The Joe Rogan Experience - #993 - Ben Shapiro

Episode Date: August 2, 2017

Ben Shapiro is editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire, syndicated columnist, and host of "The Ben Shapiro Show."

Do we have enough left for tomorrow? We don't have tomorrow. Good. I'll bring it in this week. Ben Shapiro, we are live. The people have spoken. Well, thank you for having me. Thanks for being here, man. I became a fan of yours when I watched you, um, with- what the fuck is his name?

The CNN asshole. Oh, Piers Morgan. Oh, that was glorious. Thanks. When you went after him with the Sandy Hook thing, like right away, immediately, it was just glorious. And you could tell that he didn't know what to do with it. And he literally said, how dare you? Which is what I say to people all the time when I'm joking.

I say, how dare you? Exactly. As one of my friends said, it looked like he was clutching his pearls. He was really pissed. He was really pissed. I'm sure he was. It was a two-segment interview. And during the break, I said to him, thanks so much for having me on.

He kind of growled at me. He was not a happy camper. Yeah, well, you crushed him, and one of my other favorite ones was Chelsea Handler crushing him, where she was literally talking like, you don't even talk to me in the break. In the break, you're checking your phone and checking Twitter. And you could tell he was like, oh, no. He just, you know, he came from that weird British tabloid environment. And you found out that the company that he worked for did really creepy shit, like check people's voicemails.

They hacked into people who were dead. And they gave the family false hope because they had checked the voicemail. And they found out that someone checked in. They thought, oh, maybe she's still alive. And then we made him a host on, like, The X Factor and brought him on CNN. It was awesome. I just don't understand why CNN thought that. We have this fascination with British people.

Yes. If you have a British accent, we automatically add 20 points to your IQ. Yeah, they're great for selling mops late night and nonstick cookware. And I enjoy John Oliver. I think John Oliver is great. And apparently he has, you know, a lot of people think of all British accents as being the same. But he has like a blue collar British accent. But I don't.

I can't tell the difference too much except when I'm watching My Fair Lady or something. Well, I could tell people from like Manchester and stuff like that because they, you know, they have like the sort of like way of talking so fast that all the words kind of pile into each other. But yeah, Oliver, his recent one. Eddie Bravo got really mad at it. The recent one about Alex Jones is fucking hilarious. I don't know if you've seen it. It's almost impossible to make something not funny about Alex Jones.

Yeah. You've got to meet Alex. Have you met him? I don't know that, given how much I've made fun of him. Oh, it'd be fine. Oh, really? Trust me. Yeah. He's a guy. He wouldn't like to strip off his shirt and start. He might, but he'd calm down. You're a good guy. We're basically on the same team. He would come around. If you remember, the Piers Morgan thing happened two nights after Alex was on Piers Morgan. So Piers was like flying high because he had that whole debate with Alex and Alex did his shtick and it was really over the top. And he thought I was going to be like Alex

Jones part two and it was going to be Piers, you know, succeeds again. And Alex and I could not be more different in our approaches. No, you're very rational and very reasonable. And, you know, we've been talking about some of your debates. There's not a lot of guys like you out there, which is really interesting. It's like you're a fast-thinking, fast-talking, very smart young guy who's also a conservative. Like, there's not a lot of those out there. And this is one of the things that we're encountering today is there, especially on college campuses, there's this very strange separation between the left and the right to the point where the right is like almost non-existent

or at least doesn't have any representation. And they're actively shunning that representation. Like they're pushing people out. I know what's going on with you and Berkeley. Has that been resolved? Yeah, I think that – so Berkeley, after the publicity, they said they're going to try – Explain to people if they don't know the whole story, please. Yeah, so UC Berkeley, if you recall last year – I actually spoke there before any of this happened.

I spoke at UC Berkeley in like April 2016. And then Milo was supposed to speak there. And he actually went there and there was a riot where Antifa infiltrated the student community. And there are all these pictures of them bombing things and blowing up cars and setting them in a fire, at least, and throwing things at windows. And so Berkeley shut down that event for safety reasons. Then Ann Coulter wanted to speak there. And they basically used what they call time, place, and manner restrictions to stop her. They kept saying, well, we have safety problems.

We can't figure out how to do the event. And in the end, they just canceled it because they didn't have security. And then Young America's Foundation, which sponsors me to go to a lot of these campuses, they said, we want Shapiro to come. And again, I spoke to them like a year and a half ago. And they gave them two and a half months advance. And Berkeley said, well, we have no venues available. And so this seemed to be another cover for we're not going to allow a conservative on campus because there are security problems.

So we made that public. And then Berkeley said, no, no, no, no. We'll make sure that you get in. They gave us an alternative venue, and they even said they'd cover the security fee because they didn't like the bad publicity. Oh, well, that's nice. Yeah, so that should be good. Well, you know what happened with Jordan Peterson yesterday? Yes.

Yeah, just yesterday, Jordan Peterson was banned from YouTube. And YouTube has a new policy that it's very weirdly worded, but apparently they're allowed to block and restrict any kind of videos that are about religion or that could be deemed offensive, which is almost everything. Yeah, that's right. Anything that's remotely, I mean, anything that's interesting is going to be offensive to somebody. So it won't be monetized.

It also won't be in the videos of interest. I know they did this to Prager University as well. They blocked like 10 of their videos a couple of months ago. So it's, yeah, I mean, this is nasty stuff. And listen, YouTube's a private company. They have the right to do what they want. But don't proclaim that you're a free speech promoting institution if you're going to block people like Jordan Peterson, for God's sake.

Well, the problem is they're not blocking things that are offensive to other people. They're not blocking certain things that are representing Islam in a positive light. That's right. There's a lot of weirdness with this left wing choice of what to censor and what not to censor. And it's not just dangerous. It's also bad for the whole idea of being a progressive or being a liberal because it makes you look,

it makes them look really petty and really weird and really resistant and hesitant to actually have real debate. Yeah, for sure. And this is one of the reasons why I'm very meticulous in my terminology about people who are on the other side of the aisle, actually separate people who are liberal from people who are leftist. So when there are people who try to ban speech, I call them leftist. And if they are not interested in banning speech, then they're liberal, meaning they want bigger government. They disagree with me on politics, but they're still willing to have a conversation. They want an open forum. People who are on the hard left think that it's actually an insult to their identity to disagree with them.

And this is what I experience sometimes on campuses, you know, Cal State LA, where there's a near riot when I speak, or University of Wisconsin, where people storm the stage and stand in front of it and won't leave, or Penn State, where we have, again, another near violent incident over at Penn State, or DePaul, where they actually banned me outright. So sometimes you get this routine from people who think that they conflate their viewpoint with their identity, and then if you have a differing viewpoint, you're denying them their humanity. And it's like, no, I'm not denying you. I just think what you're saying is dumb. That's a very good point. That's a very good point, is that they have their identity completely connected with their ideology.

And when you oppose these people, when you have these debates with these people, what's really fascinating is the level of hysteria that gets reached while you're staying calm. Yeah, that's what I've noticed is that there's a ton of, you know, I tend to keep relatively calm just as a human being. And very often when I'm debating someone, you see them getting more and more and more emotional. And people on the right love this because, of course, it's the triggering of the snowflakes. But the easiest thing in the world to do is trigger some idiot college kid

who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. And what's hard to do is actually discuss issues with somebody who's intelligent enough to make the point. But the level of hysteria on the campuses has really increased. I mean, I now have to travel with two members of security to every campus just because you don't know which campus is going to go off. I never had to travel with security before. It's the weirdest thing in the world. How long ago did this start happening?

Well, February of 2016 is when I started traveling with security. So I spoke at University of Missouri. Remember, they had a big blowup at University of Missouri with Black Lives Matter taking over campus offices and suggesting that there was some sort of big racism problem at Mizzou, which is just ridiculous. And so they flew me in. I did a speech there. And then the next time I spoke was Cal State L.A. And they brought in a couple of security guys.

And I was like, what do I need security for? I'm just speaking on a campus. Who cares? We get to the campus. And they had already tried to cancel my speech because of security. And I said, I'm coming anyway, so tough. I had to be escorted in by 20 armed police officers. I had to be escorted off campus by motorcycle cops flashing their lights.

There were 300 students who had blocked all of the entrances, were physically assaulting people trying to get into the theater. The police had to sneak the students in two by two into the theater. They told them that until I left the campus, they couldn't actually let the kids out of the theater because they were afraid that if they let the kids out of the theater, they'd be attacked as they were released. That one was pretty wild.

So after that, it was like, OK, well, I guess the security is necessary. Wow. What is shifting? Like what what is what is ramping things up? I think the identity politics is ramping things up. So I think there's a new mentality out there. It's this intersectionality politics on the left that says that there are a bunch of victim groups, basically, right? They're blacks and Hispanics and gays and Jews and Asians. They're all victim groups. And we get all those people together to attack the system because the system is keeping them down. And there's a hierarchy

among these victim groups. And if you are a straight white male, you're at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy in terms of viewpoints that should be acknowledged because you're the creators of this vast white supremacist system that keeps down everybody else. If you're a black woman, you're near the top, right? If you're LGBT, you're at the top. If you're a white guy and you challenge the viewpoint of a black woman,

your viewpoint is an attack on her identity, and therefore she has the right to shut you down. And so the idea is that your words are violence to her identity, and therefore she has the right to react. This is the term you hear on campus a lot, is microaggressions. This idea that my opinion microaggresses you. Now, even that terminology, I think, is really stupid

because normally in regular life, we would say that's insulting, and you said something I don't like. The terminology microaggression suggests aggression, like I'm actually doing something aggressive to you, and the rational response to someone aggressing you is to use physical force in response. And so you start to see a more violent response.

I think that's it's been growing in our politics. I think there's a reactionary side on the right that's that's growing. If there's an identity politics on the left that says, you know, black identity politics, gay identity politics, female identity politics. I think you're starting to see in some areas of white identity politics that's almost formed in response. Like, OK, well, if everybody else gets to have their identity politics why can't we defend ourselves on those same grounds i hate that shit i mean i think it's terrible i hate that shit too and i would like to find the person who invented the term microaggression because that fucker whoever it was they they created quite a mess i'm sure you saw what happened at evergreen with uh brett

weinstein where literally the left is eating itself. And that's where it gets crazy. It's like you're not progressive enough unless you're literally submitting to leaving your class because you're white. Like you can't be there because you're white. They want a day of absence, meaning the professors, the white people. And then when you don't do it, you're somehow another racist and a Nazi. I mean, the whole thing another racist and a Nazi. I mean, the whole thing was very bizarre to watch, but not surprising because you see it so much so often all over the country right now. And it's almost like some new flower

of ridiculous thinking and behavior has blossomed and it's in bloom everywhere. And when people can point to it existing in other places, like in Missouri, where that woman, what was her name, Crick? Was that woman who got the- Melissa, Melissa Click, yeah. Yeah, whatever her name was. When you see it in video,

when you see her on video saying, can we get some muscle over here? Exactly. Like this is fucking insane. Like you're telling a photographer, and by the way, a minority, an Asian man. Yeah, taking photos of a public place that you've created some safe space. control people and control people's behavior, control their vernacular, control the way they communicate, and how much you give in to groupthink.

It's weird. It's scary. And Jonathan Haidt, who's a social psychologist over at NYU, he did a really good piece for The Atlantic in 2015 about this phenomenon, this kind of safe space trigger warning phenomenon, this idea that you must never be forced into a position where someone has an idea that opposes yours. And what he said is it basically makes people crazy. You know, it actually makes you crazy that the idea in psychology is that if you have a chain of thoughts leading to a bad outcome, if you're depressed, or if you're depressive, then you have a chain of thoughts leading to a bad outcome. The way that psychologists deal with that is with cognitive behavioral therapy, they say, Okay, where in this chain of thoughts? Are you going

wrong? Are you attributing to somebody a motive they don't have? Is your wife really being nasty, or is it you just attributing nasty to her, and that's why you're getting depressed, you're spinning off, right? Try to control your own chain of thoughts. What the microaggression trigger warning culture does is it actually grants value. The more you are offended, the more value you are granted, and therefore you have actually an interest in being offended. We give you awards if you're offended. You're treasured if you're offended because it demonstrates that you're woke, right? The more you are offended,

the more we can show that you are woke and because you are woke, therefore you're granted this virtue. You get to lord it over everyone else. I mean, I say in my speeches, if we could somehow identify like the LGBT, half black, half Hispanic, one quarter Native American, little person, you know, then we would

finally have the person who we could go to to answer all of our questions because their identity would be unquestionable. It'd be Yoda. Right. If we could find Yoda, we could just get rid of democracy and discussion altogether. He could just rule from on high. He, she. I don't want to put a gender on Yoda. Right. I don't think Yoda's gender. Does Yoda?

Yoda's a dude, right? It's gotta be a guy with a deep voice. Maybe we're being rude by insisting. I don't know's a dude, right? It's got to be a guy with a deep voice. Maybe we're being rude by insisting. But yeah, you're absolutely right. No one's left enough. Yeah, I don't know where the limit is. And they're so far left that they've actually made common cause with the people they hate, right? So when they talk about safe spaces,

in Missouri, you had all these black students protesting. And they actually said, we don't want white people who think like us and who want to help us in our safe spaces and say we had Missouri and all these black students protesting and they actually said we don't want white people who think like us and who want to help us in our safe spaces we feel insulted by that I just thought to myself well the KKK agrees like if you want to do safe spaces for separate races I can find some Jim Crow racists who are totally up for that from like 1962 well there's the other the really bizarre statement that I've heard over and over again that black people cannot be racist against white people because they don't have any power over white people. Yes.

Wow. Which is just. It's inane. I mean, it's an inane statement. This idea that you have to have power in the superstructure in order for you even to be racist. I can understand the argument if they said, look, you being racist is not connected to racist action. If you don't have the capacity for action that affects people, then your personal racism is not as important as the racism of people in power. That at least is an argument. But the idea that you can't be racist at all if you're black because

black people don't have enough power. First of all, the idea that black people have no power in the United States is utterly crazy. I mean, it's utterly crazy. Well, especially when it was going on while Obama was president. The attorney general was president. I always said this about Baltimore. We kept hearing, you know, Baltimore, right? Where they had the riots. They had riots. And they were saying, well, the Baltimore PD, you know, they're cracking down on black people.

Okay, the chief of police was black. The majority of the city council was black and Democrat. The district attorney who was prosecuting the case was black. The majority of the police department was minority. The attorney general of the United States was black and Democrat. The district attorney who was prosecuting the case was black. The majority of the police department was minority. The attorney general of the United States was black. The president of the United States was black. But the majority of the city of Baltimore is black. But apparently it's the white guy's fault.

At some point, you're going to have to make your ideas actually work in concert with reality. I can't do this with you. work in concert with reality. I can't do this with you. Do you ever step back and look at this trend and look at what's going on in popular culture and look at what's going on with identity politics and this war between the left and the right and wonder where it's going? I mean, it feels like the people on the left are completely emboldened by the fact that you have this guy in office who has said things like grab him by the pussy and he lies all the time and makes fun of people's plastic surgery. And you think that having this guy in this position, I guess, in some way emboldens them and makes them even more convinced the fact they're right. You know, fight,, put up the resistance and

hashtag resistance, hashtag resist. It's all over the place. Where does this go? I think, well, no place good. I think what's happening, and it's one of the things that I personally am not a fan of, and this goes all the way back to the Piers Morgan debate that you mentioned. I mean, I started off that debate with Piers Morgan saying to him, you don't get to attribute intent to me that I don't have, right?

You're standing on the graves of the kids of Sandy Hook in order to promote your political agenda, implying I don't care enough about dead kids because I don't agree with you. That is the sweet spot where a lot of people like to live, which is if we disagree on politics, it's because you're an asshole. It's not because we disagree on the best method to get to the goal, or we have different goals. It's because you're a bad person. And I think that what you're seeing is with Trump,

there's an attempt to cast all of his voters as people who love all of the things you have different goals, is because you're a bad person. And I think that what you're seeing is with Trump, there's an attempt to cast all of his voters as people who love all of the things that are bad that he does and says. It's not that they voted for him because they thought Hillary Clinton was the worst presidential candidate in the history of America, which is true. They voted for him because they liked the grab him by the P word stuff. They voted for him because they liked that he's vulgar and he lies a lot. They voted for him because they are bad people. This is why people misread, I think, Hillary Clinton's deplorable speech.

The implication was, okay, everybody who voted for Trump is a bad human being. They tried this with Romney, too. I mean, they tried to castigate Romney, who's whatever you can say about Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney was maybe the most honorable person ever to run for the presidency. They tried to cast him, as Joe Biden said, a guy who wants to put y'all back in chains. He said that he straps dogs to the top of his car. He's an evil, nasty guy. Did he really say that?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This was a big issue in the campaign. He straps dogs? So there was a story, I think it was in the Boston Globe, about how back in 1982, he went on a family vacation. And when they were traveling, he put the dog in a cage and put the dog on the top of his car. And this was like a big campaign issue, right? You remember binders Full of Women? Yeah, I remember that. The 47%

number. Right, exactly. He's mean. He hates the poor. He hates women. The Binders Full of Women thing was particularly stupid because the entire point he was making is that I was trying to recruit women to my administration so they would bring binders full of female resumes to me so I could staff more women. And they turned it into Binders Full of Women. He's like, Hugh Hefner.

Yeah, Mitt Romney? Like, really? So this attempt to castigate the other side is really bad. And I think that you see some of that on the right, but I think it's more reactionary. I think that the unearned moral superiority that the left likes to kind of wallow in, I think that's more on the left than on the right. Although I think that there is an attempt by some on the right now in response to do some of that. Well, it becomes these sticking points that you use to win, you know, and it becomes something that people repeat over and over again, you know, like the deplorable thing. Racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe.

Yeah, it's just, well, I was walking down New York City, down the street, right after Trump won when they were protesting, and there was this guy right next to me fucking screaming. He wasn't even in the actual parade itself. fucking screaming. He wasn't even in the actual parade itself. He was like on the sidewalk, but he was screaming, Donald Trump, KKK, racist, sexist, anti-gay. He had just boiled it down to this thing. But the best part about it was he saw a black guy coming towards him and he just started screaming, black lives matter. Black lives matter! And I just saw him. I saw his soul. Like in that one move, that shift to screaming Black Lives Matter when he saw a black guy.

Yeah, exactly. There's the intersectionality for you, right? You have to know how to appeal to every racial group on the basis of a stereotype. It could have been Thomas Sowell. He wouldn't have known. Yeah. It's almost like the laziness in having the ability to communicate is one thing, but having the ability to express a complete thought that covers something as nuanced and as complex

as American politics in 2017, that's too hard. So let's just yell out, Donald Trump, KKK. And this ability to boil down what's the difference between the left and the right to like a little statement is, or, you know, a bucket of deplorable, basket of deplorables, whatever it is, you know, binders of women. It's so tempting because it's like, it's so powerful that it works. You can put it on the back of a bumper sticker. And I think we've also been shaped a little bit by, we all live in Hollywood.

I mean, you live in Hollywood. I live in Hollywood. That means that, and I think all of America lives in that milieu because everyone watches TV, everybody watches movies. So when we do politics, we tend to see it through the prism of House of Cards or any of the other political movies you've ever seen. And that means there's a bad guy, right? There's a bad guy, there's a villain. And the villain has to, it can't just be that the villain is somebody who's incompetent. Like usually in politics, if somebody is bad, sometimes they have a malevolent point of view.

That's pretty rare. Usually it's somebody who's misguided. Maybe they have some bad ideas. Usually they're just stupid or incompetent. Like, this is what I keep saying to people who oppose Trump. Like, why are you attributing to him malice when stupidity would do? Like, you keep saying that everything Trump is doing is out of some sort of malicious genius. Are we watching the same film?

Like, if you have a problem with Trump, it seems to— I have a solution for the left, by the way. If they really hate Trump this much, listen, I thought Obama was a crappy president. I have a deal. How about we just minimize the power of Washington, D.C., and then we don't have to give a crap who's the president of the United States? You think anybody in 1832 really cared who the president was? It had no impact on their lives.

But now the presidency has this outsized impact. We care about Washington all the time. We treat it— I mean, the truth is we watch it for fun. I mean, right now, the last week particularly with Scaramucci, it's impossible not to watch it for fun, but it's actually kind of serious business. Like there are other world leaders who are actually looking at this, like this impacts my nation. For us, we look at it and we go, well, I wonder what's on TV on tonight's episode of Trump the series. Well, when you say reduce the power of the president, I think there's a lot of people that would think that would be a great idea because having one person has the authority over 300 plus million people. It is kind of ridiculous at this point in time.

But how would you go about doing that? Like what would be the best way to implement something like that? I mean, it really isn't just the presidency. You'd have to reduce the power of Congress as well. I mean, you'd have to go back to a federalist-based system where localities and states have more power over local issues, and the federal government just isn't that powerful. Because what's happened basically in the constitutional structure, the federal government was never supposed to be anywhere near this big. There are very certain delegated powers in the Constitution of the United States that Congress has, and they are very small. I mean, it's things like building post offices and interstate roads and regulating interstate

commerce. But the idea that they could regulate, you know, your toilet flushing is just that's silly. I mean, the founders would have thought that was ridiculous. Yet you have a federal government that that's that's that big. So Congress regulates on that. But if you're in Congress, the last thing you want is to be answerable for that. So what you do instead is you drop vague statutes, right? You say things like, we hope we're passing a law that says that we should fix the environment. And then you kick it over to the executive branch. And the executive branch, you know, run by President Trump or President Obama, has a bunch of executive branch agencies like the EPA. And the EPA puts together all these regulations that you've never seen, never heard of, you never

elected these people. They put together all the regulations. And then those are the ones that actually govern your lives. So if you're in Congress and things go bad, you say, well, that's not what I meant to do. I told them to do good stuff. And the bureaucrats who are not elected don't have to care. So basically, you have everyone kicking the can to the other person for purposes of responsibility. The only way this is going to happen is if the American people just decide they're sick of the federal government running all this stuff and they start actively working to elect people who want to minimize their own power, which is difficult. I mean, most people in power don't want to minimize their own power.

Yeah, that seems almost impossible. It seems like no one who's worked so hard to get to the top of the game is going to try. The other way to do it is to elect people on the state level who are pretty zealous about their own authority. You've seen this from like Greg Abbott in Texas, that every so often he'll say to the federal government, listen, you're telling me to do something? Go screw yourselves. What are you going to do about it? Well, Texas is a weird one. They're almost ready to leave. At any point in time, they're ready to put a fence up and go, fuck you.

Weren't they, for the longest time? They were not really a state, right? Yeah, they're still called the Republic of Texas, right? So, yeah, I mean, people in Texas, I mean, it's a wonderful state. I love that when you drive through Texas, every single store is called Lone Star Brewery or Texas this. Everything is named after the state. Like, nothing is really named after the country. It's all named after the state. Like, a lot of state pride in Texas.

There's a lot of state pride. Maybe more than any place else I've ever been. Yeah, well state like a lot of state pride in Texas There's a lot of state pride maybe more than any place else. I've ever been yeah Well not a lot of state pride in California because everybody's a transplant and yeah There's some you know people who get here and it represents something that they always wanted you know some sort of a Liberal paradise where you could get famous for doing nothing Like there's some city pride. Like, there's Hollywood pride. There's San Jose pride. But, like, California pride?

I mean, the people who run the state are idiots. Well, California's so confused. I mean, we have a grizzly bear on our flag, but we don't have grizzly bears. We have a team called the Los Angeles Lakers. Not a lake in the state, right? Yeah, our lakes are all man-made. We have to keep pumping water in them

because they'd fucking dry up. Our river is just a giant concrete ravine. The L.A. River is hilarious. When I've shown people the L.A. River, I'm like, that's the L.A. River. They're like, shut up. Yeah, the romantic and scenic L.A. River. It's a real river.

Like, that's not a river. No, no, no, it's the L.A. River. Like, it just, it is L.A. It's a fucking concrete, shitty slide for water. This city is so dirty. I mean, it's weird. I've grown up my entire life here. I mean, I was born in Burbank, grew up in North Hollywood.

I've lived here my entire life. The first time I realized I liked it is when I moved to Boston for law school, because at least the weather here is good. But yeah, I mean, it's gotten so shabby lately. It's such a shabby city. The weather's amazing. But have you I mean, it's gotten so shabby lately. It's such a shabby city. The weather's amazing, but have you ever been to Mexico City? No. I've been a couple times for UFC events.

I'm not going back because I would get headaches from the pollution. And what Mexico City to me is, is like LA in the future, but with zero respect for the traffic lights. When I mean zero, I've never seen anything like it. It's crazy. They're very nice people. Everybody's worried about getting kidnapped over there.

I find Mexican people to be some of the nicest people and real friendly and easy to get along with, but they don't give a fuck about traffic lights. When we were stuck in traffic, there's bumper to bumper, and it's a green light going this way. Cars just go in front of you, and they just sort of make their way through, and people hit the brakes, and they make their way through the intersection. It's a straight-up red light, and they just sort of make their way through and people hit the brakes and they make their way through the intersection. It's a straight up red light and they just go. And it's not just one. One guy goes and another guy goes behind them.

And then you got like 20 cars and it's just gridlock everywhere. It's funny you say this, but it's actually indicative of why the United States works, that people actually follow traffic lights. It's true in Italy. Also, it's true in Israel. When I visited Israel with my wife when we got married, no one pays attention to the traffic lights. It's true in Italy also. It's true in Israel. When I visited Israel with my wife when we got married, no one pays attention to the traffic rules. Everyone's honking their horns at each other.

I'm American. I'm like, why are these people so rude all the time? And my wife's like, honk the horn. She's Israeli. But it is why in America, because we have a baseline, and this is what I think is breaking down actually, so not to get too deep on a point about Mexican city traffic, but I think that the country was based on this idea. There's a social fabric. We all have respect for each other enough that we're going to follow the basic rules of the game. And that's

true as far as traffic lights. It's true as far as financial dealings with one another. And when you lose that, when you lose the basic respect for the guy who lives next to you, you know, you need to get through the red light. You know, screw him. It doesn't matter if it's red. Then it's kind of indicative of a culture in collapse generally when small rules start to go broken. Like in Italy, the problem in Italy is that 50% of their economy is black market because they have high tax rates and no one pays them. You're starting to see that in California too.

California has the highest taxes in the country by far. We also have the number one rate of deductions. So we pass all these high taxes so we can, you know, congratulate ourselves for social justice. And then we avoid all the taxes as much as we possibly can. It's wonderful for the accountants. Yeah, exactly. Those people are making a freaking fortune. Well, I just also feel like when you get a giant number of people smashed into a small area, and with LA, it's not even a small area. It includes greater Orange County, and it

goes into the Conejo Valley, and it's just like there's so many of us. There's so many. It's almost like you get that sort of diffusion of responsibility thing, where there's just too many people to care about, and you lose this feeling of value that you have for fellow people. I lived in Boulder for a little while, and when I lived there, the people's Republic of Boulder, you want to talk about lefties.

Oh, yeah. Holy shit. If you had a right wing anything on your lawn, like a sign for someone running for, they would take it down. Wow. They literally take things down. But when I was there, I was amazed at how many people are polite when they drive and they wave.

And like, there's only 100,000 people. Exactly. So that's what I was going to say. I'm looking it up while we're sitting here. It's like 110,000 people in Boulder. So that's what I was going to say. I'm looking it up while we're sitting here. It's like 110,000 people in Boulder and the population of LA County is 10 million people. It's at least. Plus Mexicans. You got to count Mexicans and then you got to count everybody's connected to all the

other counties around it. It's not like there's some border. Yeah. You just drive around. That's exactly right. So it is in the first time I visited Oklahoma, I had this. And I was in Oklahoma for doing a radio show. Southern California, look at that, 23.77 million. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, I'm in Oklahoma, and I'm walking down the street, and the first thing that, and some lady and I catch eyes. Now in LA, you're from LA, you look away, right? You don't want to get stabbed. If you catch eyes with somebody, it's rude. You don't catch eyes with people in LA. And I'm walking down the street, we catch We catch eyes lady goes. How are you? I? Called my father. I was like what where am I what's going on here like this is not regular? But I do think that there is something to the idea that if you have too many people in too small a space We're all up in each other's business so much that it's very hard to say to people okay, Liberty Stay away from one another leave each other alone It's, yeah, but he lives next door and he's a

jackass. Hate that guy. Because he's like right next to you. In Oklahoma, the guy next to you is three miles down the road. There's that and there's also, it's been replicated in rat population density studies that you get more mental illness, you get more weird, aggressive behavior

when they stack rats in these cubicles and then just jam them closer and closer together. And that's exactly what's happening with people. Manhattan is famous for it. I mean, I enjoy visiting Manhattan, and every time I'm there, I'm always like, no, I can't live here. There's too many humans.

I was there last week, and I like the sky, so you can't actually see the sky in Manhattan, right? I mean, you just see these brick buildings, you know, 25 stories high. And I noticed that we were walking past a store, and there was a shirt on sale. And the shirt's entire text was F-U-U-F-ing-F. And I thought, only in New York could you sell this, right? I mean, you try to take this anywhere else, and people would have been like, wait, what now? But in New York, I'm sure that's a bestseller.

That's why, honestly, I think it's one of the reasons why Trump won, is because he's basically just a guy from New York, I'm sure that's a bestseller. That's why, honestly, I think it's one of the reasons why Trump won is because he's basically just a guy from New York. He's like a taxi driver from New York who's really, really wealthy. And, you know, he does what a taxi driver from New York would do if you're really, really wealthy. He marries models and builds gold toilets and all this kind of stuff. And people in the rest of the country actually take that language seriously. So when he says stuff like, yeah, we're going to bomb the shit out of him. People in New York are like, yeah, that's what we do. And people in Oklahoma are like, wow, he's serious.

That's actually going to happen. And it's like, probably not. Probably that's just how people from New York kind of talk. We saw this last week, right? He was talking about the cops and he was saying this thing about— Covering their heads before they put them in the cars. He's talking like a Long Islander. He's talking about they throw them in the back of the paddy wagon and you don't put your head on it. Fine. They bump their head. They just killed someone.

And so the entire media went, how dare he? He's talking about how cops should rough people up. Listen, is it appropriate for the president of the United States to talk like that about treatment of suspects? No. Are we supposed to take this super seriously? Like this is like Trump is actually recommending a policy change with regard to. He was working the room. That's what he does. He works the room. He's a New York real estate guy who works the room. And more than anything else, if you understand New York and you understand L.A., you understand Trump. He's not a giant mystery. He's just any other reality TV star. He's a reality. He's a marketing image guy. I mean, that's what he does. Like, he's not even that great at real estate. He puts his name on the

side. He brands himself. He puts his name on the side of buildings. They pay him not to be involved in the real estate business so they can put Trump on the side of his hotels. Great. I mean, that's what he does. That's why I'm kind of shocked that he's kind of crappy at the imaging as far as being a president. You'd imagine that he'd be better at this part of it, at least. I just think he didn't understand the volume of hate that was going to come his way. And I think he's such an egomaniac. He has a hard time dealing with it. He has a hard time like separating. And that's one of the things that I've read about him, that he's getting better at getting away from the comments and not reading comments on Twitter.

But he fucking blocks people. And so you know about that. Yeah, yeah. Somebody sued him. Yeah. Well, there's a group of people suing him, and now they're actually starting to rule against public officials, people who are in the public light, being able to block citizens and having their own opinion

about what this person is doing or not doing. So then you have to say, well, are you allowed to be vulgar towards the president? I mean, how far does that go? I mean, what are you allowed to say? I mean, my view is you should be able to say whatever the hell you want about anybody. But you can't threaten them. Well, you can't threaten them, obviously. But it does go more to the level of pettiness.

He's the most powerful man on the planet, and he's busy blocking people on Twitter at three o'clock in the morning. Well, that whole Joe Scarborough, and what is her name? Mika Brzezinski. That was just insane. The bloody face thing. He was saying that she, this is the fucking president. He's saying she showed up with bloody scars, or she was bleeding from her recent facelift.

Exactly. And first of all, it turns out that it probably wasn't true. Of course it wasn't true. I mean... Who the fuck goes out when you're bleeding? I agree with you. I agree with you. But I wrote a piece in National Review about this.

You know, you say that the level of hatred directed toward Trump is warping Trump. I think that it's also warping some people on my side of the aisle who are so interested in the fight that they're less interested in advancing the policies that i'd like to see achieved so i think there's a whole group of people where let's say that trump would just resign tomorrow he'd say you know what i've had it screw it i'm out and mike pence becomes president and then mike pence proceeds to do all the things conservatives want him to do you know we get tax reform and we limit immigration and we do do all of these things but but he does not tweet about mika brzezinski's bloody face. I think there's a whole group of people on the right who'd be pissed.

They'd miss it. I think that, right. Especially now because it's fun. Exactly. What they want is somebody who pisses off the left more than beats the left. Pisses them off. If you piss off the left, I think Obama sort of trolled some of the right into insanity. I think there are a lot of people on our side where it's like, this jerk.

He keeps saying things just to piss us off. And Obama did do some of that. And so Trump is kind of a Twitter troll. And so he does the same thing where we're like, yeah, that's awesome. Like two days ago, or yesterday, there was a report that Trump said that he thinks the White House is shabby. Now, I can say, as somebody on the conservative right my entire life, if Obama said that, we would not let him forget that for 1,000 years. That the White House is shabby. I mean, it's an ass move to say that the people's house is shabby. First of all, it's a mansion.

And second of all, this is the most iconic building on the face of the planet. Oh, it's shabby. What was he saying it was shabby? They were asking him why he visits his golf courses so much. And he said, oh, because my golf courses are nicer because the White House is shabby.

But there are people on the right who are like, fine, it's funny. At least he's trolling the left. At least it's ticking them off. Guys, ticking off the left is not a substitute for defeating the left if you actually care about defeating the left. This is one of the things that drives me nuts. Because my life goal has been to promulgate particular ideas, not just to piss off the left. But I think that in the fight, there are a lot of people who have fallen into the trap of thinking these two things are identical, right? You piss off the left, that means you're winning. It's like, no,

pissing off the left may be part of it, but that's not how you win. You win by saying things that are true. And if they get pissed, they get pissed. Well, my good friend Bill Burr did this piece about Obama back when Obama was mocking Trump and saying the one thing that I am that you'll never be is the president of the United States. The crowd went nuts. You remember when he did that? Oh, yeah. And Obama was saying this on stage.

And you see Trump in the audience boiling with his big frog double chin, just sitting there eating it all. And that fucking stuck in his craw. There's a whole story that came out from BuzzFeed about his interaction with a guy named McKay Coppins, a reporter for BuzzFeed, in which McKay was basically like saying to Trump, like, you're a joke. You're not going to run. I think Trump ran just because he was sick of people telling him that he wasn't going

to be president. I really think that's half of what drives him. That doesn't mean that he can't do good things. I hope he does do good things. He's the president. I want every president to do things I like. But, you know, he's going to have to get it under control a little bit because, I mean, he was willing to keep the mooch. I mean, the mooch was only ousted because of John Kelly.

And the mooch is it. What did the mooch say? What was his, oh, it was about Steve Bannon sucking his own cock? Yeah, that's exactly right. About him performing acts of. Why would he think that he could say that once he's in the office i mean first of all why would you think that steve bannon could even possibly do that i mean ban is not that flexible i know steve that's that's not that's not something maybe steve's repertoire a giant unit but it doesn't matter just the idea that he would think

i mean it's got he must be emboldened by the fact that trump has said so many outrageous things well i mean there were reports from the new york post that that he actually that trump liked it that all that happened is that there was so much blowback that he had to replace Kelly. And he puts Kelly in there and Kelly's like, you can't do this. Right. And Trump's like, OK, fine. But doesn't it seem more crazy to fire a guy after 10 days than it does to sit him down and say, hey, man, don't say that again. You apologize. Right. Let's move forward. That's what they should have done the next day. But the problem is he's been doing it for a week at that point.

He was out there like saying that Reince Priebus was leaking on the president and was an enemy of the president for a week. And he was saying that he was going to get him fired. Right. And at the same time, remember, this is the same week that Trump himself is tweeting out that Attorney General Sessions, who is his most loyal supporter for a year and a half, that that guy is like a traitor. Right. And that he wishes he would go away because he recused himself. Yeah. First of all, Trump can fire any of these people at any time. Like, this is very passive aggressive. For a guy who made his living saying you're fired on TV, it's amazing that all the people that Trump has fired have been fired actually through surrogates.

Yeah. Mike Flynn resigned. James Comey was fired basically through Rod Rosenstein and Sessions. And then Rosenstein had to recuse himself, which is how you get the special counsel. And Comey found out on television. On TV, right? Which is hilarious. He sends like an emissary to go to L.A. and give him a letter.

And like everyone he fires has to be fired in the most roundabout. I think that Trump actually, I think the dirty little secret is I'm not sure Trump actually likes firing people. Oh, wow. I think he kind of likes torturing people, but I'm not sure that he actually likes firing them. Well, he maybe doesn't like people being mad at him face to face. I think that's it. He wants them to love him in front of his face. So like when he's not there, you know, he can make a phone call, fire him.

You're fired, Jetson. Hang up the phone. You don't have to actually see the guy. He wants that guy to like him. Yeah. I don't, the Comey thing was really bizarre because it was like, oh, you can do that? Like this guy is looking into improprieties and you can just say, no, you can't do that anymore.

You're fired. You can't look into the things I've done wrong. Yeah, it was. Well, the way he did it was the stupid part. So I was calling for Comey to be fired since last year. I thought the way he handled the whole Hillary thing from beginning to end was terrible. I thought that Trump should have replaced him before he became, you know, as basically day one.

Here's my new cabinet. Comey did a great job, you know, usher him out the door, bring in somebody new. He kept him around. And then the first thing he said to Comey, you remember, was when he met him, he said, you're more famous than I am. Well, when Trump says that to you, you know, that's the writing on the wall right there. First of all, it's not true. But second of all, I think maybe there was also a part of the problem was that Comey's a giant. Yes.

You know, Comey's, what is he, 6'8"? 6'8", 6'9", yeah, something like that. Giant dude towered over Trump. The whole thing is such a comedy. And Comey's saying he was trying to hide in the curtains to avoid Trump. So you just see Herman Munster over there hiding in the curtains. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, it's weird.

Now, what did you think? I'm enjoying the show. I mean, it's wild. If I didn't think that nuclear war was a possibility, I'd probably enjoy it more. But if I see a fucking Korean missile headed our way, I'm going to be pissed. When Comey was handling the email thing, what specifically did you not like about it? What I thought was crazy was when he restarted or reopened the case because of Huma having used her computer with Anthony Wieners, all that stuff. I was like, that's not enough.

Like, that seems crazy. Deleting the emails, to me, seemed like, I had Mike Baker on from the CIA, and he said essentially anyone else would be in jail for what she did. For sure. For sure, right? Well, Comey, so he screwed it up, and then he re-screwed it up. So when he originally said publicly, we're not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, he was doing something he didn't have the authority to do. The FBI does not decide whether to prosecute people.

They refer the information to the DOJ and then the DOJ decides whether to prosecute people. It was Attorney General Loretta Lynch's decision whether to prosecute or not. The statute itself, I mean, I'm a lawyer. The statute itself did not say, do you have intent to commit espionage? Do you have intent to make classified secrets public or expose them to the possibility of being made public? Intent is not an element of the crime, right? If you do it, it's a crime. So my wife, she's a doctor, and that means that she is under HIPAA requirements.

There's no element under HIPAA that says that if she reveals somebody's, you know, proprietary medical information by accident, well, there's no intent, so she's okay. That's not part of the statute. If she brings somebody's medical records out to her car, and somebody steals the medical records, you know, if she's working at the VA or something, that's a crime. It doesn't matter if she intended to do it and just left it in her purse.

So Comey read the element of intent into the crime to get Hillary off, and then he said, okay, we're not going to prosecute this. We're going to leave it alone. He shouldn't have intervened in the first place. Remember, he made an entire case basically for why she should be prosecuted. And then at the end, he goes, but you know, but no, we're not going to do that. He also said we're going to keep Congress updated on any future development. Well, you get to October and there's a future development. They found this laptop with all sorts of information on it with new emails from Hillary Clinton that they haven't seen before. And now he has an obligation to inform Congress because he told them that he would. And so he screws the pooch again because

he's afraid that if he doesn't reveal that information, Hillary goes on to win and then it comes out there's something criminal. Then people are going to blame him for Hillary winning and putting a criminal in the White House. So instead he said, oh, well, I'll be fully transparent. I have to honor my institution. I'm going to put this out there. Of course, then Hillary loses. And now he screwed it up twice. And then he gets into the White House. And now he's supposed to be investigating the Trump Russia stuff at the same time. So now he's investigating basically both candidates in the 2016 election. He handled this the wrong way, every step of the way, because he was so focused on

what will uphold the integrity of the FBI and the integrity of the investigations and the integrity of the DOJ. He was less worried about, OK, what do I actually have to do under the law? What's my obligation under the law? His obligation under the law is to shut his piehole, hand the information over to Lynch. If Lynch wanted to kill the investigation, let her do it. So in a sense, Trump was right in saying that he's a grandstander. Yeah, for sure I mean, I think that part was right, but that the problem remember was not the firing of Comey It was the two days after he fired Comey He went to Lester Holt on NBC and he said the reason I fired Comey was not all the excuses I gave about the the Hillary stuff. It's because of the Russia stuff. I was angry about how he was handling Russia. I

mean That's really stupid. Yeah, that's really stupid. That's intensely stupid. It's intensely stupid, but it's also strange that it didn't go anywhere. Right. Like, that was it. That's against the law. Well, so it's, you know, obstruction.

So obstruction, looking at the statutes, obstruction is a little bit more than that. So you have to actually obstruct an ongoing investigation into criminal activity. There's a counterintelligence investigation going on, but not necessarily a criminal one. So not to get too specific about it, but well, that is specific, but you should get specific about it. Yeah, I mean, the obstruction laws, I mean, I've looked into kind of the statutes that they've used to suggest obstruction. And it's not clear that there's any statute that specifically governs something like this. Plus, it is true that Trump does have the power as the chief executive to fire as the commander in chief to fire the FBI director for any reason he chooses now. All that said, he can be impeached for any reason, criminal or non-criminal. Right. Impeachment is not a you don't actually have to have committed a crime to be impeached.

Well, most people don't even understand what impeach means. They think that some or another impeach means you get kicked out of office. Right. That's not what it is. There's the House and they have to vote to impeach you. Right. That's not what it is. There's the House and they have to vote to impeach you. And then there's the Senate. They have to vote by a two thirds majority or 60. Yeah, I think it's two thirds majority to actually convict you of a set of crimes that they come up with. But these are all political definitions. Right. When it says high crimes and misdemeanors, it doesn't mean they actually have to prosecute you like they would in a criminal court and you'd have to go to jail or any of that kind of stuff.

Like they could impeach anybody at any time. Clinton didn't even have to commit perjury. If they wanted to impeach him, they could. They could have impeached every president you can impeach. It's just a vote. It's just a vote. So all the talk about what's criminal and what's not criminal. The problem for Trump, there are two ways of reading Trump's behavior in the whole Russia thing, right? Way one is he's got something to hide.

And that's the most obvious way. He's got something to hide. That's why he gets rid of Flynn. We don't know why he got rid of Flynn. He gets rid of Comey. We don't really know why he got rid of Comey and then brags to the Russians that it took pressure off him on the Russia stuff. And so way one is he's hiding something and now he's firing everybody who gets in the way. And there's, you know, the chain of evidence doesn't not fit that. I mean, you know, the people he's angry at in order

are Attorney General Sessions, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the former head of the FBI, James Comey, the acting head of the FBI, McCabe, and the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller. So those are all people involved with Russia. Those are the only people he's really angry at. So there's something to be said for the idea that maybe he's trying to hide something. On the other hand, we haven't actually seen any hard evidence of collusion itself. So we saw an attempt to collude by Donald Trump Jr., but we haven't actually seen any evidence that the Russians were providing special information

to the Trump administration, which was then being weaponized for use in the campaign. We haven't seen any of that stuff. So here's the other plausible theory. And this goes to Trump's personality. He's so petty and he wants to be loved so much that he is angry that people keep saying he won because of the Russians. And so now, every time people say that, he just gets pissed and he fires people. So Comey, I mean, this is totally plausible, right? Comey comes to him and has said privately that you are not under investigation. And Trump says to him, well, why didn't you say that? And Comey says, well, I can't say that because if I say that,

I'm going to have to update Congress if you do fall under investigation. And Trump doesn't like that. He wants the public to know he's free and clear. So he fires Comey. And then he goes up public and he says, I didn't like how he was handling the Russia thing. I'm innocent. Why won't these people leave me alone? Right.

So there's two ways to read this. Either he's totally innocent but stupid or he's trying to hide something. Those are the only two plausible ways of reading the situation. The Donald Trump Jr. thing was really bizarre because he released all the emails. Like, I just, almost like, look, I've got nothing to hide. Like, you aren't supposed to do any of these things you're saying in these emails. Yes, that was not a good moment for Trump Jr. Do you think he got, I mean, and then you hear that he was coached by his dad. Again, you know, none of this is good stuff. I think that Donald Trump Jr. releasing the email.

First of all, it is imperative to note, eight minutes later, the New York Times released basically the email chain. He was beating it out of the gate. And so he puts that out there. Which is a smart move. I mean, it would be smart if he had found a way to spin it. Right. This is the thing in politics now. The way politics works now is your smartest move, if there's dirt about you,

is to be the first person out the gate with it, and you put a spin on it. So like Barack Obama. Imagine if Obama hadn't said anything in 2008, and then we found out a week before the election that he did coke in high school. Now, a lot of people wouldn't care. A lot of people would. In 2000, George W. Bush was hit with a DUI charge from 1973, and it probably lost him a point in the polls.

So what Obama did is he wrote an entire memoir and he just kind of dismissed it right in the middle of the memoir. He goes, you know, when I was in high school, did a little blow. No problem. Did a little blow. Everybody and everyone. Oh, OK. Did a little blow. All right. You know, cool. So if you're going to release this kind of stuff, you have to put a spin on it. Trump Jr. didn't. He just put out the emails and the emails themselves contain the damning material. Right. It says right in there. Right. You know, there's a Russian government lawyer. The Russian government sees this as part of its effort to aid Mr. Trump's campaign. And Donald Jr. is like, thumbs up, guys. Like, I love it. Sounds awesome.

Right. And so that does not look good. It's not quite as much as people on the left want to say it is, meaning that there's no evidence yet that any information was actually exchanged with the Russians or that anything came of the meeting. Most of the people in the meeting who have said something have said nothing came of it. You know, but we don't know whether Trump knew about the meeting. I find it kind of hard to believe he didn't, you know, considering every major campaign figure was there. But but, you know, and then they then they just keep lying. And this is this is the part that's that's a problem.

Are they lying because they just think they can get away with it and they're stupid? Or are they lying because they're actually being meticulous about their lies? I tend to think the former because this isn't a professional administration. I think Trump fibs a lot. He says things that are, I mean, like on stupid things. He says things like, the leader of the Boy Scouts called me and told me that he loved my speeches. Best speech ever. And then the leader of the Boy Scouts is like, uh, what?

So is that a calculated lie to hide something? Or is it just that Trump lies by nature and so he does it a lot? Well, I think he's just so used to putting that spin on things, that publicity spin. Right. And the thing that he said about this was that this is what happens in politics. You get dirt about your enemy and people exchange information. It's just what happens. It's just you're seeing it now. So a lot of people are like, yeah, well, that makes sense.

And this is something that, again, I think that we're shaped by Hollywood a little bit. Politics is dirty, but some of this stuff is not usual. It's actually not particularly usual to meet with a government that is really not friendly to the United States to receive information about your political opponents. But if you've watched House of Cards, you think, well, I mean, that's like two steps down from throwing somebody under a subway. So what's the big deal? Do you watch House of Cards? I don't because I work in politics.

And when I go home at night, the last thing I want to do is watch entertainment about politics. I watch Game of Thrones. That's as political as it gets. Yeah. House of Cards is a great show. But if it's half right, like I always wonder the thing, the thing that gets me is when people suicide themselves That are on their way to trial. I'm like, okay. I don't want to be that fucking guy

I don't want to be that tinfoil hat guy, but how many people are gonna suicide themselves? I mean for sure Someone's been murdered somewhere along the line someone knew something some powerful people got to them and they murder him It's gonna happen. It has happened. It must have happened. I think it happens a lot in Russia. I don't believe what Trump said. And again, I think this is what Trump has a skewed vision of what politics is. And because he

thinks that the outer limit of politics is Russia, he thinks anything inside that limit is now okay. But do you think it's ever happened in the United States or just in Russia? Like political assassinations? Yes. I can't name a specific example of where it has. I think that that's- Are you open to the possibility?

I'm open to, I mean, if someone shows me evidence- Like Lyndon Johnson. You think Lyndon Johnson could whack somebody? I don't think Lyndon Johnson whacked anybody. What about Kennedy? I don't think that Kennedy whacked anybody. What about Hillary? I don't think Hillary whacked anybody.

If I had my last thousand bucks, I'd be super tempted to bet on black. I'd be super tempted to go, you know what? I think she went dark. I think she's whacked a few people. Let's go. Let's see what we got here. I want to see Whitewater. I'd want to see Vince Foster. I want to see that Enron guy who shot himself in the

head twice. There's a few. If I could really if I could really... If I could... Man, I think it's happened. I just don't know who and when. I'm sure it's happened at some point, but again, if I don't know who and when, I'm hesitant to... Of course. And I think that we tend to think things are regular when they are...

I mean, that'd be really irregular. So we tend to think that this stuff is happening every day. And that's why you see Trump on TV saying, well, Putin, like America, hasn't killed people. And it's like, well, no, not quite like Putin. I mean, like Putin legitimately murders his journalistic enemies. Yes. Like I haven't seen you trying to double tap Jake Tapper. So I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure. No, it's not a regular thing around here. Even Obama wasn't trying to like kill Chris Wallace. Right. But maybe they, you know, maybe, I don't know.

Well, Putin is obviously the extreme example, right? Well, obviously the extreme example is North Korea. But Putin is in that range. Yeah. Like a totally feared, essentially a dictator who's... I mean, there are a bunch of them, right? I mean, Erdogan in Turkey. Sure. Maduro.

Assad. Yeah, Assad. Maduro now in Venezuela, who's literally jailing his political opponents. He's now like a complete dictatorship, and this is very recently. Right, but America is a, I mean, would you believe it if I said like leaders in France had people regularly whacked? I'd find it a little bit hard to believe. I don't think we're significantly worse than France in the whacking people in politics business. I don't think regularly, but I think every now and then the move is.

I'm open to the possibility, but I'd have to see the evidence, the lawyer in me. Well, I don't think we're a house of cards. I don't think it gets that ridiculous. The point I'm making is if you think that's a regular thing, if you think that it's not like a rare thing and maybe once in a while, you know, once every 20 years somebody gets whacked quietly for political reason. If you think that's like a regular thing, then fibbing is like way inside the line. Right. Right. Like you hiding documents is really or you like writing your son's stupid

statement about a stupid email exchange and then fibbing about it publicly. Like that's really inside the line. So, again, I don't think that I think some of this I have a rule about the Trump administration. I never attribute to malevolence what I can attribute to stupidity, because I think that that's more likely to be the case. It's like the Occam's razor of the Trump administration. I think that is a smart way to think but I think sometimes malevolence is real No, I got like remember the Gary Condit Chandra Levy thing. Yeah, that was weird. That was a weird one Yeah, if you for people don't know the story this guy was having an affair the girl turned up dead and Then 9-11 happened right away afterwards

So people kind of forgot about it But they they found her body in the park and everybody was like, Jesus Christ. Like, this is a woman that was about to testify that she was having an affair with this guy. And that one was a good one. Yeah. In terms, not a good one, obviously,

a terrible one. So I think, I think that, so let me say this. I think that, you know, if there's murder in politics, it'll probably tend to fall more into the personal than the political. It'll probably fall less in terms of like, I have a political vendetta against this guy and I'm going to kill him. We haven't really done much of that since Alexander Hamilton and Burr. But it's but there are I mean, listen, Teddy Kennedy left a woman in the back of his car and a body of water.

So right. Drunk driving. Right. That was the thing with him. He just didn't want to be responsible for something horrible that he did. Similar to Dick Cheney not meeting with the police for something like 18 hours after he shot his friend in the face. I don't think he was trying to assassinate his friend. No, he was just drunk hunting. Maybe.

I would imagine. I can't rule that one out. Yeah. Honestly, I'll find Teddy Kennedy a little more suspicious. You leave the woman in the back of the car, swim out of the car, go to a house, sleep, come back the next day and my God, she's dead. Yeah. Well, yeah.

It turns out when you leave somebody underwater for 12 hours, they tend to do that. It's weird how that works. Well, unless he was so drunk that he didn't know what he was doing, which can happen. You can get blackout drunk when you wake up and you go, wait a minute, did I crash my car? So I don't drink that heavily. Is that really a thing? Like you climb out the window of the car, swim out to the river, bank, go to somebody's house, come back like a day later. You're like, oh, shit, there was a girl in the backseat.

I've never had it happen. what I would call slideshow nights, you know, where I get hammered and then like I wake up in the morning with a pounding headache. And I just have these flashes in my head like, who is that person? Like, where was I? Where were we? Oh, yeah, there was that. And then you eat breakfast with your friends. I go, you remember that thing? And you go, oh, yeah, Jesus.

So it's not necessarily blackout. Like I did something horrible and I completely forgot about it, but I forgot a lot of it. Okay. But some people, I have a friend, and he goes gerbilize. There's a switch that goes off, three or four shots in, and he's gone, and he's not there anymore. And you almost got to, like, nerf the world around him and protect him and get him in his bed. And he wakes up in the morning. He doesn't know a thing.

He doesn't know a thing about what happened, and it's really bizarre. It's a legitimate blackout. happened and it's really bizarre it's a legit terrible things to him while he's not we're nice to him but your your instinct is to get the fuck away from him and just let horrible things happen but uh the stories are legendary but he does he gets shark eyes he gets these black like soulless eyes where he's gone and you you go, oh, no, he's gone. Yeah, it's weird. But I wonder what that is. I feel like that's a neurological issue. I feel like if alcohol does that to you, there's probably like some switches that aren't connected right in the head. I imagine there's something going on here.

Yeah. So Teddy Kennedy, who knows? I mean, he was obviously a raging alcoholic. And that could have been a part of the problem. I mean, he literally might have gone home not even knowing that he killed somebody. I mean, that would have to be his, I mean, it's his only defense. Yeah. So you'd imagine. Well, that was one of the things that they said that they would have used as a defense, again, with OJ. That OJ, with the CTE, that he might not have even known what he was doing.

That he might have flown into some blackout rage That that would an amazing defense Like I would like to hear that like everyone who has CTE now gets to like run around Chopping up their ex-wife and randos who end up at their house like that That'd be that's a hell of a defense sort of like the Twinkie defense, right? Yeah Well, the Twinkie defense was hilarious, but there are people that think that you know There you're gonna see more and more things like that out of former NFL players with massive brain trauma issues.

It's actually a serious legal question, you know? Like, there's always been the question of... This was a couple weeks ago. This kid doesn't even know he did this. Oh, God. Oh, wow. Former NFL player Devon Hall accused of killing his mother.

He doesn't remember. Yeah, he's, like, in jail right now and doesn't recall. Yeah, well, that's real. I mean... Yeah, I don't in jail right now and doesn't recall. Yeah, well, that's real. I mean... Yeah, I don't find that wildly implausible. No. I mean, the fact is that we have an insanity defense.

Yeah, right. And what it means is you don't know right from wrong. Well, if you don't know what you're doing... Like, this is something they teach in law school. If you're sleepwalking, you kill somebody. And there's no motive. So it's difficult to, like, you need mental treatment, but should you be in jail for that? Not really.

I mean, they've had cases where people are like sleepwalking and they think that and they're dreaming at the same time. So they think that their wife is actually like this defense has been used where they think their wife is some sort of monster in the rooms. They like clobber to death and then they wake up and like, oh, that was my wife. It's a really creative defense or it's true. I mean, one of the two. Well, if we know that people can go crazy and we know that brain trauma is a real issue mm-hmm the two of them together I mean there's something about getting knocked around in the head where it's so

completely unpredictable and then you add in this impulsive nature of their behavior that happens there's something really weird about a brain trauma it causes a lot of very strange, impulsive behavior in people. They really can't understand even why they're behaving the way they're behaving. It's just not good.

Obviously, this is way off track. But it's... My point is... It's not that far from politics to brain trauma. You don't want a former NFL player being the fucking president. They did the CTE study.

There was 111 players and's they did the CTE study there was a hundred and eleven players and 110 of them had CTE I mean then you tell me I mean you have more experience with this I mean, I didn't find that shocking at all. I mean they've been calling people punch drunk since yeah 1910 So well see the thing is when you get to that when you get to the slurring your words part You're so gone like you're already gone There's a lot of people that have CTE that speak really well and they're very articulate and they're very reasonable and you wouldn't even understand that they're dealing with all these, this host of neurological issues.

By the time your voice, obviously I'm not a neurologist, but by the time as it's been explained to me, your voice is slurring and you're dealing with like real heavy duty symptoms. Like you're fucked. Like you're so gone. Like you're, you're, you're, you're way off the deep end. So here's a weird question for you. I mean, what, what would you do about, like, I think the NFL is going to start losing viewers because of this.

I think they are. I think you're right. And you know, I wonder about MMA. It's a factor. I think there's a, there's two things going on. There's the fuck it factor where people like, I don't care. I want to watch people get their ass kicked. It's fun. It's a factor. I think there's two things going on. There's the fuck it factor, where people are like, I don't care. I want to watch people get their ass kicked. It's fun. It's exciting. People love it. It's consensual. It's primal. Yeah. And people know what they're

signing up for when they do it. They know the consequences of it. And it's worth the glory to be the guy who delivers it versus the guy who receives it. So I think there's that. But then there's also, look, the Colin, like the Colin Kaepernick thing, I think that probably cost a lot of ratings for the NFL. Yeah, there was that poll that came out that said I think of the 12% of people who said that they were

not watching NFL games last year, 28% of that 12% said that the Kaepernick national anthem thing was the reason. Yeah, I mean, some people probably emboldened them. They probably liked it and they wanted to watch it more. This is fascinating about the cultural breakdown of the country. Yeah, I mean, some people, it probably emboldened them. They probably liked it, and they wanted to watch it more. This is fascinating about the cultural breakdown of the

country. Basically, white people hated it, and black people loved it. This is how the polls were. It was like 72% of black people thought it was great, and like an equal percentage of white people thought that it was just terrible. Which is a fascinating look at sort of how race relations work in the country at large. It's actually one of the reasons

I think that ESPN's been losing ratings. Like, I used to watch ESPN religiously. And now all I want is to just watch my sports and not be bothered with the politics. Because I say I do that during the day. And it's a pet peeve of mine that every time I turn on ESPN, I have to lecture about Caitlyn Jenner or about Black Lives Matter. It's like, shut up. Caitlyn Jenner hasn't even been athletically relevant since before I was born. I was born in 1984. Well, the Caitlyn Jenner piece, when they did it for ESPN, and I don't know if this is true or not, but the word was that her getting Athlete of the Year, or whatever the award was that she got at ESPN. Yeah, it was like the Hero of the Year award. Hero was directly tied to the exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer.

That makes sense. They sold the two of them together as a package deal Which I buy a hundred percent if you don't if you don't come on Think about where she works if that's the case where she came from she's a fucking Kardashian. Okay. She's a giant Kardashian That's what she is now Notice I'm saying she yeah, you're saying she I would say very politically correct. Yeah, I'm not but the video where they Notice I'm saying she. Yeah, you're saying she. I would say her. Very politically correct. Yeah, I'm not. But the video where they circled her house and she was like moving in the shadows behind the drapes. Did you ever see that?

No. It was wonderful. It was wonderful. She, I mean, it was like the first time she was revealing herself as this woman. So they're circling her house. She has this glorious house and like looks like it's in Malibu or somewhere. Well, they're circling the house and it has this glorious house and, like, looks like it's in Malibu or somewhere. Well, they're circling the house and it's in the hills with a helicopter, like, filming. This is, like, fucking high production value shit.

This isn't just like, hey, you know, we met with Caitlin at home. Caitlin, tell us your troubles. You know, like, Kristen Beck, the former Navy SEAL, you know, who just sits down very reasonably and says, this just feels better for me. This is who I am. Right. No, no. There was, like, this is who I am. Right. No, no. There was like curtains and shadows, and it was mysterious.

And then she starts talking, like, well, you know, I've always been a man. And you're like, oh, God. And then there was the weirdest part, where she said she got surgery, but it doesn't make me any, it wasn't like I was any less of a man or less of a woman before the surgery.

Well, this is the case about gender, right? Well, then why get the surgery? That was like. This is, well, there are a lot of questions as to the logic of all of this. You call Caitlyn Jenner, she, Caitlyn Jenner is a biological man. How dare you? Sorry to. I'm triggered.

Sorry to break this to some, all the people who listen to your show, Caitlyn Jenner's, I had a tweet this week. All the people that listen probably agree with you. At least a good amount do. The number one retweeted tweet I have ever had. I tweeted it, I think, a day ago, and it has 120,000 likes. And there was a headline from CNN that said, Transgender man assigned the female sex at birth gives birth

to healthy baby boy and so i tweeted woman gives birth to boy right because it's a woman i mean this is like that's not a headline i'm sorry like i'm just because the woman believes she's a man doesn't make her a man like biology still exists sex still exists if you want to say she's a woman who feels like a man that's fine if you want to say that's a woman who feels like a man, that's fine. If you want to say that, and by the way, I don't even care if she gets hormone treatments or if she wants to have surgery. Like, it's a free country. Do what the hell you want. But when you start insisting that I just throw biology out the window, I don't understand

why that's any better than I as a religious person saying every time you say something, you have to mention God. Right. Like, I don't have the right to do that to you. Like, well, that's idiotic. Are you fascinated by it? Are you fascinated by the transgender? I'm fascinated by the society's obsession with it.

Yes, that's a good way of saying it. There's not just an obsession. It's compulsory and it's rabid. So I think that there's a couple of things that are going on. One is that it's very dark, but I think that there is an element of things that are going on. One is that it's very dark, but I think that there is an element of like, this is different. And we get to revel in the weirdness of it. But we're going to pretend that it's all about the civil rights of it, right? We're going to feel like special because we're on their side, right? We're not watching

Caitlyn Jenner because it's a curiosity and because it's weird and entertaining. We're doing it because we're on Caitlyn Jenner's side. But there have been trans people forever. Yeah, right. I mean, Renee Richards was a trans person, right? Yeah. I mean, it's happened throughout history. I mean, there's, what was I reading a couple of days ago about a Roman, like, there was something about reports of some trans soldier in the Roman army, you know, more than a thousand years ago. It's got to be, if it exists now and it's existed before it was popular.

Yeah. I mean, there's got to be a lot of people that turn trans now just because it's exciting. Oh, there it is right there. A trans soldier in the ancient Roman army. That wouldn't. Of course. It wouldn't be surprising. I'm not shocked.

No. I'm not shocked. I mean, it's a condition. I mean, the DSM called it gender identity disorder and then they called it gender dysphoria. It's a condition. I mean, like, I'm not saying conditions don't exist. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. It's a condition. I mean, the DSM called it gender identity disorder, and then they called it gender dysphoria. It's a condition. I mean, like, I'm not saying conditions don't exist. It was gender dysphoria, but that, in a lot of people's mind, is labeling it somehow a negative. Well, I mean, it is highly linked to suicidality. There's a 40% lifetime suicide rate for people who have this particular gender disorder that seems to me not to be, like, a great positive.

Whether or not they transition, yeah. Whether or not they transition, yeah. Whether or not they transition. Yeah. I mean, I don't care if you transition. Do what you want to do. But the idea that we as an entire society have to redefine what sex is and we have to blind ourselves to what biology is, this is something I'm not willing to do. I think that it's actually damaging to kids particularly.

I'm more than willing to call her a she. But you can only change your name once. I'm willing to call Caitlyn Jenner Caitlyn Jenner. I'm not willing to call Caitlyn Jenner aner a she oh because you can't change your sex you change your name you change your name to whatever you want i don't care but you you can't she caitlyn jenner is not a chicken caitlyn jenner is not a woman caitlyn jenner is a man a biological man and if a man lost his penis and and you know in a tragic accident it wouldn't make him a woman and if he were born with high doses of estrogen in his bloodstream, he would also not be a woman.

You're determined by your chromosomes. And it's not even talking about intersex people. Intersex is an actual status. Intersex is a biological status. But this nonsense that if you, Joe Rogan, decide tomorrow that you are a woman, no surgeries, no home or nothing. You just, tomorrow,

you wake up, and not decide, but you feel like a woman. Then you have always been a woman. We must treat you as a nothing. You just, tomorrow, you wake up, and not decide, but you feel like a woman. Then you have always been a woman. We must treat you as a woman. You don't have to change anything about yourself for us to even determine whether you're a woman. We just, like, no. I'm sorry, no. I mean, like, I had mental illness.

I had a grandfather. I get so much shit for this. But I had a, this is not me being unsympathetic to people who suffer from a condition that is really tragic and obviously harms people, you know, in terms of, again, the rates of suicide and depression are astounding. My grandfather was a bipolar schizophrenic, and it would have not been good for him or my family if people had said to him, Nate, you're right, the radio is talking to you. Nate, you're right, the curtains are talking to you. They put him in a mental hospital, they gave him lithium, and then he was better, and he could actually live a normal, relatively happy right. The curtains are talking to you. They put him in a mental hospital, they gave him lithium, and then he was better, and he could actually live a normal, relatively happy life. There's no good treatment for gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria, whatever you want to call it,

but to suggest that it is a condition that doesn't require treatment, that really it's just that you're actually brain female, again, this is ascientific. There's no scientific evidence to back this whatsoever. Even these studies that have been done talking about there's a female brain and a male brain. First of all, if you say this to a feminist, you're a sexist. Right. If you say to a feminist, there's a female brain and a male brain and male brain works differently than the female brain. The feminist will look at you like, how dare you?

Well, it's also one of the rare times where you're allowed to celebrate classic definitions of female beauty when a man embraces him when he becomes a woman. Lipstick, high heels, short skirt. This is like not sexist. Caitlyn Jenner was only a woman when Caitlyn Jenner was on the cover of Vanity Fair and a bustier. Right. Right. But if he had just said, listen, I look exactly the same as I did yesterday, but I'm a woman. Yeah.

If he got a short haircut and dressed like Billie Jean King. Right. It's the reason why the media loves Laverne Cox. Because Laverne Cox has had surgeries and looks a lot like a woman. I don't know who Laverne Cox is. The guy from, well, the transgender woman from Orange is the New Black. I never watched that show. I've never watched that show either, but she's on the cover of Time Magazine.

Oh. Or he's on the cover of Time Magazine. Well, there was the woman in that show. Isn't that the one where the girl, Ruby, is that the girl? That's Laverne Cox. Okay. That's a woman? Or a man? That's a man. It used to be a man. It used to bene Cox okay that's a woman or man that's a man I used to be a man it used to be a man it's a woman now very tricky no still a man but transgender I'm so out of the loop I'm that old man I'm that old man who I always wondered that headline there right it says America's next civil rights frontier and that's the key you have a bunch of people in

the United States who are suggesting that they want the next civil rights fight always the next civil rights fight right so the civil rights fight is immigration or the civil rights fight is immigration, or the civil rights fight is gay marriage, or the civil rights fight is transgenders. Okay, how about this? How about there was only one real civil rights fight, and it was about black people who had been historically oppressed in the United States for 200 years? There had been slaves. Yes, who had been slaves, and then she was pro.

Nobody's owning transgenders. This is correct. Yeah. Okay, the worst that Caitlyn Jenner had experienced was being incredibly wealthy in a high net worth suburb. This is not to say that transgender people aren't discriminated against in some areas of American life. I'm sure that's true. But it's also like behavior is not the same as being born black or being born Asian or being born with, you know, disabled. If I'm a business owner and I hire you and you're a man and you come in the next day and you're dressed in a woman's clothing saying you're a woman, but you still have

a full beard. Like, I don't see why I as a business owner, I'm expected to eat the cost of that. Like that's just, that seems, that seems bizarre to me. Eat the cost is a great way to phrase it. I didn't have a dog in this fight. i didn't i i was completely open and liberal about it until there was a case where a man who had been a man for 30 years became a woman for a little less than two years and then started mma fighting women yes exactly exactly beating the fuck out of these women and shocker and not proclaiming that he or she used to be a man because, in quotes, it was a medical condition that I did not need to disclose. Like, that's not a fucking medical condition. Right.

And if you ever watch the fights, she wasn't winning. Is this Dallin Fox? Yes. She wasn't winning because she was skillful. She was fucking manhandling these women. It was ugly. Of course. It was horrible.

Of course. these women. It was ugly. Of course. It was horrible. Of course. But again, it's so funny how the transgender movement destroys the feminist movement by living off of the sort of lies that the feminist movement promulgated. So the feminist movement said stupid things like, women and men, equally athletic proficient.

Well, that's something that has been repeated very recently, that there's no biological difference in the genders, and it's all social. Absolute horseshit. I mean, I'm just sorry. There's no scientific evidence to back that, and it's all social. Absolute horseshit. I mean, I'm just sorry. There's no scientific evidence to back that and it's particularly true with regard to actual physical capacity. This is just nonsense. Not just no scientific evidence, but

a mountain. Yeah. A mountain of it against it. My favorite study on this is, you know, there was, you remember there was those commercials about like throwing like a girl, running like a girl. Right. There was a feminist commercial saying, what is it to be running like a girl? And they would show an adult woman and she'd be running all girly and then they would show a little girl and she's running. And it's still a little girly, but she's running, you know, like normally.

Fierce. Exactly, fierce. It's only society that has forced the little girl to run like a woman. First of all, I have a three-year-old girl. She runs like a girl. Second of all, and it's not because I'm teaching her. It's not because her mom runs because she doesn't, right? Does she play with dolls because you're a sexist pig?

It's because of that. My daughter started off liking trucks in the first year, and I didn't give a shit. And now she likes playing with dolls and dressing up in princess dresses. Who cares? She's a girl. She's always been a girl. She'll always be a girl, whether she likes trucks or whether she likes dresses. Yeah, that was an issue with one of my daughters, too.

My daughter was a little worried about her. I go, she's going to be a dyke. She's like, no. I go, what's the big deal? You like lesbians. Who cares? I don't care. I'm like, I do not care. And she's like, and then she turned the corner and then she got but we just let her

be whatever she's in but she was really into like batman for a while yeah my daughter is in a batman then she was in a wonder woman like who cares but is it but but what's funny about this is that the left kept saying even when i met my wife right who's who's a conservative and i made her more conservative when he got married because that's what men tend to do to their wives. But she, you know, I remember early on we had a conversation about this. And I said, women don't throw like men. And she got, like, all offended. And I said, but that's factually true.

She said, right, but it's insulting. It's like, no, that's factually true. Like, I'm sorry. There have been studies. Out of 1,000, if you took a woman throwing a baseball, and then a thousand men throwing a baseball, the woman will throw faster than out of those thousand men, this is in the book The Sports Chain, the woman will throw faster than two of those men, out of a thousand. And we're not talking about, like, goose gossage here.

We're talking about, like, we're talking about the accountant from down the block. We're talking about Paul Ryan flinging a baseball. Yeah. Right? I mean, that's just not the way this stuff works. Well, that was the counter that Fallon Fox used talking about Paul Ryan flinging a baseball. Yeah. Right? I mean, that's just not the way this stuff works. Well, that was the counter that Fallon Fox used, was that she actually lost to a woman. She lost to a woman named Ashley Evan Smith. But what I

said was, no, this proves my point is that you're not good. Right. You're just a man. Well, this was, you know, John McEnroe got slapped all over the lot when he said about Serena Williams, she's great. Serena Williams is great and all, but if Serena Williams were competing, he said she's the best female player ever. And they were like, well, why not just the best player ever?

And he's like, because she's a woman. Like, if she were a man, she'd get her ass kicked. And everyone was like, no, how dare you? There is something called the universal tennis ranking. She would rank in the mid-ranks of college male players if she were a man. And Serena Williams had said, like, five years ago, no, I'd never want to play with, like, Andy Roddick. He'd kill me.

She actually did this. There was a 200th ranked man in the world who she wanted to just warm up with. And they played just a normal match. He won 6-1, 6-0. And he was ranked 200th in the world. And the only shock was that he dropped a point to her. Well, there was the issue of Renee Richards when Renee Richards started playing tennis against women and kicking their ass. And he was a

middling player at best as a woman or as a man rather but as a woman he was a fucking killer I mean this is what should insult feminists it turns out that Caitlyn Jenner won all these hero of the year awards and everything we men are so great that even when we decide to be women we're better than women

that was the most bizarre thing you've only been a woman for six months but he's amazing at it he's incredible at it he's just he was the most bizarre thing. He'd only been a woman for six months. But he's amazing at it. He's incredible at it. He's a natural. He's a gold medalist as a woman. It turns out that men are better even at being women than women. No wonder feminists are pissed, and they should be. And this whole glossing over the difference between feminists who have been claiming that women

are distinct from men, and important, and different, and better in certain ways. I don't understand how you hold these two simultaneous thoughts. Hillary Clinton needs to be president because we need a female president. But also Donald Trump, if he said he was a woman tomorrow, would be a woman. How do you hold those two simultaneous thoughts? I always thought that in the last week of the election, if Trump thought he was going to lose,

he should have just declared himself a woman. And then he, too, could have run as the first female president. That would have been incredible trolling. If he just showed up with a dress and lipstick. And the entire left could have been. I identify as a woman. I'm the best looking woman ever. I've lipstick. And the entire left-footed bit. I identify as a woman. I'm the best-looking woman ever. I've been voted as the best-looking woman of all time. One of the great arguments that I got in online, it wasn't even arguments, but so many people

were calling me a bigot because of this Fallon Fox thing. It was stunning because it was so confusing to me. I'm talking about defending a biological woman. These biological women, at least two of of them got the fuck beaten out of Them by Fallon Fox before they found out that she used to be a man I'm like that's not an issue to these people and so this one woman said she's always been a woman and I said okay She gave birth she Impregnated a woman and got her pregnant. I go, what about then? She goes, even then.

So even then, she was a woman. She was a woman. She was fucking a woman with her dick and getting that woman pregnant. Like, we are in fantasy land. Yeah, it's crazy towns out there. This doesn't mean, this is what's crazy. Like, you can't, just because something's illogical, you can't just decide that someone's a bigot. Like, we're in a weird area.

We're talking about bone structure. And here's the crazy thing. Muscle density. There's a crazy thing is that they always rely on these gender reassignment doctors to define the terms. And it's really interesting because I got deep, deep, deep into the rabbit hole with this because I was really shocked at how many people were angry at me. And there is one doctor who is a board certified endocrinologist who sort of broke it down. She's like, not only is the science behind this crazy, but when you have gender reassignment surgery, one of the big issues with men transitioning into women is bone density.

She's like, when you have gender reassignment surgery, you're taking estrogen, which actually preserves bone density. She's like, not only do they have less bone density once they become a woman, they might have more. Whoa. Because you're preserving it. Like, you're not going to automatically be just like a woman in a year or so. I don't think surgeons, I mean, I know too much about doctoring from having spent 1,000 years with my wife's medical education to believe that doctors have the capacity to

magically change a man into a woman. No. Maybe it's going to happen one day with like CRISPR or something like that when they start using genetic, literally genetic editing. Before birth maybe. If you actually edit the chromosomes before birth. But no. I mean, like no. Once your genes

have been defined, once your chromosomes have been defined, this is fifth grade science, people. It's fifth grade science. What scares the shit out of me is when you hear these stories about people deciding that their child who's like eight or nine years old... This is effed up beyond belief. It's scary because a fucking 17

year old doesn't know. That was the thing about that Ruby Rose girl. She was saying that when she was young, when she was a teenager, she wanted to be a man. She wanted to be transgender. And that she had gone through that phase, and now she's so happy that she didn't do anything. Right. Well, they say that 80% of kids who experience any sort of gender dysphoria

as children grow out of it. So when you have a society that reinforces it, and then in Canada they're passing laws now that say that if a kid says, you know, you have a girl, and the girl says, I'm a boy, and she's three, that the government can come into your house and take the kid. Because obviously, if you don't want to humor the kid and get the kid treatment or surgery or hormone blockers, then you're obviously doing something wrong to the kid. This is just, it's insane.

First of all, if anyone tried to do that with my kid, I would meet them at the door with a gun. I mean, this is the kind of stuff where you're talking legit civil war. Like when you say that the government can take people's kids from them because the government knows better than you how to parent your kids on basic things like are you a boy or a girl? That's going to get violent pretty quickly. If you send someone to my door with a gun saying I'm taking your daughter from you because your daughter says she's a boy at school and you're not going to take her to a psychiatrist to start her transitioning process? Oh. No.

But how did we get so far down this rabbit hole of insanity? And this is, again, this is not taking away the personal choice of a 60-year-old man like Bruce Jenner who decides he wants to be a woman. Do what you want. Free country. Go have at it. Have a good time. But how did we get so crazy that that becomes an option, that people aren't, they're not paying attention to the massive variables that a child encounters, psychological variables, stress variables, what's going on in the home,

what's happening hormonally, what's happening psychologically, what is happening to you, and how can you decide, like, this is it. You're going to allow this kid to make a lockdown decision to begin gender transition surgery at like nine or 10 years old? You can put hormone blockers in there to an eight year old. Yeah. And, you know, and then they'll show you like this girl who's like 13 who used to be a boy. And, you know, you see her act and talk and they go, how could you imagine that this isn't a girl?

OK, I don't you know, I don't know that this isn't a girl? Okay. I don't, you know, I don't know. I don't, I don't, I just don't know what happened. I'm going to go with the fact that there's a Y chromosome in every cell of that person's body, except ironically for some of his sperm cells to tell me that that's probably a boy. And yes, you can block the manifestation of some physical characteristics that does not change the chromosomes. And there are legitimately intersex people, right? I mean, there are people who legitimately have conditions like Kleinfelter syndrome. I mean, these are

actual biological things. But if you're telling me any boy can be a girl, no. No. The answer is no. And that's not biologically correct, and you're not doing any sort of service to a child, especially evidenceless. I mean, you're doing no service to a child

by humoring what is obviously a mental condition. And a mental condition, by the way, again, linked 40% lifetime suicide rate is higher than any other population on planet Earth by a whopping margin. I mean, telling kids that we are going to force you into the, like you express when you're five that you think you're the opposite sex,

and now at eight we're going to transition you into this and your suicide rate is exactly the same as somebody who didn't do that right or it's very similar to somebody who didn't do that and and like this is somehow supposed to benefit the person it's just it's it's beyond imagination i think it's cruelty well it's very strange for sure and as someone who doesn't experience gender dysphoria i like to i mean i when when someone's got some sort of an issue, whatever it is, whether you call it an issue or a condition or whatever the fuck it is, and I don't have it. I try to be as standoffish. I try to be as objective. I try to be as kind as possible.

This is a weird one, though. This is a weird one because it's it's become some sort of a fad and any criticism of it whatsoever, even discussion of it. You are labeled as a transphobic piece of shit. Yeah, I think it's only weird, honestly, because it's run into the weird sexual politics that dominates in the country. Because if we were to talk about anorexia, which is a form of body dysphoria. Yes. All right. Or if we were to talk about I mean mean there actually was something body identity integrity disorder right where people like want to lose an arm like we would be saying well the problem is in your brain it's not in your arm right like chopping off your arm seems a little extreme but if you want to do that like go ahead but if you were a kid and it's in five-year-old you wouldn't say oh well this kid's going to suffer with this their entire life like let's

just chop off their arm now let's prevent them their arm from developing like this is not and and to tell the entire society that this is a positive good is a whole other thing. It's one thing to try and treat people who have a disorder humanely. It's another thing to redefine the terms of the entire civilization as well as biology in order to fit that. It's valuing the subjective over the objective. Science is objective. Your feelings about who you are is subjective. You can have those feelings. But once

you are trying to translate those feelings into the objective standard we almost told by, now you're encroaching on my territory. It's not just you doing what you want to do anymore. You're telling me what I have to do. And that's a different thing. Right. Now, when people say that there's this 40% suicide rate amongst transgender people, one of the arguments that I've heard is it's because they're not accepted. Right. I've heard this too. Yeah. Yeah. And that if they were accepted and then they felt themselves and they felt loved for their

true self, then it would be just like everybody else. And I've seen no evidence to suggest that. If there is a decrease based on treatment, then it's marginal at best. But that dysphoria, is it uniform? It's marginal at best. But that dysphoria, is it uniform? I would like to know, gender dysphoria, is it in a similar percentile as anorexia or what bodybuilders get or what strippers get when they get triple F tits? I don't know.

I'd have to look up the anorexic suicide rate. Body dysphoria is a weird thing. It is. I've met people. There's a girl that goes to my yoga class that's anorexic and it's so disturbing. Yeah. It's so sad.

Oh, it's, it's, it's horrifying. It's horrifying. And listen, I'm not, I'm not saying that we should mistreat people, but if, again, you're talking about

an entire society being forced to redefine basic biological terminology. Right. Then, like, be an adult. Like, like, live with this. I'm happy to treat you with Listen what I would hire a transgender person

But I'm not going to see I'm not going to change what reality is in order to humor you like if you call yourself Napoleon I'm not gonna call you Napoleon. You're not Napoleon like this is not something I'm up for would you take it into consideration though? I mean when you were looking at this like what if someone was really good at their job and someone else was equally good at their job, but not transgender, would you lean towards the not transgender person? Cause you say, well, the transgender person, they're dealing with a host of psychological issues, obviously. Well, I mean, I think that you would have to think about, you know, typical aspects of reliability, just the same way you would with any other mental disorder.

If you knew somebody was, was manic depressive, which is super common, and you have somebody who's equally qualified who's not manic depressive, you might think, well, that might have an effect on how they do their job. So maybe. I mean, I haven't had enough personal experience with transgender people to know whether it would impact a secretarial job or something. Probably not. Yeah.

Probably not. But again, to pretend that like transgenders in the military, this seems to me like a decision that should be made by military people who actually have to determine how much does this impact the job. And if you already have a group of people with a 40% suicide rate, who have high levels of higher levels of instability as a group, not individually as a group, and you're choosing which groups to pick from to be on the front lines in small units, living under severe pressure for months at a time. Yeah.

Like, is that something that is that what you're going to go for? Or is that something where, like, you'd have to overcome certain presumptions in order to get there? Yeah, I tweeted something that Kristen Beck wrote the other day. But when the military ban, when Trump, apparently there was not a real ban. No, it's bullshit. I mean, basically, Trump was trying to distract from the Sessions thing. Is that what it is?

Yeah, yeah. Two minutes later, he was back to tweeting about Sessions. This was the part about that I didn't like. Like, I actually agree that there is a question as to whether the military should be recruiting transgender people because I think that the military has certain,

like, it creates a bunch of questions, not just questions about who showers with whom, but also questions like, okay, you have a transgender man. Does he have to fulfill the female standards of fitness or the male standards of fitness? Right. These are actual questions. Yeah. How does it work with troop cohesion?

You have a group of men, and now you have a man who's technically a man, but do you treat him as a woman? Like, does he have to carry the same amount of stuff as the guy? Like, how does that work exactly? Right. And does the cost of gender transition surgery and hormones and psychologists like does that come into play at all here would you recruit from the anorexic community for the military like that's it these are like real questions but that said that's why they commissioned a study from general matt as a department of defense he was going to look into all of this and then give a report in six months and trump just sort of tweeted it out there i I agree that I think that Trump's general, you know, his general attitude on it is probably

correct in terms of what the military is there doing, what it's not there to do. But what I don't agree with is how he did it at all, because it's disrespectful to the people in the military who are transgender. I mean, like, I wouldn't want to find out in a tweet. I want a better rationale than two tweets. And then we're back to and then we're back to you know like look they're doing more than i i mean they're serving the military i didn't serve in the military it seems like it would be pretty hypocritical of me to say well it's perfectly respectful to say in two tweets

you're out because that's the way it is without any sort of supporting argumentation and he didn't actually implement a policy he didn't give the policy to the defense department so they could even implement it the pentagon says they're not implementing it because they don't have a policy. So it's a PR thing. It's a weird PR thing, but it really stirred up people in the comments section. Which I think it was designed to do, right? I'm sure. Well, either that or he just felt like tweeting. I think that's what it was. I mean, he wanted to shift the conversation. And the funniest thing about that is that he did it in two tweets. And the first half of the tweet was, in consultation with my generals and my military experts, we have decided that we will no longer accept ellipses, 10-minute gap, transgender people in the military.

So there was a story at BuzzFeed that was kind of funny. They went and interviewed a bunch of people in the Pentagon. And a bunch of the people in the Pentagon were like, during that 10-minute gap, I didn't know whether we were going to nuclear war or what. Because that first tweet was like, we will no longer accept it. No, no, except North Korea's statehood. North Korea's missile test program. Wow. Yeah, but this, again, is evidence.

I think it's an example of even if I think the policy is good, good policy done the wrong way is actually counterproductive for the policies that I want to see done. Like I want it laid out by Mattis. I want it laid out by Defense Department. I want it laid out by Defense Department. I want all the reasons laid out so we can have a good discussion over it. I don't really want just, like, thought vomit on Twitter. That's just not, I don't think it's effective.

Well, it also seems that this issue is such a hot issue, and it's also an issue that you're not really allowed to have an opinion on other than the standard opinion that this has always been a woman trapped in a man's body,

and this is the way it is. By the way, this Descartian notion that it's like the soul in the machine and there's a woman deep down for 40 years who had three children with a man's penis and now is escaping. There's a Ghostbusters. Like, again.

Ghostbusters. Have you seen The Man in England? Was it in England? No. Was it Germany? There's like Ghostbusters. Like, again. Ghostbusters. It's just. Have you seen The Man in England? Was it in England? No. It was Germany. The man that identifies as a six-year-old girl. Yes.

And so they turned him into a six-year-old girl. So there's this clip. With the pigtails. Yeah, exactly. So there's that clip of me that's gone around the internet a fair bit where I'm talking to a college girl about this. And she's saying like men can be women and women can be men. And I said, well, how old are you? I love that clip.

I mean, come on. Why aren't you 60? Why aren't you 60? 60 yeah and she's like baffled like what and then it finally hits her and it's like well you know yeah so it's i think this is what's kind of frightening about the age we live in is that we can't even come up with common definitions of basic things how are we supposed to have conversations with each other if you can't decide what a man is or what a woman is or or whether a scientific fact ought to be relevant or not yeah like like at least we could decide what was a scientific fact or not before and now it's like the subjective has just eaten everything if i don't think it's a scientific fact it's no longer a scientific fact and therefore

the parameters of the argument has become about freedom the freedom to be your authentic self versus biology and right and again be be be your authentic self i biology. And right. And again, be be be your authentic self. I don't give a shit. Do it. Do whatever you want. Like, you know, more power to you. But it is no longer about your freedom to be your authentic self when you're talking about either legislation that impacts how I run my business or how I raise my child. Or you're suggesting that it is my duty to humor your authentic self.

Like, I think there are a lot of people who do stupid crap their entire lives. It's not my job to humor their authentic self. self. Like, I think there are a lot of people who do stupid crap their entire lives. It's not my job to humor their authentic self. I mean, I'm pro-drug legalization, but I've never done drugs, and I think that drugs are stupid. You know, don't tell me that I have to, like, cheer when somebody smokes a joint. Like, do what you want, but don't tell me that I have to redefine what I think is good and bad behavior. Like, that's silly. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. And the other thing that it became this weird political hot point where we're talking about bathrooms. Yeah.

And then it become like the number one topic. Because it's easy for people to sort of boil down the argument into that, I think. Right, of course. Like this, what about my children? My children are going to the bathroom and a man with a dress is going to come in. He's going to claim that he's identifying as a woman. And it got to the point where so many people were upset about it that people were boycotting South Carolina. Remember that?

Oh, yeah. And the one I thought was amazing was the NCAA saying they were going to remove the final four from North Carolina because they passed the bathroom bill right in North Carolina. And I asked online, OK, so when are you going to abolish the separate male and female divisions of the NCAA? I mean, you've said that we can't have separate male and female bathrooms where biological males play and, you know, where biological males go to one bathroom and biological females go to another. So why do you have separate divisions? Why do you have a, why do you have an NCAA women's division and an NCAA men's division? Yeah. Where does this go? I mean, eventually, how does this boil down? I mean, eventually it goes to one place or another, like either we just say, this is a step too far. Give me a break.

You know, science says no. Or we say, anyone can be anything at any time. A man is a woman and a woman is a man. And, you know, just pick. Have you ever seen any of the videos of people that are gender fluid? I have seen those videos. Those videos are fascinating. Like, they wake up one day and they're a woman.

And the next day they're a man. Fascinating. They wake up one day and they're a woman and the next day they're a man. And there was a guy on NPR, on Radiolab, on the podcast, who transitions at times of stress. Makes perfect sense to me. In the middle of having a conversation, I just switched. I'm Paul now. I'm a man now. When he's more stressed, does he switch into a woman? Because that'd be really sexist, right? I mean, I think that if he was stressed at work and he switched into a woman and started crying, that seems kind of sexist to me. That's implying that women are the people who cry at work.

That is sexist. Also, this raises a bunch of other weird questions. Like, okay, if you're like, there's been this, again, you want to talk about weird. There's been this weird push in parts of the trans community to suggest that a male who doesn't want to have sex with a biological male who says he's a female is now a sexist against women. Transphobe. Is a transphobe, right? You're a bad person if you're a man who doesn't want to have sex with a man, a biological man. And it doesn't make you gay to do that, right? If you have sex with a biological man who says he's a woman, that's straight sex.

But if you were to have sex with a biological woman who says she's a man, you're gay. Yeah. Kind of weird. It's definitely weird but i have seen the arguments in the the blog posts and the tweets about men who discriminate against trans women who do not want to date trans women and people keep saying well it's culturally defined it's like no that's called evolution well you can have a baby together correct yeah correct it turns out that evolution wants men to have sex with women like i'm sorry to break it to everybody but evolution relies on human reproduction okay if you put that thing

in the wrong place it ain't gonna reproduce like that's just sorry i mean like i don't know i don't know why i have to keep apologizing for science and and then they say that my party is the party of non-science like what like you're the ones who say that two minutes before my baby is born, it's not a baby. And a man can be a woman. But I'm anti-science? I'm just, I'm wildly confused by this. Well, the whole thing is wildly confusing. But it's just, it's such a strange subject.

It's such a strange subject that's been brought to the forefront. Again, I think it's about more the moral posturing than it is about people who actually think this is a major issue. I think you're absolutely right. And I think people love to be virtuous. They love to be on that side. They love to virtue signal. How dare you? Yeah.

It is the how dare you. It's the how dare you with dicks or lack of fake dicks. But they don't really have a lot of fake dicks. They don't really go that far. They just sort of take testosterone and see what's up. But it's just, it's a weird facet of our society today. That is Unexpected I mean you go back 20 30 years and it was an oddity and you know even during the Renee Richards thing It was it was more of an oddity than anything and I think sort of accepted

This is why I say I think that it's I think that a lot of people who are virtue signaling are still treating it as an Oddity they just won't admit that right I think that they're watching it because it's a circus to them And I think that's actually cruel. I don't think that you should put people who suffer from mental illness on the cover of magazines. I just don't. I think that that's bad strategy. What about bodybuilders? I mean, I'll be honest with you. I don't know that much about bodybuilding.

Do I look like I know that much about bodybuilding? No, but the argument that I've heard is that... I'm a CrossFit guy. I'm ripped, but small. I'm more of a marathon runner. What I've heard, the argument about bodybuilders heard is that... I'm a CrossFit guy. I'm ripped, but small. I'm more of a marathon runner. What I've heard, the argument about bodybuilders is that they suffer from it as well, is that in order to get that big, you almost

have to have some sort of a body dysmorphia. You have to not understand how insanely huge you are. Or be really into it. Their argument is they're really into it, which makes sense to me. But I've heard people say that it's almost like a reverse anorexia. Like they never feel like they're big enough.

Yeah, I've seen that. People say that before, yeah. Well, it's weird that the human mind is suspect or subject rather to these. It's really variable and it's really open to suggestion. Really open to suggestion. Which is what scares people about children transitioning. For sure. For sure.

I mean, listen, you see it in everything, including fashion. Like, how many dudes wax their chest now? 30 years ago, nobody waxed their chest. Are they waxing? Dudes are waxing? Jamie, I turned to you. They shave their chest, wax their chest, whatever it is. Whenever I have questions about the youth, I turn to young Jamie.

Yeah. But, I mean, you watch TV now, and every dude on TV has a chest as bare as my, you know, 14-month-old sons. I hear you. And it's like, where did this come from? And this came from TV. They all look chiseled. And it also came from TV.

I mean, it was like TV. It was going to be men are going to be hairless now. This is the new trend. Men are going to be hairless. You don't even get the Burt Reynolds-like, you know, bare chest anymore. And so if people are susceptible to even that with regard to fashion, like people have, for five years, people convinced themselves that skinny jeans were a thing.

People are open to virtually any sort of suggestion. Bell bottoms. They come in, they come out. Remember when they tried to bring bell bottoms back a few years ago? I did remember that. Not a good call. They tried. And people are like, nah, not this one.

Platforms? I mean, these three are platform shoes? That's why I'm just keeping around all my dad's old clothes, because eventually they're going to come back in again. You never know. Yeah. The idea of fashion and culture also being like the same sort of mechanism that allows people to be variable when it comes to their gender. That's. I mean, you actually said there's a study. I thought this was fascinating.

There's a study in Britain or a poll in Britain about sexual orientation. And what I found was 95 percent of people over the age of 60 identified as exclusively heterosexual. Of people who are under the age of 30, only 42% identified as exclusively heterosexual. And I was like, okay, well, in two generations, it's not that half the population became bisexual. That is not a scientific thing.

That means that people are open to suggestion about their sexual behavior, which you would assume. So assuming that culture has no impact, and this goes against the whole born this way aspect of even the homosexual rights movement, the gay rights movement, that says, oh, you were born this way. I agree that there's a genetic component to sexual behavior, but the idea that that's why 50% of the UK population has shifted toward, you know, I'm open to anything.

Culture has something. Is it 50%? has shifted toward, you know, I'm open to anything. Culture has something. Is it 50%? As I say, 95% people over the age of 60, and then 42% of people under the age of 30. Wow.

So that's... 42% bisexual in the UK? No, 42% people say they're extremely heterosexual. Extremely heterosexual. Exclusively heterosexual. So 60%, nearly 60%. 58% say that they're on the spectrum, but not exclusively heterosexual. That's fascinating. I wonder if they only talk to women who are drunk.

You know? Like young drunk girls, they get crazy. But I think also it's like they're trying to impress people. You know, there's an Adam Carolla thing, right, where Adam has a whole shtick about like in the future, there's going to be a point where guys are considered gay if they won't kiss another dude. Like, what are you, gay? You afraid that you're gay? Kiss another dude and show me you're not gay.

We've gone around the bend a little bit. We have. Well, there's also this thing that I think happens when you have two very clear sides, you know, where you have teams. And you sort of have a line in the sand that you're not supposed to cross. And there's the right side and there's the left side. And we have that in this country. We really don of have a line in the sand that you're not supposed to cross and there's the right side and there's the left side. And we have that in this country. We really don't have a third party option.

No. Oh, a third party is kind of a joke. And whenever you have two opposing viewpoints, people dig in. Have you seen this new documentary about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal and the debates they had? No, I've heard about it.

Is it any good? It's great. It's really interesting. Debates they had during the 1968 election, it's fascinating. I mean, I've watched some of those debates, but yeah. It's intense. Yeah, particularly the one where Buckley threatens to punch Vidal. Yeah.

It was pretty spectacular. He calls him a queer and says, I'll sock you in the face and you'll stay plastered. You'll stay plastered. It's weird because it's so- Stay plastered. Yeah. It's spectacular. And it's such a, it's so in the speak and you'll stay plastered. It's weird because it's so... Stay plastered. It's spectacular. And it's such a, it's so in

the speak of the day, you know, like 1968. He's got the Brahmin accent. It's great. It's almost British accent. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's really interesting. And then, but these, I mean, it's that thing, this my team

versus that team. And I think the left is guilty of it as much as the right is guilty of it. It seems like it's a real issue where there's a lot of people that have ideas and opinions. It's sort of cross party lines. But they vote on one side or another and they vote for their team. I think that's right. I think that especially in this last election, I think that was true. I think that people felt so alienated by the other side. Like, to understand a lot of people who voted Trump, you have to understand that there are a lot of people in the country who felt insulted by the left. They were just sick of being called racist,

sexist, bigot, homophobes every time someone wanted to advance a policy on the left. And so they said, OK, screw that. At least Trump's not calling me that. So I'll do that. And then there are a bunch of people on the left who now feel insulted by Trump's even presence. And they think all the people who voted for Trump are those people. And so they're bubble on the right too, which is the idea that every piece of the media is lying to you. The New York Times is always fake news. Everything is fake news. You don't like it, it's fake news. These bubbles are not healthy for the Republic. I mean, we can't have conversations with each other if we do this routine.

No, deception is not healthy across the board. And there's another thing that's going on where everybody's a Nazi. Like, I've never heard people called a Nazi more than I have over the last six months. I mean, it's been crazy. If you support Trump, you're a Nazi. You're a neo-Nazi. Somehow or another, you're a fascist. If you didn't vote for Hillary, you're a Nazi.

Like, some people have boiled it down to, like, the purest form. Yeah, I agree. I mean, first of all, it demonstrates tremendous historical ignorance. Forget the Holocaust. Like, you just look at who Hitler was and the policies he promulgated. Like, he was basically, he was all over the place. When he wanted to talk to socialists, he was a socialist. When he wanted to talk to capitalists, he was a capitalist.

He was a top-down government guy for sure, but he would speak the language of, you know, what would be considered the European far right today on a lot of issues. But then he would talk about redistribution of resources and universal health care and all this kind of stuff and removing guns. But he's just a convenient club. I mean, it's just a convenient club because then and then this is part that scares me. Once you say that somebody is Hitler, then it actually becomes obligatory to physically resist them. Then we can't you can't have a conversation with Hitler.

Once you say somebody's Hitler or the KKK, what are you going to do? Have a conversation with them? At the very least, you won't talk with them. And at the most, you might try to punch them. That is really a problem with the nomenclature, right? That's really a problem with identifying someone in that way, that they are someone that you have to resist. And they are someone who cannot be reasoned with. They are someone who is absolutely evil. There's no like

variables or variants in their behavior. And listen, I like fiery political rhetoric. I find it fun. But I think once you label somebody, you know, completely evil, you have a responsibility not to debate with them. You have a responsibility not to talk with them. Even the conversation legitimizes them. I mean, like, listen, I'm sure you're going to get a bunch of shit from people for even having me on because the idea is going to be,

well, how could you have on somebody like Shapiro? You're legitimizing his point of view by having him on. I know a lot of people who I politically disagree with who have had that experience will have me on their show and it's like, how dare you have Shapiro on because you're just granting him cover. You know, like, or we can just have a conversation and maybe we'll disagree. Maybe we'll agree. Yeah. I really don't give a fuck about those people. I think

that's a silly conversation. I feel like you should talk to everybody. And if you disagree or agree, I have friends on that. I, my friend yesterday on Eddie Bravo, he believes in everything's a fucking conspiracy. I disagree with him wildly and I love him like a brother. I don't think you have to agree with people and I don't think you have to. The idea that you can't just have a conversation with someone about something and see if you can find middle ground or see if you could clearly define their point of view or find their perspective. That's missing today in a weird way. And one of the weirdest things about the election was the ping pong match between the left and the right as played out on national television by the media. I would watch,

especially cable news, I would watch Fox News and then go to CNN and go back and forth, flip channels. You know, you have that previous channel button on the direct TV. I would just put it on both of them and go, what's really happening? It's two different worlds. My mom said this in 2012 with Romney and Obama. If you read the right-wing media, there was no way Romney was going to lose. And if you read the left-wing media, there was no way Romney was going to win. And she said, which one of these do I believe? And I said, it's probably somewhere in the middle.

Like, I have a basic rule, which is that if you have a New York Times report and then you have a report from my site, The Daily Wire, and they share the facts, you can probably assume the facts are true. But the opinions that are embedded with the facts, those are opinions. And that's what's so hard about, I think, the modern media landscape is trying to separate the facts from the opinion. And so this is why when Trump says fake news, he's not wrong that CNN hates him and the New York Times hates him. He's right about that. But just labeling it all fake news is inaccurate also because most of what they're reporting is true.

It's just that it's biased. Something can be both true and biased. Yeah. I'm true and biased. Right. I say things that I think are factual, but I'm obviously conservative. That's my point of view. You know, tough shit.

So that's. And you're a commentator. Right. That's what you do. I mean, half of it is, you know, riling people up, saying provocative things. I mean, that's. This is and this is where I think the right is correct about CNN in the New York Times and some of the other networks like though if you ask the right what pisses you off more CNN or

the MSNBC most people on the right will say CNN not MSNBC because MSNBC is honest enough to say we're on the left and CNN pretends we have no bias we're above all that same thing with the New York Times you know we're above all that and then they run the most egregiously biased headline so we go well, well, if they're lying about that, they're lying about everything. You know, one of my most fascinating characters of this whole play was Scott Adams. And particularly because Scott Adams, when I had him on my podcast, he was saying he doesn't even vote. Yeah. And he was like, what I am paying attention to, he goes, I am a trained hypnotist.

And I'm paying attention to the powers of persuasion. And I'm looking at trends and I'm making some predictions that turned out to be accurate. And he's like, he's looking at Trump and he's not talking about Trump in these glowing terms. He's talking about him as being an effective persuader. And he lost millions of dollars because of that opinion. Talking about a guy that he's not even going to vote for. I mean, this is all leading up to the election where people were fucking furious at him and even more furious at him after Trump won because he would do those coffee with Scott things where he does on Periscope where he wakes up and he just starts asking questions. And he's

so measured and calm. And he had a podcast recently with Sam Harris where I think he was just like a little too far over the edge of apologizing for some of Trump's behavior and sort of attributing some of Trump's behavior to that you could say was incompetence and attributed to some sort of a master plan. This is my only quarrel with Scott, I think, is that he tends to believe that everything Trump does is 987 degree underwater, Scott, I think, is that he tends to believe that everything Trump does is 987 degree underwater upside down hungry, hungry hippos. Like everything is just, it's all just acts of genius

and it's three steps down the road. Instead of like stumbling his way to victory. Okay, I knew everyone involved in the campaign, like every single person who was involved in the campaign, I knew. This was a stumble their way to victory. Like it is amazing. Human beings are, we need to think, it's sort of like the Joker says in The Dark Knight. We need to think there's a plan.

We always need to think there's a plan. And so if Trump won, it must be because there was some master plan that he unveiled over the course of the campaign. Three weeks before the election, he was caught on tape saying that he wanted to grab women by the P word. No, there was no master plan. It's just that Hillary was an awful candidate and no one liked her. The idea that Trump was like, even the idea that there was like broad national movement for Trump that wasn't there for other candidates. He won fewer votes in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney did and he won the state. And that's because no one liked Hillary.

I mean, this is the untold story of the election. This was not a referendum on Donald Trump. This was a referendum on Hillary Clinton, particularly in the heartland. And people hated her guts. Right. Barack Obama won Ohio walking away. Everyone talks about Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Nobody talks about Ohio. Trump won Ohio walking away. One of the reasons he won Ohio walking away is because in 2012, Barack Obama really drove out the black vote. The percentage of the black vote typically in Ohio, it's Obama really drove out the black vote. The percentage of the black

vote typically in Ohio, it's like 10% of the general vote. In 2012, it was like 13 to 15% of the general vote. And that was the entire margin of victory for Obama in the state of Ohio. Hillary got closer to sort of the traditional percentages, and she lost in a whopping blowout in Ohio. No one likes Hillary Clinton. And the left was so arrogant that they thought, we can take the most unpopular, unlikable, unqualified, nasty, boring human being anyone has seen for 20 years, and we'll run her. She's the one we'll run. Do you understand how incompetent you have to be to lose to a celebrity game show host? You have to suck at this in a royal manner. I don't know now.

Now that I think the floodgates are open. But don't you think... Senator Kid Rock, man. Yeah. Kid Rock is going to win. Apparently, he's like way ahead. So he's going to win the primary. If he didn't win the primary, then he would have to run as an independent.

Then he'd be Indie Rock, right? Kid Rock is going to win the primary. Well, we can only hope that once he's in the office, he grows into it and he becomes Adult Rock. How has Ted Nugent not run for office yet? That's what I want to know. How has he not? Nugent, Rock, 2020. I saw him giving a conversation about running for president.

If the people really wanted it, he would do it. I was like, oh, good Jesus. I just can't wait for The Rock Oprah. The Rock might win. The Rock might win. He's a beautiful man. If Oprah ran in 2020. Yeah.

The Rock with Oprah. It's a fucking slam dunk. Oh, man. The Rock and Oprah together. So I have this weird idea that we should actually reinstitute a monarchy. And it should just be ceremonial. And it can be a celebrity. We'll just make a celebrity monarch.

Okay. And that person will just be there to look pretty and sort of like the queen of england exactly but don't really have anything no power policy no power because we keep conflating the presidency with like who actually has to do things right with like people who we want to represent the country yeah we have a popularity contest to see who gets to control the nukes which is insane that's pretty wild that's pretty wild i think that you know this is That's insane. That's pretty wild.

That's pretty wild. I think that, you know, this is, we all think in cinematic terms now, and, you know, Hollywood is run by the dopiest jackasses. Like, I grew up with all these people. Right. These are not people who you want controlling the narrative. And then we're like, you know what? Let's take, if Tom Hanks would only run. If Tom Hanks, what makes you think Tom Hanks would be a good president?

Like, did you look at Trump and you went, God, he's doing such a brilliant job. What we really need now is the guy from Castaway. What we need is an actor again. We did well with Reagan. We need another actor. We did great with Schwarzenegger as the governor. At least Reagan was governor for 20 years before he was the president of the United States.

Let's put him through the ringer. Schwarzenegger proved in eight years that he was not capable of doing anything except kind of sucking. Well, you ever heard him talk about it? The way, from his perspective, he's like, you don't really understand how much red tape and bullshit you have to go through. He goes, I would meet with people and they would agree with me that it's a good idea. However, they would say, my voters are never going to agree with it, so I'm going to oppose it. So even though I know you're right, there's a bunch of farmers that are going to be mad at me for doing that.

So I'm not going to do that. Well, this is the other thing in politics that really drives me nuts. There are two promises that politicians make that are complete bullshit. The first promise they make is, I'm going to go to Washington, D.C., and I'm going to get things done. No, you're not. The system is built for gridlock. It's built for gridlock.

It's why we have two separate houses of Congress. It's why we have a president who can veto. It's why we have a Supreme Court that rules on cases. It's built for gridlock. It's why we have states that are supposed to be able to check the federal government. All this is in the Federalist on cases. It's built for gridlock. It's why we have states that are supposed to be able to check the federal government. All this is in the Federalist Papers. It was built for gridlock. And some people are happy with that because that's how Trump is being, like, sidelined at every time he tries to make something really important happen.

I think we all should be happy with that because the only way things were supposed to get passed was with wide public support, right, which is probably a good thing. We don't want the government shifting wildly and veering on its axis every four years or every two years. I like the gridlock. My big problem is that the gridlock now protects a huge system that I don't like that's been built up over 100 years in the case of growth of government. But I like the gridlock. But that's one promise that's made. And then people are disappointed. Oh, if we get in there, we're going to repeal Obamacare. It's like, no, you're not. You're not. I mean, like, you can promise it. But now you're not going to do it because you were full of crap when you said it, and now you're not going to do it. And the gridlock is there, and it's hard to change things. You know, it takes a tremendous effort of will and electoral power to actually change things in a big way.

So this idea, we'll elect Trump, and Trump would say, it's all going to be so easy. It's like, no, it's not. It wasn't easy for Obama. Obama passed Obamacare, and that was it for his presidency. He didn't do anything for the next six years. There were no major pieces of legislation. Nothing happened after that. He lost Congress, and that was it. Okay, so that's promise number one. The other promise is your anger is justified, and this is the one I hate even more, and that is the idea that in regular life, when you have kids, I have kids, when your kid is angry, the first thing you

have to teach your kid is maybe you're wrong to be angry sometimes. Your anger is not justified. If you want to make good human beings, you have to determine whether they're right to be angry. Is your anger correct? Politicians are in the business of justifying people's anger. Oh, you heard this about the Trump voter a lot, right? They're so angry. They're so angry.

Okay, well, I'm angry too about things, but are they angry about the right things? well, I'm angry too about things, but are they angry about the right things? And Trump would say, you're right to be angry because you've lost your job in Podunk, Ohio, because it's being stolen by the Chinese or by the Mexicans or something. And it's like, well, is that factually true or are you just pandering to the anger? And on the left, you hear people say this to black folks in the inner city. It's the system that's keeping you down. It's a racist white supremacist system that's keeping you down.

Well, is that true or are you just pandering to the voter? Because it's hard to tell people hard truths like you're not right to be angry, get off your ass and do something with your life. And it's true for regardless of race. You know, go out there. No one cares enough to stop you in your life. Your life is your own. No one in the United States cares about you, wants to stop you, wants to throw obstacles up in your own way. I'm not sure you can win an election on the basis of go live your own life, even though everyone keeps claiming they want to live their own life. I think most people are full of it. I think most people don't want to live their own life. They want a politician to tell them that all of their complaints about life being unfair are justified, and the politician is going to solve all that. We don't want people who stay out of our way.

We want people to be mommy. And that's a tempting proposition for politicians. Well, there's certainly a lot of that when you're talking to adults because you're dealing with people that have the momentum of all their failures in their life and all the different things that are not going right. And then here they are at this moment today, right now, and they want to figure out why and why they're not on track and how to get on track. And the easiest way is to point the finger or blame someone else. And everybody has their own hand. I'm not saying that people's hands are fair and that one person doesn't have it easy. A lot of people would have it easy. I have it easier than a lot of people, for sure. For sure. Absolutely.

But the reality is there's a tremendous amount of psychological factors that go into why someone does or does not succeed and to placate them or to, you know, to play on those psychological factors as, you know, not being their own fault. It's very tempting because it works with people. People love to hear that. They love to hear that it's not your fault. Yep. And I think that's what politicians have become in the business of doing. And it's both right and left.

It's people saying that it's not your fault because you're being screwed by some foreign country. It's not your fault because the immigrants are doing it to you. It's not your fault. Maybe some of that's true, but you have to show me why it's true. You have to show me what the actual, like, did you lose your job because of China?

Or did you lose your job because you're in an industry that is being crowded out because of technological change and because your union struck and created wages too high to be globally competitive? Like, let's look at the actual logic here as to and how and then how can we change it? How can we make it better? How can we? Is it something we have to do? Or is it a matter of you need to broaden your skill set? Like you see a lot of people now who are stuck in the mindset of 30 years ago that you're going to work a job and stay there for 20 years and then you're going to and then you're going to leave with a gold watch watch and that's not the way the job market works anymore I mean if you're entering the job market right now as a college student

You can expect that in the next 10 years you'll probably work for jobs You know like the the turnover is too great and you have to be constantly increasing your skill set also with every new innovation there's businesses that Branch out and become new and then there's also businesses that die. And there's no bringing them back. You're not going to bring back the printing press. Exactly.

There's a lot of stuff that people... But for the guy in the printing press industry, you tell him that. Try to get elected from the printing press guy. Well, I mean, right now they're trying to stop automated cars. I mean, there was a vote, right? Wasn't there a vote within the last day or two to try to block automated trucks? Yeah. Yeah.

Because there's a tremendous amount of people that that's what they do for a living. Yeah. But it's going to be a lot more efficient when it's not people. And, you know, this is the great fallacy that people have been trying to fight since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is this idea, okay, well, the new technology is going to kill jobs and then no one will ever work again. We've had the same unemployment rate in this country for the last hundred years, and the technology is a little bit better. Teamsters convince Congress to block driverless trucks. Yeah, that's crazy.

That's crazy. Seems crazy. It seems like you're fighting an inevitable tide. Well, I mean, imagine that, like, how is that going to work for all the other industries that are affected? Let's say that you now have, you're artificially raising the prices of all the goods that now have to be brought in by the Teamsters. And now it's more expensive. So it's more money out of your pocket and my pocket. That's money that I'm, maybe I was willing to buy American, but now I'm going to buy Chinese because I have to feed my family. Like this is, that's not how economics works.

It's just not how economics works. Is there any argument that they're not ready yet? That these trucks aren't viable? So that's one of the issues is that with a lot of the – so the automated trucks, basically, in order for them to work, you need dedicated lanes because otherwise human error is such that if there's a Google car on the road and you're a bad driver, the Google car is probably going to get in a crash or might be more likely to get in a crash than if it were a human driving. Have you ever seen people freak out those Tesla cars? Have you seen what they could do to them? I haven't seen those tests. I actually saw somebody do it to a Google car.

When a car is on that automated thing, if you just swerve at it, they slam on the brakes and back up on you. People have done it to people and filmed it when they see people using automated cars. It's not done. It's not 100% ready. Yeah. The mix again. It's sort of like how there's a lot of fuel efficient lighter cars on the road, but they're a lot more dangerous than the heavier cars because the heavier cars, the clunkers are still around from 1970 and they're tanks. They just run through three Priuses. How do you feel about universal basic income? Because that's a subject that comes up a lot lately when Elon Musk is talking about these driverless cars. One of the things he's saying is that one thing that we're going to need is universal basic income. He said we're going to have to figure out some way to feed all these people that are going to get taken out of the job market because their jobs have become irrelevant. because their jobs have become irrelevant.

So I think that universal basic income is for when the technology gets so good that there legitimately are no jobs. I don't think that we're there yet. So if you have a machine that can make everything basically for free, and then there's a bunch of people who you don't need anymore to do work, then you can talk about a universal basic income because there's no scarcity. Scarcity is what creates a need for labor. So if there's scarcity in any industry, then there's going to be a need for labor. There's going to be a need for new labor.

People are going to still have to work on these trucks and deal with technology. And the computer industry didn't destroy jobs all over the United States when typewriters went out. So I think it's a little premature. I'm not sure there will ever be a day when the machine society is so well developed that it can take over all jobs. I do think you're seeing a bifurcation in the labor market. So I think people who are in jobs like yours and mine, like we're lucky. This is a creative job. It's hard for machines to create. But for jobs that are single task jobs, a lot more of those are going to be technologically driven. And so people are going to have to, you know, work the right side of their brain a little bit.

We're going to have to train people in a different way. But my perspective on universal basic income is when you have a 4% unemployment rate, it's very difficult to say you need a universal basic income. It's again, 96% of people in the labor market who can work are working. So that's not suggesting to me that there's this vast underclass of people who are totally incapable of working. And once you do that, you see what you've seen actually with the disability programs in the United States, right? Where now everybody's on disability. Like the fastest growing government program in America is the disability program, where people declare themselves disabled so that they can get government pensions, basically. Once you have universal basic income, is there an incentive to work?

And also, I'm not sure that you've solved a lot of people's problems. Like people still need something to do with their day. Yeah. How many 60-year-olds do you see who retire and they're dead within three years? The utopian idea is that somehow or another you're going to open up these people's inherent creativity and they'll find something they actually enjoy. Yeah, that's a bunch of hooey. I mean, how many people say, like, again. I love that you said hooey.

What are you, like, 32? How old are you, man? I'm 33, yeah. Ah! When you're 33 and you're using the term hooey. Yeah. I love it. It's, again, you know, I hope I never retire because I just know too many people who retire and they're,

oh, I'm going to retire and I'm going to golf and I'm going to paint. I'm going to create. And six months later, they're dead. They're dead. Yeah. Well, people enjoy doing things and feeling like they're valuable, you know, and I don't know if that necessarily has to be a job, but it's a very clear, definitive test of whether or not you're valuable. If somebody gives you money and you get that money and you're like like look. I'm valuable I'm doing something. I'm contributing. I got a check for my week's work There's a there's a lot of hours in the day and it's gonna be hard to fill that with watercolor painting and beat poetry classes

Ha I don't know man. I'd find shit to do, but I see but I I've been fairly self-employed most of my life Yeah I think I just I've gotten some people are driven Like I would find stuff to do too But it's there is a difference and you know Not all human beings are the people who would actually go out and take classes and find things to do Do you have aspirations outside of commentary when it comes to politics? Maybe some point down the road do you think you run for president or something like that?

I mean apparently anyone can and this is what I'm finding out sure so um, but you're a reasonable guy I don't know I mean, apparently anyone can. And this is what I'm finding out. For sure. But you're a reasonable guy. I don't know. I mean, I like what I'm doing in the sense that I get to work on what people believe, which I think is sort of the root of politics. I'm not sure implementing is the same thing. As I said, I'm not sure that the president can get like I'm more focused on getting people to think in the terms that I'd like them to think, you know, about limited government and you taking control of your own life. And I might be able to do more good, you know, promulgating that message using a growing medium. Like we're very lucky. I mean, the podcast went from having 3,000 listeners, you know, 300 episodes ago to now we have 300,000 listeners a day, you know, so it continues to grow. So as that crowd continues to grow, it's actually harder for me to say I'd

want to jump into politics. Not easier, I think. The limited government thing to me has always been a fascinating subject because the people that don't want limited government, that is the utopian ideal in my mind. That somehow or another the government's going to be effective if you give them more money. I had an argument with a friend where he wanted people to be taxed more because he felt like that money could be distributed to people and you would get more funding for the arts was one of his arguments. But my thought was like, first of all, the arts, when people like them, they pay for them. Yep. That's not good. And funding for the arts means you're going to have like fucking LACMA.

Like you go to the LA County Museum of Art And you have a fucking box on the ground That someone's calling a piece of art Did you see that guy It was either in San Francisco or LACMA Where he went there and he took off his glasses And he just put them on the floor And then he stood next to them

Kind of standing there and stroking his chin Seeing there were 30 people all around him Staring at the glasses on the floor It's amazing Yeah it's fucking horseshit right Modern art exhibits There was another one recently where someone like left behind a pineapple or something like that. Yeah, I remember this, yeah.

It's just, it's crazy. It really is crazy. And it's also pretentious. And it's also stoking those fires of pretension and making something that's not legitimately creative, making it celebrated because you don't really have the ability to create something that's legitimately creative. Yeah, I was pointing this out today with regard to it's funny how a lot of people who want bigger government, they embrace states that start to grow the government.

And then when things go to shit, they're like nowhere to be found. So Venezuela is the most obvious example, right? Venezuela has turned from what was the richest country in South America and had the best oil reserves of anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, basically. They've turned it into just a garbage heap. People waiting in lines. I have a friend named Nami Horowitz who went down there, did some documentary stuff down there. And he was, I think his cameraman got shot. He was watching people like literally shooting dogs in the streets for food.

And this is, I mean, Caracas is the most violent city in the Western Hemisphere now. I mean, Caracas is the most violent city in the Western Hemisphere now. And all of this is because Hugo Chavez was a piece of garbage who centralized all power to himself, redistributed the wealth to all of his friends and cronies, and then supposedly uplifted the poor, except that now everyone is poor. Wait a minute. Wasn't he friends with Sean Penn? I don't even know what you're saying. Exactly. So on my show today, I played like Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson and that freak Jeremy Corbyn, who's the head of the Labor Party in Great Britain.

And they're all just praising Chavez. He's a great guy. He was a hero to the poor. And now Venezuela is going to shit. And where are all these people? Would someone stick a camera in Sean Penn's face like now and just ask Sean Penn? So like five minutes ago, you were saying this was awesome. Well, there's got to be some sort of a left response for that. Like what is their take on why it all went bad? The no true Scotsman fallacy, right? Oh, well, you know, this is them living on. It's because they never really got rid of enough private industry. If

they'd just gone further, it would have been better. It's like, well, the Soviet Union didn't work out that great either. But I actually got a response. It was really funny that today I tweeted out that according to the World Bank,uela has one of the least income unequal societies on earth so it's actually pretty income equal right because nobody has anything right and the end it's garbage and so the the socialist the official socialist party tweeted me and they said this is because socialism has never truly been tried. Okay, dude. All right. Sure.

Why not? Well, the wonderful idea of socialism is that it's going to even everything out and that you shouldn't get paid more, that no one should get paid more, and that everyone should have some sort of a peak that you could reach, right? There's some sort of competition involved. There's got to be some. There's got to be some. There's got to be some sort of incentive, but only so much. Right.

This is like the Bernie Sanders, this is democratic socialism. Like formal socialism is the state owns the whole thing. But democratic socialism is there's private industry, but only to a certain point. And then we tell people, no, no more. But then you find out about Bernie and his wife and his wife's idea was to buy up a bunch of land and expand the college. And then the fucking college went under and now they're being sued and two vacation homes yeah come on man it's all based on on a lot of myth making about like western europe and and the netherlands right so there's

all this oh democratic socialist countries they're working great first of all a car in denmark has a 60 import tax it costs literally twice what it would cost in the United States. Tax rates in Denmark are insane, except for corporate taxes, which the left in the United States really, you know, they love corporate taxes.

They want those higher. Denmark has some of the lowest corporate taxes and regulations in the industrialized world. So everybody is coming in and investing in Denmark. It's only the citizens who are getting screwed

by paying for this giant welfare state. Then their GDP tanked, and now they've had to elect right-wing governments to slash back the level of government. I mean, it turns out that capitalism is the great engine that drives, like, Singapore

is, there's nothing on Singapore, right? Singapore is like a rock, okay? There's nothing there. Singapore has one of the most powerful economies on earth because they basically have no business regulations, no taxes, and no tariffs. So you can do whatever you want. And when people can do whatever they want, they make a lot of mutually beneficial exchanges, end of story. This is not that difficult,

but it is difficult if you think that life is unfair, right? So what would you propose? Like, what would you propose for the United States? Like, the United States, obviously, what Trump wants to do is reinvigorate manufacturing, make things in America again, bring back the labor force, take away the jobs that are going overseas in other countries in South America. So I think that that's a bunch of slogans from him, and I don't think it means anything. So number one, I don't think a manufacturing job is more important than a tech job. A job is a job, and in industries that are thriving, you actually need more jobs.

And in industries that are not doing as well, if the jobs disappear, that's just the wages of a global economy. And I know that sounds harsh to people who are in those industries, but it's not a referendum on you or your value. It's just saying that certain industries over time always are outsourced. Like we used to make t-shirts in the United States. We don't make t-shirts here. We make them in Vietnam and it costs us like five bucks. view is, I'm not going to privilege one. I understand a lot of this is politics. You want to favor manufacturing bases because there are a lot of manufacturing hubs in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, but since I don't care, right, since I'm not a politician, my view is that if you want a thriving economy, you relieve as much regulation as possible. You lower the taxes for everyone, personal and corporate. You attract as much foreign investment as possible. And you allow people to build businesses with as little risk as possible. And then you allow them to compete, and if they succeed, they succeed, and if they fail, they fail, and you get rid of tariffs as well, because I want cheap inputs for my products,

and I want cheap products on the shelves at the store, so I don't have to pay a bajillion dollars for a pair of shoes. So my view of this is that economics is an element of freedom. I am a free person. I get to do with my money what I damn well please, and you don't get to stand in my way unless there is some sort of moral thing, right? Like if you want to say let's put sanctions on Iran, let's put sanctions on China, right? China's funding North Korea right now. It hurts our national security.

We want to put sanctions on China to try and pressure them into ending North Korea. That's a national security thing. But the idea that like today, Trump rolled out this new plan on immigration, And he says, I want to cut down on legal immigration. But the reason is because I want to raise wages of people in the United States. And I think, well, that's not productive. Because what you're actually doing is you're restricting the supply of labor, artificially increasing the wages, which artificially increases prices, which means it's not competitive on a global scale, which means the companies outsource.

It's the exact same thing as minimum wage. You create a minimum wage or artificially increasing wages that increases prices, that makes it non-competitive, people outsource. So it actually achieves the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. All government intervention in the economy, save for interventions that are designed to prevent externalities, things that I do that hurt you, all of those are unjustified in my view. What about environmental protection? So those are externalities.

Right. So like if I were to pollute a river, it's not my river, I don't get to pollute it. Right. I don't get to throw my trash over my fence into your yard. Right. That's a different thing. Yeah, that's one of the most disturbing things about this administration is the cutting the funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and the changing of their standards, removing

some of the funding for things like satellites that they're using to track the climate change and things along those lines. And that scares the shit out of me. It scares the shit out of me that they're going to ignore the environment in favor of the economy. So I think that some of the environmental regulations are badly drawn. And some of them are overwrought when it comes to, for example, fracking. Obama pushed a lot of environmental regulations on fracking or the Keystone XL pipeline, that kind of thing. How do you feel about fracking?

I'm very much in favor of fracking. But what do you think about when you hear stories about more earthquakes happening and instable water supplies, water tables? From what I've seen, the earthquake evidence is extraordinarily weak. Is it? Yeah, from what I've seen. Again, if you present me evidence that I find convincing, I'm happy to change my mind on this. Right. And as far as water pollution, again, the evidence has been pretty weak.

So if that changes, then I'm happy to regulate. When you say it's been weak, there has been instances of fracking leading to pollution, right? Sure. But that's not every fracking leads to pollution. And so the question is how broad is the regulation? Or how many are you willing to accept? Right, which is the truth for all business, right? And like how much we all drive cars, how much pollution we all drink.

We all drink water bottles. Somewhere there's a seagull choking on a cap. Correct. So like how much are you willing to accept? What I don't appreciate is when people kind of futz the evidence and it's like, oh, well, I set my water on fire because of fracking. It's like, well, no, that's not because of fracking. That's because of the groundwater. But in any case, as far as the satellites and global warming, listen, I think that it's pretty clear that the climate is warming.

I mean, the greenhouse gas effect is a thing. The question to me is less whether it's happening and more what are you going to do about it? Because even the left seems to have no real solutions as to what to do, except for massively cutting economic growth. And it seems to me that if we're talking about an increase, according to the IPCC, of something like seven degrees Fahrenheit over the course of the next century, then on average, right, not not universally on average, then it seems to me that it's easier to just say that the climate changes over time. And maybe cities that are on the coast are going to have to pull back a little bit over time, like 100 years, a long time. A hundred years ago, we would have said that the the pollution was the chief thing to worry about in the United States because we were all using smokestacks. Yeah, particulates. Yeah, exactly.

And now, not really even through regulation, but just through market competition, you've gotten better environmental products. Right. So I think that the market does take care of a lot of these things. People don't actually want to live in human waste. We actually don't want to do that. You know what's been disturbing me recently is how many times

I see Bill Nye on TV talking about climate change. Well, he's, again, he has the same qualifications as I do. I mean, he has, like, a mechanical engineering degree. Yeah.

Isn't he kind of a comedian? Yeah, I mean, I think he is. From my childhood, yes. I believe he was, like, a comedian. He's a stand-up guy, yeah. Yeah.

And he does, did you ever see his thing with Tucker Carlson? Yes. Which was great. Yeah. a stand-up guy, yeah. Yeah, and did you ever see his thing with Tucker Carlson? Yes. Which was great. Tucker Carlson kept saying, okay, but you're talking about science, so tell me how much of an effect do human beings have on climate change and what's the science?

Show me. And all he wanted to say was that, you know, are you a consensus settled? Yeah, exactly. What is the difference? Or give me a range. How much is changing? Right, give me a range. Like, it doesn't even have to be an exact number, but give me a range and then tell

me, okay, what do we have to do in order, in your opinion, in order to stop the climate change where it stands? Or if we can't do that in order to minimize it, what's the actual risk also? Like, people keep giving these catastrophic scenarios where it looks like the day after tomorrow and Dennis Quaid running into subways and shit. One of the weirder ones he said was that we were supposed to have an ice age. Now that's not going to happen. Like, Jesus Christ, man, that's good.

Yeah. You know, Randall Carlson has been on my podcast a few times and he's an expert in collisions and asteroidal collisions. And one of the things he said is like, he goes, global warming is not great. He goes, but it's way better than global cooling. This is true. This is true. Global cooling kills everybody.

Right. The Little Ice Age was not a good thing for the world. I mean, the global warm period was actually a pretty good thing for the world. So, I mean, this is the other thing is that there are costs and benefits to the climate changing, which it has throughout time. What are we willing to sacrifice in order to make that seven degrees into six degrees? Right. And just losing some coastline is not the real issue. Pollution is far more devastating than losing coastline.

So I think that if you're going to worry about the emissions problem, worry about the sea absorption of emissions, right? Like the toxification of the oceans. Like that seems to me to be a bigger problem than the climate changing over time. We're pretty adaptable. Like there's a lot of land. Okay, that seems to me to be a bigger problem than the climate changing over time. We're pretty adaptable. Like, there's a lot of land. Okay, so we move. We have historically. Right.

I mean, Venice, the sea level rises in Venice every year. People are going to move. I mean, like, that's just, that's the way it works. There's this weird idea, and it's true in economics,

it's true with global warming, that where you were born is where you must die. Right? And that you can never move. And it's like, well, this is the most mobile society in human history. We can get on a plane and be on the other coast in six hours.

It's easier to move than ever before. So if you really think that the climate is that bad, first of all, I'd like to ask Barbara Streisand if she's that deeply concerned about global warming, why she doesn't sell her coastline estate. But it's like, am I going to lose a lot of sleep if a bunch of Hollywood stars lose, you know, five feet off their coastline because we didn't kill the industry of the United States and lose $4 trillion a year? Like, no. And I'm not really sure that that would have worked that way one way or another. It has been absolutely proven that human beings are having an effect on the carbon dioxide levels.

Of course. Of course, yeah. And there's a greenhouse gas effect, sure. 100%. But the modeling's been so wrong that, like, there's no level of certitude, and then there's no level of solution that I know for sure is going to do this.

So you're talking about human beings suffering in the now for the later. And let's be real about this. Like, yes, there are a lot of emissions from the United States, but the leading emitters on the planet right now are China and India. And they're not going to stop this shit anytime soon. Like, that's not going to happen. Well, there's a lot of emissions from the United States, but the leading emitters on the planet right now are China and India. And they're not going to stop this shit anytime soon.

Like, that's not going to happen. Well, there's also this thing that happens where if you even discuss it, you become like a Hitler or a Nazi. You become a climate change denier. And once you get locked into one of those labels, you know, you're a piece of shit. Well, this is it again. Nobody wants to be locked into those labels. So they don't even want to have the discussion or the debate. And that's one of the things that I felt like Bill Nye was not prepared for.

Because I felt like he's so lazy with this conversation because so many people just appease him and agree with it. Yeah, I think that's right. That when Tucker Carlson was challenging him on it, he didn't have any data to support this argument he just wanted to sort of like play word games and and have this we you know say well you know you guys on CNN there was one time when when they had some guy on who was saying exactly what we were saying that the models did they have not been proven to be accurate and that Al Gore's movie predicted that we'd be underwater in 2014 like didn't it yeah I mean his predictions in that movie are not correct, yeah. They're not correct at all.

And he's made, like, some insane amount of money off of it. There's a sequel, too, yeah. He's got a sequel out this week. Isn't he, like, the first billion-dollar green guy? Yeah. Like, he's made a shitload of money off of giving these speeches and... Cap and trade and, yeah. The whole thing is very strange because it becomes this untouchable subject like what we're talking about before with transgender people or with many other subjects.

You can't discuss them. They're not even open to debate or scrutiny. They become locked down. And when Tucker Carlson was pressing Bill Nye, like, what are the numbers? Like, what is happening? Tell me how much of an effect are we having? And Bill Nye, like, what are the numbers? Like, what is happening? Tell me how much of an effect are we having? And Bill Nye had nothing on it, and he just became stammered and started getting angry. It was like, wow, this is weird.

Yeah. This is weird to see. I mean, if this is the cause of your life, you should know a little bit more about it than everyone who disagrees as a denier. And I think the way Tucker handled it was brilliant. It was Tucker's best moment, I think, on the show, yeah. I think so, too, because he was saying, essentially, he was like, I'm not denying it. I'm not saying it's not.

I just want you to tell me. Educate me. How much of an effect? Tell me. Tell me. Exactly. And he had nothing. It's like, so maybe Bill Nye's the wrong guy to have there.

But Bill Nye shouldn't be selling himself. Like, you can't have me come on a fucking show and talk about global warming, because I don't know anything about it. Or at the very least, Bill Nye should say, listen, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did this study. You can look up the numbers there. I don't have them off the top of my head. Or have the numbers. Have the fucking numbers. You're going to be on one of those shows?

You're going to be on for seven minutes. So everybody in the media is lazy. There's a lot of that. Nobody actually does their prep for debate or for TV appearances. Because the truth is, you think you're going to be on for five, having done a thousand TV hits at this point, most people think, okay, I'm going to be on for five, having done a thousand TV hits at this point, most people think, okay, I'm going to be on for five minutes. I can get through five minutes, right?

It won't be that bad if I'm on for ten minutes. How bad can it be? And the answer is you can get pantsed on national TV in five minutes if the person knows what they're doing. Well, you've done that to many people. One of the things that I think is, do you talk fast always? Yes. Is it like you're born this way?

Yeah, everyone in my family talks this way. Your family just talks fast. Yeah. Because I was wondering if this was way? Yeah, everyone in my family talks this way. Your family just talks this way. Yeah. Because I was wondering if this was a strategy to develop to be really good at those shows. No, no. It's been fortunate that it fits that way. But yeah, even my kids talk this way. Even the three-year-old talks this way.

We see some people that are just really good at, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. And you get them in the podcast. And after, like, Peter Schiff's a great example of that. After like 20 minutes, I'm like, you want a drink? Let's have some whiskey. We had a couple of glasses of clink, cheers. And we settled down. And then he settled into like a normal way of talking.

But he's just so used to like force feeding you facts and opinions. And it's such an ineffective way to communicate with those three heads. And the one person who's the host, Megan Kelly throwing a question, and then this person's talking over that person. It's such an ineffective way to communicate. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the things that I do like about long-form podcasts like this one or like mine. I like the ability to actually expand on a point.

Yeah. On TV, it's like, okay, you have 30 seconds of a point? Excellent. We can make that work for us. It's the only place left that you can do this unless you're making YouTube videos. And, you know, Jordan Peterson is obviously finding out that that's a problem. Yeah. But unless you're doing something along those lines where no one's there but you and you get to expand and express yourself, there's no other form of conversation like podcasts where you're not getting interrupted

by a commercial. You're just talking. And you know, as well as I know, that conversations sort of evolve and move. And when I get to know you better, I see how you're thinking better. And I kind of have more questions to ask. And you expand more. And you get to know a person for real. And that's just, those television shows are so, it's so divisive in that way.

Honestly, it's hard for me to watch cable television because of that. I don't feel like I'm getting tons of information that way. Well, CNN had nine fucking people on the other day. It's crazy. The panel on CNN, it's Hollywood squares now. Yeah, Anderson Cooper's sitting there in the middle, and there's people, and then there's people that are just... It's like, ooh, I made a diagonal.

Cool. And they're interrupting each other and say, excuse me while I talk. You mind not interrupting me for a moment? Like, they're grandstanding and trying to have this point they think is going to be a zinger because they wrote it last night. And it's just like, ugh. The best you can hope for is that you have 30 seconds where you say something that goes viral. That's basically...

Yes. That's the extent of it. Yeah. Well, you've done a lot of those. Yeah. I won't say I'm not good at it. I'm good at it. No, you're good at it. But it's like we were talking about before that a lot of the

people that have debated you that are real, they're really fucking lazy. Like, like they have this supposed passion for something, but when it comes to preparing for this sort of interaction, they're not really doing that. They're not for sure. And I think that, you know, part of that is there are people who are experts on particular topics who could, I'm sure, know more about their specialty than I do on a lot of topics. Like if I were to discuss climate change with a person who is like an expert on climate change, I would not know as much as that person. Sure. But, you know, there are a lot of people who think they're generalists and have never read

a book. Right. You know, like I know one fact about one thing and it's that you're a denier. Yeah. And I, well, I mean, if I i know two then i beat you right well that's the so the climate denier thing seems to me one of the laziest things about the left and this is not saying that there's not some sort of a real issue with human waste because i think there is i think it's a there's a giant issue with plastic in the ocean there's a giant issue with pollutants in

our water system in our air and there's a lot of issues with the ocean. There's a giant issue with pollutants in our water system, in our air. And there's a lot of issues with the side effects of being a person in an industrialized civilization. We burn things, we create poisons, and we've got to figure out a way to be sustainable. I don't think there's any denying that by anybody. I think it's also worth noting the market makes these things better in many cases. I mean, the fact is that if you look at the areas where, for example, everyone is down on carbon based fuels. OK, fair enough. But if you go to places that don't have carbon based fuels, they're burning animal dung and wood. There's nothing worse for particulate than animal dung and wood. So as we get back and if we if we did even better than than this, we would get to

nuclear power. Right. Which, unfortunately, a lot of people have banned because of unbased fears, like most of France's electricity is provided by nuclear power, and that's about as clean as it gets. So, you know, I do think- Until it goes dark. Well- Until it goes Fukushima. Even in worst case scenario at Fukushima, I mean, if you're talking about the, if you're talking about global warming and environmental damage, the amount of environmental damage supposedly done by carbon emissions is a lot larger than Fukushima. Right, but the local damage

is devastating. That's the disturbing thing, that they don't have a way to stop that. They figured out a way to put a wall of ice around the containment area, and that didn't work. It seems so fucking science fiction-y. They really don't know what to do.

Yeah, I don't know enough about nuclear containment to take off on that one. Nor do I. Let's just say that one disaster in, basically there have been three major disasters, right? Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Yeah. The only one that's happened, two of those three have happened in the first world, right? Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island basically ended up having no long-term impact.

So Fukushima is really the only major disaster in 40 years of industrialized countries using nuclear power. Well, apparently they had some weird meltdowns here at Rocketdyne that weren't really discussed. You don't tell about it? Well, it was all during the 60s, 50s or the 60s, when they were involved in the rocket program. But the Rocketdyne stuff, my friend's dad is a scientist,

and he was explaining to me the half-life of whatever was released in the atmosphere. It's nothing to concern. But there's a bunch of Rocketdynes right down the street. There was a bunch of articles that were written about it, like worrying about people that have higher cancer rates in this area. that were written about it, like worrying about people that have higher cancer rates in this area. But there's also like, I think there's a website called the Sins of Rocketdyne. Really?

Yeah. See if you can find that. I think there's a website dedicated to that, that people, but there's a lot of cancer just living in cities, man. Like they say that one of the worst environments for a human being is living in a place that has a lot of break dust. Like if you're living in Manhattan and you got your window open, you're just inhaling particulates from people. There it is, the sins of Rocket Time. But the thing is, like, I mean, how much more cancer are these people? This is from 2003. Yeah, sometimes the statistics on cancer are hard to correlate because you'll have groupings that are sort of weird. And that's just because random statistical grouping happens. So how much of it is due to X factor or Y factor? If we knew

that, then presumably the cancer rates would be going down a lot. They haven't really in most cases. So it's pretty rare you have like a lung cancer situation where smoking obviously causes lung cancer. Most cancers, like breast cancer, we have no idea why it happens. Also the valley itself, like anything that happens in the valley, like breast cancer, we have no idea why it happens. Also the valley itself. Anything that happens in the valley, when you drive from a thousand oaks over the hill and you look down at the valley, you're like, Jesus, that can't be good. Yeah. I hear you. I've been flying into the valley my entire life.

And every time you fly into the brown gunk soup that is the valley atmosphere, you think that's not great. That is one area where obviously we have gotten better. The smog alerts have gone down tremendously in the last 30 years. Yeah, it's gotten a lot better. It's gotten a lot better. But that's also one of the things that Donald Trump has relaxed some of the standards. The case standards? I don't know if he really did.

Wasn't it emission standards he changed? The car emission standards? Yeah. Maybe. Again, I wonder how much of the car emission standards, like there's actually a pretty thriving debate in the libertarian community, particularly, about whether CAFE standards are what drove greater fuel efficiency or whether it was the price of gas that drove greater fuel efficiency. That as the price of gas has risen and

fallen, you see people change their buying habits, right? In the 90s, everybody bought an SUV, and then the prices went up and everybody bought a Prius. Well, the Prius thing is interesting too, particularly the Tesla thing, because then you look at the environmental disasters of creating these batteries. And you're like, oh, this is not totally green. There's some weird gray area too. It's pretty complex. And I think that the one thing we know is that there are millions of people all over the world for all of human history who've been living in absolute penury and misery. And we now support 7 billion people on the planet. And the rate of global poverty has dropped by 50% in the last 30 years.

A lot of that is technological change. A lot of that is fossil fuel use. And so before we, you know, we always have to balance. These are two things that are worth thinking about balancing. And this is what's, again, a little frustrating is that sometimes you see people on the environmental left who will say, well, this has to be done or it's the end of the world. And it's like, well, how about those people

in developing countries? How many of those people are you going to say have to live in poverty in order for this to happen? And then on the right, you'll see people say, well, no environmental regulations at all. Just let it all hash out. And sometimes the market hashes it out and sometimes the market doesn't hash it out.

And so I think a little caution is warranted. I think that's a very reasonable point of view. And that's one of the things that I really like about your commentary. I know you're a right leaning guy, but you're very reasonable. You make arguments that are sound and easy to trace. It makes sense. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I think we need more of that, you know, and I think it's rare that you find that in a 33-year-old guy. That's some strange sort of conservative character that travels around clowning people at universities. Pissing people off, exactly. So the Berkeley thing is going to happen. When is it going to happen?

September 14th is the date it's supposed to happen. Dude, good luck with all that. Well, you know, if they cancel it, we'll still go. Are you going to go on a bulletproof Popemobile? Yeah. Hey, he wears a funny hat and so do if they cancel it, we'll still go. Are you going to go on a bulletproof Popemobile? Yeah, hey, he wears a funny hat and so do I, so I think we can both go.

Yours is a little low profile, though. Yeah, we keep it on the DL around here. When you do show up at these places and you see the Antifa people

and they're screaming and yelling and cheering and that's got to be a surreal thing that it's just you and your thoughts and your opinion. I mean, you're not selling babies. You're not there slaughtering dogs in the ULIN festival.

Exactly. It's weird. I think that, you know, I'm not arrogant quite enough to think that a lot of those people know who I am. I think that what happens is that there's sort of a call that goes out from a select few saying, this KKK member is coming to campus. Go, go stop him. And that's what happened to Cal State LA. Like when I spoke there, there were actually a couple professors were telling their students that I was a closeted member of the KKK member's coming to campus. Go stop him. And that's what happened to Cal State LA.

Like, when I spoke there, there were actually a couple professors were telling their students that I was a closeted member of the KKK. Meanwhile, you show up wearing a yarmulke. I'm their favorite person, the KKK. I'm like a charter member. It's my thing. I was literally, in 2016, it was hilarious. That year, 2016 was a wild year.

So David Duke accused me of being a far leftist. Black Lives Matter accused me of being a far leftist. Black Lives Matter accused me of being a member of the KKK. And I was the number one recipient of anti-Semitism from the according to the Anti-Defamation League, I was the number one recipient of Twitter anti-Semitism in the United States for journalists last year. Whoa! I do. I have a little

trophy in my house. It's the most hated Jew in America. Which is a hell of a title. Is it a green frog? It is. It's a green frog and then a little model of a gas chamber. It's perfect. You were number one? Yeah, by a huge margin, by the way. Wow.

Blowout. It was like 40% of all anti-Semitic tweets on the internet directed at journalists in 2016 were directed at me personally. It was a party. Holy shit. It was a good year. It was a good year, you know? Some years are more productive than others.

What did that feel like? Well, I mean, it felt like my Twitter feed was just a dumpster fire. Anytime I retweeted anybody, I'd get people emailing me, please don't retweet me, because as soon as I retweet someone, they'd just be hit by waves of these people.

And that's died off? Yeah, since the election, it's really gone down a fair bit, but, you know, there were some pretty serious, you know, death threats. Like, I got people calling my cell phone. I had to up my security. I already had a shotgun. Jesus Christ.

Well, what started it off? Probably me quitting Breitbart. So when I was, you know, I was not a Trump supporter. I didn't vote for either candidate in this year's election or last year's election. Who did you support? In the primaries? Cruz. Yeah, Cruz.

I supported him in his positions. He was the closest to me politically. So, you know, I was not pro-Trump during the primaries. He didn't earn my vote during the general election. I thought, like, there's two ways to look at your vote. And this is what I always said to people. I said, vote for who you want to. But for me, there's two ways to look at your vote. It's a coupon that expires November 9th. Right. And so either use it or you lose it. Or it's just, it says something about what you are willing to accept. And it's possible that there can be election where both candidates suck and you just don't want either of them. So what did you do during the election? I voted down ticket. I skipped the top of the ticket. Wow. So which is the first time I've ever done that. So I didn't think either of these people was qualified to be president of the United States. Once Trump was

elected, then it was like, okay, if he does good stuff, I'll praise him. And if he does bad stuff, I'll hit him as I would any other president. So I've been sort of, you know, calling balls and strikes with him and some of the stuff like Gorsuch I love and some of the stuff like Mika Brzezinski's bloody face, I'm not so hot on. So that's, but yeah, so the, I think what led off was it was a combination of three things. One, I'm Jewish, and obviously so. Two, I was working at Breitbart, and then I quit in the middle of the election cycle. Do you remember the Michelle Fields incident where Corey Lewandowski grabbed a reporter from Breitbart by the arm hard enough to bruise her? Did he actually bruise her?

He bruised her. I mean, she took pictures. She reported to the cops. Unless you believe she bruised herself. It didn't look much like a, I mean, when I watched the video, it looked like he just kind of grabbed her arm. It didn't look like he, her body didn't, like,

move like she was being injured. Yeah, I mean, she, let's put it this way. That was her account. That was also the account of Ben Terrace at the Washington Post, right, was that she was grabbed hard enough to bruise, and then she had bruises. Well, you know what? Let me, as a fight commentator, there's a lot of things that I see live that look a lot worse than when you watch them on video.

You know, when people get knocked out, like, that wasn't much of a punch. I'm like, oh, you had to be there. Yeah, I mean, the most, the example that comes to mind is the Ali Liston punch, right, in fight number two, right? That was probably a fake punch, though. That was probably a fake, though. You probably did take a bite of it. That's probably a bad example, but.

Yeah. Yeah. Bottom line is that she, there were three, there were a bunch of different excuses that Breitbart went through on that one. One was that she was never grabbed at all. The second was that it was a Secret Service guy. And then the third was that that Trump thought she was a security threat. And Corey Lewandowski had to protect Trump from this 90 pound soaking wet girl. And so once Breitbart did that, then the real question for me was not, you know, what a horrible thing had happened to her. Once Breitbart did that, then the real question for me was not, you know, what a horrible thing had happened to her.

It was much more about as a journalistic entity, do you stand by your reporters or do you stand by the candidate who you support? And once Breitbart made clear to me that it like I already knew they supported Trump, that wasn't any great shock, but I was kind of their token non-Trump guy. And once it became clear that they were willing to sort of sacrifice journalistic credibility on the altar of getting close to Trump. Then I was out. Then it's no longer a journalistic outlet. So I quit. And that sort of started the ball rolling. So you really didn't get anti-Semitic responses on Twitter before that? Not too much. Not too much. So I won't say that Breitbart directed it at me because I don't think they did. But I think that there are a lot of people who follow Breitbart and Milo Yiannopoulos. And they were pissed at me, and they'd seen me as an ally, and now they saw me as an enemy, and this kind of thing. That's their prerogative. It becomes a fun little war for them, right?

Oh, yeah. I mean, people enjoyed it, obviously. That's a weird thing about the online hate is how much people enjoy it. Well, it's anonymous. You never get tagged for it. For now. It's anonymous for it. For now. It's anonymous for now. For now. I mean, I've said this to a bunch of college students about, you know, the alt-right.

First of all, I think it's important to mention a lot of people who say they're alt-right aren't actually alt-right. Just because you like a meme doesn't make you alt-right. But like, there's a group of people who actually like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor and the race-based identity politics of white supremacy. And those people are actually alt-right. When the alt-right is coming after you, then it's not a lot of fun. But there are a lot of young students who will retweet things from like things that are obviously nasty and are going to hurt them in their future career. Yeah. Right. Where they'll like be joking around on Facebook and using the N-word. And I'll say to them, like, guys, you may think it's funny, and 10 years from now your employer is going to find that,

and you're going to be toast. And there are a lot of people who sort of fall into this idea that what you do online is anonymous, and it is not. It is not going to remain anonymous. It's just a matter of time before it blows. Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't say this crap. Any anonymity in 10 years. I agree.

I think that we're moving in that direction. And this is actually a thing that bothers me in general. Like, did you follow, I'm sure you did, the Donald Sterling saga out here? Yeah, sure. I agree. I think that we're moving in that direction. And this is actually a thing that bothers me in general. Like, did you follow, I'm sure you did, the Donald Sterling saga out here? Yeah, sure. So it really bothered me. Yeah, me too. That everybody was willing to, like, take Donald Sterling's team away from him because he said something shitty to his girlfriend. Right.

About Magic Johnson. When there's no evidence that there's actual discrimination among clients at the Clippers. Right. Again, if there are actual evidence of discrimination, then sure, boycott his team and do what the NBA has to do. But I'm pretty certain that every human being says crappy things to their intimate loved ones about groups

of people and other people. If this now becomes the standard, then I think that we're all toast. Oh, for sure. And his defense of it was very reasonable. He's like, I was just trying to get laid. He's like, I was just saying shut the fuck up. He thought he was alone. He thought he was I was just trying to get laid. He's like, I was just saying, shut the fuck up. He thought he was alone. He thought he was with her

and no one was recording him and she was trying to say that she had recorded all of their conversations and it was a part of her job. He's like a senile old guy and he's obviously not with V Stiviano

because she's a Nobel Prize winning physicist. Exactly. He bought her a condo and a Bentley and a Ferrari and he was just trying to fuck her.

His interview with Anderson Cooper was one of the classic interviews of all time. I never saw it. Oh, my goodness. What was that? Because there's a moment where he turns to Anderson Cooper and says, Anderson, have you ever fallen in love with a woman? And Anderson Cooper, who is, you know, super gay. Gay as fuck.

Yeah. Anderson Cooper goes, he starts laughing. He goes, no, I've never had that experience. Well, Anderson, when you do fall in love with a woman. And he's so unaware. And it's like, he starts laughing. He goes, no, I've never had that experience. Well, Anderson, when you do fall in love with a woman. And he's so unaware. And it's like, I'm sorry. I can't consider this guy, he's a KKK threatening figure. The guy can't even find the toilet in the mornings.

He's stumbling over his ottoman. I had a bit I did about him defending him. Because if you look at what he actually said, everybody's like, he's a racist, he's a terrible person. He said, do me a favor. He goes, don't take pictures of black guys. He goes, in the next sentence, he said, I don't care if you fuck them. Just don't take pictures of them.

I go, in my world, that's pretty reasonable. Like, you got a girl, you're buying her a Ferrari. All he's saying is just don't take any pictures. You can fuck them. She should just, like, leave well enough alone. You're getting a Ferrari out of the deal. No, I think that was, that whole thing was just, like, it was our capacity to get ourselves outraged

so we could show everybody how outraged we were. Well, the president of the NBA, whatever the fuck his name is, what is his name? Adam Silver, no, Adam Silver. The guy that got on TV and was talking about it, like, it was the most horrific thing that's ever been said by any human being. Like, he was reinstituting Jim Crow at Clipper Crow at Staples Center. He should have gotten on TV

and said, look, this is obviously we know what this was. This is a gold digger and an old man. It's a story as old as time. He said some stupid shit. Old people say stupid shit. He's a senile old guy. Here's the thing. Don't take his advice when it comes to race. And he probably should have said, look, but on the bright side,

he told us she can go fuck black guys. So, hey, everybody's happy. Good night, everybody. Would have been a better presser. Would have been the greatest press conference. The ratings would have been amazing. Instead, he was self-righteous and bullshit. Well, I mean, a lot of that, again, is I think that if you look at the NBA statistics and who watches the NBA, the outsized

number of people who watch the NBA are black, and they spend an outsized amount of time watching it. And so, you know, Donald Sterling pissed off a lot of black folks with that, understandably. And so a lot of people were like, I think the NBA are black, and they spend an amount of time watching it, and so you know, Donald Sterling pissed off a lot of black folks with that, understandably, and so a lot of people were like, I think the NBA was like, we're not going to lose our fan base over that. It was a money decision, in other words. I don't think it was a values decision as much as a money one. I agree with you 100%, but I don't think

they had to make that decision that way. I think they could have suspended him. They could have divested him and put him, like, put his kids or his wife in charge of the team. Like, this idea that you're going to force him to sell his team, or you're going to force him to sell his team. It's crazy. Or you're going to disband the Clippers because there was a tape of an old man saying stupid-ass things to a gold digger.

Didn't he sue anyway? And he wound up making more money from that team than he ever would have. It became much more valuable. He sold it to Ballmer for a bajillion dollars, yeah. It became much more valuable. The whole thing is bizarre. Yeah.

That's it, dude. We just hit three hours. Isn't that crazy? I appreciate it. Flew Yeah. That's it, dude. We just did three hours. Well. Isn't that crazy? I appreciate it. Flew by. That was great. Well, listen, people have been asking for a long time for you to come on, so I'm glad

we finally got together. Yeah, me too. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Let's do it again. Sounds good. Thank you. Thanks, Ben.

See you guys. See you next week. Or girls, too. Non-binary folks, too. Everybody. All-inclusive. Bye. folks, too. Everybody, all-inclusive. Bye!