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 thanks slender and healthy you look good oh thank you i appreciate it turns out running away from my children for four months straight will do that to you i literally took up running just to get away from my children just going outside just for some mine space it's la man you can't get outside unless you're actively exercising are they coming to arrest you oh i could alluded to [ __ ] foot locker right then they would have that would be
okay do you run with a mask on no does anybody yell at you no no no what 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 that's the that's the goal did you try to get healthier when covid hit like were you worried and a little bit it really wasn't about covered 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 never learned how to use a barbecue actually and then it turned out it was actually not that hard so i don't know what i was doing for years i got to give you some elk meat are you barbecuing right now oh yeah you're still doing it yeah i'll give you some elk sausages you have to do kosher right so i have to oh that's not cool at all 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 how that what's the logic behind that so i mean not too fast into the biblical stuff but the the original logic was that you were supposed to kill the animal in the most humane way was the idea now do i know if it's the most humane way now i have no idea it's most certainly not okay because you have to slice it up with the rabbis man i don't know yeah i get it how back in the day a very sharp knife going through the throat would have been the most humane way 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're not allowed to eat blood and judaism so oh really yeah yeah so what do you do when you have a medium rare steak i mean you salt the steak really heavily that's why this is why kosher meat is pretty salty so if you go to a steak house are you allowed to go to a steak house uh kosher steakhouse there are kosher steakhouses ah you're so deep in that one no man but you're a logical intelligent guy does part does it every now and then i like juxtapose those but does every now and then it [ __ ] 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 you got to embrace the system but you feel like for tradition and for just the whole jewish culture it's worth doing exactly i mean you 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've 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 a lit these little incremental steps they slide and people go oh god what's the big deal what do you care and you're like i see where this is going like i said there's so this is it's going down that way this is not gonna stop it's sliding oh yeah and you saw it in l.a i mean i've lived in l.a my whole
life and the the move from la being a pretty safe fairly nice city suburban orientation to just overrun with with horror shows is really it was a lot faster than i thought it would be but it's sort of a you're right it's a gradual decline and then it's just off a cliff well you started to see tents and you didn't see them at all for decades and then all of a sudden i started seeing tents i remember i was doing fear factor in skid row in the early 2000s we would film down there and i'd be like this is crazy like has anybody seen this does anybody
know this because there was these homeless streets like you go down these gigantic and downtown l.a back then for people don't live in la you would think oh downtown's like downtown new york or downtown cleveland no downtown la was uh no man's land nothing's going on in downtown l.a it is now like there's what was pre-covered it was like there was some bars and there was some really cool upscale apartment buildings it was kind of picking up but uh i took my family there before kovid like
a few four months before covert or so we went to we we're gonna go to there's a famous donut place there so we said just uh one of those goofy sunday things like what do you guys want to do today let's go get donuts so we went to downtown l.a like holy [ __ ] literally [ __ ] human [ __ ] on the streets everything smelled like piss bums everywhere and i'm like okay stay close to me stay over here if anybody comes near you move move closer to me like jesus christ like this is crazy i don't want him to be freaked out but i'm like this is nuts well the thing is that that sort of disaster area
stuff in l.a was sort of localized right it really like i worked in the lida's office for a summer when i was when i was in law school it's been like 2007 says a while ago and i remember they had a giant tent city and you had to walk from the car they made you park a mile away and walk it and so you were walking through skid row and it's like okay well this 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 you know is it for for people who are living in the suburbs like this is at least localized it's not like reaching into your life and then over the past 13 years like i live in a pretty decent suburban area and i'm seeing like open needles on the street and walk out of my house one day there's just a guy lying face down in the gutter like edgar allan poe and i thought well this is this is falling apart rather quickly what do you think caused the slide or the expansion of the slide because i agree with you that it was very
it was very isolated skid row was very isolated downtown l.a was very i remember one time we were filming in downtown l.a and we were on a gurney or i guess that's one of those things called where it lifts up oh all right 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 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 l.a 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 right here you go you know you got a little gift you get to see some weird [ __ ] while you're here but i didn't i didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where you're on like winnetka off the 101 and there's 80 [ __ ] tents and they put a porta potty
there they put a port-a-potty we're doing real building and real development here in los angeles not apartment buildings we got some porta-potties we put every underpass shall have a port-a-potty thanks to mayor eric garcetti you pay attention to politics far more than i do and and law enforcement and all that what happened how did it get to this well on this particular problem this actually started with a bunch of lawsuits so the lapd used to have the authority to move people's [ __ ] if it was on the sidewalk if people had a bunch of stuff that was
on the sidewalk and they're just camping out there the lapd could come 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 tell you you do such good work sometimes and the court's ruled that you actually are not allowed to move people's stuff that that's actually personal property even though it's in a public area and then they got a ruling from a court that you're allowed to live in your car
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 do it 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 if there's misery it should be equally spread across the city and and that's kind of what you're
seeing i mean this is 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 douche bags could run around shattering windows pretending that they were standing up for social justice they shut down beverly hills at then rodeo drive 1pm 1pm so that people could run up and down rodeo drive talking about how capitalism sucks while tweeting from their iphone while
stealing stealing nikes you know there was two moments where i was like this is a real opportunity for us to come together and one of them was the moment the lockdown happened it it felt to me very similar to right after 9 11 where everybody was confronted with their own mortality like holy [ __ ] like we we might be on the verge of a pandemic like in a movie where a lot of the people we know die and here we we have to be kind to each other we have to be this is what's important family is important and i remember thinking i've never been
closer to my family never been closer to my friends we're calling each other all the time we were it was like it was a there was there was real hope in that i was like if we get through this we're going to be tighter we're going to know what means something what counts [ __ ] stand up comedy [ __ ] 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 like they were scared so people started getting shittier with each other online and then i basically swore off twitter i
was like this is just too toxic and too hostile the second moment where i thought we had the opportunity to come together was george floyd so george floyd died and all of a sudden you have these black lives pro matter protests and and i'm like maybe we can finally make a dent on racism maybe we can finally make a dent in police brutality maybe this is a moment where we can come together and realize what's important is community solidarity that we we 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 into
account ptsd maybe we should take into account the fact that these [ __ ] guys are pulling up on people every day that might shoot them in the face they might never be able to see their family and their kids let's rework this let's think this [ __ ] through nope then chaos and then all of a sudden it became like what we saw yesterday where they're breaking into amazon go in seattle like that [ __ ] guy owns the washington post he owns the most left-wing newspaper in america and
you're like not good enough well you saw they set up a like a fake guillotine outside of beethoven's house in washington dc it's insane and it's it's just it's madness i'm too rich i totally agree with you by the way like when when the when covet happened i thought i can't really see how we're going to split in partisan fashion over this thing right like everybody wants to live and everybody would also like to eventually get back to regular life and the better we can live the better we can get back to regular life so it seems
like okay we're on board when it came to the lockdowns the original lockdowns i was like okay i'm on board you know i'm taking this thing really seriously i've got parents in there in their 60s i feel like you know 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 i mean 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 like a couple of things that you really can do that are obviously wrong like nobody has a good solution on this thing okay it ravaged italy it ravaged spain it ravaged new york like there are a couple things you shouldn't do don't take the olds and send them back into the nursing homes with coveted right that's like an obvious one but beyond that like just staying away from each other and socially distancing and worrying like this is all kind of common sensical
stuff that people have known since the flu pandemic event 1918 like nothing nothing has really changed and yet it immediately turned into who can we blame who's who's to blame for all these dead people maybe it's ron desantis or maybe it's cuomo like who who can we blame so that was terrible and then on the floyd stuff i had the same feelings like i don't know a single human being who watched that tape and didn't think okay that guy deserves to go to jail chalvin right the officer in that case and the george foreign everyone and everybody
every single person was like yeah that's that's real bad like that's and cops like i know tons of cops i'm friendly with tons of cops and not one of them was like yeah that's good police procedure i'm glad he did that like no one thought that and so when people like okay we're gonna look at police brutality maybe we'll take a look at qualified immunity maybe we'll take a look at police unions and the kind of restrictive covenants that they have with the cities and and how we make sure that everybody knows who the bad cops are so they can't get hired at different places like all those are solutions but 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 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 don't have like a responsible conversation about things that make sense we'll talk about like what if we just got rid of the police how crazy is that discussion that discussion uh
when when people were really saying defund the police i'm like cooler heads will prevail but they're going to realize and i think they're realizing it now in new york city i mean new york city has had record crime record 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 that's exactly right i look at garcetti and i look at de plasio i'm like garcetti i'll have him
over my house for dinner he's way better so weird he's so you can have protests but only black lives matter protests that one that was that was a solid you know that was that may have been the moment when i realized that we were all effed right it was the moment when like we're in the middle of a global pandemic with hundreds of thousands of people dead and an entire swath of our media and health elites just decided randomly that if you were protesting against lockdown you were very bad right then you were a racist and you're going to get people killed and you should wear a
mask and i was like well if you're pro i sort of agree with the 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 covet and their family could not visit them like they literally died alone in the hospital of covet 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 but what [ __ ] 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 um for your freedom to go to a restaurant look they figured out how to do restaurants in a lot of places the the servers wear masks
and many of them wear face shields you distance the tables apart from each other you do temperature checks you take people's names and addresses down when they enter so that if anybody gets sick if there's any sort of kind and they'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 that's the stuff where people are getting this stuff and i i i trust most americans not like some americans would be dumb asses some people are just dumbasses oh there's a lot of videos
oh yes you watch youtube there's plenty of karen's out there how sad is it if your name is karen and you're a good person all the good karen's out there i'm sorry ladies i'm really sorry but it's like this is i made this point online i got shellacked for it but i was pointing out that most americans are wearing masks right now bipolar data 59 of americans say that they always wear a mask when they leave the house and if you look at the map of mask wearing across the board in the places where
there are the most cases people are wearing masks that's not i wasn't saying masks don't work i wear a mask i think that the evidence shows that they do something and we don't know that they're not like full protective they're the cloth masks are not as effective as surgical masks which are not as effective as m95s but wear a mask good the point that i was making is people are acting in fairly rational fashion meaning if you think kovit is like around you you're wearing a mask and you're socially distancing so this this idea that
gavin newsom knows best how you ought to live your life like i i got some trouble with that especially because california saw the same uptick as texas and florida and california never opened i mean we've been here the whole time california never really opened well we were doing pretty good up until the protests yes everything seemed like it was on an uptick the comedy store was talking to them about becoming an essential business and and opening up because they had opened up bars and they had opened up restaurants and they didn't really have a
designation for comedy clubs they they sort of talked about it as a live performance venue but then that puts comedy clubs at the same place as the staples center which sounds crazy right right so 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 this other thing is we were trying to figure out like is it protest only i
think it's bars too yeah the thing about bars is close talk people are talking yeah they're drunk and they're on top of each other i think bars probably have a church significant update lots of singing lots of lots of vocalizing right churches and synagogues were a main vector for this yeah i mean but again these are all things that are fairly common sensical and we can agree on and yet we're beating the hell out of each other over this stuff and there's the suggestion we know what to do if only we just did it this would stop it's not
gonna stop okay it's not gonna 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 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 the you can only protest if it's a black lives matter protest what about a protest for increasing your immunity what about a protest for educating people to
the the the techniques and the strategies for increasing your immune system it is 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 [ __ ] in your diet start taking vitamin supplements get outside get some vitamin d
get get your body healthy exercise do do all these things and you will increase your immune system you increase your body's health you don't hear a word of that all of it is just stay inside lock you know we have to stay apart to keep everybody safe and god damn the number one vector for transmission remains the home right that's still the number one vector in every society is the home people going home and giving it to each other and when they i remember for for me one of the breaking points in la was was when they decided they were going to
shut down all open areas they're going to shut down all the parks they're going to shut down all the beaches and i was like what is this well not only that it goes against science because there's been papers that have been studied that 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 all 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 [ __ ] about george floyd or black lives matter were just stealing [ __ ] and then this police was letting them steal [ __ ] they were standing down in beverly hills and santa monica literally cops standing there while people are saying i gotta say the media coverage of
this stuff is just awful the media were cheering this stuff on and they were simultaneously making two arguments that conflict with each other one was these are mostly peaceful protests first of all mostly peaceful is the most it's it's the loosest most loosely defined arbitrarily applied term in history simpson was mostly peaceful that night oj 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 like i've never heard this term before where
a protest turns into a vast riot you know wrecking all of melrose and everybody's like well it was mostly peaceful what what is that what is that true so how about this 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 minute you shatter a store window you go to jail right that's the way they should run or alternatively if it's if you're saying they're the same group then they need to be treated as law breakers so
i i believe the first i believe you're a protester you should be protesting if you're a looter and a rioter then you should go to jail but the media refused to make that distinction and then they act like the cops are the bad guys when they come in to to arrest people who are violating the laws i think it's in portland right now they're trying to burn down the damn courthouse yeah and the and the feds come in and start arresting people and people like this is the gestapo it's like okay speaking as one of the tribe let me say this is not like the gestapo okay like the 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 want 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 [ __ ] i mean like i'm sorry that's at some point somebody's got to restore some semblance of law and order here well it's it's a weird situation because i don't exactly understand why they're attacking the courthouse
i don't exactly understand why they're smashing the windows at amazon go it's it's steve martin right they think they must hate these paint cans really from the jerk right but it's it's 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 this is actually really the the biggest problem right now on the racism point is the shifting definition of racism so i had the unfortunate experience of actually reading one of the best-selling books in the country robin 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 ibrahim kendy's how to be an anti-racist the the basic definition of racism changes in this theory so racism you and i were sitting here discussing racism and the way i define racism is probably the same way you define racism you believe in the inferiority or superiority of a group based on race of an individual based on their membership in that group too right that would be racism
i believe that you're inferior or you're superior based on your race end of story right that's that's racist so robin d'angelo and ibram kendi redefine racism to mean any societal structure that results in a racial inequality is itself racist so any structure that results in a not exact proportion between whites and blacks does that make the nba racist exactly exactly the answer is kind of yes except that the nba is not racist because obviously it benefits black people right i mean now the nba is not racist in except it's
because it's meritocracy it's the reason the nba is not racist but robin d'angelo and kendy 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 again i've read their books the the basic notion that to be anti-racist you have to tear down free markets or you have to tear down free speech or you have to and what that means is of course that any time there's rioting and looting that's really just an expression of outrage at the broader american system and so it justifies that sort of stuff this is why you saw nicole hannah jones the de facto editor of the new york times 1619 project lady tweeting out that she appreciated the
people were calling these the 16 19 riots because once you say america is rooted in slavery and rooted in evil in a terrible horrible no good very bad place then robbing a shop is just the latest iteration of you fighting the system explain the 1619 correlation to people if you would sure so the 1619 project is is something put forward by the new york times it's not good history there are four pulitzer prize-winning historians who said this is not good history the basic argument is the united states was not founded in 1776 with the principles of the declaration of
independence the count the country was actually founded in 1619 with the importation of african slaves to american shores because that's when the first african slave arrived in the united states was 1619. so the idea is that the entire history of america is a history of a system that is endemically white supremacist and that all of the declaration of independence is basically a lie that the principles of all men are created equal that was a lie when it was written and it's a lie now that the idea that we have rights that
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 they essentially make the argument that from 1619 to 2020 is a continuum racism has gone underground a little bit but it's still there and it's still it's still implicit in all of our systems so the 1619 project has essays blaming literally everything on racism so disparities in maternal mortality between black women and white women which by the way exist in europe and in canada
that's due to american racism traffic patterns in the united states is due to systematic american racism every racial disparity is attributable to a system that was rooted in slavery now the traditional notion of america 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 blood on america but the story of america is trying to fulfill the promises of the declaration
of independence over time make those promises available to everybody and this isn't my argument this is martin luther king jr's argument when he talks on in the march 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 is the argument frederick douglass the freed slave makes in 1852 makes a famous speech before slavery is ended he says july 4th doesn't mean anything to black americans
because we're not included in the bargain include us in the bargain the story of america is the declaration of independence those principles that we should all basically still agree on because they're pretty good principles free speech free assembly all the things you see in the constitution that those things brought about greater freedom and prosperity than anything else and helped us overcome the sins that are present in all human societies and were present in the united states in extreme ways as well but that's that's the counter-narrative right the 16-19 project says
that all that was basically nonsense and that america's 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 is there middle ground d 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 the to 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 it's true in your family history if you have a grandfather who went to who went to prison on a particular charge that leads to poverty for your parents which led to more poverty for you right people have histories those histories
are embedded in their life experiences and that's true for societies as well all of that is for sure true then there's the question as to whether the institutions today are racist and that's not quite the same thing right because history has consequences is not the same thing as saying the rules today are racist because the rules today are not racist actually the rules today are quite not racist so but historically it's fairly recent if you go from the civil rights movement to 2020 we're really not talking about that much time it's about three generations 50 plus
years 60 years yeah i mean it's 50 plus right in the world of you know in the best span of human history it's not a very small amount of time right so clearly there's some impact of both racism and then jim crow laws so that that's where i'm saying there's a middle ground yeah and it's independent it is important for people on my side of the conservatives to acknowledge and recognize the importance of of history in people's living situations now and it's important for people on the
other side of the aisle to at the same time not attribute every single thing to history because right but people who are bullies something like that there's always like extremes on each position and the truth lies somewhere in the middle yeah but i don't think that it lies as far in in the dead center of that as people i think want it to what i mean by that is the problems that have plagued communities in the united states not just the black community in the united states but problems of racism or problems of sexism the way those get alleviated is people
making better choices over time right that is the problem that's the way that those issues get alleviated when jews arrived in the united states in the in the early 20th century to talk of my people when they when they came they were impoverished they didn't speak the language they were banned from country clubs there was open discrimination against them they were banned from harvard right harvard law school had quotas on jews the the way to fight against that is to make good decisions and so the you fight against the system to make sure that the
system has rules that apply equally to everyone right but you clearly see that there's a big difference between people coming over here willingly and doing so in order to better their lives versus someone whose ancestors were dragged over here to be sold as property and then dealing with the repercussions of that being your family history and redline laws and all the other things that were put in place to sort of keep them in very specific areas which to this day remain crime-ridden gang-ridden deeply impoverished communities well
that's true but the question is how much of that is historic redlining and how much of that is an 18 year old kid today deciding to pipe a gun and shoot somebody but how much of that 18 year old kid today deciding to pick up a gun and shoot somebody is based on him growing up in this [ __ ] up environment where that's what he models where everything around him is crime and gangs and you imitate your atmosphere which what all humans do right but the answer is there's only one way to break that chain what what way is that that way is to not pick up a gun and
shoot somebody i think that's a simplistic way of looking at it if you're on the outside of that community and you're not one of those 18 year old kids that grows up with the incredible influence of all the people around him and that's all you see and that's all you know well but the problem is the only way that's going to be the thing that your kid doesn't know is for you not to do it at some point personal agency has to come in some it does because the expectation education and and teaching them about personal agency and 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 gonna succeed right that's literally the worst thing you can say to a kid what you should be saying is look at how your grandfather was born behind the eightfall and look how hard he had to work in order to get ahead and look at all the options that's true though but if your grandfather wasn't ahead didn't get ahead if your grandfather was in and out of jail if your father was in and out of jail everyone around you is like that if there's literally no influence that's positive in your life
the idea of saying to a kid like that hey don't pick up a gun and shoot somebody it's way that's way too simplistic a version of of their future in my mind i mean 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 what what has already been set in motion and the momentum that keeps continuing decade after decade i don't know what could be done well but that's the problem is that i think that
a lot of the solutions that have been proposed have already been tried meaning okay so 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 that's an equal race right so you have to get the person who's 20 yards behind to actually get up to the starting lines
that they're equal and so the idea was we're going to fight this war in poverty and alleviate poverty largely through transfer payments and and through the government taking a forcible step in favor of alleviating people's lives we've now spent 22 trillion dollars in the war on poverty and we have about the same number of black americans living under the poverty line as we're living under the poverty line by the late 70s the the the real issues that that are inter that are creating intergenerational
poverty everyone knows this but remains true the number one predictor of intergenerational poverty in the united states remains single motherhood the single motherhood rate in the black community was 20 in 1960 it is upward of 70 today that's not unique to the black community by the way it's true in the white community as well the five five percent of white kids were born out of wedlock in 1960 today is upward of 40 percent 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's been a cultural change that does not place tremendous emphasis for black or white or for anybody on personal responsibility and personal agency there needs to be a mindset change we do this by the way in all other areas of american life except for the most important decisions in the area of sports nobody does this routine and there is a point shelby steele makes in the area of sports if a kid is not does not have a good jump shot nobody says to him you know what you don't have
a good jump shot because your father didn't have a good jump shot his grandfather didn't have a good jump shot and the game is biased against you we say okay if you want to be on the team you're going to have to learn to shoot a jump shot right that that sounds harsh that sounds bad but sports are different and here's why sports are different because sports you enter them independently of your culture you you you base what you're trying to do on the parameters of the rules and the people that you're competing against that's how you look at it so you
whatever culture you're from you you walk into this new thing with this very rigid set of rules i don't think white people are good or asians have a monopoly on valuing education or monopoly on hard work or punctuality or anything i think that black people have exactly the the same capacity as any people of any other race to do all of these things and those are the preconditions for success you either meet them or you don't i mean that'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 look i was very fortunate when i was young that i discovered martial arts and it kept me from being what i could have potentially been a bad kid like it gave me something to focus on there's and i didn't grow up in a bad environment but it wasn't the best there's a lot of people out there that grow up in horrific environments and
they never have that thing they never have something they they don't have a father around or they don't have a mother around or whatever whatever bad influences they have are overwhelming and they they don't it's it's very difficult for someone to just air quotes get their [ __ ] together it's very difficult 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 they everybody who's fat wants to be thin
they do but it's [ __ ] hard for sure and that's nothing in comparison to changing your whole life but but you would say about somebody losing weight you know what's not useful here is lamenting how bad your family has had it with regard to losing weight like at a certain point if you want to lose the weight you got to figure out a way to lose the weight that's true 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 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 i mean being able to like move outside your crap local public schools would be good the best influences for kids that grow up in these environments seem to be
people that have gotten out and then come back and talk to them right and tell them how to do it but none of this can 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's seeking to keep you down well maybe not but there there has been a very small amount of emphasis placed on taking these impoverished communities and figure out how to engineer them out of this situation that's true so i don't think that's true yeah i mean the amount that we've spent
on a federal level and a state level on educational programs and poverty programs over time but on a year-to-year level i mean these are these are enormous quantities of money this is not a mon this is not really a money problem it really is not a money problem in just terms of you could sign everybody a check tomorrow right the predicate so the the predicate for the slavery reparations movement is exactly this sign everybody a 80 thousand dollar check and the problem will be alleviated no it won't i don't think that's i don't think
i think they'll spend 80 000 and they'll be right back where they started from 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 that i'm making about the 16 19 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 black america should be a story of unbelievably brave people triumphing over systems that sucked
right i mean that that is the story of black america most black americans do not live under the poverty line in the united states there's a huge black middle class there's a black upper class yes there is let's let's simplify this if we can sure if ben shapiro is the king of the world how do you fix baltimore how do you fix detroit how do you fix the south side of chicago okay so here's the unpopular view but it happens to be empirically correct the first thing you have to do is you have to load the place of the police you got to load the place of the police
because you have to stop crime once you stop crime then businesses are happy to invest in those areas you're not going to get businesses to invest in those areas and provide jobs unless the crime is gone you need in fact one of the reasons that you have such a vast differential in racial crime in the united states is because of white racism and there's a point that jane levy writer for the la times has made and she writes a book called ghetto side and she points out that the reason that black crime was so high in the early 20th century and late 19th century
is because basically white communities said to black communities you're on your own right 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 re-establishment of faith in churches right you need social institutions outside of government that are promoting things like family you need you need more one of the reasons you need more companies
in these areas is they can offer educational opportunities to kids internships deals to go to college and then come back and work for us for a couple of years right you need opportunity the same way that opportunity is built anywhere else on earth you need to provide a safe space for business to work and for free speech to flourish and for education to be valued you need to go in 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 are a black kid and you graduate high school with any level of achievement you will have a very solid shot of at least going to a community college and if you score per even decently on the sats of going to a very high level college right affirmative action programs are extraordinarily common across the united states but the 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 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 you can have a single mom but if there are a lot of other male
father figures around that helps fill in the gap right 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 it would be a solution here but this all starts with the notion that it is not racist in the slightest to suggest that law and order have to prevail and that law-abiding people should be protected in their exercise of their rights i think you're 100 right on that and i think although that might be an unpopular opinion i agree with you i
think that is very important now what do you do in this environment when you look at the way people distrust the police now in particular i mean i mean i've been reading stories about cops going to five guys burgers and they can't get served because people won't serve cops and this idea that all cops are bad and this is a very really disturbing perspective to me because you're seeing what's happening right now in chicago you're seeing what's happening right now in new york where you have this massive uptick
in violent crime because it's perceived that the police presence has been diminished greatly so how do you reaffirm the trust in in in law enforcement and what do you do to reform law enforcement because clearly there are some people that are cops that should not be cops yes there are a few things that you can do right off the bat and that people right left and center have sort of talked about and one of them is that you can abridge qualified immunity in certain areas so qualified immunity is the idea that you're not liable to civil suit
if you don't do something bad that has specifically had a precedent in law so you could do something bad but as long as nobody else has done the same exact bad thing before you're not subjected to civil liability you could you could experience it it's a little complicated it's a 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 the
reason that qualified immunity as currently understood under supreme court doctrine is too broad is because that the standard used to be you would have to act as a reasonable police officer if you acted as a reasonable police officer and you took a reasonable action right somebody went for their waistband they had an object in there you didn't know if it was a gun you shot them right you wouldn't presumably be suitable because that's still reasonable you track a guy down you shoot him in the back you know and then you plant the gun on him that
presumably would be suitable right he'd be personally liable so the the the the way that supreme court has done this is they broadened qualified immunity to such an extent that you can still bottom line you can still get away with some bad stuff and not be sued for it so that needs to be curbed that's one thing second police union contracts need to be utterly redone across the country police union contracts right now protect a lot of bad cops right because the police unions are designed to protect the members the members of the union just like any
other union yeah and so what that means is that police unions i'm not a fan of public sector unions generally um 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 right or something those are some easy things that you could do right off the bat but the biggest thing right now the biggest factor in terms of lack of faith between police and and citizens
really is the media because there's been a lot of talk about the racial constituency of police forces the the majority of the lapd is minority the majority of the baltimore pd is minority i believe that a huge percentage of the of the chicago pd is minority so it really is not about you know lots of white cops in black neighborhoods in baltimore it's a lot of black cops in black neighborhoods and that has not solved the problem of people mistrusting the police on an endemic level well it's an inherently difficult job a it's a rotten job man i mean i've i have nothing but for for good cops
those they're heroes and the vast majority of cops are good cops and they're heroes yeah i read uh a a meme the other day that's very accurate it said if you have a 130 good cops and 12 cops you have or 12 cops that are bad you have 12 bad cops if you have 130 good cops and 12 bad cops but the 130 won't do anything about the 12 bad cops you've got 142 bad cops yeah and i think that that's right i think that's right i i think that it is also true that our standard of what constitutes a bad cop has in some ways become much more stringent
so for example there are cases that become national stories in which a cop was labeled a bad cop it wasn't a bad cop right but there are bad cops for sure look look here's a great example the the cops that pushed down that old man and and where was it buffalo new york is that where it was yep granted yep that's [ __ ] crazy i mean and that's white on white crime right i mean uh is a white guy pushes this old man down and the most bonkers part about that was the way the president reacted like oh the way he felt sam
seemed funny maybe he was antifa yeah 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 thing worse yeah i mean unknown president trump having bad reactions look i'm i'm a big supporter of law enforcement i have a lot of friends that are cops i know a lot of friends a lot of people from martial arts that are cops from the ufc i know a lot of cops from jiu jitsu i
knew a lot of cops growing up from all the different martial arts disciplines that i engaged in a lot of cops get involved in that there's a lot of good cops there's a lot of good people out there but it is a [ __ ] insane job and so many of them have ptsd for sure and but i will say that one of the great myths is that the big threat to the black community in the united states is law enforcement it's just nonsense it's not only nonsense it's counterproductive nonsense and you're seeing it but it is a plan right it is a threat off all these times it is
on a data level an extraordinarily small threat law enforcement law enforcement is a threat to black life on a generalized level is extraordinarily small the washington post database last year showed a grand total of 15 black americans shot unarmed across the united states in a country of 42 million black people the problem is when it happens it doesn't matter what the statistics are if people see that video and that video gets shared 200 million times it looks like there's 200 million white cops killing a black guy well and this is why i say that the media's
treatment of this stuff is just horrific it's not just the media it's it's social media social social media has blown this stuff up and it's gotten to the point where if you say that's a horrible situation that's also an anecdotal situation here's some data if you present the data it's like well you're are you ignoring people's lived experiences that's racist how can you present the data the data is the data doesn't take into account the full story nobody takes into account an awful lot of the story which is why it's called data right like i just don't anecdotal
evidence is evidence of an anecdote it is not evidence of a broad national trend nor is it evidence that taking a broad national policy like cutting back funding to the police in a time of rising crime is a good idea because you saw a video on youtube i'm sorry that's a terrible idea but when you look at these videos the positive side if there is any positive side is that it's they're accountable now and this has been going on forever if you talk to people that are black that grew up in
in poverty stricken areas they will tell you horrific stories about being abused by cops and i think the number is like 25 percent more likely a black person or brown person getting any sort of interaction with a cop is 25 more likely to become physical or for them to be abused that's that's real right when you look at the statistics of them being killed yeah white people get killed more by cops than black people but there's way more white people no no even on a percentage basis when you have to use the control group of
crime you can't use the control group of raw population so you have to look at people who are in situations where a deadly interaction is likely there have been multiple studies that show that black people are not in more danger of being shot by cops than 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 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
gonna kill them whereas black people are probably convinced the cops going to kill them that might 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 of 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 and then he might be more likely to rough you up so it's 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 killed by black people by people you know mostly right it's intraracial right there is there there's very little interracial crime like black on white or white on black in the united states there's a lot of intra-racial 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 interview it was kind of an amazing interview terry crews the actor yeah he was on with uh his own don lemon right and don lemon uh is doing the black lives matter sloganing and terry crews says well all lives matter and don lemon says but no black lives matter doesn't mean all black lives matter right but terry crews said all black lives matter and he said no no not all black lives matter only black lives matter we're only talking about police brutality right now and terry crews was like why aren't we
talking about all black lives matter because if black lives matter means you withdraw cops and withdrawing cops means more dead black people then why wouldn't those lives matter too and this is where the slogan nearing gets in the way of actual progress because that's where ideology hits facts right exactly it gets very weird and terry crews was called some terrible names for that but then a video surfaced of don lemon from 2013 chastising sounds like me on that right he sounds like me he talks he sounds
exactly like you it's hilarious pull your pants up get your [ __ ] together you know like he's literally saying things like don't have babies out of wedlock right stay in school which by the way again all of this is commonsensical and true for all races it is not just black people young white people in appalachia need to get their [ __ ] together yes everybody needs to get their [ __ ] 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 no potential for escape i mean that i agree but the first thing that has to change the firs so my dad had a when i was you know looking to get married my dad said the way that you get married is it's not that you find a girl and then you decide to get married you decide to get married and then you find a girl meaning that you you have to sort of make up your mind that you're in that you're in the mode of this might be where we disagree the most a good way to get hooked up with the
wrong lady bro well you make the life decision that you're at that point in your life when you want to make a decision along those lines get married when you love a girl so much you're willing to do something so [ __ ] stupid that you're willing to get married to her because getting married to her is how is where we're going to get married less painful to you than the idea of losing that person because i look i think marriage the good thing about it is that there's financial protection for the family financial
particularly when there's children involved i think that's when it's the most important thing you know i think financial protection for the children 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 [ __ ] 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 they attempt for them okay so not to get into marital advice here but like but i have some you know i've been married for for 12 years at this point thank god very happy marriage we have three kids and the the reason that i say you have to make up your mind that you want to get married before you get married is because you look for a different set of factors then if you are if you are if you make up your mind you want to get married what you're going to look for is
commonality of values who is the person you want to build your life with do you share interest 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 don't think they'll like true i don't think you fall in love with someone that you don't share values with i think you you think they're hot and you want to [ __ ] them people makes this stuff up pretty regularly well people are silly people are indeed silly people do people tattoo their eyeballs ben they do
a lot of dumb [ __ ] you live in a world i don't man 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 how many times you married a girl just because they thought they were hot
a lot a lot a lot men period it's not just jews like the drug of sexual attraction is the most sold drug in the united states it it sells cars it sells homes it's literally it sells lifestyles pornography yeah but that what is that i mean when you're seeing a woman with a short skirt on and long legs walking like like lustfully around a car what do you what is she what are you saying you're saying if you buy this car maybe you can [ __ ] this girl that's what you're saying well of course the worst [ __ ] false advertising we
have in america but this is why when it comes to marriage i think that it's important to actually put your large head before before your other one uh you know the jonathan height in his book his book called the happiness hypothesis great book terrific right he and he talks about this right he talks about the fact that people make a very large scale mistake about marriage which is they think that the passion you feel at the very beginning is what you're going to feel 40 years in and that's not the way this works it starts off where your passionate love level for
somebody meaning like lust and how much you want to get them in bed and how much you want to be with them all the time is it like 100 and your 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 well at sea 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 there's 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 that i think that the the the thing that that has been forgone uh is in my life at least more than made up for by the relationship that i have with my wife so i can i'll go anecdotal there but i also will i'll go data driven which is the longer you live together with somebody before you get married the higher divorce rate after so that's the higher the divorce rate
after if you live for a long time with somebody and then you get married there is a higher percentage chance you will end up divorcing that's interesting i wonder why that is probably because of the open window syndrome like people feel like okay i lived with you for 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 and so they're still 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
right like if it was if it was i'm so committed to this i want to get married right now maybe they just did mushrooms together and realize they really love each other again different world man you know y'all i have a different experience from everybody else i dated my wife for for three months we got engaged we were married within 10 months we married for 12 years we're both versions when we're married so we're old school 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 and they wife swap which is i feel like that's complicated i mean i'll be honest it's complicated i always think those people are trying to i i know people that do that and i almost universally believe that they are distracting themselves from their life they distract themselves from either their career 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 with multiple sex partners and a lot of times what they're
doing is they're doing it they're distracting themselves and they don't realize it at the time that just keeps getting pulled into this direction pulled in that direction it's because you don't have a primary focus on something that's very important to you yes you know and it doesn't mean that you have to be with this person for the rest of your life it doesn't mean you have to only be with one person but when i see a guy that is you know involved in swinging or something like that and then they're balancing a bunch of different gals trust me
that you that you're going to waste time man you know there's not enough time in this life i mean it's weird to tie this whole conversation together but it is true that if you want to be good at a thing or be successful at a thing you have to commit to the thing yes and so that's true whether you're talking marriage it's true whether you're talking educational success whether you're talking career and people you know making bad decisions because distractions are distractions distractions and distractions with every discipline and i think relationships are a discipline
in a lot of ways i totally agree yeah i mean and it is true that you know you have to make the the pre-investment and you have to you have to make the commitment that you're going to continue to invest in the relationship as time goes on yeah and then that's where people fall off the wagon it's why i see a lot of divorces around year three right as that passionate love kind of goes down and the companion and love is the name of the term when the companion love starts to rise people are like well yeah but the companion loving is much fun is the passion to love
like of course not of course that's just the way it works well that's nature's biological trick the ultimate biological trick is like look when we were monkeys hiding from eagles okay you had to [ __ ] as much as you could and and spread that seed around because you likely only had five or six years on this earth right and 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 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 uh i don't know what is the difference he's
like beautiful is someone who you look at 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 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 [ __ ] you know it's it's like you you know you you're the pizza guy you show up and two girls are having a pillow fight yeah exactly it's your it's your lizard brain versus your prefrontal cortex exactly yeah it's your monkey brain it's that that monkey that wants to hide from the eagle that's what it is it's like it's like huh i could just do this real quick and
across the board you're gonna you're gonna have a a better life it may not be a hotter life but you're gonna have a better life if you use the prefrontal cortex a little more often yes unless you're hugh hefner i don't know if he he had a good life or not he seemed i know some people who worked with him near the end yeah you seem kind of miserable i mean towards the end i'm sure he's miserable he's an 80 year old guy hanging out with 20 year olds what the [ __ ] do you have to say to these people right it's like you were talking about with o.j simpson o.j
simpson had a mostly peaceful mostly peaceful day well his life is mostly annoying the time that he gets to [ __ ] them when you're 80 years old you only get to [ __ ] those 24 year olds for like how long can he last once every six weeks what do you think well he's on probably all kinds of drugs that keep his dick hard but i would imagine like he couldn't run on a treadmill for 20 minutes right right at that age so how is he gonna have sex for 20 minutes so if he even if he's having sex like it's probably exhausting
and the rest of the day he's just listening to them talk about tick-tock and all kinds of other stupid [ __ ] he's like he's like remember when 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 on a tv show i had my own channel he had a playboy channel for a while yeah i think it's the image of it is way more interesting than the actual act of living that life yep and i think that again
that that goes back to you know every bad decision people make is is tied into this is the 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 it's drawn a lot of things yeah and so you actually have to look at the actuality of things and you don't want to be an 80 year old guy i live with five 24 year old girls you just don't that guy lived in hell i guarantee you i bet his life was 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 like with this wrinkly sack of rocks that he has as a body he gets to have sex with this beautiful perfect specimen of a of a female human being and then she's like buy me stuff and he's like god this is all he has to do you make me famous yeah yeah worked out great well you know the grotto the by the end it seemed like it was pretty dingy dude i went there i i really did a marijuana policy project uh thing there once and uh
of course sounds like a lot of policy it sounds like a lot of policy 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 it's what it sounds like right there it was it was a fun night well i would i remember you know it was there was a lot of marijuana smoked it was quite a blurry evening but i remember thinking like my god this grotto is so outdated like it had like a [ __ ] old ass phone there and like i'm like how much how many people
[ __ ] in here like how weird is there just generations of human residue in here yeah yeah and maybe not like the best times either you know it's like a lot of it it's it's just it's what you think it is versus what it is you know yep well you know it's all working out of life it is let's work on on thinking about what things are rather than what we would like them to be because accepting reality is 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 yeah right social media is well that's another jonathan height book the coddling of the american mind which is amazing and it is really illuminates and um i'm waiting for my kids to read it i think maybe this year is a good time for my 12 year old just to understand that this is this is a real issue with children that are comparing their lives to these fa oh here's a 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 um this is something that uh my daughter did uh this is my daughter is ten okay that's her look at that oh my god that's not a ten-year-old you're right it's not 10. it's like a 20 year old right there exactly how's that possible how's that my 10 year old daughter oh she would watch a youtube makeup tutorial or something she used a [ __ ] app she used an app that turned her into it turned her into a woman
like what the [ __ ] is that so like when you're you're seeing things like that what is that how are they doing that and who's doing that so if you're a girl and you are overweight or you have you don't like the structure of your face or you know whatever is bothering you you have acne and you see a girl like that and she's she's like can't believe i'm graduating high school lol what do i do now and you see this that's not even her right this is my 10 year old she doesn't look anything like that like she showed she's like daddy look
this is what i look like i go that is not what you look like i mean what the [ __ ] 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 like was it khloe kardashian the one who changed her whole head yeah yeah yeah that like you know this 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 and 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 unattainable but it's sick it's it's sick because you're these people don't even look like that and then you look at that and you go why don't i look like that like they don't even look like that right the amount of people that actually look like that that that image that i just showed you is so small and it's 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 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 something it's involving us now
no it's true it's 100 i mean they've built these apps that are specifically designed to be addictive right i mean they're specifically designed to prey on certain parts of your brain that are you're not really in control of that are mostly subconscious and that is scary stuff for sure i mean you can be manipulated by by that stuff it's you can make people very very easily very easily my kids 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 probably yeah
[Laughter] 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 how to browse porn yes i think that is good logic you know what's it really that's a real issue with boys uh boys that have access instantaneously i mean if you give a phone you're basically saying here little fella go watch people [ __ ] they're gonna that's the first thing they're gonna do when you're not around and there are 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 a giant it's got to be 50 right i mean it's got to be extraordinarily high percentage and none of that is good for relations between men and women and then you got this weird dynamic where it used to be that the feminist movement sort of recognized what social conservatives did that this is pretty
objectifying and not necessarily great for women now and then it's like now in sex workers which is weird it is weird they went completely the other direction and i just thought in what what hugh hefner fantasy did women decide that all the women at hugh hefner's mansion were actually super duper empowered like that does not seem like the most super empowering lifestyle like you make your choices man it's a free country but my wife's a doctor and i feel like that's more empowering than like getting screwed by an 80 year
old for for you know pocket change depends on what kind of car he buys her mom is a doctor she can get whatever car she damn well pleases my friend what happened what happened that that became like empowerment like how did what where was this i think there was a shift and it's a shift that's happened throughout american society that went from the notion that men were acting like pigs and they should stop acting like pigs to what if everybody acted like pigs and so instead of just
saying that standards exist and people don't live up to them but the standards are actually not a bad thing we just decided you know what we don't want to be hypocrites we're getting rid of all standards whatsoever everybody shouldn't have standards and if you believe that anybody should have standards then you're a hypocrite and when all the standards go then everything goes so like i actually kind of agree with the original feminist idea that men were kind of acting like sexist jackasses and they should stop that but the solution to that was not okay now women should imitate men at
their worst and that's a free or better society like i just don't think that that's against free country do what you want on the 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 into marrying them and then take all their money i feel like that's that's yeah that's deserved at a certain point you're like okay i sign off on this come on stupid yeah you didn't see this coming it's like this is a great country i mean it really is like you can make money doing pretty much anything like when people say it's hard to make money in this country
there are a lot of people making money a lot of different ways yes in this country and i mean for god's sake colin kaepernick is making millions of dollars kneeling for the national anthem it feels like and calling america racist while cashing the check this is a great damned country well we're now we're getting into the weeds i just wanted 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 sort of raised awareness for police brutality just let it just put it to the forefront let people like let people understand that this is a problem no no no because i think that he made a serious error which is that the most positive movements in american social history have been ones that don't kneel for the flag but say in the name of the flag you should do x right so martin luther king said in the name of the flag civil rights are necessary booker t washington said the name of the
flag civil rights are necessary they didn't say the american flag stands for racism and jim crowley so the american flag stands for something beyond that live up to the american flag but here's here's mine trashing the american flag is like endemic of police brutality is first of all it's [ __ ] but second of all it's actually divisive on an issue that does not need to be divisive like nobody is in favor of police brutality nor should anyone be right here's the counterpoint why is it trashing the american flag to take a knee isn't that in in some ways just another gesture of respect like you're not
doing what everybody wants you to do which is put your hand over your heart but you're doing something that's also respectful and silent you're not standing up and going [ __ ] the american flag [ __ ] these people you're actually taking it to another level of respect you're taking a knee you're bending the knee whether you're doing it for something that you want to talk about later saying i'm not going to stand up because this is my way of acknowledging the fact that there have been a lot of people that have been mistreated by police and murdered by
police and this is how i do it this is how i treat racist police killing black people i i take that moment to take a knee like how is that so disrespectful like how is that any it's a just a silent gesture it's not uniform like it's not doing this thing that everybody else is doing but you're doing something that's very respectful you're taking a knee um well that's certainly not the way that he intended when he first started that way i mean if you want to interpret that way you can how do you know what his intention is
because he literally talked about it i mean he said that he wanted to highlight that right he said but he said america is a systemically racist country he worked socks with pictures of cops as pigs on them oh yeah i don't know oh yeah i mean colin kaepernick is a terrible spokesperson for this moment like again like these are there's so many people that have taken a knee and don't you think that but if you just look at the gesture itself isn't taking a knee even more respectful than standing with your hand over your
heart i mean then i imagine millions of us would routinely take a need for the american flag i mean the idea wouldn't if that was the thing you had to do if the id but again this guy decided to stand and put his hand over his heart really it's just it's sort of a traditional thing we're arguing over well i mean it isn't the way that it was originally expressed it sort of morphed over time right to the point where it doesn't necessarily mean what he originally meant it's not like he's going
[ __ ] you while everybody else has their hand over their heart in silence but he's taking a knee he he didn't mean it as an fu i mean there's no question that's what he meant it is he and it wasn't even over something that actually made sense like you understand during the civil rights movement when people are raising the black power fest at the olympics to say like we're fighting for civil rights jim crow is still in operation around the country right colin kaepernick taking the needs 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 there's cases that you see like when the guy's just selling loose cigarettes and they're struggling from 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 that these are anecdotes and this doesn't encompass the full statistics of cops versus black men and how it what what is
exactly is happening but that's not his area of expertise anyway he has he has that so making him a spokesperson for a movement where he has no expertise is a weird thing to do there are plenty of people who talk about this with actual statistical right but if you're knowledgeable a famous person and you you decide to take this big stand publicly like that after you get benched for blaine gabbard yeah i have to get bench for blaine gabbert and take millions of bucks from a major corporation is that the guy yeah the immortal blaine gabbert the hall of famer blaine gabbert who played like no no
no blaine gabbert was an nfl quarterback who sucked i mean he was terrible and they they benched colin kaepernick for him and it was after he got benched that he started doing the kneeling for like for the american flag i am a pretty good gig sports broadcaster who knows nothing about sports listen people try to talk to me about it 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 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 god there's certain guys that like lock arms during the american fight i never promised that okay locking arms okay but kneeling is bad well no well the way that he characterizes kneeling was bad okay meaning like but what about other people that neil if they characterize it differently it means a different thing okay right i mean meaning like what it originally was is what it was i'm not gonna 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 don't think it takes a whole hell of a lot of bravery to be benched for blaine gabbert take a knee make millions of bucks from nike i wish i could play explain gabbard fellows terrible qb rating is all you really need to know not a good quarterback is the answer so is colin kaepernick i mean i don't as a an athlete is he not good like he's a terrific athlete he's just not a very good quarterback okay so i mean he he had one fantastic season he led the the 49ers to the super bowl and then like a lot of kind of one-hit wonders in sports people kind of
figured him out season two and his qb rating started to decline but i mean look bottom line is that the making him the spokesperson of a movement where he really i don't like the idea that you are going to attribute to all of america a sin that is number one anecdotal in nature and number two cannot be attributed to america's highest ideals 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 conv
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'd be left alone leave us alone and it took time but most americans came around to that perspective the the same thing holds true on race the same thing holds strong police brutality if you make an invocation and you say to americans as
americans i know that over time my fellow americans are going to come to realize that they need to live in accordance with the fundamental principles that founded the country that's unifying to say that the american flag is inherently non-unifying is is really bad like to the point where you now have college campuses where if you fly an american flag there have been cases where people are asked to take it down because it's too divisive like that that's that's that that does seem crazy when you say it's anecdotal that you know you know
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 they're they're so prevalent there's so many videos so this is my friend joe schilling is a kickboxer and his entire instagram has been dedicated to bad cops over the last few months just showing all these videos of bad cops i mean yes it's anecdotal but god damn there's a lot of anecdotes well there's 330 million police interactions every year so yeah i mean that's what was the initial
interaction that what was his motivation to do that was there an uh a single instance of police brutality that caused him to do that 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 because i remember there were protests in the nfl over michael brown right which was actually a bad anecdote like that was a bad one for people to pick people doing the hands up don't shoot that didn't actually happen right he actually tried to grab the gun from the cop he the gun went off in the car
he charged the cop by witness testimony all the witnesses were black you know the eric gardner one is much cleaner right well the eric garner one is cleaner in terms of police brutality it's not super clean in terms of racism or even cause of death so this is one of the problems police brutality police brutality for sure it's kind of like it's actually you know i'm warning people now that what happens in the george floyd case with derek calvin like they should be warned up front i want this police officer punished i think everyone wants the police officer
punished the defense is going to make a case that the police officer is not responsible for george floyd's death in exactly the same way that the new york police officers made the case that they were not responsible for eric garner's death and the autopsy the the initial autopsy tends to support that so what that suggests is not that derek calvin is good or clean or decent but if you're going to charge him with murder that's that's a hard charge to make just on a legal level so i'm warning people now of that because the the move the next move will
be obviously the system is racist if derek shaven doesn't get convicted of first-degree murder it's going to be very hard to convict him i think you're charging him with second it's going to be very difficult to convince him to charge for a second right because at first would mean pre-meditation right third well he was charged with third originally and then keith ellison the ag over there elevated it's a second degree i think that's very difficult to make the case for for second-degree murder what were you pulling up jamie you had something you want to say yeah i had the
part of when this actually started in 2016. he started i just 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 gonna play a video of it so 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 okay but here's him talking about that and i've been very blessed to be in this position and be able to make the kind of money i do and i have to help these people i have to help these communities it's not right that they're not put in the position to succeed or given those opportunities to succeed and as far as taking the 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 fighting our country but keep the focus on what the issues really are and as we talked about it we came up with taking the knee because there are issues that still need to be addressed and it was also a way to try to show more respect to the men and women that fight for this country okay so that's better obviously but that's him scroll down for a second because i think that that's his that's 2016. so here's
this one okay look at the one right below that okay this is the one i'm talking about i'm not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color that's the sentence right there so that's a different that the video was four or five days after these statements were made so he said he changed after talking to someone he made okay right so the initial explanation is the one that i was talking about okay so he revised his feelings on it and then well that's nothing much it started with kaepernick had guns
drawn on him by cops for being one of the only black guys in his town yeah that seemed super reasonable what he said there about how having the second take after talking about the military yeah that's better 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 which is a problem that's a hot take right now it's good it's very popular yeah that's that's the big one yeah that's the big one yeah how do you think we get back on track
how does how do we find balance i always hope that things go really far in one direction and then really far in the other direction and sort of listen i end up in the same place i always end up which is we gotta learn to leave each other the f alone i mean seriously like that's that's the only way this is going to work because we either have to decide we want to share a country and live together with each other or we have to decide we don't yeah if we want to live together and share a country
then we have to stop basically making crazy demands of one another and this is what the cancel culture is all about but we we got we got to stop that we got to recognize that people may not agree with you people may do things differently than you and that's okay like as much as i just like what colin kaepernick's doing i don't think that you 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 off of colin kaepernick that's a great deal
so how come people aren't doing it um i mean i assume because he's not that great a quarterback i mean like if he were tom brady i think that he would you know be getting a contract he also i mean there was that whole situation last year with kaepernick where he where he wanted to do tryouts for the nfl and then he sort of broke the nfl's rules and doing the tryouts and he wanted to film it a certain way and all this sort of stuff but i guess i'd backup quarterback because here's the thing you're either going to please one half of the population or please the
other either he's amazing in which case you've got a winning team and a great story or he gets sacked every other down in which case half the country cheers so controversy sells yeah that's for sure yeah but how do we i mean this is probably one of the most racially divisive times in my memory in my lifetime i 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 so 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 jose's and some bored person in their basement decided to create a petition that got signed by some 2400 other board people about why it shouldn't be called trader jose 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 trader jose's then that's i i think they called it exoticizing mexican people-sizing yeah it's making
them exotic and other so trader joe's pulled it down trader joe's gonna is gonna not use this anymore 17 year old called out a 17 year old called out trader joe's now the chain is dropping offensive labeling like how many hispanics were picketing outside trader joe's being uh now that i saw that trader jose beer right listen i'm italian do you think papa gino's is that really you know i mean is that really an italian who made that company like how many how many different like different pizza companies and all these i would love to see italians
i'd love to see the racial breakdown of the people who signed this petition i would bet 90 of them are white 90 right right white live in the suburbs hate their parents yeah what did you say what was the word they used for it exoticized exoticized they said yeah oh my god that is so adorable exoticizing i was talking to you about um rick bayless who's a famous chef of mexican cuisine who is a white man who who adores mexican food i mean i love the guy i love listening to his videos i love mexican food so watching this guy's videos it's like i
love someone who's really into something you know i just i get a kick out of even like there's a guy i used to watch on pbs that would make furniture with um ancient tools i could use like like ancient like um uh different old-timey saws and chisels and [ __ ] and he would make these wooden chairs and tables and furniture right but he kind of looked like that but he was he was really dressed like an old-timey guy and he had this old-timey shop and he would make this stuff and i loved watching him and i don't give a [ __ ] about his shitty furniture i don't but
what i cared about was the fact that this guy was really passionate about his thing and it was very attractive to me and i feel the same way and i watched 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 he talks about it with this great passion but the guy just got [ __ ] all over they were just like you're culturally appropriating you shouldn't be doing this you're a white man 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's the best in life all the things that are good from ever everybody else's culture like the reason people live in major cities is to go to all the different restaurants from all of the different cultures yeah 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 yeah this kind of stuff is just crazy it drives me nuts i look i grew up teaching taekwondo which is a korean martial art i learned to count in korean i had to speak all the techniques in korean i hate koreans clearly i mean that's clearly the problem i culturally appropriated the [ __ ] out of my childhood yeah exactly it's this is all this is all crazy and there's no there's no apparent end to it like there's no limiting principle 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 like literally forever we should just keep changing the name of everything she said you know there's 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 a case we are living in 1984 right yo orwell talked about renaming everything man people will find a way they'll find a way to be mad well here's my here's my controversial
statement okay okay if you uh 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 get 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 just like they're actual victims in this country yes and internationally they're seriously actual victims yeah but we don't focus on any of those folks right we focus instead on like the
dumbest bull crap you ever heard you know about about renaming libraries and listen i'm fine with you want to move you want to take a confederate statute and put a museum fine i mean those guys were jerks they're they're terrible people fine go 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 did like i understand we don't put up statues to people for all the bad crap they did martin luther king had a real bad record with ladies okay we don't put up statues to martin luther king because we were
saying he was great with with women i think everybody was bad with women back then everyone is bad period human beings suck okay so either get rid of all the statues and recognize the human beings obviously for sure and there are gradations of suck do you remember back when they were tearing down the civil war statues and and trump in all his wisdom was like what are they gonna do next what about lincoln what about uh they're gonna 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 the what i mean in chicago well actually 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 right fairly commonplace do you think it's there's an argument to be said that maybe we shouldn't celebrate those bad people anymore that we know what they now that we know what they really were not really i think we should just talk about the bad people like i don't think we're the only good people in history
i think they should have a statue of genghis khan i don't know what did genghis khan do that was good that had good results well he opened up trade to china okay if you want to put up a trade to china statute for genghis khan federation 10 of the population yeah true enough and and what impregnated the other 10 or something everybody literally raped his way through asia the point of a christopher columbus statue is not all the bad things he did to the arawaks the point of a christopher columbus statue is we are glad
that western civilization came to the western hemisphere i kind of agree with that principle i think it is a good thing that western civilization came to the western hemisphere and yes there's a lot of brutality and yes there was a lot of cruelty we should talk about all those things but this notion that the only cruelty that has ever existed in human history came at the behest of western civilization that everything was a rusoli in paradise before christopher columbus came that christopher columbus doesn't deserve a statue in specific
that we should that that like either make the argument that everybody was a product of their time and therefore no one deserves a statue or recognized that when there's a statue of christopher columbus we are not honoring how he treated the arrowwalks no one ever thought that we put up a statue to christopher columbus because he was really sweet to the natives on the other end of that right that nobody so what is the purpose of a statue like when you have a christopher columbus statue like what is the purpose of that statue we not 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 that's it's a monument to a in historical event right right or listen columbia university is named after columbus right the idea of america as colombia right which was an alternative name for america was after columbus because he was a discoverer well that's a weird one right we're we're named after amerigo vespucci
who nobody knows who the [ __ ] that guy is yeah he's been lost in the time he's totally been lost but but there is this idea that has settled in that we and it's really of high irritation to me that we are now the only good people who have ever lived everyone who came before us was just a horrible person and we are the only good humans who have ever like isn't the world lucky to have us we're the only people who have ever lived who are completely sinless and we can look from our perch at the top of morality at everyone who came before us and say that those people were all garbage compared to us now
there were people who were garbage compared to us but i really don't think that washington was among the people who you can say was garbage compared to you like i don't think that you living in 1770 are a better person than george washington i think you stand atop the legacy that george washington hell built well i have news for those people that were trying to break into amazon go history is going to look back at you like you're a piece of [ __ ] the people in the future that would never shatter property and never spray paint things and and 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 one i mean it's every single generation hopefully if society doesn't implode we don't have nuclear war every single generation is going to learn from the mistakes of the past and hopefully improve that's what we're hoping for and we should be happy that we can look back on a lot of these people and say we understand now how deeply
flawed they were and what was wrong with george washington or what's what was wrong with thomas jefferson although he did you know draft the declaration of independence he was a slave owner and this is one of the contradictions of our society and our culture though we fathered kids with a slave i mean yes yes i mean you don't have to shortchange the evils of human beings in order to recognize either the direction of american history or recognize the good things about people people are a little more complex than i think we want to think of them yes and this is one of the arenas that
this sort of gets back to the point about the system if you recognize that human beings are capable of great sin and also capable of doing great things what you really want is a system that that of checks and balances that prevents people from gaining too much power to hurt other people and what you also want to recognize is that the flaws of human beings are not necessarily the flaws of the system and that just changing the system is not going to change the underlying flaws of human beings which means you actually have to
think through the policies that you're promulgating before you implement them clearly if you say this you're not paying attention to what happened at chazz 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 want to beating the [ __ ] out of people who did anything they didn't want them to do including film things they wind up see you saw murder you saw
massive graffiti you certainly saw borders there were borders put up they kept cops from coming in they kept a lot of people from coming in enough journalists the beat up journalists they uh 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 a beautiful mutually beneficial agreement with these people that own these buildings no [ __ ] you they took them over they took them over and started spray painting [ __ ] all over them
it's crazy but it shows you like your child-like child-like idea of what you can do that's better you don't take in that you don't really understand that the founding fathers really did put into play into place all these checks and balances to keep someone from abusing power and as much as trump would like to overcome all that you see time and time again he's a great example in in many ways of how this system really is beautifully engineered from 300 [ __ ] years ago because the founders didn't understand the
the problem of human nature which is people want power and they want to hurt other people very often and you still need government in order to do things but there better be broad scale agreement on the things you want to do or a small majority of people can really hurt a huge minority of people right this is what they call tyranny of the mob right they were they were much afraid of this and and that's stuff that is worth remembering you know the tearing down that system because you want to build something more beautiful if it looks like chas or chop that ain't
a thing what's this idealistic they have blinders on they have this this narrow tunnel vision view of what they think this utopian future could be i think they think that human beings are going to be fundamentally transformed by a different system yeah so they look at the problems one of the biggest problems we have in american politics is the myopia with which we look at the united states so when you're dating somebody it's very easy to see all the problems with the person you're dating when you're married to someone it's certainly easy for my wife to see all
the problems with me and there are plenty but when she looks at all the other people then she's like okay well he's less flawed than the others right when you look at the united states it's very easy to see all the different flaws in the united states because of course they exist this is a society filled with humans 330 million of them but when you look abroad and you look at other examples of civilizations over time and then you look back at the united states you think maybe the system 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 weaker 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 you will shape humanity such that we are all saints and no sinners you're out of your mind i agree with you and it's it's the uyghur situation is shockingly undercovered oh my god well it just it demonstrates that when people said never again they were full of crap they're just full of crap i mean it's not true in the the this is one area where the united states should absolutely be taking a leading role it is obvious that china is a nefarious actor china's been stealing our technology china's the chinese government is attempting to extend its rule of tyranny over hong kong they just subjected 7.5
million people to their direct tyranny in violation of trading and the response has basically been muted from the western world and did you see that did you see that video of the uh the chinese ambassador in britain being asked on the bbc about that tape no i didn't it's fantastic so the bbc interviewer shows him the tape of the people being pushed onto trains right and he says what is this and the chinese ambassador says i can't see it i'm not sure what you're talking about he's literally saying that the screen is huge it's right behind him like he's looking right at it
and he acts as though he can't see it and then he starts talking about the natural beauty of the region right he he he won't he won't deal with it he won't he won't explain what it is and the rest of the world is just like well you know what this is where you know in the sporting world the the whole the story that's undercover in the sporting world is the is the blowback on that the nba gave to daryl mori the the houston rockets jam for saying free hong kong right you can't even get anybody in the nba to condemn china while china's subjecting a million uyghurs to abject slavery
mark cuban just had an exchange with uh ted cruz the other day where where he was going after cruz for something and cruz said just you know he questioned cruz cruz's balls or something and cruz 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 i thought well that's that is not an internal affairs question it's one thing to say i don't want to get involved in the tax rates of other countries another thing to say
shaving people's heads shipping them on trains to concentration camps where you force them into labor and or sterilize them that seems like not an internal issue that you're not allowed to criticize really yeah that's a big one but the the china thing is so crazy because so many so many business interests have this connection with them and so much of the the money that they generate is because of china i mean the nba films there's there's so much so much of our culture that kowtows to china we're so connected
to them that's one of the things that we really found out from this pandemic is how many things are built there how much of our medicine how much we rely on china it also demonstrates the lie of the idea that if you trade with somebody then they're going to liberalize yeah and that was that was something that was pushed over the last 30 40 years real hard which is we'll help them out economically we'll have mutual trade it'll be good for both of us and they'll liberalize because once they realize it's good to be part of the world economy then they won't be pirates 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 i mean she is the most powerful chinese leader since mao it's incredible we don't have much time you have a heart out in one minute i just want to know what what do you think goes down in november and how hopeful are you for the future because it seems to me like we're [ __ ] no matter who wins because the chaos that we're seeing the civil unrest we're seeing it's going to either accelerate or or or or spread one way or the other so i
think that if we're going to hold together we have to make a decision either fundamentally the american system is good but flawed 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 gunked 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 nuts on the national data they were kind of right so on the national data the final real clear politics poll average was like three points hillary won by three points in the popular vote the state polls were really 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 and you feel threatened by i don't feel threatened by and the man's not alive you can't threaten me with a corpse right and so and so trump who is innately volatile and looking for something to kind of attack is his own worst enemy it's 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 you know i've said for a long time politics is about the art of making it hard to vote for your opponent and easy to vote for you and trump is fairly good at number one and he is awful he is god awful at number two making it easy to vote for him that
Key Themes, Chapters & Summary
Key Themes
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Personal Health and Fitness
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Societal Changes in Los Angeles
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COVID-19 Pandemic Response
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Race Relations and Policing
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Role of Media and Social Media
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Personal Responsibility and Societal Progress
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Marriage and Relationships
Chapters
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Introduction to Health and Personal Growth
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The Changing Face of Los Angeles
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Analyzing the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Delving into Race and Policing
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Media Influence in Modern Society
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The Significance of Personal Responsibility
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Perspectives on Marriage and Relationships
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Concluding Thoughts and Reflections
Summary
The Joe Rogan Experience #1512, featuring Ben Shapiro, is a comprehensive dialogue encompassing a wide range of topics, blending personal anecdotes with societal issues. The conversation begins with a focus on personal health and fitness, where Shapiro shares his journey towards better health, including his newfound interest in running and barbecuing. Rogan and Shapiro emphasize the importance of maintaining personal health, especially in light of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting how individual wellness can impact broader societal health.
The discussion then shifts to the societal changes observed in Los Angeles. Shapiro expresses his concerns about the city's increasing homelessness and overall societal decline. Rogan contributes with his recollections of earlier times in L.A., noting significant changes in the city's safety and landscape. This part of the conversation paints a picture of a city that has drastically changed over the years, reflecting broader societal shifts.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on society form a significant part of their dialogue. Shapiro criticizes the political division that emerged in response to the pandemic, expressing disappointment at how a unifying crisis quickly became a source of division. Both Rogan and Shapiro reflect on the early days of the pandemic, where there was a sense of unity and collective effort, which unfortunately gave way to fear, anger, and polarization, exacerbated by social media and political narratives.
Race relations, policing, and protests in America, particularly in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, are thoroughly discussed. Rogan and Shapiro explore the effectiveness of protests, the media's role in shaping public narratives, and the complexities surrounding systemic racism and police reform. Shapiro emphasizes the need for personal responsibility and individual agency in addressing these societal issues.
The role of media and social media in influencing public perception and contributing to societal divisiveness receives significant attention. Both speakers express concern about how these platforms can distort reality and fuel polarization, especially in the contexts of race and policing.
Shapiro and Rogan also delve into the importance of personal responsibility in societal progress. Shapiro advocates for the role of individual action in overcoming societal challenges, while Rogan highlights the complexities introduced by environmental and systemic factors. They discuss the impact of family structures, education, and community support in shaping personal outcomes.
Personal topics such as marriage and relationships are also touched upon. Shapiro shares his views on the importance of shared values in a relationship, contrasting with Rogan's perspectives on physical attraction and cultural influences.
Throughout the podcast, Rogan and Shapiro engage in a deep and structured discussion. Their conversation is marked by a blend of well-researched perspectives, personal experiences, and analyses of current events, offering a multifaceted view of the complex issues facing contemporary society.