Ben Shapiro dissects the Las Vegas shooting fallout, framing leftist reactions—like Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ measured response vs. Jimmy Kimmel’s rapid gun-control push—as emotionally driven "emotivism" exploiting tragedy for ideology. He ties this to broader cultural decline, citing Puerto Rico’s hurricane recovery media frenzy over facts and Dr. Sean Smith’s dating advice warning men against impulsive relationships due to mental health risks. The episode argues leftist policies—from academia’s victimhood narratives to over-medication—foster societal instability, suggesting ideological extremism mirrors individual psychological disorders. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, this is the Andrew Clavin Show, and today we'll be asking, is the left out of its mind?
Yes, it is.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you again tomorrow.
Oh, no, wait, we're going to talk a little bit more than that.
We're starting again without our song and without a little comedy at the intro.
Not to, you know, not to be somber and solemn, and it's not that this is obviously a somber and solemn occasion when we're talking about all these deaths in Vegas.
But, you know, I'm not trying to peddle my emotions as mattering to you or making anything I say more important.
That is the left's job, and they did it all through yesterday.
And I have to tell you, when I look at this story, I'm seeing a story of mental illness, but it's not just the mental illness of this evildoer who opened fire for reasons we still don't know, but it also is the reaction to this from our entertainment, media, and political overlords on the left who really can't let 24 hours go by and let us mourn without trying to use our emotions to peddle their philosophy.
And I think that that is, there's something wrong with that.
That is not okay.
And I'm not even going to argue about the guns.
You know, I'll say something about that, but I don't even want to argue about the issues.
I just want to talk about ways people react to a tragedy and ways that you don't react to a tragedy.
We've got the mailbag coming up tomorrow.
Do not forget, go on.
What do you always have to remind me?
You go on the podcast button, right?
On this on the website, if you're a subscriber, you got to subscribe.
You go on the podcast button, you press the podcast button, then it just says mailbag.
Mailbag.
How much easier could that be?
You can ask about religion, you can ask about your personal life, you can ask about politics.
We answer all those questions, and the answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Just a lousy 10 bucks a month to subscribe.
You don't have to leave after we're done with you on Facebook and YouTube.
You don't have to come on over to the dailywire.com.
You just watch the whole thing at thedailywire.com for a lousy $10 a month.
And if you subscribe for a year, it's only a lousy $100 a month, so you're saving a tremendous amount of money.
$20, I think, isn't it?
That's my figuring that out.
And you also get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, which automatically fills with leftist tears every time Donald Trump makes a speech.
Also, today we have Sexual Follies and we have an author, Sean Smith, who wrote the Tactical Guide to Women.
So I know we're going to do this with Jess in the room and she's going to grade him afterwards and tell us whether or not he actually knows what he's talking about.
Plus, it's autumn.
Did you realize that?
It's fall.
It's October.
My God, it happens so fast.
You know what that means?
In California, it means the temperature goes from 75 to 74, I think, and a leaf.
William Faulkner said, one damn leaf falls in one damn canyon, and they say it's autumn.
It also means your Starbucks coffee starts to taste different.
And it means it's a good time to give the person you love something that will delight her and surprise her.
If it's a hurry, you know, you might want to say to her, let's go to a horror movie and watch people be torn to shreds.
Or, or, here's a better idea: send her some flowers.
Send her some flowers.
ProFlowers.com, the place I use to send flowers because it is so easy, so convenient, and the flowers come and they are all fresh.
They have a perfect gift for anyone who's excited about fall, a long-lasting bouquet in their favorite fall colors.
They're best-selling cinnamon cider roses.
I have to be honest, I haven't looked at these yet.
I haven't tried them, but anything that's called cinnamon cider roses has to be good, right?
That really sounds nice.
It's a great option for a birthday, an anniversary, any fall occasion, or go with one of the classics like 100 autumn blooms or a dozen autumn roses.
You can't lose because no matter which bouquet you send, my listeners get 20% off any of ProFlowers' unique bouquets for $29 or more.
ProFlowers bouquets are guaranteed to stay fresh for at least seven days or your money back, and you control the delivery date.
They give you more bloom for your buck, big, beautiful flowers, more stems for your money, and long-lasting freshness.
I have used this for years and years and years.
I mean, maybe it feels like about 10, 15 years I've been using ProFlowers.com because it's just so easy.
And I'm a guy who forgets things.
So it's usually like the day before my wife's birthday.
I think, ah, you know, proflowers.com.
To get 20% off all bouquets of $29 or more, go to proflowers.com and use my code AK at checkout.
That seems easy.
I was going to say, how do you spell that?
AK.
And it's important to us because it tells them that you are listening to the show and you're answering the ad, so it helps us a lot.
If you go to proflowers.com, use the code AK, you will get 20% off all bouquets of $29 or more, a great way to celebrate autumn, autumn.
So, you know, I'm going to say some things about mental illness today, and I don't want anybody to take this as an attack on the mentally ill.
Most mentally ill people are harmless, but there are kinds of mental illness that are not harmless.
Mental Illness Matters00:14:06
Obviously, this guy, Stephen Paddock, who opened fire, you know, you can say, we don't know what his motives are yet.
Everybody's speculating.
ISIS has claimed credit twice.
They've claimed credit twice, but law enforcement says they can't find any connection between the guy and any religious or political organization.
There's some people posting stuff saying they saw him at an anti-Trump rally.
We don't know that.
People speculating, all kinds of speculating.
We just don't know anything about it.
We just don't know.
He was some kind of gambler, it seems like.
You know, apparently had millions of dollars, but we really don't know.
So let's start.
Let's start from a baseline of what's a sane response to a terrible, terrible tragedy like this.
And it is a terrible tragedy, and we've seen a lot.
And we've been through a lot these last few weeks.
Hurricanes and all this stuff going on.
You know, it's just been a lot of stuff, a lot of tragedy to take in.
Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the presidential spokesman, spokeswoman, talking about the first thing she does is she pays tribute to all the people who did wonderful, heroic things in this moment.
And the reason this is important, and obviously she gets very emotional.
We've all been very emotional during this period.
You can't read about this stuff without tearing up.
But the reason it's important to remember this is because one guy can cause so much damage.
As we saw in 9-11, just a handful of people can cause so much damage, so much tragedy.
But think about the fact that instead of entropy constantly wearing away our society, our society is constantly building up.
It's constantly getting bigger, better.
Technology is improving.
They're giving Nobel Prizes to people who've made wonderful this week, to people who've made wonderful discoveries about the way we age, things that's going to help cure diseases in the future.
People are doing wonderful things, building stuff, loving each other, creating children all the time.
And the reason this is news is because it doesn't happen all that much.
I mean, I know it seems like it happens a lot, but it doesn't happen all that much.
So here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders paying tribute to the heroes of Las Vegas.
This is cut number two.
One man, 29-year-old Sonny Melton, had traveled from Tennessee to Las Vegas for the concert with his wife Heather.
When the bullets began raining down from above, Sonny shielded her from danger, selflessly giving up his life to save hers.
They'd been married for just over a year.
Others risked their own lives to save people that they had never met.
Mike McGarry of Philadelphia laid on top of students at the concert to protect them from the gunfire.
They're 20.
I'm 53, he said, and I've lived a good life.
Lindsay Padgett and her fiancé Mike Jay fled for cover during the attack and immediately returned to the scene with their pickup truck to help transport the wounded to nearby hospitals.
Gail Davis, who was attending the concert with her husband, said she owes her life to a brave police officer who instinctively served as a human shield, protecting her from harm.
Sadly, multiple police officers, both on duty and off duty, were among those killed or injured.
But what these people did for each other says far more about who we are as Americans than the cowardly acts of a killer ever could.
The Gospel of John reminds us that there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for a friend.
The memory of those who displayed the ultimate expression of love in the midst of an unimaginable act of hate will never fade.
Their examples will serve as an eternal reminder that the American spirit cannot and will not ever be broken.
In the days ahead, we will grieve as a nation.
We will honor the memory of those lost as a nation.
And we will come together, united as one nation, under God and indivisible.
So what's it take?
You know, 24 hours.
That really is what we're talking about.
For the first 24 hours, that's really all we need to talk about.
Immediately, a reporter goes to the gun control agenda.
And it is like clockwork.
If they don't have to tell us how wonderful Muslims are because a Muslim just killed people, if they don't have to blame the GOP for every neo-Nazi loon who wanders around and kills one person and then do weeks and weeks and weeks of reports about the white supremacist threat that virtually doesn't exist in this country, you know, if they don't have anything else, if they don't have to make excuses for the Bernie bro and tell us how it wasn't Bernie Sanders' fault that the guy opened fire, they go to gun control because this is what they want.
This is a big deal, and we're going to talk about this a little bit, but it's just the lack of restraint.
I just want to talk about what is going on in the guy's mind that he has to go there today, today.
It's not like he's not going to be there tomorrow.
He's going to be there tomorrow.
Sarah Sanders is going to be there tomorrow.
He's got to go there today.
And listen to the sanity of Sarah Sanders' response, which is the only response, the only rational response you can make.
Listen to the question.
Listen to her sane answer.
Many times when these horrible massacres occur, it leads to questions about gun control.
Has this particular massacre made the president think anything more about pursuing tighter gun laws, such as background checks to prevent massacres like this from happening at Canada?
Look, this is an unspeakable tragedy.
Today is a day for consoling the survivors and mourning those we lost.
Our thoughts and prayers are certainly with all of those individuals.
There's a time and place for a political debate, but now is the time to unite as a country.
There's currently an open and ongoing law enforcement investigation.
A motive is yet to be determined, and it would be premature for us to discuss policy when we don't fully know all the facts or what took place last night.
So that, of course, is rational.
Why is it rational?
Because the time, how about in your own life?
Is the time to make decisions about your own life, about the policies of your own life, when you're upset, when you're grieving?
When they tell you if somebody you love dies, you should wait a year.
If somebody you're very close, like a spouse dies, you should wait a year before you make any big decisions because you've got to calm down, you've got to get rational.
Isn't that—but the left has an expression, right?
Don't let an emergency go to waste.
Don't let a crisis go to waste because they are playing off emotion.
But the thing is, they're not just playing off your emotion, they're playing off their own emotions.
And that's one of the things I'm going to talk about.
Now, why do you wait?
You wait to get the facts.
Listen, I'm not a gun nod.
I shoot sometimes.
You know, I own a gun, but I'm not a gun person who worships at the altar of guns or anything like that.
You know, I understand that there are debates to be had.
This guy apparently had some gizmos that helped turn semi-automatic weapons into automatic weapons.
If that should be illegal, I'm willing to debate that, but not today.
Not today.
Why?
Because we've got to see, did he break any laws?
I mean, they keep going to guns as if guns were their issue here.
But AEI, I think it was, just put out a chart showing that since 1994, gun ownership has skyrocketed.
It's gone up like 56%.
The murder rate has at the same time gone down 49%.
So you can't make the argument that gun ownership and the murder rate correlate.
You just can't make that argument.
It's not necessary that the murder rate went down because of gun ownership going up, though that's a possibility.
Correlation isn't cause, but it's probably better law enforcement.
That's why I think the murder rate has gone down.
There's been a lot better law enforcement.
So you can't say that.
And people keep saying, well, in Australia, where they don't have a Second Amendment, they confiscated all these guns and their murder rate went down, but it went down about the same as ours.
So it went down the same as ours.
So what are they talking about?
And by the way, just to show that this issue is political, the FBI recently released new crime data.
And there was a correlation of where murders spiked and where Black Lives Matter had been most active.
What Heather McDonald calls the Ferguson effect.
So why aren't they worried about that?
Why aren't they saying, hey, you know what?
We got to stop this Black Lives Matter stuff.
You know, we got to stop CNN from going on and saying, hands up, don't shoot, when that never happened.
We got to stop this because when they pull the police out of these neighborhoods, people start to die.
They're not talking about that.
It's all agenda.
It's all agenda and it's all emotion.
And let me talk before I show you some of this video, which really did get to me.
Let me just talk about why the left, you know, I believe that ideas are the most formative things about people.
I believe that when we're talking about black people, for instance, in this country, we're not really talking about black people.
I don't care what color they are because a lot of the dysfunction that you see in poor black communities, you see in poor white communities.
You're talking about the ideas that are in people's heads.
That is what forms them.
The ideas, the religious ideas, whether you're an atheist or a religious person, that idea forms you.
All kinds of whether you grew up under freedom, that forms you.
Whether you believe in top-down government or bottom-up government, all these ideas are what make you who you are.
Now, a while back, just two weeks ago, wasn't it?
We had the philosopher Edward Phaser on, and we were talking about Aristotelian ideas of natural law that begin with the idea of what things are for.
How can you know what's good or bad if you don't know what a thing is for?
How can I know whether I should use this corkscrew to open a bottle or stick it in my eye unless I know what the thing is for?
And it's the same thing with human beings.
If you don't know what a human being is for, if you don't know what his ultimate goal is, if you don't know what good life you're aiming toward, then you can't know whether something is good or bad because you can't know whether it's advancing you toward that goal.
Without that idea, which the left has lost entirely, and I'm not talking about your average liberal Democrat voter.
I'm talking about the left thought leaders.
I'm talking about the people who are the media and our entertainment media and our academy.
If you give away that idea and you believe that life is purposeless and people are purposeless and people don't have a purpose and a cause and a reason for being, then all you've got left is what feels right.
It's called emotivism, right?
It's the idea that when you talk about morals, you're really just talking about your emotions.
So when I'm talking about facts about guns and all that, that's one thing.
But when I say guns are bad, I'm just talking about how I feel.
And the problem with emotivism is that sometimes it's in conflict with the facts.
And if it's in conflict with the facts and you don't change your mind, you're essentially acting like a crazy person.
You're acting just like somebody is mentally ill because you're not relating to reality, which brings me to the late night comedians.
And we, here at the Daily Wire, we put together a little montage of yesterday's comedians suddenly doing this thing where they all have the serious faces and they all got rid of the monologue.
And fine, again, we're all unhappy, we're all emotional.
And they start to sell gun control, show after show after show.
And I didn't even put all of them in it because I didn't want to go on forever.
Here's the montage.
This morning, we have children without parents and fathers without sons, mothers without daughters.
We lost two police officers.
We lost a nurse from Tennessee, a special ed teacher from a local school here in Manhattan Beach.
And it's the kind of thing that it makes you want to throw up or give up.
Gun violence should not be a staple of American life.
Some say it's too early to talk about gun control.
For those victims last night, it's far too late.
Congress can be heroes by doing literally anything.
Universal background checks.
Or come up with a better answer.
Enforce Obama's executive order that denied mentally ill gun purchases or a better answer.
Reinstate the assault weapons ban or come up with a better answer.
Anything but nothing.
We've talked about gun violence on this show before, and I'm not sure what else I can say.
I also know nothing I say will make any difference at all.
But to Congress, I would just like to say, are there no steps we can take as a nation to prevent gun violence?
Or is this just how it is and how it's going to continue to be?
Last night, the White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said this is not the time.
Or actually, it was today, this morning, she said it was not the time for political debate.
And I don't know, we have 59 innocent people dead.
It wasn't their time either.
So I think now is the time for political debate.
So, first of all, I used to have a girlfriend who cried every time she wanted something.
Now I just have Jimmy Kimmel.
Like, you know, how often is this guy going to use his tears?
You know, we're all in tears.
We're all upset.
We're all, you know, but why does that, that doesn't make you a better person.
It doesn't make you, you know, I mean, sure, it makes you a human being, and I'm glad you're a human being, but it doesn't make your points any better.
It doesn't make your ideas any better.
And this idea that, yes, we must act now before people forget, before they become unemotional.
No, the exact opposite is true.
The exact opposite is true.
We should wait.
We're dealing with an important right.
The right to bear arms in this country is important because we're a bottom-up country.
We are a place theoretically, I know the left doesn't like this, but theoretically, the idea is that the guy in his general store in the Midwest and the guy in his big office in New York are the bosses of themselves, right?
And the government is given certain limited areas that they can control.
Now, I know we're losing this to this massive bureaucracy called the deep state, and this is part of the reason I think people get so angry because they don't even know who to blame sometimes.
But that is the idea, and guns protect that right.
We don't have guns.
The Constitution didn't allow us to have guns because they wanted us to go hunting.
They wanted us to have guns so that we were the final militia that defends our rights because that was how the country was formed.
And they, you know, this whole thing that we have to, oh, and the other thing that they say that's just not true is we have to do something.
We have to do something.
Maybe not.
Maybe we can't do anything.
We don't know whether we have to do something.
We don't know if there's anything to do.
We don't know who this guy is.
Maybe ISIS is right.
Maybe he was working for them.
We don't know.
Maybe he's an anti-Trump guy, like the right says, doing that.
Why Texture Matters00:03:07
We don't know.
I mean, how do we know anything except for the fact we know he was mentally ill?
And that is a problem.
And I really do believe, I really do believe that the left is creating a psycho-society, a psychopathic society.
I'll talk about that more in a little bit.
But here's one of the things I agree with about the left.
Yesterday we were talking about the media and the media was saying, Bob Schieffer, I think it was, was saying, you know, yeah, we have all this news.
We're overwhelmed with news.
We're overwhelmed with social media.
But we don't know what's true and what's not true.
And I have to say, this is true, and this is the reason you have to read deeply about everything.
And what helps you to read deeply are going to the people who actually spend money to send out reporters and cover the stories.
And a lot of those places happen in magazines.
And texture.com is an app that gives you so many magazines.
It is one of the most addictive apps I have ever looked at.
I always joke whenever I do this ad that I'm basically selling a heroin, because once you go into this thing, you will not come back.
It just has incredible, incredible depth and incredible variety of magazines for a really low price.
Let me just read you some of the titles.
It goes everything from People, Esquire, Time, Reader's Digest, National Geographic Sports, Illustrated Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, Vanity Fair Vogue, Fast Company, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan.
You heard that there's some left-wing stuff in there.
There's some right-wing stuff in there.
But these are people who are responsible so that you can see on the page and judge for yourself whether you are getting the truth or not.
It's searchable.
You can mark anything you like and check out back issues, view bonus video content, and they even curate articles and magazines just for you or whoever you're giving texture to as a gift this year.
Texture is normally $9.99 a month, and you get over 200 magazines for that.
So $9.99 a month is like, that's a really good price for over 200 magazines.
If you sign up right now at texture.com slash Clavin, you get K-L-A-V-A-N, texture.com slash Claven, you get a 14-day free trial.
Try it because what will happen is you'll go in one day and you will look up and it'll be 14 days later and you'll think, yeah, this is pretty good.
I like this.
So why subscribe to just a couple of magazines when you can have all of your favorites on your smartphone or tablet all the time for way less?
Plus, Texture was selected as one of Apple's top 2016 iPad apps.
So start your free trial now and download the Texture app.
Texture is offering my listeners 14-day free trial when you go to texture.com slash Clavin, 14 days to try texture for free at texture.com slash Claven.
Let me say it one more time.
Texture.com slash Clavin.
It is so addictive and you will really enjoy it.
We got the mailbag tomorrow, so I want to remind you of that.
But we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Oh, we also have, you know, we have sexual follies today.
And today we're going to have Dr. Sean Smith, who's a clinical psychologist who has written the guy, The Tactical Guide to Women.
So you're going to want to stay tuned for that at the end of the show.
If you want to continue listening, you've got to come over to thedailywire.com.
If you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, you can watch the whole show at thedailywire.com.
Dying Realities Ignored00:15:51
If you subscribe for a lousy $100 for the entire year, you get the leftist tears tumbler.
It keeps your leftist tears cold.
It keeps them hot.
However you like your leftist tears.
I don't really like to drink the tears of leftists, but they're just so good.
I have to.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
So, you know, I really want to continue talking about this a little bit more.
This idea of emotivism, the idea that your emotions are the only guide you have toward morality is nuts and it drives people nuts.
And I really believe, you know, a lot of the stuff we see on college campuses, I believe is induced mental illness.
Now, a lot of kids, you know, nowadays when kids are depressed or when they're inattentive or when they're active, you know, they don't send them to somebody who'll talk to them about the fact that their parents are divorced or their mother wasn't home or whatever it is that was bothering them.
They drug them.
They give them drugs.
And the drugs get rid of their depression.
Everybody says, oh, this is so much better.
You know, now I gave my little boy Riddle and he doesn't run around like a little boy.
He sits in a seat like a zombie.
It's so much easier.
Everybody's so much happier.
And then, of course, these kids go off to school and they stop taking the drugs because who wants to be drugged up all the time?
And then they're nuts, you know?
I mean, then the mental illness comes out and they get a lot of depression, a lot of suicide, a lot of stuff that comes out in campuses.
Plus, there are these college professors selling them this idea that if they're angry, someone else is to blame.
If they're angry, society is at fault.
If they're angry, they've been abused.
They've been there on some intersectional chart of abuse.
And this induced psychopathology that I really believe is now affecting the left throughout as Donald Trump takes away from them the reality they wanted there.
They wanted Hillary Clinton.
Reality didn't pan out.
They feel so bad.
They feel so bad that it must be right to abandon their journalistic principles.
It must be right to abandon the search for truth.
If they hate guns, let me ask you this.
Steve Scalise, the congressman who was shot and almost killed by that Bernie bro at the Washington softball game, he recently came back, a very beautiful scene.
He came back and people were cheering him and he made a speech and all this stuff.
He was recently on CBS, and I believe this interview was before Vegas.
So I'm not saying this is in relation to Vegas, but the woman said he's a Scalise is a big defender of the Second Amendment.
And the interviewer asked him, how can this be when you yourself were shot?
And here's Scalise's cool, non-emotional, non-emotive answer.
But you're now a victim of gun violence.
Yeah, but I'm also saved by well-trained people who had guns to shoot back.
And whatever the weapon's going to be, I mean, if it's not a gun, it'll be a hand grenade or it'll be a knife or an axe.
You know, I think what's important to focus on is that we have strong rights in this country and we're protected by them.
Do you think all congressmen and women should be able to have concealed carry permits?
I'm a strong believer in concealed carry legislation.
It comes with proper training, and I do think it's important to remember that if you're going to have a firearm, it's important that you know how to use it and how to protect your family so that it doesn't get into the wrong hands.
But it's every day in America you see people use their firearms to protect them against a criminal.
So there's a guy who actually took a bullet from a mad shooter and is defending the right to bear arms.
Why isn't he more authoritative than weepy Jimmy Kimmel?
Why does Jimmy Kimmel think that his tears, and again, I'm not making fun of his emotions, I'm making fun of the fact that he uses his emotions to sell a political point of view that he doesn't know that much about.
I mean, these guys keep saying stuff like they talk about, oh, the gun show loophole.
It's not a loophole.
It's the Second Amendment, pal.
You know, there are rules against, there are rules when you go into a store and buy guns, and some of those rules don't apply to private sales between people.
That's not a loophole.
It's not a loophole.
That's the Second Amendment.
He says a lot of things, Jimmy Kimmel, that just aren't true and just aren't accurate, but he's crying, so it's all important.
Let me just show you some of the true craziness that came out yesterday because of this emotivism.
CBS Corporation fired a vice president in business affairs for comments she made on social media regarding the mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas.
Her name was Haley Geftman Gold.
And she wrote on her Facebook page that she was not sympathetic to the victims of the shooting because most country music fans, she said, are Republicans.
And she wrote, if they wouldn't do anything when children were murdered, meaning if Republicans wouldn't pass gun control after Sandy Hook, I have no hope that repugs, as she calls them, will ever do the right thing.
I'm actually not even sympathetic because country music fans often are Republican gun toters.
The comments were deleted, but not before they were picked up by a number of blogs and websites, and a petition was posted online that called for her firing, and she was fired, and she should have been fired.
I mean, come on.
Richard Dawkins, the atheist, right, the famous atheist.
This guy's a scientist, right?
He tweets, I can barely read this size.
He tweets, Dern Tootin, great shooting, cool dude, certain he's Second Amendment rots.
Hell yeah.
I mean, 60 people are dead.
59 people are dead.
You know, I mean, that is, there's something wrong.
What I'm saying is it's not just mean.
It's not just cool.
There's something wrong.
There's a disconnect between the reality of the situation and the reaction.
You know, here was Jeff Zelaney.
I always have to remind you, he's the New York Times, former New York Times reporter who was a White House reporter whose first interview with Barack Obama, he asked him, what enchants you about the presidency?
Just a complete left-winger.
So now he's on, I think he's CNN.
And, you know, Trump, the hilarious thing yesterday, if hilarious is the word I want, ironic, I guess is the word I want, was that Donald Trump was restrained.
You know, Donald Trump, not the most restrained person in the world, he got up and said, he hit a pitch-perfect speech where he said, this is pure evil.
Our minds and thoughts are with the people, the morning people.
We will come together as a nation, blah, Jeff Zelany could barely get the praise out of his mouth without slipping into.
Listen to the Freudian slips in this report.
Of course, Las Vegas is a town that he is connected to and knows well.
His name is emblazoned on the top of a hotel there as well.
He campaigned there a lot.
So this is something that I'm not surprised at all to see him go there visiting early.
But again, I think the moment here is what comes after this.
This invariable, I mean, invariably after today and tomorrow will become a discussion of politics, of guns.
It's not appropriate for that moment today.
You will hear it from some Democrats, but what will this president do in that respect?
Will he take a leadership role in that respect?
We will, of course, watch that as the days unfold.
But the president clearly, as John said, striking pitch-perfect tone there.
And something else, I think, to keep in mind, a lot of these country music porters were likely Trump's supporters.
And this is something that, of course, is hitting the tapestry of all Americans.
And there are going to be victims from across the country here.
This guy's babbling like an idiot, but what he's really saying was Trump only did this because he has a hotel in Vegas and because these are his supporters.
That's what he's saying.
They can't even bring themselves.
And this goes back.
I was talking about this yesterday, but now Trump is in Puerto Rico.
He apparently met with the mayor of San Juan.
That's what it is, right?
Yeah, the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Cruz.
She's the one who's been saying, oh, we're dying here.
We're dying.
And it's all terrible and all this stuff.
I have to play.
This is a long clip, but it's worth playing.
Geraldo Rivera, reliably sentimentalist kind of liberal guy, he interviews her, and he's been covering the island.
And he says, I don't see anybody dying.
There were 16 people who died in these two horrible hurricanes that hit the island.
But he said, but that's it.
So listen to this interview.
Listen to her dance around the question.
I think the president needs to get the information that he needs to get.
And apparently he hasn't been getting it or he hasn't been watching the news.
But are people dying?
I've been traveling around.
I don't see people dying.
I spoke to the doctors.
They saw 53 patients and they had a septic, a person who was septic, but nobody dying.
I wonder.
Well, dying is a continuum, right?
If you don't get fed for seven, eight days and you're a child, you are dying.
If you have 11 people like we took out of a nursing home severely dehydrated, you are dying.
You wish you had characterized that a little more.
It is.
I said it the way it is.
I don't have to characterize anything in any way that is not the reality.
That is the truth.
He who has eyes will be able to see it.
He who has an open heart will be able to feel it.
Those that prefer to be blinded to injustice, that's their issue.
I have no time for that.
How much of that is politics, the fact that you and the president are different parties and...
Well, I'm not a member of the Democratic Party.
Just like he says, I don't see any people dying.
Well, they're not literally dying.
They're dying.
They're dying in spirit.
And the thing is that Trump has claimed that he got all the aid to Puerto Rico he could as fast as he could.
And one of the problems is that a lot of the truckers, a lot of the people on the island who were supposed to transport this stuff weren't there.
And the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, he says the same thing.
He basically confirmed everything that Trump said.
Play this cut.
It's number eight.
He was being questioned, I think, on the view.
And of course, they're asking these anti-Trump questions.
And he said, no, the problem is exactly what Trump said it was.
The president has been in contact with me almost on a daily basis.
So he is aware of the devastation.
And I thank him for issuing pre-land emergency declarations, for issuing a disaster zone declaration verbally as the storm was hitting Puerto Rico.
He has also given instructions to FEMA and other federal agencies to help Puerto Rico.
So that effort is ongoing and it's very good and it's very effective.
However, there are some logistical threats that we're facing.
A lot of the people in Puerto Rico that used to say, for example, truck gas or food from one place to the other have not reported.
So the logistical transportation of the help that's arriving to Puerto Rico is kind of becoming a bottleneck.
So again and again, because they hate Donald Trump so much, because they hate you so much, because they hate the right so much, because they hate America, the basic idea of America so much, they're selling you their emotions as virtue again and again.
It is a pathway to mental illness.
It is a form of mental illness itself to believe that your feelings are an accurate, always an accurate description of the world.
There is, as the Bible says, a time to mourn.
This is a time to mourn.
In your mourning, in your mourning, as anybody will tell you about your personal life, is not when you make policy.
It's not when you start debates.
Why is it so important?
Why is it so important for them to convince you that your virtue is tied up?
Because their virtue is tied up in their emotions because they have no rational system of figuring out what virtue is.
And this is not the time to be discussing this.
This is the time to be sad, which I know is tough.
I know it's tough to do.
But that's all you can do in a situation like this until we know more.
Until we know more.
Our police, our law enforcement will figure it out.
We'll find out more.
We'll have more to discuss.
And we will be here to discuss it.
Now, it is time for sexual follies.
I just, I would just do that every day.
That was 45 minutes of doing it.
Dr. Sean Smith is a clinical psychologist specializing in couples therapy and anxiety disorders.
And if you're part of a couple, you probably have anxiety disorders.
He has written a book called The Tactical Guide to Women, How Men Can Manage Risk in Dating and Marriage.
You can find him on Facebook at Sean T. Smith, P-S-Y-D, or on his blog, docsmith.co.
Dr. Smith, thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Hi, Andrew.
Call me Sean, please.
Oh, thanks, Sean.
So, the tactical guide to women sounds pretty dire.
Why did you decide you needed to write the book?
Well, I've been in this psychology game for a long time working in the clinic here, and I work with a lot of guys and a lot of couples.
And I see these guys who either do really well in marriage or they do very poorly in marriage, and it comes down to the choices that they make, really.
And the research, there's a lot of research that says a good relationship is the best thing that can happen to a man.
A good marriage, we live longer, we're happier, we make more money, we have more sex, we're healthier.
But a bad marriage, you know, the horror stories are everywhere.
And I started noticing all these guys that come in, came in with these horrible relationships that they were in and how it can be devastating.
Just one quick example: within the last week, I met a guy who went through a very costly divorce that he had to fund and pay for.
And his ex-wife got primary custody because he works quite a bit.
And so, his wife, after they got divorced, decided to leave the state, take the kids with her.
And he had no say over this.
He had no legal say, and he couldn't very well follow them because he needed this high-paying job that he has here so that he could support his children and ex-wife that are in another state.
And this is the kind of stuff that just devastates guys.
Well, it does.
And, you know, I have to say, I meet more and more guys.
I have been blessed with one of these weird marriages from God that really has just been absolute delight for 40 years.
But I meet guys, especially young guys, who are saying, you know what, I don't even want, it's too dangerous.
I do not want to get in this game.
Let me ask you this before we get into the actual advice in the tactical guide to women.
Have things changed?
I mean, as you've been watching people develop, do you think the dating scene and the sexing have changed dramatically?
I do think things have changed with the sexting and the availability of the availability of cheap, easy sex.
But there's also, I think, the vast majority of people that are actually looking for some kind of real connection.
And I think one of the things that's changed maybe in the last 50 to 100 years is that women have always been very good at communicating with each other about the risk management that you need to take into account when they bring a man into their lives because they've had to be more attentive to the risk.
It's only been maybe in the last 50 years or so.
I don't know.
I'm not really a sociologist.
But wherever we are now, men need to start attending to this.
And men are not good at, you know, fathers are not good at talking to sons about how to choose a woman and how to bring a person into your life.
Values Alignment Matters00:06:53
Whereas women have been doing this for centuries.
And we need to get good at it because it is now a big risk for us.
So let's talk about that.
I mean, how do you take this risk on?
How do you assess the risk when you're going out on a date?
Well, number one, and this is where I start in the book, is you got to know as a man where your motivations are coming from.
Because we don't get a lot of information from other men about how to choose women.
It's really important that we take a look at why we're choosing women.
What did we learn by watching the men that were around us and what kind of history and what kind of experiences are we bringing into our choices?
Because if we're not attentive to what drives us, then we're just going to be on autopilot and we could have all the wisdom or all the information in the world, but we don't have wisdom in choosing women.
But beyond that, the biggest piece is knowing the basics about what makes a good partner and looking at things like, is a woman emotionally stable?
These are questions that women have been asking for a long time about us.
But we're not asking about them.
Do they have good communication skills?
And not just when skies are blue, but can they communicate when you're having a hard time?
And do they understand that men and women communicate differently and it's not better or worse?
But are they willing to listen to our side, our method of communication?
Do they have some basic mental health problems that sort of permeate society, like substance abuse, depression, anxiety, personality disorders I touch on in the book?
These are all things that if you're going to be in the dating arena and you're thinking about bringing somebody into your life, you better have a little wisdom about what makes relationships work.
You're essentially saying, I mean, everybody who really pays attention realizes that women are a lot more practical than men when it comes to dating.
I mean, men, you know, seriously, I married my wife because she was hot and beautiful and, you know, and all this stuff.
It was only later that I realized that I'd done a good thing.
And I think men get swept away in the visuals and the sexual attraction in a way that women sometimes don't.
I mean, women are really thinking, are you a good provider?
Women know what they want better, don't they?
Yeah, and you and I have a very similar story.
I married a hot, beautiful woman who was smart and funny and all that.
And it's only been, we've been married 18 years or so.
It's only been like in the last 10 years that I really appreciate how good this is.
And I, despite myself, I stumbled into something good because I was not thinking about it and I wasn't planning.
Yeah, women do think about these things.
What do you think are some of the danger signs?
I mean, you say, like, look for a woman who's emotionally stable and all this stuff, but what are the kind of obvious things that guys miss when they're on a date?
The obvious things that guys miss, because, and actually, let me jump back to your previous point.
There is some research that says that we are more vulnerable to falling in love quicker or getting attached quicker or becoming sort of territorial about a woman and considering her something that we need to have.
And so, yes, we are, to your previous point, vulnerable to that, whereas women tend to be a little more thoughtful.
And that's kind of counterintuitive, but there's some research to back that up.
And as far as the obvious things people need, guys need to be looking for the things that we don't see are like, how does she treat the people in her life?
How does she talk about her exes?
If every one of her exes fell from grace, well, guess what?
You're going to fall from grace at some point.
If they're all jerks, you're going to be a jerk.
Looking at her friends, the people that she surrounds herself with, we get very narrow-minded on this woman that we think we need to have, and we're not paying attention to the people that she chooses to have in her life.
They say that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
That can be very telling.
But one of the things that guys really need to be attentive to is taking their time because the qualities that make for that reduce your risk of ending up in family court and that sort of thing, they show up over a long period of time.
And we have this honeymoon phase that's been quantified as like nine to 18 months where we're not thinking straight and they're not thinking straight.
And we need to get past that and then give it time and then see what shows up in her personality and her social circle.
That's a long time, nine to 18 months.
I'd always heard it was more like six months that you could sort of wait for the chemicals to pass and get a clearer view.
I mean, do you really think people have to wait a year and a half before they make any big decisions?
I don't think it necessarily needs to be a year and a half.
And this data is coming from people getting a very research is getting a very rough sense of how our brain chemistry changes when we're in this infatuation stage and when our chemistry deviates from its baseline.
And obviously we don't all have access to these tests.
So one way to know when you're coming out of that honeymoon phase is that you're not idealizing this person anymore like you used to and little things are starting to annoy you and they're becoming a real human being rather than this idealized person you've you've been having sex with for six months and it's been wonderful.
So when they become real, that's when you're probably exiting the honeymoon.
One of the things that I talk about a lot is I talk about the fact that marriage has become financially or economically in some ways, it's become a bad deal for men.
The children no longer take over your farm.
Women sometimes won't make a home for you.
I mean, one of the things my wife did that was so valuable to me is she made a home for me.
She raised my children.
You know, we were a team.
I could go out and do some of the things that meant so much to me because of her.
Women, some women don't want to do that.
What role do values play in dating?
I mean, what should you be looking for?
Should you be looking for someone who shares your values or can opposites attract?
Where do you come down on that?
Yeah, the opposites attract.
That's fun because it's like a challenge.
And maybe we can win this person over to our side.
Or there's a little spark there and it's exciting, but the research doesn't back it up.
That you really need to find somebody whose values line up with yours.
Actually, I have a whole chapter on this.
And like I said, that first third of the book is about sizing you up as a man or you sizing yourself up.
And a big piece of that is understanding where your values are and being forthright about it because men can be chameleons when we're trying to win a woman over.
You don't need to hide yourself.
Be forthright with yourself about what your values are and then be unapologetically honest about where your values lie, where your masculinity lies.
Don't sell her a bill of goods that's going to come back to haunt you later.
I think that is such great advice because I think a lot of times guys basically are thinking about scoring.
They want to make a good impression.
They hope the girl will stay overnight and then you find that she's moved in and kind of you're on that train.
And really, I think if you're honest, you know, maybe you'll score a little less, but you'll make a better long-term decision.
Really good advice.
Dr. Sean Smith, the author of The Tactical Guide to Women: How Men Can Manage Risk in Dating and Marriage.
Great Dating Advice00:00:58
Sean, thanks very much for coming on.
Really interesting conversation.
Thank you, Andrew.
All right.
Sexual follies.
Can you play it again?
Come on, play it again.
I mean, I'm here for the laughs, right?
I'm not working.
I'm not working for pay here, folks.
Anyway, really interesting.
It's a dangerous world out there.
It's good to have some decent advice.
That was decent advice, Jess, right?
I mean, oh, you couldn't hear him.
Oh, you couldn't hear him.
All right, you'll have to listen to it and tell me tomorrow.
Decent advice.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
Questions about religion, about your personal life, about politics.
We will answer them all.
The answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life.
The person that you see today will not be the person you see tomorrow.
For one thing, he will have subscribed for a lousy 10 bucks and he'll be short 10 bucks.