human nature, which is people want power, and they want to hurt other people very often. And you still need government in order to do things, but there better be broad-scale agreement on the things you want to do, or a small majority of people can really hurt a huge minority of people. This is what they call tyranny of the mob. They're much afraid of this. And that's stuff that is worth remembering. They're tearing down that system because you want to build something more beautiful. If it looks like Chaz or Chop,
then anything what's this idealistic of the have blinders on it has a bit of a 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 yeah they look at the problems one of the biggest problems we have an american politics is the myopia with which we look at the united states when you're dating somebody is very easy to see all the problems with the person you're dating when you're married to someone certainly easy for my wife see all the problems of me and there are plenty
But when she looks at all the other people, then she's like, OK, 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 isn'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 Uyghur 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 the Uyghur situation is shockingly under covered.
Oh, my God. Well, it demonstrates that when people said never again, they were full of crap. They're just full of crap. I mean, it's just not true. This is one area where the United States should absolutely be taking a leading role. It is obvious that China is an nefarious actor. China has been stealing our technology. 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 and violation of trading. And the response has basically been muted from the Western world.
Did you see that video of the Chinese ambassador in Britain being asked on the BBC about that tape? No, it didn't. It's fantastic. So the BBC interviewer shows him the tape of the people being pushed onto trains. 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 that the screen is huge. It's right behind him. 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 here if you read he won't he won't deal with it he won't explain what it is and the rest of the world is just like well you know what this is where you know in the sporting world that the whole the the story that's under covered in the sporting world is the is the blowback on that the n b a gave to darryl moray the the houston rockets jim for saying free hong kong right you can get anybody in the n b a to condemn china while china's subjecting a million wiegers to abject slavery mark you've been just had an exchange with uh... ted crews the other day where where
he is going after crews for something and crew said we'll just you know he questioned crews crews balls or something and crews came back and said well do you have the balls to condemn china and cuban said something like well you know i don't want to i don't want to get involved in the internal affairs of another country 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 transit to concentration camps where you force them into labor and or sterilize them. That seems like not an internal issue that you're not allowed to criticize, really. Yeah, that's a big one. But the China thing is so crazy because so many business interests have this connection with them and so much of
the money that they generate is because of China. I mean, the NBA films, there's so much, so much of our culture that cowed tiles 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. 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. 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. She is the most powerful Chinese leader since male. It's incredible.
We don't have much time. You have a heart out in one minute. I just want to know, what do you think goes down in November? And how hopeful are you for the future? Because it seems to me like we're fucked no matter who wins. Because the chaos that we're seeing, the civil unrest that we're seeing, it's going to either accelerate 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 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 skunked. I mean, right now the polling data's 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, they were kind of right. So on the national data, the final real-clear politics poll average is like three points, Hillary won by three points in the popular vote. The state polls were really wrong, particularly in Wisconsin and 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...
Because he's not threatening. He's fundamentally non-threatening. You look at Biden, do you feel threatened by Biden? I don't feel threatened by Biden. The man's not alive. You can't threaten me with a corpse. And so Trump, who is innately volatile and looking for something to kind of attack his 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. Right now, people who don't like either Biden or Trump are breaking nearly universally for Biden because Trump is so off-putting. And I've said for a long time, politics is about the art of making it hard to vote for your opponent and easy to vote for you. And Trump is fairly good at number one, and he is awful. He has got awful at number two, making it easy to vote for him.
That's that's a toughie. Well said. Well said. Thank you Ben Shapiro. Always a good time, man. I really enjoyed it. Always enjoy seeing you. All right. That's it. Bye, everybody. Awesome. Thank you.
