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Aug. 26, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:03:01
Clay Travis | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 16
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Meritocracy works.
You know, the most talented person in sports wins, and I'm afraid that we're trying to turn sports into another version of politics as opposed to the best thing that I think politics can aspire to.
Well, here we are on the Sunday special with Clay Travis Clayton.
Clay is the host of the nationwide morning show for Fox Sports Radio.
He's author of the book Republicans Buy Sneakers To Have Left His Ruining Sports With Politics, which will be released on September 25th.
We're going to get right to it in just a second.
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Well, Clay, thanks so much for stopping by.
I appreciate you having me.
Well, absolutely.
One of the reasons that I've been fond of your commentary is because you take a politically diverse point of view.
For a person who, like me, cancelled Sports Illustrated years ago over their political coverage, it's been interesting to watch as you've gained a lot of fame and credibility off of speaking to a different side of the coverage.
I've obviously been aware of your site, outkicked the coverage for a long time.
I want to get started by asking you sort of where your politics developed and how this sort of political sports merger happened for you.
It's a great question, and first of all, I love the show.
I appreciate you having me on.
I'm a fan of everything that you're doing, so keep up the good work.
Secondly, so I was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, K-12 public school.
As I was growing up, huge history buff, huge sports buff, like huge politics buff, all those different things.
And I think a lot like you, I would wake up every morning, and as I ate breakfast before I'd go to school, I'd put on SportsCenter, and I would wait and see what happened the night before, after I'd gone to bed, whatever else.
Along the way I went away to GW for undergrad and then I came back for law school.
And to me, and this is a big part of the book, most of the 1980s and 90s when I was growing up, I'm 39, in the early 2000s, I don't remember an athlete ever having a political opinion.
I say in the book, I had three posters on the wall when I was a kid growing up.
I grew up a Cincinnati Reds fan.
I had Eric Davis, who was chasing the 40 for 40 before Jose Canseco did it.
I had Jordan dunking from the free throw line, even though he took off from inside of the free throw line, right?
That iconic photo of him in flight.
And then I had the Bo Jackson with the shoulder pads and the baseball bat, like black and white photo.
I was a huge Bo Jackson guy.
So those were the three.
And I was thinking about this as I wrote the book.
None of those guys do I ever remember while they were playing ever having remotely a political idea.
And then I went back and I was like, well, maybe I'm a kid and I'm not remembering.
I'm missing something.
And I kind of went back over everything.
And outside of the O.J.
Simpson trial, which was political in many different ways, was involving a former athlete.
None of the athletes that we grew up with ever got political.
And I went back and went through Jordan's history, and the Republicans buy sneakers to quote, or shoes, depending on who you want to give attention to, for the Harvey Gantt versus Jesse Helms 1990 election in the Senate in North Carolina.
That was what Jordan said when he didn't choose a side, a black guy running against a white guy in a sort of racially fraught political climate at that time.
And I think Jordan was right, you know.
So to answer your question, I graduated from law school.
I started practicing law.
And like a lot of 25-year-old lawyers, probably some who are listening right now, I had a quarter-life crisis where I said, my God, I can't imagine sitting around and doing litigation like this for the rest of my life.
And I started writing online.
And that grew and grew, wrote a couple of books.
And in this book, the Missouri protest, and I know you spoke at the University of Missouri, the Missouri protest in 2015 was my red pill moment.
The way that I saw myself and other sports media members responding to that story, I said, we're covering fundamental untruths here.
The actual facts and the actual story is not being covered.
This is an illegitimate protest with no rooting in reality whatsoever.
And yet, you were seeing all of these protesters lionized and treated as if they were modern-day civil rights activists.
So for people on this stage, do you want to kind of recapitulate what exactly happened there?
Yeah, so the story was at the University of Missouri, there was a protest started by some graduate students, and their goal was pretty outlandish.
Like, they were like, we want the university president to climb up on a cafeteria table and denounce his white privilege publicly and then resign.
We want the faculty to suddenly be, and I don't remember the percentages, but like 28% African American.
And as a result, if you have to fire other people, we don't care.
Like fundamentally illogical, illegal, certainly, you know, things that could not happen.
And so they started a protest in the center of the campus quad.
And as the protest grew, there was a hunger striker.
Now, the Hunger Strikers' dad was like an executive, I think, at Norfolk Southern who made like $20 million a year.
I mean, like, he was insanely wealthy, but he was saying, oh, we can't afford health insurance anymore.
And there were three incidents, they said, that demonstrated extreme racism that was going on in the campus.
One of them was a poop swastika, remember?
The infamous poop swastika.
And I've said before, and I'm sure this will be the case for you, if somebody said, oh, Ben Shapiro, I'm a huge fan, and they showed up with you, like a portrait that they had done of you in feces, you wouldn't be like, oh, that's a huge endorsement of me.
Right.
So I'm not sure which direction the poop swastika is even going.
Like, that could be somebody hating the poop.
Like, whatever.
It's good.
So that happened.
We don't know.
Also not clear it was directed against African-Americans.
Or who did it.
Right.
Like, it could be.
We don't even know the motive.
Could have been directed against Jews in the swastika.
Exactly.
Nothing to do with, no idea about that.
There was a student body president who allegedly had a racial slur yelled at him off campus by somebody in a red pickup truck.
No idea who that was.
There were no witnesses.
It's off campus.
It's awful, but you have no idea how that's connected to Missouri.
And then one person who was a non-student walked through campus and said a racial slur, like as an African-American group was meeting on campus.
And for that, that was the locus, the reason why they started the protest.
And so I went and I looked at all this and I said, the University of Missouri at this time was embracing Michael Sam.
They had a gay black man who had been elected as student body president.
I can't speak to the hearts and minds of every single student at the University of Missouri, but I had spent a lot of time there as they got integrated into the SEC, became members of the Southeastern Conference.
Inclusion and diversity did not seem to be an issue at Missouri.
And so the protest eventually spread from this hunger striker to the football team saying, we will not take the field and play unless the demands of these protesting students are acquiesced to.
And I said, my God, this is a big story, right?
I got to look into all the details.
Well, I looked in and found out the three incidents that they were complaining about.
And I said, there's no legitimacy for this protest.
But the head of the football team, Gary Pinkle, the athletic director, everybody was afraid to call out the students and in any way fight back.
The chancellor ended up losing his job.
The president of the overall Missouri University lost his job.
And so, and then the, this was amazing when I looked at the data, the overall enrollment of the university I don't have the numbers in front of me right now, but it was more crippling to Missouri, this protest, than Hurricane Katrina was to Tulane.
So you think about this Hurricane Katrina, which basically shut down the city of New Orleans and crippled the entire region.
Had less of a significant impact on the enrollment and I went and looked at the enrollment numbers at Tulane than the Missouri protest did.
And so as I examined all the details surrounding this story, I just said, my God, the media is not doing their job.
Our job to me in sports media is to speak truth to power sometimes, right?
And the students were the powerful people here who were protesting and they were the ones who were winning in the court of public opinion.
And their protest was completely illegitimate.
So I started writing about that.
And something happened to me that I'd never seen happen before, which was immediately, everybody attacked me and said, oh, you're racist, you're sexist.
And I had never seen that happen before.
Because up to that point, I worked on Al Gore's presidential campaign.
I worked in Democratic politics.
I consider myself to be a very middle-of-the-road guy.
And what I noticed very rapidly was people weren't attacking my reporting or my opinions or the facts that I was discussing in this case.
They were attacking me personally.
And from there is my red pill moment.
My eyes started to open and I said, my God.
Maybe I have been missing and slowly the sports media has turned into politics by any other name.
And from there, I really do just think it's continued to grow in a rapid fashion.
So what the hell happened to the sports media?
Because many years ago, now it's probably six, seven years ago, maybe longer, I was a Sports Illustrated subscriber from the time that I was probably 13 years old to the time that I was probably 27, 28 years old and read it cover to cover every single week.
And then I unsubscribed because they decided to put Caitlyn Jenner on the cover.
Because I just felt like this is not athletically relevant.
What does this have to do with anything?
And I began to notice that ESPN was doing the same thing.
I had the same experience that you did, which I would get up at six o'clock in the morning, West Coast time, so I could be the first person to see all the highlights.
And then it became, I don't want to watch any of this stuff anymore because I'm going to get a human interest story on Hands Up, Don't Shoot, which has nothing to do with sports itself.
So why do you think that it was that the athletes started to get more political, so the media got more political?
Do you think it was that the media got more political and so the athletes rushed to sort of meet that moment?
It's a tremendous question and one of the things that I really grapple with in the book that I wrote.
So I've spent a ton of time thinking about this issue exactly and I think there are several threads at play.
One is, I would say this, social media.
Alright?
I think that ESPN, and I write about this some, their business started to collapse.
They had 100 million subscribers.
The court is fraying the number of kids who are subscribing.
The old cable subscribers are dying off.
And I think ESPN, I had this interesting conversation back in 2012 when Alabama played Notre Dame.
I remember having a conversation with a lot of top ESPN executives, because I used to have and still do have a really good relationship with a lot of people there, despite the fact that we've kind of gone at loggerheads at times.
And their discussion at that point was, do we pay attention to what people say about our talent on social media, on Twitter in particular, or do we pay attention to the public reaction we see?
And I remember having this conversation specifically about Chris Berman and Lou Holtz.
And they said, everywhere Chris Berman and Lou Holtz go, they get mobbed and people love them.
If you go on social media and you read what people say about them on Twitter, they're old white guys and they get crushed.
And at the time, ESPN was making the argument, we think we need to pay more attention to what we see in face-to-face interaction over social media.
I think as ESPN's business collapsed, they looked for salvation on social media and believed that if they made Twitter happy, if we promote the wokest people who are getting the most attention on Twitter, that will lead to success on television as well.
It will combat our dying business.
So I think they looked for salvation in Twitter and instead found a way to drown faster, like a big rock.
Because I think politics was basically a rock they were holding over their head and they thought it was a life jacket.
So I think that's a big part of it.
And you certainly have seen the radical polarization of politics along sports lines.
And it's been really devastating for sports fans because I don't want to watch sports anymore unless I'm at a live event, specifically because I'm afraid of the political coverage that I'm going to see.
And it doesn't seem to matter the sport, although the ones that seem least political are the ones that are also least covered by ESPN.
ESPN will cover basketball.
If it's very political, they'll cover football, which has now become a political football.
But they won't cover hockey and they won't cover baseball.
Yeah, and I think that ESPN decided Salvation would come through social media, and then I think they promoted everybody who was, you know, left-wing in terms of mixing sports and politics.
I think what also tied in there was the athletes.
This is amazing stat, and this is in the book, too.
Everybody talks about how biased the political media is.
And if you go look at the numbers, I think it was something like 27 times as much money was given to Hillary Clinton by people employed in, quote, media circles, right, as opposed to Donald Trump.
ESPN in the 2016 presidential election, their employees gave 270 times as much money to Hillary Clinton as they did Donald Trump.
So 10 times as much a bias that was existing right there in terms of what they were sending their money on.
And so I think what happened is you had a total mix between what was real news and what was opinion.
And ESPN in particular, and I think a lot of other sports media people followed it, used quote unquote real news to advocate for their political opinions.
And so I think what ended up happening was, instead of saying, like, I use as an example in the book, Kid Rock gets named as the performer at the All-Star Game, right?
Big deal.
Kid Rock's a rock guy.
He's from Michigan.
A lot of hockey fans are Kid Rock fans.
And he got attacked.
Front page story on ESPN was, oh, controversy arises over Kid Rock's selection.
Well, you can't use social media as a barometer of controversy because if I check my phone right now, every single decision that's made is controversial, right?
You think about in the world of sports.
When your team makes a draft pick, it's controversial because not everybody agrees, right?
So, they use objective journalism, example like that.
And ESPN set the precedent.
I think it's a bad precedent.
want to just say Kid Rock's not the right choice because he has conservative politics, that's fine.
That's your opinion.
But don't cover it as if the backlash is justified.
And so to me, this really crystallized further with the treatment of Curt Schilling versus Jemele Hill.
And ESPN set the precedent.
I think it's a bad precedent.
I'm curious what you think about this.
I don't think that we should be in a business today, regardless of what your business is.
When you are outside of the office, if you are tweeting your political opinions or you are sharing your Facebook opinions, I don't think you should get fired based on those for outside of our opinions, right?
Whether you agree or disagree with Curt Schilling on transgender bathroom issues, he has a right to have that opinion in my mind.
And so ESPN fired him over sharing a Facebook meme about the North Carolina transgender bathroom dispute.
And then when Jamelle Hill came out and called the president a white supremacist, they didn't punish her at all.
And so I think we've entered into this kind of scary time where if your opinion is different than the company you work for, You either keep your mouth shut, or you don't necessarily know that you're going to be able to have that job.
So I think all those things have coalesced together, and I think they've created a mess.
Because sports used to be the place that united us, used to be the place where when your team scores, you turn and give a high five to somebody in the arena, in the stadium.
And their ethnicity, their religion, whether they were born in this country, whether they're an immigrant, it doesn't matter.
Sports was the ultimate big tent, right?
Your tribe was connected regardless of your race, your gender, your ethnicity, your sexual orientation.
And I think that ESPN has been so desperate to save their business that they've kind of prayed to a false idol.
Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with this.
I mean, it's one of the reasons why I say I'll still attend live events of various sporting events.
I went to the Super Bowl last year and it was exactly that.
It was a bunch of people who I'm sure disagreed about politics, but we were all in the stadium to just enjoy the game and it was fantastic.
But the minute you leave the stadium and you turn on TV or you turn on Twitter, it's going to be whatever is the latest controversy.
I absolutely agree with regard to Schilling and Jemele Hill.
Look, I think that there are certain opinions that if you express them on Twitter, you say, I'm an absolute Nazi, right?
Like, I actually endorse Adolf Hitler.
I think the company has a right to fire you.
Right.
But what these companies have done is they've shrunk the Overton window, the window of acceptable discourse, so narrowly that Jamel Ahola is inside of it, but Kurt Schilling is not, for expressing as an opinion that is pretty mainstream on the right.
And the opinion that there should be separate bathrooms for men and women is not a fringe opinion for at least half the country, and probably for more than half of the country.
And the other tweet that they went after him for was something comparing ISIS to the Nazis, which seems utterly uncontroversial to me.
And they went after Schilling for that as well.
And it's not just Schilling, obviously.
They went after Ditka, they went after Chris Broussard, right, for suggesting that he and his own personal viewpoint-- - And they just hired Keith Olbermann.
Right, right.
I mean, who has been so far left wing.
I mean, he calls the president a Nazi all the time.
And so, it's just, it's not an equal standard being applied.
You know, the difficulty with, you know, the great legal aphorism is tough cases make bad law.
Right.
Right?
And so, I think ESPN set a really bad precedent with Curt Schilling, and I don't think they can follow it, but I think that your average listener out there, your average viewer, they don't think Caitlyn Jenner is a hero for deciding to become a woman.
Do whatever makes you happy, but you're not heroic, right?
I don't think the average NFL fan cared at all who Michael Sam slept with.
And making the argument, oh, this is a modern-day Jackie Robinson issue, is fundamentally not true, right?
Everybody could see what race Jackie Robinson was.
Unless Michael Sam waved his arm around and said, hey, I like to sleep with guys.
Nobody would have known.
There have been many gay football players before.
They just haven't felt the need to publicly come out.
Now, to his credit, whatever.
He makes him happy is fine.
But I think covering Michael Sam as if he were Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, you know, beat writers who are following him around all day, you talk to his people in his locker room, what was the shower like today, right?
I don't think sports fans care.
Or the suggestion that all the teams that had not drafted him had not done so.
Were somehow homophobic.
Right, exactly.
He couldn't even stay in the NFL after the NFL tried to convince various other teams to sign him in a secondary fashion.
And maybe that had more to do with his skill level in a meritocracy than it had to do with his sexual orientation.
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Okay, so can the genie be put back in the bottle here?
Because it's really drained my enjoyment of sports in a major way, particularly basketball, which I really enjoy and love, that every time I turn on a basketball game, I have to get a political commentary from somebody who's spent five minutes studying the issue.
I've spent my entire life studying these issues, You're racist.
is considered suddenly, and if you question the expertise of an athlete, then you are considered something, it's somehow racist to do that.
Yes.
Like, I think LeBron James can have whatever opinion he wants to, but I'm not going to pretend that LeBron James has actually studied the federal budget in any depth.
Or that LeBron James really knows all that much about race relations beyond what he's experienced in his personal life, which is relevant to a certain extent, but I don't think that he knows all the statistics about police shootings in the United States, for example.
And I don't think that that should be that controversial to say, but I'm not sure that we can go back because it seems like everything is so polarized now that to even make those arguments puts you in a kind of nasty category.
Well, we'll see.
Cause I make those arguments in my book.
So, uh, I mean, that's really what I'm arguing.
I'm going to get, when the book comes out, I'm going to be attacked and people are going to say, Oh, look at Claytree.
You know what?
The attacks are going to be already racist, sexist, homophobic, like whatever they're going to, they're going to be all labels that people try to put on me.
And what they're not going to do is actually look at the merit of the argument, because I think Even most reasonable people, if they look at the merits of the argument, would have to say, oh, you know what?
Like, you're more likely to be, five times as likely to be, like LeBron James is a great example.
LeBron, and this is in the book, but I think it's a really kind of instructive moment in the way that sports is covered.
LeBron James said, the way America is today, when his son leaves the house, he's not afraid that he's going to come back if he gets pulled over by a cop.
LeBron James said that.
Overwhelmingly, the sports media said, God bless LeBron James for understanding what black America is going through right now.
Thank God he is talking out and speaking out and using his platform.
That's a big deal, right?
You're using your platform.
Okay.
If LeBron James had said, when my son leaves the house, I'm not sure if he's going to come home because there's a lot of bees, wasps and hornets out there.
People would have said, it seems a little protective of LeBron, right?
People probably would have made fun of him.
Assuming LeBron's son left the house unarmed, he is more likely to be killed by a bee, wasp, or a hornet in America today than he is by a police officer.
And what troubles me is, we got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of police officers out there working as hard as they can every day, and there's a fundamental untruth that sports is helping to propagate, which is, if somebody gets pulled over by a police officer, You should be expecting that violence is going to ensue, and that mutual disconnect, because it translates into body language, it translates into the interaction between the police officer and the minority youth there.
I think LeBron James is actually making things worse with a statement like that, right?
And I think it would be the duty of a robust sports media to speak truth to LeBron James' power and say, actually, this isn't true.
But very few people are willing to do that, and so I think there's a couple of things that would be substantial.
I think one, sports figures, whether it's Greg Popovich, LeBron James, Steve Kerr, whoever it is, have the right to give their political opinions.
The media doesn't have to give those opinions a megaphone.
Right?
There are plenty of people out there making great critiques of Donald Trump, much better than Greg Popovich is, because it's what they do for a living.
They can go on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News maybe sometimes, wherever it is.
We don't, in the sports media, need to make the number one headline on our programming, Greg Popovich ripped Donald Trump.
Greg Popovich can do it.
He's entitled to his free speech.
So is LeBron, so is Steve Kerr.
But let's not pretend that what they are saying is so perceptive and unique and without parallel that we need to treat it as if they're all modern day Muhammad Ali's, right?
Muhammad Ali, and this is in the book too, fought against Vietnam.
in the middle of a draft, and was willing to go to prison for his opinions.
People on Instagram get more likes the more political they are, right?
These athletes are being rewarded for their opinions, and I think this is where the bias of the sports media comes in.
I think the sports media knows they can't say it, but they can praise the athlete for saying it, and that becomes a default endorsement of their political belief, right?
And a great example of this was the Boston Bruin goalie, Tim Thomas, who didn't go to the White House because he was a Tea Party guy.
And if you went and read what everybody said about him, he got crushed beyond belief for not going to the White House with his team.
Every athlete who comes out now or team and isn't willing to go see Donald Trump gets praise to the high heavens.
It's because the media agrees with them.
It's a fundamental untruth.
So my argument is don't cover the political opinions.
I think it's bad for business.
If I'm CBS, NBC, Fox or ESPN and I'm paying for the NFL, why would I want to cut out?
I'm paying billions of dollars a year.
Why would I want to cut the legs out from underneath that brand by covering the protests and the anthem as much as we are?
And then I think another aspect of it is, if you're going to cover politics, you need to have people to come on and set the parameters of the debate.
Instead of saying, how heroic is Colin Kaepernick, which is the kind of debate show that I have seen for like the last three years?
Oh, I think he's a superhero.
Well, I think he's only, you know, a quadruple hero, right?
It's like, how heroic is he as an artificial frame?
You need to have somebody come on and say, actually, I think Colin Kaepernick's a moron and his protest made no sense and he doesn't have a legal right to do it.
I would make that argument.
I make that argument on my radio show, but it's not something that's on television on a regular basis.
So I think you need to have people throwing punches.
You know, when Laura Ingraham said, shut up and dribble.
I think that's a strong argument.
If you step into politics, you shouldn't expect golf claps.
Like, oh, it's so brave of you to say something political.
Politics is, you know, it's a bloody, bare-knuckled fight every day to win your argument.
So I think we actually need more speech.
I just think we need more ideological diversity.
I think that would be a big deal.
Because I think what would happen is people would say, you know what, I can watch CNN.
If I want to see two guys argue about Donald Trump, I want to see somebody argue about sports.
This is totally right, and bringing up the Muhammad Ali example is a great example, because at the time, Muhammad Ali got crushed by the press, or at least by half of the press, for what he was doing with regard to changing his name, or being against the Vietnam War.
And by the time he fought Frasier the first time, there was a serious political war over whether Ali was right or not.
It wasn't just, let's praise Ali to the high heavens for everything he did, that sort of revisionist history that we know.
out and say, oh, more credit to Colin Kaepernick.
Right.
And this is, this is my argument on Colin Kaepernick is his protest never made any sense.
And this is a big part of the book.
Cause I go line by line.
He was protesting the United States flag, which at the time he began his protest, Barack Obama was the president and, uh, Lynch was the, uh, the head of the justice department.
Yeah.
They were doing independent federal investigations of every suspect police shooting already.
Right.
Right.
So, So Barack Obama, I think, if he had been really honest here, he would have said, I appreciate what Colin Kaepernick is protesting, but what he's protesting for, we are already doing.
We're doing rigorous federal oversight to ensure that the blue wall of silence or local communities are not covering up Improper shootings that should be prosecuted.
The analogy I like to use is, it's like Colin Kaepernick went into McDonald's at 1105 and took a knee and the manager walked out and he said, like, why are you taking a knee?
He's like, oh, I want to get breakfast all day.
It's like, we serve breakfast all day here already, right?
Like, there was no logical thing.
And the analogy I love to toss out that drives people insane is, imagine the response if Colin Kaepernick had taken a knee to protest the national anthem because he disagreed with gay marriage being legalized.
The same people who are like, oh, it's so great that he's exercising his First Amendment rights would have insisted that the San Francisco 49ers had to cut him immediately.
But that would have made sense because the Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage.
And when you protest the United States flag, you're actually protesting a tangible federal action.
What he was doing made no logical sense.
Now, you and I understand that.
A lot of your listeners and viewers will.
I bet that if we had Colin Kaepernick sitting here right now, his understanding of the separation of powers between federal and state governments is probably not that in-depth.
And I think it speaks to what you're saying, which is athletes are entitled to their political opinions.
What they aren't entitled to is a presumption that they're incredibly well understanding of those political opinions.
Justify it like we would ask anybody else.
Can the leagues do anything about this?
Because the NFL allowed this to run out of control.
And it actually predated Kaepernick.
I remember the hands up, don't shoot was the first time I saw it, when you saw members of the St.
Louis Rams.
Which is a fundamental lie.
It is an absolute lie.
It never happened.
Michael Brown was not standing there with his hands up shouting, don't shoot.
He was shot in the front.
The whole thing is just, it's such nonsense.
But with all of that said, If the NFL had cracked down on this, as they should have at the very beginning, would that have stopped it?
And is there any way for it to stop now, considering that now that the President of the United States has gotten involved, it looks like if the NFL tries to crack down, now it looks like they're surrendering to Trump, as opposed to just making a case for the viability of their product.
First of all, the NBA.
A lot of people want to say that Kaepernick is a modern-day Muhammad Ali, and I think I destroy that argument in my book.
I mean, I really kind of dive into it and explain why it doesn't work.
The better argument for Kaepernick, I think, is Mahmoud Abdul-Raouf, who a lot of people will remember as Chris Jackson.
And I believe it was 1996, Chris Jackson refused to stand for the national anthem as a member of the Denver Nuggets.
And the reason why he said it was because the United States government oppresses, you know, different communities.
I mean, it's basically the exact same logic as calling Kaepernick 20 years before.
And David Stern, then the commissioner of the NBA, immediately nipped it in its bud.
He suspended him, he fined him, the entire game check, and the protest lasted for one game.
I think if Roger Goodell had made a smart strategic decision, he would have done the same thing to Colin Kaepernick, and he would have cited the NBA's example.
Now, the NBA requires that every player stand at attention for the national anthem before its games.
Nobody criticizes that rule at all.
The NFL's policy is actually more lenient than the NBA's policy.
So I think Goodell blew it.
That's what he gets paid a lot of money for.
He blew it.
If I were Goodell now, I would sit down with the players.
And I hear a lot of players say, oh, we don't care if the fans come to the game.
We don't care about it.
I think it's insanely stupid.
The players and the owners are in a partnership.
The players get to share revenue.
And I think the big flaw here is the players believe that their salaries are always going to go up.
Well, if 20% of your market disappears and continues to not show up, then sooner or later your revenue is going to go down, which means the players are going to make less money.
And I think if I were Roger Goodell, I'd have every player come in for a big meeting, all 1,500, 1,600 NFL players, and I would say, look guys, you're entitled to whatever political opinion you want.
Use your Instagram accounts, use your platforms as you see fit, use your Twitter accounts, everything else.
But what you should know is this.
Millions of people are choosing to consume our product less.
Are you so committed to your politics that you have to do it at work in uniform if it's going to make everybody in here lose 20% of their paychecks?
And I think almost everybody out there would say, no, you know, like you're capitalist.
So I think the business side is actually one where you could appeal to players because players like to think, oh, I'm not labor.
I'm a businessman.
Right.
The great Jay-Z line.
So if I were Roger Goodell, that's the line that I would try to hit.
The other thing is, I would just say, look, Like any other business, we're looking at the metrics.
And if the metrics start to decline in this insanely competitive entertainment world, we need to figure out why and we need to combat them, because ultimately all of us are going to make less money.
So I think that there's an economic argument that takes it outside of politics and just says, regardless of what you think about abortion or gay marriage or, you know, police misconduct, Is that really something that people come into our stadiums or turn on our games for?
A great example, my father-in-law is a lifelong, poor, suffering Detroit Lions fan.
I've been married for 14 years now.
I've got a 10-year-old, a 7-year-old, a 3-year-old.
We were down for Thanksgiving.
It's past year.
And Jordan Lions play every Thanksgiving.
We're getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner, and I'm gambling on the game, because it makes games a little bit more fun.
And I say to my father-in-law, why is the Lions game not on?
He took us to an NFL game when I grew up in Nashville, the Tennessee Titans played.
So why is the game not on?
He said, I'm not watching this year.
He said, I'm so frustrated with the politics.
I've been married to my wife for 14 years, probably been done 15 years of Thanksgiving.
Every other year, the Detroit Lions game was on Thanksgiving.
Yesterday, two days ago, went to get my hair cut.
Lady doesn't know me at all.
Just sitting there getting my hair cut.
Supercuts are one of those cheap places, 15 bucks.
Lady, 60-year-old white woman, big football fan.
She wanted to talk about football.
She said, because I said we'd gone to the game.
First question she asked me, went to the Tennessee Titans, Tampa Bay Buccaneers preseason game.
What did they do when the anthem came on?
Very first question she asked me.
So there is a fundamental disconnect between people who don't understand how much of the base of the very foundation of the NFL's business is being impacted by this, There's a cottage industry of people out there that want to pretend these people are not real, that there aren't a lot of people with entertainment options who decide on Sunday morning, am I going to watch the game or not?
The numbers reflect that they're leaving.
I don't think that cord cutting suddenly hit two years ago.
I don't think that suddenly people said, I love Netflix or Amazon or anything else.
I think the NFL's core fabric of their audience is being attacked here by getting political.
And I think the NFL has to fix it.
And I think the way you fix it is just by saying, guys, the business is collapsing.
Let's be honest.
I know this for a fact.
The television partners last year, NBC, CBS, Fox, and ESPN, they missed their budgets by over $600 million last year.
Off of their television ratings.
Down nearly 20% over two years.
How about you?
Over $600 million is real money.
The NFL players don't see it because their contracts are guaranteed for multiple years.
But if that money was being pulled out of their contract, I think they would police the league.
Think about wherever you work.
If you knew that 20% of your paycheck was coming off because your co-worker had an opinion about abortion, Would you say like, hey, shut up about abortion at work, do whatever you want elsewhere.
We're not going to talk about abortion at work because people, this is not our business.
So I just, I think it's substantial and I think it's seismic.
And I don't think that the NFL can tiptoe up to this.
I think they needed strong leadership.
And I don't think that Roger Goodell is providing it.
Okay so let's talk a little bit about meritocracy in sports.
So one of the reasons I think that the sports media are getting it so wrong when it comes to who watches sports is they're forgetting that the reason people actually watch sports is because sports is in some ways the most conservative of all institutions in the United States.
Amen.
It's a meritocracy in which if you suck at basketball you're not playing in the NBA and if you suck at baseball you're not playing in the MLB and yet leftist politics is so much about sympathy for the person who's not able to make it on merit, that it cuts against the very fabric of sports itself.
And so you end up in bizarre battles, for example, over transgenderism in sports.
For two years, ESPN has done nothing but talk about transgenderism in sports, and you get ridiculous arguments where people like Jimmy Connors will say, well, you know, it turns out that Serena Williams is the greatest female player ever, but she's not necessarily the greatest player ever, because that's ridiculous.
And suddenly, he's getting just shellacked over it.
You know, how is it that folks in the sports media don't understand that when they make these arguments, they're actually undercutting the reason we watch sports in the first place?
John McEnroe, by the way.
John McEnroe, thank you.
Yeah, that's right.
And he said that Serena wouldn't be one of the top 700 men's players, which was insanely generous.
I talked to a lot of former tennis players and they said she wouldn't make a men's first round, like, college team.
That's right.
There's an actual statistic where they look at, like, it's called the universal tennis ranking.
They actually look at this sort of stuff.
And so, like, her height, weight, strength, all those things, biologically, is very high for women, right?
But men and women are different, right?
I mean, I feel like, newsflash, you know, like.
And so, even the most talented women's tennis player of all time would be a pinprick of a men's player against the greatest men's player in the world, necessarily.
Now, she would crush your average metal tennis player who plays for fun and might be really good, right?
It's not to say Serena's not good.
I think that this is a great example.
The McEnroe story was a great example of how delus—like, I always say to my kids all the time, The only hand you can rely on is the one at the end of your sleeve, right?
It's ultimate individual responsibility.
If you were in a locker room and your coach walked in and he said, guys, we're probably going to lose this game because those kids go to a better high school, better facilities.
Their weight room's a lot nicer than ours is.
They haven't had a broken rim in their gym.
They don't have single parenthood issues.
So, we should get 20 extra points before this game starts.
Every single person who likes sports would say, wait a minute, what in the world are you talking about?
Like, the great thing about sports is the meritocracy.
When you step on that field, or court, or into that arena, or wherever you are, everybody is equal.
It's literally the perfect place to allow the meritocracy to exist.
And who your dad was, where you went to school, how much money your parents made, where you grew up, none of it matters.
All that matters is, are you better than the guy or girl across from you?
And I think what happens is, there is an element of not wanting to acknowledge that.
And so, when you talk about the transgender issue, the transgender issue was amazing to me because when you really break it down, The city of Charlotte decided they were going to be uber inclusive and make sure that something that wasn't an issue was not going to be an issue, right?
And this ends up tying in the NBA and the ACC, right?
Because they pulled their games out.
But think about the root of this conflict.
There's nobody standing outside of the bathroom right now, to my knowledge, like Crocodile Dundee genital checking people, right?
Like, Paul Hogan's not there, like, that's a Sheila or whatever, right?
Like, you, if you look like a guy, you go in the guy's bathroom.
If you look like a girl, you go in the girl's bathroom.
That's been the rule for as long as I can remember.
I think we fight about such minor things now.
There's no issue, right?
People can use whatever public bathroom they want.
Charlotte politicians decide they need to protect Charlotte from making sure that something that isn't an issue doesn't ever become an issue, right?
And then the Republican legislature says, wait a minute, why is Charlotte doing this?
The amazing thing about Charlotte was they were being uber-inclusive, and as a result, they lost the All-Star game and the ACC title game, which the irony on that is amazing, right?
But so I think that there is a recognition that Really, what we're fighting over isn't that significant, right?
99.9 whatever percent of people are whatever gender they are.
And the idea that we need to be fighting over this, this is a great question for you.
You're a deep thinker on this.
I got into a discussion with people in sports recently.
I said, what's next?
Like, let's say that I am the most uber-inclusive person imaginable on the planet right now.
The reason why I'm a First Amendment absolutist is because I think we need to have all marginalized opinions able to debate, because a marginalized opinion 20 years ago might become one that's very commonplace now.
So I'm like, what would you argue in favor of?
Can you even think of one that is considered societally unacceptable in 2018, that in 2038, when we are grandparents potentially, our grandkids will be like, I can't believe Grandpa in 2018.
Maybe eating meat?
Yep.
That's the one that comes to mind.
But other than that... Like, it's almost impossible to even think where the inclusion train can go next?
It could go some ugly places.
I mean, it could go to victimization of children, theoretically, because... Or polygamy?
Right.
And you may think that's ugly or not, but I've said before, like, if you follow the logic of the Supreme Court's decision in allowing... Oberstdahl.
Yeah, that's right.
Then theoretically, if consenting adults decide, if three women for their poor decision decided they wanted to be married to me, or if I wanted to marry the same woman that three other men did, in theory there is not a prohibition to that happening under the same logic, right?
But I think that's a tiny minority opinion.
A percentage of people in America today would like 4% of people or 1% or something would be like in favor of polygamy.
It's almost impossible to even think of what's next, right?
And so what I would say is there's this belief that things can't be good.
Right?
Good is not good enough.
I walk around in America today, I'm like, it's pretty awesome.
Right?
Regardless of what race you are, regardless of what gender you are, there's a reason why by and large people come over here and they think they're going to be radicalized.
And most of the time they're like, I could go blow myself up or I could get a job and go buy a 50 inch flat screen television and go watch Stranger Things.
Right?
And what's amazing to me is what I loved about sports was Sports, and the Jordan era in particular, was about making us all recognize that we weren't that much different after all.
Right?
And that's to me what's so great about sports in general.
Why I love my kids playing now, regardless of what the other backgrounds of the kids are, you learn that you all have a lot more in common than you do different.
And that's what I love about sports.
And I think what's happened is there's been a desire to try to make us all think that we have a lot more not in common than we do.
And it used to be, you know, if you think about Jordan, and I would even include Barack Obama in this, but Jordan, Oprah, Will Smith, if you think about Bill Cosby, The Cosby Show, all of those, you know, sort of the rise of the African-American meritocracy.
We're not about saying like, oh, I'm black, I'm raising my fist in the sky, you're a lot different than me.
It was about we're all pretty similar, right?
The Cosby Show was about trying to make us think, man, you know what?
We're not that much different after all.
And so what I love about sports is anybody can win.
Right, like your kid could end up being the greatest heavyweight champion of all time.
You're not going to happen.
Probably not genetically going to happen, but in theory it's one of those great questions like, you know, what do we say like that every time a man has sex like there's like four billion sperm or whatever.
I would love if I could get my four billion sperm and look at them.
Is there a Clay Travis produces LeBron James level athlete sperm?
Like there are four billion of them, right?
Like how much of the flow chart of possibility do we talk about here?
But in theory, that's the great thing about sports.
You can come from anywhere and end up the greatest in the world.
And I just think we're losing that.
And more importantly, people will actually root for you no matter what those things are.
Tiger at the PGA Championship was a great example.
Tiger has had all sorts of issues in his past, right?
And the last decade for Tiger has been really bleak.
But when you watched him walk around, I looked at the crowd, all white dudes, right, almost at the PGA Championship.
When Tiger Woods walked up onto that platform and looked out over a cheering crowd, they weren't cheering for Tiger Woods because of his racial background or anything else.
They were cheering for Tiger Woods because sports connects with something many of us, innate, and it makes us see people as individuals, not as specific groups of tribes, right?
And so I just think the great thing about sports and Michael Jordan's era was I rooted for Michael Jordan when he stepped back and pushed off on Brian Russell and drained that jumper.
I rooted for him because I was a Jordan guy.
The fact that he was black was inconsequential.
The fact that Tiger Woods is a Kaplan Asian is inconsequential relative to his dominance.
The best person wins.
And, you know, I have this great section in the book, I think, where I say, can you imagine if the most uber-inclusive person bought an NFL team?
Right?
And what if you followed the logic of diversity inclusion so far that you said, okay, half this team is going to be, 51% of this team is going to be female, and it's going to be the most representative football team that's ever existed.
49% will be male, 63% will be white, 12% will be black, 6% will be Asian, whatever the math is of the latest census.
You'd have a beautiful kaleidoscope of a football team for the team photo, and you might never score a touchdown.
Right?
You'd get your ass kicked all over the place.
Meritocracy works.
You know, the most talented person in sports wins, and I'm afraid that we're trying to turn sports into another version of politics, as opposed to the best thing that I think politics can aspire to.
All right, so I want to talk about some of the non-political problems with sports.
Yeah.
Because there's some, it seems like if you had to invest, let me ask you this question, we'll just start with this.
Yeah.
If you had to invest in a sport right now, you've just got a hundred bucks, you've got to invest it in a sport, you get to be an owner in one of the sports, which is the sport where you invest and why?
I would sell the NFL today.
I think the NFL has peaked.
If I had a $4 billion NFL franchise, if I was Jerry Jones, I would sell.
Watch this in 20 years, I may be an idiot, it may be a $40 million franchise, but I would sell.
I think the NFL has peaked.
I think the NBA has peaked.
I think their television dollars are so out of whack relative to what the brand is actually producing an audience that I wouldn't want to buy into the NBA with the valuations that current teams are getting down in Houston and Clippers and everything else.
So I'd sell the NBA.
Major League Baseball I wouldn't be very comfortable in either.
I mean, I'm bearish in general in the world of sports because I think there's a television sports rights bubble, which is a fascinating business kind of proposition to examine.
But if I were going to buy one, it's funny, I would probably buy something like lacrosse or something crazy like Ultimate Frisbee, which is so undervalued that I think you could put on television and people would care about and they don't make any money now.
So I think you could invest You know, $100,000 and buy a franchise, or make a million, or I might put my money in esports.
Because I don't know about you, my boys play Fortnite all the time, right?
Like, it's insane how much my boys love Fortnite.
And I was coming home with them recently from the Titans preseason game, and I was like, well, how was that?
It was like, it was pretty cool.
It wasn't Fortnite, right?
So when I was a kid, I got to go to an NFL game.
I'm like, this is the greatest day of my life.
My boys are like, well, it was cool.
But I mean, if I had to give up the NFL or Fortnite, I would give up the NFL.
So I think some of these e-games, the challenges with the e-games, I've tried to look into it in investing, is I feel like you might buy in to the USFL.
You know, you don't know what the league is going to be that's going to be successful.
In retrospect, you're like, oh, of course the NFL was going to end up huge, but you could have bought into the USFL or the AFL.
You can be wrong on, you can be right about the industry and wrong about the way that you choose to invest in the industry.
So I would go like a lower tier sport.
I mean, I would go, like, it may seem crazy to say answer, but like lacrosse or ultimate Frisbee or something that's almost off the radar.
Yeah, no, I've thought about that before, like a paintball league.
Yeah, right.
It would be insanely popular and fun to value.
And the same thing with these eSports leagues.
I don't play video games now.
I grew up playing them.
Mike Tyson's another good example.
Mike Tyson's punch out.
I could probably do a whole show, I bet, on awesome sports video games as kids growing up.
But yeah, I'm not bullish on buying big, successful sports teams right now.
And it seems like a lot of these sports are experiencing severe problems that have nothing to do with politics either.
So the NFL has a serious concussion problem.
And it seems to me that there are more and more parents, like I wouldn't let my kids play football for love or money at this point because just the level of head damage is too high.
And also because there's a basic lie at the root of the NFL, which is that it's safe.
Yeah.
At least when you're watching UFC, you know people are getting their brains beat in.
Yes.
When you watch the NFL, you're being told by people, this is safe.
Everybody's going to be fine.
And then you look at people five years later, and they're completely destroyed.
Oh, I mean, look, if we did this, if we'd done this talk 50 years ago, I would have come on.
I would have said, Ben, horse racing, boxing, and baseball are always going to be the biggest sports in America, right?
And what's happened?
Nobody pays attention to horse racing except for the Triple Crown.
Boxing, you talked about not letting your kid play football.
Nobody, like who has a college, I mean the number of people who have college degrees and let their kid box, there's like four in all of America.
It's almost unheard of because you're like, I've seen what happens with the syndromes and everything else.
I'm not letting somebody get hit my son or my daughter or whoever in the head.
And so I think there's going to be a lot of that in the NFL.
My theory on the NFL, this is another reason why I wouldn't want to buy it, is where's that impact going to hit first?
I think it's quarterback.
You think about where the quarterbacks are coming from.
Two-parent households.
They go to college even if, typically, even if they weren't playing quarterback.
They could play baseball.
They could play, you know, lacrosse.
They could play another sport.
You know, you look at the Cam Newtons, Russell Wilsons, Tom Bradys.
All of these guys that are quarterbacks at high level in the NFL right now are double-parent households.
So I think the first place that's going to get hit is quarterback.
I think there's always going to be a lot of kids who will say, you know, like, I'll let them play.
Fat kids are always going to play on the offensive and defensive line.
Like, what else are they going to play?
But a quarterback has a lot of options.
I think defensive backs, you know, the best defensive backs could certainly have been great strikers in soccer, right?
So, I think it's going to be a massive hit to the NFL.
Now, if I were the NFL, I'd just go all in and say, look, our sport is violent.
Exactly.
Totally agree with this.
Everybody is assuming the risk now, and they're making millions of dollars a year, and if these guys weren't doing this, they might make $60,000 a year.
My grandfather, long before I was born, worked in a coal mine in Kentucky.
The reason why he did that, and everybody else around him did that, was because they had no other options.
But the money was so much better.
They were willing to take that risk in exchange for the money.
You assume risk.
If I'm the NFL right now, I'm saying, look, it ain't pretty, but these guys are making millions of dollars, and in exchange for allowing their legs and their bodies and potentially their brains to be beaten up, They're taking money for it.
That's what the UFC is doing, and it's working for the UFC.
As far as baseball, the big problem now, obviously, is the strikeout ratio, that nobody knows how to put a ball in play, and nobody can lay down a bunt.
And it's boring to watch, frankly.
I mean, as a lifelong baseball fan, I was always fond of teams that knew how to steal a base and knew how to manufacture a run, and manufacturing runs has gone completely the way of the dodo bird.
Is there any way to fix baseball other than lowering the mound, basically, at this point?
It's a great question.
I mean, they've never seen anything like this, where there are more strikeouts than there are balls in play.
And, you know, it's challenging.
Also, I think baseball's issue is a guy like Mike Trout.
The NBA does a better job, I think, of broadcasting their stars.
And we talk about this sometimes.
I think it's because you can watch a baseball game and the best player in the world can look very average.
Whereas if you watch LeBron James play basketball, he's going to be good every game.
Mike Trout can go out, go 0 for 4, make a fielding error, and you're like, ah, I'm not sure he's that good.
So I think the level of excellence in baseball is much more difficult to achieve every single game.
Should they allow the intentional walk?
I went to an Angels game recently.
They intentionally walked out three times.
Yeah, I think the sport is what's crazy.
As you watch the game now, I think baseball has changed more than any other sport.
Because you look at the way the guys line up on the field, right?
When we were kids growing up and we were tearing open the Ken Griffey Jr.
1989, you know, upper deck card, like, oh, number one card, you know, like, that was amazing.
There's a left fielder, there's a center fielder, there's a right.
Like nowadays you look at the shifts and everything else and it's a totally different game.
I think you need to diminish the power of the pitcher, but I think you simultaneously can't diminish the power of the pitcher too much because the other thing about that is the home run rate is staggering.
So you're basically like home runs or strikeouts and there's very little middle of the ground, middle of the road, which is where all of the strategy comes into play and everything else.
I don't know the answer for baseball.
I think baseball is in a challenging place.
And by the way, we mentioned NASCAR, right?
I talked recently with NASCAR people.
They peaked in 2005.
Nobody can even figure out what happened with NASCAR in the last 13 years.
The sport has almost disappeared, right?
So, I think the one thing we've got to keep in mind, and the reason why maybe I mentioned using the football, Ultimate Frisbee, or what sport I would invest in, is things happen really quickly now.
So you can go from some being the top of the world, which I think the NFL was to two years ago, to being significantly in an issue in 10 years in a way that you couldn't have 50, 60, 80 years ago where you had to build for a long time and things didn't change that much from year to year.
With regard to basketball, what do you think is the problem with basketball?
Putting aside the politics, is there a problem with basketball?
Because it seems like the sport itself is pretty robust.
It has a lot of big stars right now.
There are actually some people who can shoot now, which is better than it was.
Everybody wants to be Steph Curry.
When we were kids, everybody wanted to be Michael Jordan.
My kids now, everybody wants to be Steph Curry.
The problem with basketball, I think, right now, and I'm not sure if it's cyclical or if it's a more substantial issue, is if you make the playoffs in the NBA, you don't know that your team has any chance.
There are 16 teams that make the playoffs.
There's about three or four teams that can win a championship every year.
Major League Baseball, you make the playoffs, you can win the World Series.
NFL, in theory, you can win the Super Bowl.
Certainly hockey, God forbid, anybody can win hockey if they make the playoffs.
The 8th seed in the East or West can win.
I think the biggest issue that the NBA has is long regular season, 82 games.
The Warriors can win.
The Rockets, maybe.
I don't think the LeBron and the Lakers are going to be very good.
Maybe the Celtics.
There's like three or four teams that can actually win a championship.
When you've got 30 teams, I think in this really sort of complicated era where there's so many different things to compete for your entertainment dollar and your entertainment time, as Reed Hastings says, we compete against sleep now.
If you're competing against sleep, why do 27 teams want to pay attention when their team has no chance to win a championship?
Okay, so back to the sports media for a second and the media in general.
So obviously you made a big splash several months ago when you used your slogan on CNN and everybody lost their mind.
I wanted to get your reaction to that.
I'm banned on CNN.
So the book starts, I always say when your wife texts you inside the house and you don't have like tiny babies that are sleeping, it's probably not a good sign, right?
So I did that, so it's funny, on that Friday It was September, and I was doing a bunch of hits talking about Jemele Hill, the politicization of sports, everything else.
I told my wife, hey, I'm going to do this last hit on CNN, and then we're done, let's go get pizza, we'll take the boys out, and we'll get ready for a weekend of football, just kind of chill.
It's been a busy week.
I've been doing a lot of, you know, we work all the time.
And I was like, let's just go chill, we'll have pizza, we'll have a chill night.
So my wife is watching downstairs.
And I finish the interview and they basically kick me off the air and shortly thereafter my wife texts me from inside the house and it says, just this one line, do I need to put the house on the market?
Because my wife's fear, and this kind of goes to what we started talking about, is my goal every day is to tell you exactly what I think.
That can be very dangerous.
And so my wife's fear from the get-go is, like we're talking right now and everybody's listening, if this camera went off, what I'm saying to you and hopefully our conversation would be no different if we were sitting down and just relaxing and watching a game together.
So when I talk for three hours every morning on the radio, I try to talk like I'm sitting at a bar watching games with guys, right?
That's my target audience.
And I hope women are entertained by it too, but 90% of my audience is gonna be guys who like sports.
And so I try to be as honest as I can.
And my wife's fear has been that the mob is gonna come for me, right?
Like the mob has come for other people.
So my response, I went downstairs and she's like, I think this is gonna be really bad.
You know, I think this is gonna be really bad for us.
And it's funny, like I've been saying, things are going so well.
I said, you know what?
It wouldn't shock me if we got invited to the Trump White House.
My wife voted for Hillary Clinton.
So I was like, you'd go to the White House, right?
And I didn't vote for Trump, I voted for Gary Johnson.
But you know, I'm not an anti, like Trump's driving me crazy.
We were having an argument about whether you have an obligation to go to the White House regardless of who the president is.
My argument is yes.
If the president wants to meet with you or you get a chance to go at some point, shake a hand, you go.
I've never met the president.
I'd love to do it at some point, regardless of party.
And she's like, no, I wouldn't go.
I'm a Hillary Clinton supporter.
And so we were having that discussion.
And I go downstairs.
And so things have been going pretty well.
And she's like, I think this is going to be really bad.
And the truth of the matter is I almost got fired from my radio show over this.
And thankfully, the people who were in positions of power at the radio show were like, no, we're not going to fire him over this.
It's not a major thing.
And first of all, I've been saying that the First Amendment and boobs is a funny line to me, because if I just say I'm a First Amendment absolutist, it goes over everybody's head.
Right, because it's such a cliche to say that really it's when you unpack it that it makes sense.
So I thought, you know, it's like the great line from Sling Blade back in the day, like, and I'll probably get in trouble for this, but I think like the character said, I got an issue with midgets and antiques, right?
It's an amazing combination, like two things that don't really fit together.
Like if you just said I have an issue with midgets, you'd be like, that's kind of weird.
I just have a thing with antiques.
It's the juxtaposition of two incongruous pairings.
So to me, that kind of made it funny and interesting.
And so when I said it, I'd said it on CNN the day before.
Like I didn't think it was remotely controversial, but when she reacted, I am a don't slow down.
I am a don't slow down.
I'm going to go full speed ahead and keep saying it.
I'm going to go full speed ahead and keep saying it.
She wanted me to apologize.
She wanted me to apologize.
She's like, as a woman, I was like, would be sexist if I was talking differently to a woman, right?
She's like, as a woman, I was like, would be sexist if I was talking differently to a woman, right?
That's my argument.
But that's my argument.
I try to talk the exact same to guy, girl, everybody else.
I try to talk the exact same to guy, girl, everybody else.
And the folks on CNN drop language that far exceeds that every New Year's Eve.
And the folks on CNN drop language that far sees that every New Year's Eve.
And the crazy thing was Hugh Hefner died a couple of months later.
Right, that's exactly right.
And if there's anybody who loves the First Amendment and boobs, it is Hugh Hefner, right?
And CNN was lionizing the guy.
They were talking about how much they love him.
I'm like, how can you ban me for basically saying in three words the entire philosophy of Hugh Hefner, right?
I mean, it was just so poor and artificial.
The pearl clutching was just insane on the part of these folks in the media.
So fake.
And it was all lies.
Again, I mean, these are people who were, like, Kathy Griffin was simulating oral sex on national television on New Year's Eve with members of the CNN crew, and they were getting on your case for spelling out the word booze.
Well, they were smoking weed live on the air at the most recent, and Brooke Baldwin said, like, that she has bigger balls than Don Lemon.
That's right.
I'm fine, like, if you want to, outrage culture in general drives me insane, but that was just such, frankly, bulls**t. I mean, there was no truth to it at all.
It was really absurd.
OK, so what are your fixes for the media?
So we've been very critical throughout this show of everything that the sports media is doing.
I totally agree with you that a little bit of diversity at ESPN would go a long way.
Yeah.
Like every time I'm at the gym and somebody turns on Around the Horn, it's like, oh good, five people who agree with each other.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Perfect.
Just what I've always wanted.
I am big and increasingly have become more so every year on the idea of I like to have conversations with people from a variety of different perspectives, right?
And so having a lot of people who look different and think the same is very much in vogue in media.
I think it needs to be the exact opposite.
I think we need to focus less on what people look like and more on what they say.
And so in my book, and I keep referencing the book because I've spent so much time thinking about this, I say, the idea that you preface your opinion by what your identity is, is to me insane.
Like, if I said to you every opinion that I got, I look in the camera and I say, as a white man with green eyes, I believe, you'd be like, why do I care that Clay Travis has, you know, like, is a white guy with green eyes or brown hair or whatever else?
My opinion is what it is.
So the idea that my opinion has more validity if I'm female or trans or whatever else, I think this cosmetic diversity ridiculousness that we have ended up in is absurd.
Find the best people who make the best arguments, who have the most cogent analysis, put them on air, and let them debate if that's the kind of situation you're going to have.
I also think a difference between opinion and news is really something that is getting lost.
I think if you have an opinion, make it clear that it's an opinion, not that you're trying to argue that this is legitimate news.
I see this in sports all the time.
Like Dak Prescott came out and said that he was going to stand for the National Anthem, and they tried to turn him into, you know, like a modern day Uncle Tom, right?
And the article on ESPN that I read about it said, a couple days later, it says, Dak Prescott sticks to Anthem Stan, despite the fact that he has been almost universally criticized, right?
And it uses all these examples of, like, Get Out.
Like, they're like, oh, this is the guy from Get Out.
It has all these different— And Sunken Place and all that.
Yes.
It's supposed to be a news story.
But it's only saying that he's been criticized, right?
Many say.
Many say.
There are a lot of people out there that said, you know what, good for Dak Prescott.
Dallas Cowboy fans who were very happy with that decision.
So, I think the idea that you are covering things objectively, I also think, just come out and say it.
Like, I say exactly what I believe, but I also give you my background.
Like, I didn't vote for Donald Trump, I voted for Gary Johnson.
I worked in democratic politics.
You can agree or disagree with me, but I think just owning it, like even in sports universe, I grew up a fan of the University of Tennessee, right?
I talk a lot about Southeastern Conference football.
If that means that you don't trust my opinion on Alabama, that's fine, but I'm going to give you my entire roster of background.
It's amazing to me.
You know, ESPN doesn't employ a single person who has publicly admitted to voting for Donald Trump.
There are a lot of people out there who came out and said, I voted for Barack Obama, right?
Tons of people.
They are so afraid, the Trump voters are, that if they come out and admit to voting for Trump, that they'll get fired.
Well, that's not fair.
That's not a, and I know by the way, a lot of the people that you see on the air who would have voted for Donald Trump.
And so whether you like Trump or not, I think it's scary that we, you hit on this a lot, and this is why we're so simpatico on many of these things.
I think there's a big difference between, you talked about like the, The sort of atmosphere of what's allowed to be said.
The reason why I found myself moving more right wing, and right wing is the wrong thing, but towards the middle, like whatever you want to say.
Away from the left anyway.
Away from the left.
Well said.
Is there's a difference between I disagree with you because, and I disagree with you and your opinion is not acceptable.
And the left wing in this country now embraces the idea that there are acceptable and unacceptable opinions to have.
And I find that terrifying.
That's the most threatening thing, I think, in our country today, alongside of identity politics, is this idea, like you said, there are some opinions you could have, like Adolf Hitler is a great human being.
Somebody will probably pull that and they'll be like, look what Clay Travis said.
If you wanted to have that opinion, I think that's so far outside the bounds of acceptable opinions that that's okay.
But even still within that scope, this we have expanded what is acceptable and unacceptable to the point where it's like a pinprick, right?
Like so that Kurt Schilling cannot believe that North Carolina has the right to pass a law responding to Charlotte.
And so it really, it drives me crazy.
And I spent so much time as I wrote this book, like trying to dive into it.
And I think just honesty is a big part.
I say I have four goals every day.
Smart, original, funny, and authentic.
And if I can hit those four, I know that I have succeeded for the day.
And some days I do, some days I don't.
But the authenticity I think is the most important one.
Well, Clay Travis, it's great to have you here.
Listen to Clay every morning on Fox Sports Radio, 6 to 9 a.m.
Eastern.
And check out his new book, Republicans Buy Sneakers Too, have left his ruining sports with politics.
It's available September 25th, so go check that out.
I'm sure it's going to be fantastic.
Clay, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
I appreciate your work.
Thanks for everything you're doing.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Associate producers, Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Caromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
And title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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