July 26, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:09:51
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| I think a lot of people are, like you and I, just kind of coming around on the idea that so much of, frankly, what goes on in this country today is total bullshit. | ||
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me on The Rubin Report this week is the host of OutKick, the coverage on Fox Sports Radio, and the author of Republicans Wear Sneakers 2, and one of the best guests we've ever had on, Clay Travis. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| We were just talking before we started here. | ||
| I came in October of 2017, so it's been almost two years since we hung out last time. | ||
| I got great feedback when I was hanging out with you last time. | ||
| I appreciate you're going to come on my new podcast as well during this same kind of time frame. | ||
| The world may have just gone crazier. | ||
| We were hoping that maybe the world would go less crazy when we talked back in October of 2017, and it seems like things have just continued to spin wildly. | ||
| That does fit well with my notes, because yes, the world has gotten crazier since then. | ||
| Yeah, it's been about a year and a half that I've been waiting to say that stupid breast joke, which I've done on Twitter about a thousand times. | ||
| But the thing that kind of put you on the map outside of the sports world, let's just recap that little nonsense, because it does kind of capture sort of everything related to the media and outrage and all that. | ||
| You dared to say that you like breast on CNN. | ||
| And the First Amendment. | ||
| And I'm still banned by CNN. | ||
| Like, you think about all the people that they've had on who've done all the crazy things that they have done. | ||
| Russia coverage. | ||
| Yes, like, I mean, all of Michael Avenatti, who's been on, you know, and now is, you know, | ||
| he's on hundreds of times and now he's, you know, under siege with all the different charges against him. | ||
| But yeah, they banned me for that, for saying I, the only two things in the world | ||
| that, you know, I can believe in completely, the First Amendment and boobs. | ||
| And, well, look, it was good for me. | ||
| The book "Republicans Buy Sneakers Too" came out and it did really well, bestseller, | ||
| and got a lot of attention back in September. | ||
| I think the paperback's coming out. | ||
| I know you're working on your own book right now. | ||
| But I think it definitely galvanized for many people what I think typically happens, | ||
| which is the absurdity of false outrage and what is and what cannot be said | ||
| and what should and shouldn't be said. | ||
| I think a lot of people are, like you and I, just kind of coming around on the idea | ||
| that so much of uh... frankly what goes on in this country today is total | ||
| It's just endless nonsense. | ||
| And I'm glad you said something there about what's happened to you since then. | ||
| Because I think a lot of people that care about what you do, that watch this show, that are paying attention to the culture war and all that, they still fear that the mob will destroy them. | ||
| And what I've been trying to show people, just through my own life, every week that the New York Times calls me all right, or just the next stupidity, I'm like, you know, if you actually take a breath and don't lose your shit in the middle of it, not only will you survive, you will most likely thrive after, and I think you're an example of that. | ||
| I think so, and I think you're right. | ||
| There is this rush to apologize anytime someone criticizes you. | ||
| Even if you're sticking to things that you have long said in your career. | ||
| My radio show is thriving, you know, nationwide. | ||
| We went over 300 affiliates. | ||
| And one of the wild things I think that would surprise people is my show is dominating in a lot of different markets, right? | ||
| Like our ratings in Los Angeles are up something like 400% in the past couple of years, right? | ||
| Our numbers in Kansas City are up insanely. | ||
| On the East Coast we have done Insanely well. | ||
| In the South, where I'm from in Nashville, we continue to do outstanding. | ||
| The podcast numbers are booming. | ||
| I started a television show daily on FS1 called Lock It In, which is focused on sports gambling, but we have a lot of fun on there. | ||
| And I've continued to be as outspoken as I ever have. | ||
| And what I have seen, I don't know about you, but is people get frustrated because they want to take you down, and when you stick to what you believe in, The benefit is a lot of people have your back and they may not have your back in the same way publicly that you can, but I am a big and have long been in law school, I kind of have come to this as I've gotten older, a big believer in the marketplace of ideas. | ||
| We're artificially constraining what people feel comfortable talking about. | ||
| I think it leads to a lot of the angst that exists in our country today. | ||
| And so particularly in the world of sports, there are so many guys and girls out there who regularly slide into my DMs and say, I 100% agree with everything that you say, but because of how I'm employed or who employs me, I don't feel comfortable getting out on the battlefield like you do, but keep doing exactly what you're doing. | ||
| Does that type of person, though, drive you crazier than the person that doesn't contact you, that just remains quiet? | ||
| Because it's like, you know, you're not Jesus. | ||
| You're just a guy doing your thing, right? | ||
| Like, I'm just a guy doing my thing. | ||
| And then when I get these messages from often people that are more popular than I am, more famous than I am, have more money than I am, and they're subtly like, yeah, keep doing it. | ||
| It's like, well, I'm doing what I think is right, but like, Why are you getting this too? | ||
| Get some skin in the game. | ||
| It's an interesting question. | ||
| I think what protected me early on was I started my own site, Outkick. | ||
| And Outkick, the coverage, initially was just writing. | ||
| Now we do a lot of videos. | ||
| Now, obviously, it's a lot of audio as well. | ||
| In fact, we do more video and audio than we do writing almost now. | ||
| And once I started to produce revenue and realize, and I think you probably have gotten there too, you can take a breath and be like, okay, I'm never going to go hungry. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think anybody who tries to get into media, and especially early on, when I left the practice of law, my first question was, oh my God, is my family going to starve to death, right? | ||
| Am I going to have to abandon my media career to go back to practicing law at some point? | ||
| And it's hard to get over that, right? | ||
| Because I still have those worries sometimes. | ||
| That fear is always in the back of your mind because we live in this cancel culture that somebody wants to believe they're going to cancel you. | ||
| So, I guess I wish that there were more people who wanted to speak out, but if you're employed solely by a major corporation today, I totally understand the fear of, I got kids, I got a mortgage payment, I got my kids college funds that I'm worried about and everything else. | ||
| And frankly, the way I think about it too, is that leaves me a huge area to own, right? | ||
| Where there are a lot of people who may agree with me, which proves, you know, the audience responds to it, but others are afraid to say what I'm saying, even if they agree with it. | ||
| Which to me, you know, from a pure business perspective, I'm like, well, I'll just keep rolling, right? | ||
| I mean... What do you think it is about some people that are willing to kind of walk into that thing? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because people say that to me all the time. | ||
| They always say that I'm brave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not something I think about. | ||
| I'm just doing what I think is right. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's a great line, because when I was a kid growing up, my favorite quote was from Davy Crockett. | ||
| And Davy Crockett's most famous quote, I think still is, although who knows, be sure you're right. | ||
| He's got some new stuff coming. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Be sure you're right, and then go ahead. | ||
| And so, by the time I come out with an opinion, I have worked through every permutation of that opinion. | ||
| You know, like if I give an opinion and somebody immediately responds on Twitter, well, did you think about X, which always happens? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in fact, we do on the radio show sometimes, we'll do a segment where I will flip and start arguing the other side. | ||
| And I think that's the lawyer training in me. | ||
| But by the time I go out with an opinion, I'm not just shooting off at the lip. | ||
| Like I have kind of in my head worked through every different angle of an argument. | ||
| And once I'm convinced that my opinion is right, I'm comfortable putting it out there. | ||
| Now, here's the other thing. | ||
| If you think I'm wrong, it doesn't bother me. | ||
| I remember when there was the argument over Bush v. Gore and the two sides of that argument, I think David Boies had Al Gore and the other side, I'm forgetting the guy, Ted Olson, I believe, was the other side. | ||
| And they argued as hard as they could in front of the Supreme Court. | ||
| And then I think they shook hands afterwards and may have gone out for a beer because they knew that it wasn't then in their hands. | ||
| The Supreme Court had the decision to make. | ||
| Each of them had made the argument for their side as good as they possibly can. | ||
| And that's kind of the era that I wish we could go back to where we can disagree in the old school Senate, but you could have a situation where Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy are really good friends. | ||
| And that's kind of what drove me crazy about this whole Joe Biden flare-up, right? | ||
| The segregationist comment? | ||
| Like, just because you work with someone doesn't mean you agree with everything that they've ever said. | ||
| And this idea that you have to be at constant war with someone is just something that I repudiate and reject. | ||
| Is it even worse than that in that it's really a war with the past? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when they get up there and they say, well, Biden, you talk to these people because he's actually got a 40 year record. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Doesn't mean he loved everybody. | ||
| And we don't even have to get into the minutia of what he said or the people's hands he shook or any of that. | ||
| But it's actually an erasure of the past. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| You don't just magically, you know, go like that and hope, oh, okay, everything's great. | ||
| We're in 2019, we're all evolved and perfect, which is so ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, I always like to say, because I, you know, I'm a big history guy, right? | ||
| And, you know, the Confederate statue debate and everything else. | ||
| We live in an era where we believe that we are everything that's perfect in the world. | ||
| And I was having this conversation. | ||
| They're all idiots. | ||
| How do they ever make mistakes? | ||
| But the reality is that 200 years from now, we are going to be advocating and embracing even the most awoke members of our society for things that others will find later to be abhorrent. | ||
| That's just how history works, right? | ||
| And so, you know, the idea that we've reached the end of history is kind of fascinating to me because I think 200 years from now it might well be, and I'm just tossing one out, that anybody who eats meat is an infidel, right? | ||
| Like the idea that you could have ever eaten meat will be crazy. | ||
| It might well happen, right? | ||
| And so are people 200 years from now going to be like, oh, we've got to tear down this Martin Luther King statue because he ate meat. | ||
| We've got to tear down this statue of John F. Kennedy because can you believe he liked a steak? | ||
| Obama wasn't for gay marriage the first time he ran for president. | ||
| It's like, you're gonna tear that library down? | ||
| Why are we building it right now? | ||
| In 2008, Obama's entire platform would be the most moderate platform of any Democrat running for president right now. | ||
| And people would say, is this guy electable? | ||
| What does that tell you about internet culture? | ||
| Because it is exactly where we started here, which is you were on the show a year and a half ago. | ||
| We were talking about this. | ||
| You were right in the midst of your own little mob situation. | ||
| We've thrived since then, and many other people have. | ||
| The institutions have continued to crumble. | ||
| I mean, we've watched the way trust in mainstream media has crumbled, watched the way trust in sports media has crumbled, while the little guy now doing their own thing is doing great. | ||
| But what does that tell you about just the speed that we're getting the information at and where people are going to trust things? | ||
| We're in a disruptive cycle. | ||
| I don't think there's any doubt at all. | ||
| And what I say all the time is, the only thing I can do, and I love what you do about this as well, is try to be as honest as possible with my audience, right? | ||
| And so the things that I often get attacked for by people who don't like me, and I'm sure you see this all the time too, you're like, I address that all the time, right? | ||
| All the time! | ||
| I'm like, come on people! | ||
| And so I think trying to be as authentic as possible is ultimately the connection and I think large institutions do not seem authentic because they got their fingers up in the air and they're paying attention to the vagaries of day-to-day responses on social media. | ||
| I also think listening to social media is insane, right? | ||
| I mean, it's a tiny segment of the population that's often very, very active. | ||
| And so we live in an age of abundant criticism, but I don't think we live in an age of abundant reflection. | ||
| And I think reflection is more important oftentimes than criticism. | ||
| Is the problem, though, that social media's becoming our only way of reflecting? | ||
| Because the institutions are crumbling, and we don't have the nightly news show or whatever that we can all basically trust, that social media has become the mirror, but now we're all cordoning off into our own mirrors. | ||
| It would be a good example. | ||
| Nancy Pelosi said this thing recently about AOC and Ilhan Omar. | ||
| She's like, yeah, they're big on Twitter, but they only have four votes, but then they all go after her on Twitter and destroy her, and then the media loves that. | ||
| The whole thing is so out of whack with reality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or it's the new reality which is just out of whack with sanity. | ||
| I think in general there are a lot of people who aren't very confident. | ||
| And this is what I always talk about from a perspective of, you know, let's say in my world of sports media. | ||
| If you are an executive and you have gotten to the point where you are high up and making decisions at a sports network, let's say. | ||
| I think the idea that you would make a choice on who you think is good based on your 30, 40, 50 years of expertise rising up to that level, and then because when it goes out publicly, a bunch of people on Twitter say, I don't like that guy or whatever, that you would allow that to be a reflection of the real world. | ||
| I mean, there's a great stat that's out right now that I saw where it's something like 20% of people are on Twitter. | ||
| Let's use it as an example. | ||
| And of that 20%, 80% of all tweets are sent by like 10% of the overall population, right? | ||
| And we know that Twitter leans far left. | ||
| We know that, and I know you've been in your own battles over this, the social media companies, as if they don't lean far left enough already, they're also magnifying those voices, right, that reflect the culture by which they wish were more popular. | ||
| And so you're allowing ultimately, you know, something like two or three percent of the population that isn't at all reflective of the universe to dictate decisions that you make. | ||
| And I'll give you an example, and this is in the book. | ||
| I remember talking with ESPN execs, and they said, Twitter hates Lou Holtz and Chris Berman, right? | ||
| Old school guys at ESPN, Lou Holtz, former Notre Dame football coach, college football guy, Chris Berman, maybe the most iconic voice in ESPN history, right? | ||
| Yeah, like putting ESPN on the map. | ||
| And they said, if you read the mentions reflecting what they say on social media, everybody hates them. | ||
| But if we are out in public, those guys get swarmed with positivity such that we have to have security to protect them. | ||
| And the question was, do we listen to social media or do we listen to the real world? | ||
| And to me, you've got to listen to the real world, right? | ||
| Because social media is not reflective of real life. | ||
| It's funny, because after this past year where I was on tour with Peterson and we had 100 plus stops around 15 countries, and I'd be looking at mentions all day, and actually 95% of them are positive and good, but it's always that 5%. | ||
| And if 5% is several hundred, it can feel like a lot of bad things. | ||
| But then I'd meet people on the street and meet people all over the world at airports and restaurants, and everyone's great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everyone's weird. | ||
| Actually, I was at Ikea this weekend and a guy kind of gave me side-eye, like, clearly didn't like me. | ||
| But I was like, that's as bad as it gets. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if you're on social media all day, you feel like, holy shit, the world's coming to an end. | ||
| What I say is I've never had a person say a bad word to me face-to-face. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's wild. | ||
| And, in fact, the opposite of that, people will come up and, you know, ask for a picture. | ||
| You know, people say, if I ever see you, I'm going to punch you, right? | ||
| Like, that's really common on social media. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And then what happens is they show up and they want a picture. | ||
| Or, it's even happened a couple times, like I'll block people, right, on social media if they're sending me obsessive, you know, 20-in-a-row tweets or something, because I do try to go through and check every now and then. | ||
| I don't spend as much time in it as I used to. | ||
| But when I do that, I've had people come up to me and be like, man, you blocked me. | ||
| Here's my Twitter handle. | ||
| I'm a big fan. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I was drunk that night and I just got carried away. | ||
| Can you please unblock me? | ||
| I mean, and that's always, I think, interesting because, you know, people are just not accurate representations of themselves on social media. | ||
| And as someone who tries to be as authentic and honest as I possibly can on a day-to-day basis, because I think, you know, one of my buddies said, somehow, by being the most reasonable person in sports, you've made a career. | ||
| And I think that just kind of speaks to the polarity of the universe that we live in now, that just being a guy who's fairly middle-of-the-road seems radical. | ||
| I know the feeling, brother. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| You and I have many of the same, similar beliefs and kind of a career path. | ||
| Isn't that funny, though, that so the two of us that come from wildly different places, we're in different spheres, that these worlds have kind of collided, that, as we talked about last time, that sports has become ridiculously political. | ||
| Which in many ways is why the institutions are crumbling. | ||
| And the fact that a guy like you, who mostly cares about sports, you end up talking about a whole bunch of stuff that really is just a sidebar, but that is where the energy is. | ||
| And saying something like, hey, the U.S. | ||
| women are great, but I kind of wish Megan Rapinoe had shut up and just gone to the White House, right? | ||
| Or, you know, the U.S. | ||
| women. | ||
| deserve whatever money they can get in a market-based economy, but the men produce a lot more revenue. | ||
| And people are like, "Oh my God, how dare you say that?" | ||
| And I'm like, "This is the most rational, reasonable perspective." Or, you know, the NBA | ||
| shouldn't ban the word "owners" | ||
| because it's not racially insensitive, like the owners of the team. | ||
| Do you own those shoes? | ||
| Yeah. And theoretically, although these might be owned by Fox, | ||
| but they dress me when I'm out here for television. But it's crazy. | ||
| We're only going to define words by thing, and they replaced it with governors, | ||
| which doesn't even mean the same thing. | ||
| And by the way, if you're worried about negative racial connotations, there've been a lot more racist governors, you know, in the last 30 or 40 years than there have been a racist team owners. | ||
| So, all right, let's do that one first. | ||
| I wanna get back to some of the gender stuff related to soccer and all that. | ||
| But on the owner front, the people that push these ideas, so I remember it was a couple weeks ago we started hearing this. | ||
| They're not gonna call the owners owners anymore. | ||
| And you see it start spreading across social media, and people start saying this is a good thing, and there's a connotation to slavery and all those things, and yet every part of you as a functioning person knows this is nonsense. | ||
| They own a team, they own a business. | ||
| I own the production company that produces this show. | ||
| You do not own the people who are here working on you. | ||
| Like, if they decide that they don't want to work for you anymore, they can leave and go work somewhere else. | ||
| I'm renting them. | ||
| That's all, right? | ||
| Like, you know it. | ||
| Logically, you know it. | ||
| It's obvious. | ||
| But what I think social justice has done is it's created a situation where even basic words now Yes. | ||
| have become triggers for some other thing. | ||
| And it's like, do these guys actually think they've done anything good? | ||
| That's what I'm always trying to figure out. | ||
| Guys that believe this. | ||
| Okay, we're calling them governors now. | ||
| Do they walk home and they go, honey, you're not gonna believe this. | ||
| I did something pretty ambitious. | ||
| I think it's all motivated by fear. | ||
| So let's take a step back. | ||
| Adam Silver is a white guy who runs the NBA, right? | ||
| Ultimately, he's afraid if he doesn't listen to a few loony tune black players and make this decision that ultimately they could decide, oh wait, Adam Silver's a white guy who runs the NBA. | ||
| He's like a plantation master, right? | ||
| Like that's the analogy that they could continue to build out. | ||
| Why is he making tens of millions of dollars a year when he's primarily making money off the labor of black men in the NBA, right? | ||
| And so I think what happens is anybody who is... Because managing that worldwide lead must be super easy, right? | ||
| Like anybody can do that. | ||
| Right, yes. | ||
| But I think what happens is it's an element of self-preservation. | ||
| So I don't think Adam Silver, I think if you gave him truth serum and he was sitting here | ||
| with you right now, he'd say, that's an utterly ludicrous idea. But I think the problem is | ||
| people in positions of power are so afraid that they're going to end up the target, | ||
| that they go as far left as they possibly can, because that way they can be like, | ||
| my hand, what are you talking about? I'm super woke. Like we replaced the word owners with | ||
| governors. I'm sensitive to your feelings. And that's a big problem is there's a difference | ||
| between hearing somebody's argument and at least contemplating it and being sensitive | ||
| to an argument, right? There are lots of dumb arguments. | ||
| Calling an argument dumb is not insensitive. It actually honors the argument to be | ||
| discussing it. But I think that, uh, that, that they're like, I did a poll. | ||
| I think that 95% of sports fans do not think remotely that the word owner is racist. | ||
| But people like Adam Silver in positions of power are afraid that the platform that a guy like Draymond Green has who wants to say, by the way, Draymond Green said he was an owner in his Twitter - Twitter bio, right, remember? | ||
| It's like these guys are not even able to avoid hypocritical behavior | ||
| for a short segment of time, right? | ||
| Like Draymond Green says, "The word owner is offensive," | ||
| and yet in his own bio, he's an owner. | ||
| And look, ownership is an aspirable goal in the United States, in capitalism, right? | ||
| You wanna own your home, you wanna own a business, you wanna own your education. | ||
| You wanna own your home, you wanna own a business, you wanna own your education. | ||
| Like, owning something is a powerful thing for an individual, and then you replace it, | ||
| Like, owning something is a powerful thing for an individual, so, and then you replace it, | ||
|
unidentified
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like you said, with a word that doesn't even mean In the United States, in capitalism, right? | |
| like you said, with a word that doesn't even mean the same thing, and arguably, so first of all, | ||
| they are now governors of teams, right? | ||
| That doesn't make any sense, because a governor is primarily an elected official. | ||
| These guys bought the team, and the failure for somebody like Adam Silver to be like, | ||
| hey, I heard that argument, but here's the truth. | ||
| They own the franchise, not the individuals. | ||
| If people don't wanna play in our league, they can go elsewhere and make a living somewhere | ||
| doing something else. | ||
| That's a pretty good argument, and I don't, he's a reasonable guy, and he's afraid | ||
| to say the reasonable thing, because then Is the irony, though, that the destructive force that you're talking about actually transcends race? | ||
| Because, so I gotcha, that Adam Silver, he's, you know, I'm a white guy, so I better, you know, offer some penance here, but the simple truth is that most likely, one day, even though he's doing a pretty damn good job in terms of economics, he'll be replaced, and he'll be replaced most likely, I would guess, if I had to guess, it's probably gonna be by a black woman. | ||
| Actually, if you were just putting odds out, I think there's a good chance of that. | ||
| But let's just say it's a black man or a black woman. | ||
| Well, the second that that black man or woman does anything that those guys don't like, they'll say that they're an Uncle Tom and a sellout and the rest of it. | ||
| So it's like, you actually have no protection in the world of social justice, no matter, you know what I mean? | ||
| The second they wanna use your minority status against you, I mean, everyone watching this knows that, it's like, those guys will even be treated worse. | ||
| They'll be looking at Adam Silver going, oh, those were the good old days. | ||
| And that's why you need to have somebody who's willing to stand up and just respond. | ||
| And I think the fear is in getting engaged in that fight, but ultimately we need to be having more battles, ironically enough. | ||
| We need to have more reasonable people who are willing to step into the fray, because I do think there is a huge, I don't think, I'm almost 1 billion percent certain, there's a, because they respond to my show and I'm one of the only people who's making these arguments, there's a huge silent majority out there. | ||
| that thinks that these arguments are ludicrous. And I think it kind of translates into the | ||
| Democratic presidential debates. I think everybody is so afraid of being attacked. | ||
| My thing is being attacked is a good thing, right? Like people, it means that you are having an | ||
| influence and that they're afraid of the influence that you're having. So, you know, I don't run away | ||
| from attack. I kind of enjoy, you know, like what it. | ||
| what was the old argument, you know, like a pig in the mud, like, enjoys being there. | ||
| I kind of like being down in the muck, rolling around, getting in a fight, | ||
| good fight every now and then. | ||
| And I think-- - It's weird though, when it happens to you, | ||
| and you're just trying to do something decent. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. - That's the thing for me that I had to adjust, | ||
| 'cause I actually don't mind the hate now, 'cause I agree. - Right. | ||
| People are waking up in the morning going, what did Reuben do this time? | ||
| And it's like, really? | ||
| You're doing that? | ||
| But there's still a part of me that's like, well, I'm trying to be so freaking decent. | ||
| I try not to attack people. | ||
| I try to talk about ideas, all that stuff. | ||
| And it's like, that still is what they're going for, which really, it says more about them than it says about you. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And I think the other thing I would say for everybody out there is these stories last 24 hours. | ||
| So initially, you know, early on in Twitter, I understand that feeling where suddenly a hundred people decide you're the most awful human being on the planet because of something you said that really is pretty innocuous, right? | ||
| They didn't know who you were an hour before. | ||
| Yeah, and now you're like an awful human being. | ||
| And used to, I'd look at it and I'd be bothered by it. | ||
| Now, I just say, okay, I've got three kids at home, let's go down to the park. | ||
| In 24 hours, there's going to be something new that they decide to get offended by. | ||
| And it's not going to change the way that I talk about my opinions. | ||
| And ultimately, I also don't think it's going to have an impact on my career. | ||
| Now, maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| Maybe at some point I am going to totally get canceled, but in this cancel culture that we live in, because somebody decides I said something that they don't like, but I think... I'm working on some good stuff. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think that we've entered the world where once you get...and that's where I think you and I both are now. | ||
| My audience is not suddenly going to say, I hate Clay Travis and completely abandon me, right? | ||
| And so I think the fear out there is that there's not people who are going to have your back. | ||
| I feel like we've reached the point where we have a lot of people who have our back and it's just basically a perpetual war. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| God, there's so much there. | ||
| We could do five hours just on that. | ||
| And it's important because I sense it, especially at colleges with these young kids that are just afraid to get in the fight a little bit more. | ||
| Oh, I see that all the time. | ||
| It's like you're ceding a lot of ground to people that will gladly silence you. | ||
| Yeah, and that's to me the scariest thing about our culture today is, and I wrote about this the other day and I certainly wrote in my book, there's a difference between I disagree with you and here's why, and I disagree with you and you shouldn't be allowed to make the argument that you're making, right? | ||
| The cancel culture to me is really scary in our country because there are a lot of people out there who want to cease the debate in general and just cancel you out of the debate. | ||
| And that's fundamentally anti-democratic. | ||
| It's anti-First Amendment. | ||
| It's anti-American values. | ||
| And the fact that there's not more people standing up to fight against that and in favor of that, like, again, I think back to Howard Stern, for instance, who's now evidently gone woke too, right? | ||
| In many of the ways that he behaves. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| I've heard a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, he's started to go a little bit woke, but I think it's because he fears all the things that he's done in the past, that if he continues in this era, they'll go back and they'll track through all of his different tapes and everything that he's said over the years. | ||
| You know, what they found was in his early days, people wanted to silence him, right? | ||
| And what's wild about that is it's a big circle because it used to be conservative people who were like in that position. | ||
| And now I think conservatives have realized, wait a minute, we need to have a robust battlefield of ideas. | ||
| And in the fact that, you know, in my life, liberals could be the people on a campus saying, I'm upset because of an idea, or I'm upset like they are in San Francisco right now because of this old mural of George Washington that's on the wall in that school, or I'm upset because of this statue that's out there, or I'm upset because of a word that somebody used, or a phrase, or a sentence, or a paragraph that somebody wrote. | ||
| It's like, how sensitive have we become as a society? | ||
| It honestly is, I think, the most scary thing that's going on in the country today. | ||
| Yeah, you know, there's that great moment in Private Parts in the Howard Stern movie where the executive comes out and he says, you know, the people that love you listen to you for seven minutes a day. | ||
| He's like, the people that hate you listen to you for an hour and a half a day. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, they listen. | ||
| They hated him, but they listened. | ||
| And now that culture is on social media dominating the hate culture. | ||
| And I remember talking with a politician a while back when I was working in politics, and we were talking about yes-no votes. | ||
| And, you know, a lot of times, no matter who you are, what political persuasion you have, you'll stand in front of that yes-no question, and you'll be like, it's a really complex, you know, you're like, I don't even know what this means, right? | ||
| I'm a lawyer, and I'm standing there like, I don't know whether I should be yes-no. | ||
| Like 30% of people vote no no matter what, right? | ||
| Like it doesn't matter what the question could be because you always look at those yes-no ballots and it's never, something never wins like 95 to 5, right? | ||
| It's always 70% roughly yes, 70 to 30 is a wipeout, right, in a voting booth. | ||
| And there is a certain segment of the population that is titillated by being offended by things, right? | ||
| Like that's their thing. | ||
| The problem is we have allowed those people to be voices that we give way too much legitimacy | ||
| to because one, it's a minority of voices, and two, it's not actually reflective of life. | ||
| There's that Pew study recently that came out that said people hate political correctness, | ||
| Whether you're white, black, brown, Asian, whatever you are, you hate it, and yet we've allowed that culture to predominate. | ||
| Yeah, we're seeding it, basically, 8%, a hysterical 8%. | ||
| So then it leads to the question, which is what everyone asks me, and I don't know what the answer is, and I've thought about it a lot, and I can only come up with some things that I wouldn't even wanna say, but how horrible does this thing have to get before it implodes? | ||
| What do you think would actually cause it So I think that, first of all, there are a lot of people, I think, who have been funny and smart about ridiculing, you know, for instance, the Chicago Cubs, we had the OK sign, right? | ||
| And the Cubs are like, oh my God, this fan is banned from life. | ||
| Theo Epstein is like, I was literally shivering when I was seeing it. | ||
| And I don't know about you, but the vast majority of people, like when I was growing up, if you look down, when somebody did that, you got punched in the arm, right? | ||
| I think that is a vast majority of the perspective. | ||
| The argument that is out there that common things which are used by white supremacist groups somehow render them unusable is a so utterly absurd argument, right? | ||
| Because I'm like, well, you know, white supremacists drive cars. | ||
| Right? | ||
| White supremacists fly on airplanes. | ||
| White supremacists shake hands. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, the idea that you're going to identify a symbol with a particular group and try to ban it, to me, proves the hysteria that we're currently living in. | ||
| Like we saw with Nike saying, oh, Colin Kaepernick's offended by the Betsy freaking Ross flag. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so we're not going to allow that shoe to be released. | ||
| And so I think reasonable people look at this and start to recognize the hysteria. | ||
| So I had a, you know, somebody sent me this, but I think it's a funny question. | ||
| What if white supremacists just went all in on Nike gear? | ||
| Like flip the script, right? | ||
| And they're like, we're only like every event that we do, we're only going to wear Nike. | ||
| Does Nike cancel itself? | ||
| Did they change the name of Nike? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Imagine how funny that would be if like the next, The next KKK rally, you know, like if everybody at the KKK | ||
| rally, yes, right. And everybody's like a million people stand around to yell at them. But what if | ||
| the KKK had a sense of humor and irony, which they probably don't, right? Because they're ideologues | ||
| who are absolutist, which are always the people who are craziest, right? But | ||
| what if they showed up in all Nike gear and they're like, Nike is now a white supremacist, uh, | ||
| endorsed company. | ||
| We only wear Nike head-to-toe, right? | ||
| Would Nike be like, we're going to ban it? | ||
| The way that you follow the logic down its absurd path, and I think that there are... It's almost like you've got to smuggle a little logic into their ridiculous system. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| That's like my argument. | ||
| Martin Luther King gave an interview, I think it was in Ebony Magazine back in the day, and he was asked a question about gay rights. | ||
| Basically, like, I'm afraid I'm gay. | ||
| What should I do? | ||
| He's like, well, it's probably a medical condition. | ||
| You should go talk to a doctor. | ||
| If a political candidate gave that answer today, they would be canceled, right? | ||
| Particularly if they're a Democrat, God forbid. | ||
| So, if you immediately respond, I went to Martin Luther King High School. | ||
| Do we have to take Martin Luther King's name off my high school? | ||
| Do we have to tear down the Martin Luther King Memorial? | ||
| I think when you start to put people like, well, no, that was in the 1950s. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, well, George Washington was around in the 1790s, right? | ||
| Thomas Jefferson was around in the 18th century. | ||
| What do you want to do there in terms of analyzing it? | ||
| So I think you need to flip it on people. | ||
| and make them realize, oh wait, the people that we believe are icons of our universe | ||
| are actually flawed human beings as well, and maybe we shouldn't judge every single act they did | ||
| predicated on whatever the rules are now. | ||
| But yeah, that one I love. | ||
| Like if white supremacists are just like, we're head to toe Nike now, instead of burning it, right? | ||
| If you're like, and then what does Nike do? | ||
| Nike's like, oh my, what do we change the name of the company? | ||
| Do we like, like-- | ||
| How do we retake our brand? | ||
| This idea that because somebody you disagree with likes something, you have to not be touched by it. | ||
| Like what I saw with the Mayor Pete. | ||
| He was going to come on your program and have a legitimate conversation. | ||
| In the same way I treat everybody, Pete. | ||
| And then some people are like, oh my God, if you sit down and talk to that guy, you are somehow, you're canceled to us. | ||
| It's crazy, right? | ||
| I mean, like, I would put the most right-wing person, like, whoever the Democrats nominate for president, I'd love to have him on my Fox Sports radio show. | ||
| Whoever the Republicans, Donald Trump, I'd love to have him on. | ||
| When did we enter this culture where somehow if you talk to someone, it means that you agree with everything that they represent? | ||
| Like, I said, you know... Well, there's also this crazy way we frame things now. | ||
| So Andy Ngo, who got attacked by Andy Ngo in Portland, who I know him, and he was on the show last week and he said, He's a good, decent guy. | ||
| He's a five-foot-five, soft-spoken, little, gay, Vietnamese guy, and I only mention those qualifiers to use their ridiculous identity politics against themselves, but it's like he's a decent guy, and the way that everyone was framing it was either that the journalists, the unchecked journalists, were all saying he's either not a journalist, they take it like he's not a journalist, or he's a fascist, as if either one of those would excuse violence. | ||
| No, I would just say compare the response to the woman who got killed in Charlottesville, right? | ||
| By the crazy deranged dude who I think has got life in prison, deservedly so, right? | ||
| And people were like, oh my God, this is what happens in Trump's America. | ||
| Totally innocent people get attacked for their political beliefs. | ||
| And there was a mass uproar. | ||
| You know, it still is impacting things. | ||
| I think I saw in Charlottesville where they are no longer celebrating Thomas Jefferson's birthday as part of the fallout from that. | ||
| They now have, you know, another day that they've replaced it with or whatever else. | ||
| Again, because people are afraid, I think, to have a legitimate argument, ironically enough, in a place like Charlottesville, which is founded on the idea of intellectual freedom. | ||
| And the response to that attack by a group that is I mean, it's wild to me, right? | ||
| Yeah, or Smollett or the Covington kids. | ||
| I mean, the way that they just, you go narrative first and then you figure it out after. | ||
| It's like, where are all the tweets, guys? | ||
| Where are all the tweets about what a racist, homophobic nation this is? | ||
| This one doesn't work for you, does it? | ||
| And I think part of the problem is, in a large sense, you can find evidence for whatever you want in the world or in the country on a day-to-day basis. | ||
| And what we've lost the ability to do, and I wrote about this a lot in my book, is comprehend probability, right? | ||
| Like, are there still racists in this country? | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| Are there still homophobes in this country? | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| But they represent, particularly for acts of violence, a tiny, tiny percentage of the overall population, yet In the same way, let's say there are 40,000 people a year who die in car accidents. | ||
| If the media decided to cover car accident deaths in the same way that they cover police shootings or in the same way that they cover, you know, a mass shooting or whatever else, people would be terrified to get in their car, right? | ||
| They'd be like, Oh my God, we got another, you know, what's 40,000 divided by 365. | ||
| I mean, there are hundreds, if not thousands of people dying on a week to week basis, a day to day basis. | ||
| And yet we kind of get used to that, right? | ||
| But also, what is it that they ultimately want to happen to these people? | ||
| That's what I was thinking about, because it's like, if I found out that the guy who lives across the street from me was a homophobe, meaning he had an irrational fear of gay people, well, as long as he didn't come to my lawn and stand across my house and lob, you know, Molotov cocktail, whatever, it's like, you wanna have an irrational fear of gay people in your own home? | ||
| You're allowed to do it. | ||
| Like, would it be worthy of my time or sensible for a greater society for me to, picking his house, confront him, | ||
| try to get him fired or reserved. | ||
| You think at the end, now I accomplish all those things. | ||
| Now he has to move, he lost his job, he's destitute, his wife divorced him. | ||
|
unidentified
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You think he's gonna be like, "You know, I kinda like gay guys." | |
| No, I mean, I think that speaks to a larger context. | ||
| A handshake is always more powerful than a fist, right? | ||
| Ultimately, because, and I think you've reached the point way long ago beyond the point of, you know, diminishing returns, right? | ||
| Where if you, look, I wish that nobody was racist. | ||
| I wish that nobody was homophobic in this country, but I think in trying to drive it down to zero, First of all, you end up in this strange world where you have to define what is gay homophobia and what is racism. | ||
| And oftentimes you're coming around nowadays to owner. | ||
| You know the word owner, right? | ||
| There is a more demand for racism in this country than there is supply. | ||
| Which is why the Wall Street Journal had a big editorial recently. | ||
| You mentioned Jossie Smollett. | ||
| There is a huge desire to use this as an example of the larger societal issue. | ||
| And I think that's a failure of journalism, right? | ||
| If you think about it, journalism starts with story, right? | ||
| And the story will oftentimes be used to illuminate a larger issue. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| A lot of people are dying from opioids. | ||
| In order to draw somebody into the opioid crisis, it makes sense, I think, to go talk about the impact on a family in Ohio as a larger representative for the tens of thousands of people who might be dying or afflicted by opioid addiction. | ||
| But that's a massive issue in the country today, which has tangible results, dead people that otherwise wouldn't exist because of the opioid crisis. | ||
| If you take something that is not necessarily a major issue today, let's say that Jossie Smollett did happen, it was still a minuscule number of people that was going to be involved in this attack, and it's not necessarily representative of the larger society, yet that's the argument that they try to make. | ||
| Oh, this is a stand-in for something larger. | ||
| Well, no, it's not. | ||
| It doesn't happen very often at all. | ||
| It's aberrant, much like, and this is the argument I make in my book, a shark attack. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Every shark attack gets news. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because ultimately we're all terrified. | ||
| It's summer. | ||
| Jaws season is going on. | ||
| I'm sure when you go in the ocean at some point, when I do too, the most influential movie ever made is Jaws because I think I might get killed by a shark. | ||
| I had that problem in pools for the first 20 years of my life. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Statistically, it's totally improbable. | ||
| Yet every shark attack gets covered, so we think that it happens more frequently than it does. | ||
| I feel like we've lost—you were talking earlier about the nightly news, the Walter Cronkites of the world. | ||
| There aren't people saying, you know, this is a reasonable reaction. | ||
| LeBron, for instance, said, every day my son leaves the house, I worry that he might not come back home. | ||
| And everybody was like, oh, it's so brave of LeBron James to say that. | ||
| More young black kids are getting killed by bees, wasps, and hornets leaving the house every day than by police. | ||
| If LeBron had come out and said, I worry every day that when my kid leaves the front door of his house, he's going to get killed by a bee, a wasp, or a hornet, people have been like, Man, LeBron needs to chill out, right? | ||
| But it's more likely, or hit by a train, right? | ||
| Like, it's more likely, and so- You think some of this is just the way we're wired? | ||
| Like, certain people's brains are wired for that type of hysteria? | ||
| You may have seen this video when I was at University of New Hampshire, and all these kids are screaming at me and yelling, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then this woman, this middle-aged woman, gets up, and she's screaming at me, and she goes, these kids could be killed when they walk out of here! | ||
| And I don't even remember what I said to her, but what I was thinking was, What planet are you on? | ||
| These are kids at the University of New Hampshire. | ||
| We're in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| There's no violence here. | ||
| No one's getting killed. | ||
| And yet you're an adult telling these kids that they should be fearful. | ||
| If anyone should have been fearful for their life at that moment, it was me. | ||
| It should have been you, yes. | ||
| But that sort of thing, it just goes to a certain part of the brain that then just gets fed and fed and fed. | ||
| I think politicians have become astute at motivating base audiences by fear, right? | ||
| And I think certainly the left wing has become more likely to do this, but I think historically the right wing has done it as well, right? | ||
| And the problem is you need somebody. | ||
| This is where I think Obama failed as a politician. | ||
| He is a very logical guy, whether you agree or disagree with him. | ||
| I think he looks at data and he makes arguments. | ||
| He should have, as some of this hysteria started. | ||
| Actually, I think he could have made a tremendous impact if he had come out and said, look, are there bad police? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Look, I wish that there were no bad police in this country. | ||
| Some of them can't be trusted. | ||
| But let's just walk through the statistics. | ||
| You know, the number one help to entire inner city America. | ||
| is police officers, right? | ||
| Look, here's the data on murders as they pertain to over the last 30 or 40 years, right? | ||
| This is a trend line that's regularly going down. | ||
| Here's the number of police that we employ. | ||
| This is a trend line that's going up. | ||
| Employing more police makes people safer. | ||
| It doesn't mean they're going to be flawless. | ||
| They have guns on their hips. | ||
| Sometimes they make bad decisions. | ||
| When they do, they should be prosecuted in a court of law like anybody else who makes those decisions. | ||
| And I wonder on some level whether Obama feels bad about the hysteria because I think the problem we had in 2016 was Hillary, if you go look at the numbers of voters, right? | ||
| Hillary didn't get the same black voters that Obama did. | ||
| And I think ultimately she ran an identity politics laden campaign because she thought if I make it seem like it's awful for black people in this country today and what Donald Trump will do to them is going to be awful, then they will turn up and vote for me, which will allow me to win the election. | ||
| And I think in 2020, we're going to see a reprisal of that. | ||
| Now, the people in the Midwest were smart enough who flipped from Obama and Trump to see through that on some level. | ||
| But this is an election that's going to be decided in Pennsylvania, Michigan, in Ohio and Wisconsin. | ||
| I think those four states. | ||
| And so whoever the Democrats nominate, I think they're going to look at the black turnout and say, man, if we got in the same black turnout that Obama got, we would have won this election. | ||
| How do we get it? | ||
| No matter who the nominee is in 2020, we're going to try to sell fear to that audience. | ||
| You think the simple proof on that is that we once had dinner with Candace Owens, with far-right racist Candace Owens, or whatever the hell they call her now. | ||
| But remember a couple months ago when the reparations talk started bubbling up and then Elizabeth Warren said, you know, a commission, and then the rest of them started saying, we're gonna get into reparations. | ||
| I texted Candace and I said, I think you've done it. | ||
| I think you caused such a crack Yeah, in the foundation. | ||
| In the foundation of that black people have to be Democrats. | ||
| That they literally now are saying, what do we got left? | ||
| Here's cold, hard cash. | ||
| That's all we got left. | ||
| And the fact that they're making that an issue shows that one person, I mean, it's a through line to what we're talking about here, that one person that stakes out some brave position that they really believe in actually can cause immeasurable change. | ||
| Because I really do believe it is directly related to what she has done. | ||
| Yeah, look, I-- - And you can criticize her and people get angry that I defend her and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| No, look-- - And she's not perfect and I'm not perfect and all that stuff. | ||
| But I truly believe it is because of what she caused. | ||
| Yeah, look, I think the foundation of identity politics collapsing | ||
| is maybe the most important thing that could happen in our country, right? | ||
| Because I think the idea that you should be able to look at somebody and guess who they're gonna vote for | ||
| is the foundation of our politics today, right? | ||
| And certainly fear, if it's used to motivate a voter, I think is often bad. | ||
| Now look, you can criticize the other side too, right? | ||
| Nobody's perfect. | ||
| I think that Republicans in general have overemphasized the danger of terrorism, right? | ||
| To make people think that they're in more danger than they are. | ||
| The reality is, and maybe I'm going to get shot as soon as I walk out, and that would certainly be an irony. | ||
| Yeah, it could be your homophobic neighbor who thinks I'm gay. | ||
| But the reality is we have never been safer, right? | ||
| And I think about this a lot as a parent because, you know, in my city where I live, Nashville, Tennessee, I try to consciously let my kids take risks, like let them get on their bike, let them ride down the street. | ||
| We are so suffused, I think, with fear as parents. | ||
| I think that kind of translates through to our kids who live in this incredibly anxious world where they feel like they're in danger. | ||
| And I'm like, You know, in the early 80s, we were in much more danger than our kids are today. | ||
| The fact that my parents let me climb trees in front of the house, I'd be 100 feet in the air. | ||
| My mom would come in for lunch, I'm like, I don't know how I'm gonna get down, but I always got down, you know, no helmet. | ||
| I think about it now, you know, like I rode the school bus in fourth and fifth grade, got home, got off the school bus, walked all the way, you know, down the street up to my house, a totally empty house, unlocked the door, went inside, stayed there for a couple of hours by myself, right? | ||
| I mean, and I was 10. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, and my, I've got an 11 year old now, and if we go to the swimming pool in our neighborhood across the street, my wife's like, oh my God, do you think we can leave him here for a little while? | ||
| I'm like, he's gonna be in sixth grade, right? | ||
| Like, I mean, but I think it's just, you know, we have sort of built this cocoon of protectiveness, and that can be good, but not when it's motivated by fear. | ||
| And I think that's where we are. | ||
| Total sidebar to this, Nashville. | ||
| So I performed, you might have seen the picture in the, The green room bathroom over there is me at the Ryman, which is an incredible Grand Ole Opry. | ||
| It was one of the most memorable nights. | ||
| But what is going on in Nashville that everybody is so freaking happy? | ||
| I have never seen a happier, nicer, I don't know, maybe there's something going on underneath. | ||
| First of all, let me look at the camera, whichever camera, don't move. | ||
| Don't move here. | ||
| We got enough of you. | ||
| I'm born and raised in Nashville. | ||
| I think the culture of the place is- I've never seen a group, but every single person that I walk by on the street offered to bring me to their house for dinner, take me out to eat, can I buy you a drink? | ||
| What can I do for you? | ||
| Can I buy you a new jacket? | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| It's a super nice community. | ||
| I don't know what exactly it is. | ||
| One, you get the Southern element. | ||
| Two, I think the economy has been booming, so people do feel really good about their overall status in life. | ||
| Three, I think the entertainment culture. | ||
| We kind of have a lot of the L.A. | ||
| vibe of creativity. | ||
| And just freedom and individual, you know, sort of choices that I think is so important in life, but without a lot of the negativity associated with it. | ||
| And I don't know whether it's because musicians don't have to be beautiful like a lot of actors and actresses do, but it's, you know, I really love it. | ||
| I mean, we don't want to move. | ||
| I mean, I'm born and raised. | ||
| I think it was a great culture for me to grow up in, and I think it's an even better one for my kids. | ||
| It's funny to me that you made a point of looking at the camera. | ||
| Well, everybody else is out there saying, like, it's an awesome place to move. | ||
| I'm like, no, we're full. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, you know how I feel like as a parent, kind of, my kids are at perfect ages. | ||
| They're 11, 8, and 4. | ||
| And I would be, you know, they're potty trained. | ||
| They still like to spend time with us. | ||
| Like, we can enjoy them as a family. | ||
| I'd be fine hitting pause right now in my life and having them hang out here for a little while. | ||
| Because I know, you know, my father-in-law was telling me this. | ||
| He's like, you're in a good spot right now. | ||
| The kids still have lots of problems. | ||
| But they're almost all little problems. | ||
| As your kids get older, they have fewer problems, but they become a lot bigger, right? | ||
| And that makes sense, right? | ||
| As you think about it from a parent perspective. | ||
| But the city of Nashville, like you used to be able to get everywhere in 10 or 15 minutes. | ||
| Now the traffic, there's so many people have moved in. | ||
| And that can bring a lot of good things. | ||
| And it's been a good audience growth, a lot of college educated, lots of bars, restaurants, awesome entertainment scene. | ||
| But we're full. | ||
| You need to move to another city. | ||
| It's funny, because every town that I visited last year, whenever I saw something really great happening in that town, like Salt Lake City, I was like, these people are phenomenal. | ||
| It's clean, it's nice. | ||
| And I did stand up there, and I said something about how great it is there, and literally people were coming up to me after going, please don't tell the Californians. | ||
| You guys are leaving and ruining everything. | ||
| It's funny, when I started my career, because I did local sports talk radio in Nashville, as my profile kind of grew, I would talk a lot about how awesome Nashville was, and this is, you know, over the last 15 years. | ||
| And about two or three years ago, I just stopped talking about how awesome the city is, right? | ||
| Because I'm like, I think I've had too much of an influence on some way, like, you know. | ||
| But people are just scrolling through, and they're thinking about where to move. | ||
| I think it also helps, by the way, we've got no state income tax. | ||
| So if you're out in California, 13% state income tax, let's say you make a million dollars a year, and you're an entertainer. | ||
| That's $130,000 a year boom that you have in your pocket in Nashville that you didn't necessarily have if you lived in California or New York. | ||
| How am I doing here? | ||
| I sometimes wonder why we don't have more of our Fox Sports studios out there because I'm doing the show to finish the season here and it's great to be able to do it out in Nashville. | ||
| All right, let's back up to 20 minutes ago. | ||
| I wanna talk about some of the gender stuff related to sports because you mentioned the women's soccer team. | ||
| Now, it's great that they won, okay. | ||
| Fantastic, everybody's happy. | ||
| But yes, there are economic elements to this that less people happen to watch those things. | ||
| It's just reality. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| Nobody's saying they're not worthy. | ||
| Nobody's saying they shouldn't be on TV. | ||
| Nobody's saying they shouldn't be able to play. | ||
| But this constant then need where it became about their victimhood as they were winning. | ||
| As you're winning, but the whole idea is A, we're not gonna respect the flag and whatever, they can do whatever they want, but then also just we don't get the TV time, and it's like all these things, this is such a misguided space for energy. | ||
| Let's take a step back. | ||
| I said on my show, and again, this is something that's reasonable, that some people consider to be controversial, so you'll enjoy this. | ||
| I said if you look at the Women's World Cup, you can almost pick every winner solely by determining which country has better women's rights. | ||
| It's a fascinating way. Just look at the bracket. You look at every Women's World Cup game that was | ||
| played. Almost every game without fail, the winner was the country that provides more rights to women. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh, that's interesting. | |
| So it's fascinating to think about. We are as a country so wealthy and so successful that we not | ||
| only embrace men's sports, which many countries do, we also have so many parents out there who | ||
| will spend thousands of dollars a year for their women to be able to, their little girls to be able | ||
| able to play soccer and grow up potentially to be US. | ||
| women's soccer team member. | ||
| Look at the girls that were on the team, the women that won the title this year. | ||
| They used to be little girls who grew up in pretty advantaged backgrounds, right? | ||
| Because by and large, soccer in America, unlike soccer in the rest of the world, is a sport | ||
| that elites play, right? | ||
| It's a suburban sport, especially for women. | ||
| And so the argument that I made is, if anything, Megan Rapinoe, instead of saying, "I'm not | ||
| going to the effing White House," and she said, "Fucking," | ||
| I'm not going to the fucking White House, which I think sounds different. | ||
| She should have, in my opinion, said, "I have this opportunity as the captain of the women's | ||
| team to make that argument that I just made. | ||
| If we can be a shining light to the rest of the world, this is what happens when you give | ||
| little girls the freedom to pursue things that interest them." | ||
| They grow up into women who can dominate. | ||
| And so there's a lot of talk about the women versus the men, right? | ||
| But the reason why our men struggle in soccer is because the rest of the world identifies great male athletes and they develop them. | ||
| In Iran, last year was the first time they let women watch soccer in their country. | ||
| They require women to play in pants. | ||
| They require women to wear the hijab where you can just see their eyes on the football, on the soccer field. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| Is it a surprise that U.S. | ||
| women would dominate a country that doesn't let women wear shorts or attend soccer matches? | ||
| Is it a surprise that we would dominate Saudi Arabia where they just started letting women drive cars? | ||
| You know, so our women's success to me is actually a reflection of the ideals that they should be trying to shed and shine a bright light on for the rest of the world. | ||
| Having said that, the rest of the world doesn't care about women's soccer like the United States does. | ||
| So, pure economics, when you look at this, and again, this is pure rational economics, the Men's World Cup produced most recently, the most recent numbers I saw, $4 billion of revenue. | ||
| The women's World Cup in, I think it was the most recent, like 2015, produced $73 million | ||
| in revenue associated with it. | ||
| Now, that's continuing to grow, but the men in America actually made a smaller percentage | ||
| of the FIFA revenue. | ||
| I think it was 9% than the women did. | ||
| They got 13%. | ||
| So take a step back from everybody. | ||
| I think in general is in favor of equality, right? | ||
| I mean, there are very few people who are like, oh, I think because of your sex, you should have less rights than someone else. | ||
| Again, tiny, tiny percentage. | ||
| So to me, when you look at this, it's just a function of economics. | ||
| I wish I made the money that Howard Stern makes, right? | ||
| We do the same thing. | ||
| We talk on the radio every morning. | ||
| Why do I make less money than he does? | ||
| Because my audience is smaller. | ||
| And the reason why the U.S. | ||
| women and the revenue that my audience produces is lower, right? | ||
| It's basic economics. | ||
| So, I understand the argument of, oh, the U.S. | ||
| women deserve more. | ||
| Certainly, I hope they get as much as they possibly can. | ||
| I'm a capitalist. | ||
| I want every individual to make as much money as they can. | ||
| But the money's not there, right? | ||
| And so, the reason why the money's not there is because the world, not the United States, the world doesn't value women's soccer as much as they do men's soccer. | ||
| You think Trump, every time Rapinoe or one of these athletes says they're not gonna go to the White House or fuck the White House or whatever, you think he's just like, hallelujah, hallelujah, this is just gonna make me more popular. | ||
| Because to me, it's the ultimate virtue signal. | ||
| Why not, instead of saying that? | ||
| Why not, you honored your country, you won for your country, why not show up at the White House and then do what an adult might do, which, when he walks by and shakes all your hands, say, Mr. President, I'd love to have five minutes with you afterward to discuss some of the things that I'm concerned about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or ask for a meeting, which he's shown that he's willing to do! | |
| Like, this is what's so crazy about me. | ||
| And I don't know about you, but this is what really bothers me in general about the discussion about the White House visit. | ||
| I would go to the White House if I were invited by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, George Bush, Donald Trump. | ||
| The idea that that is somehow an endorsement of whoever is president is crazy to me. | ||
| To me, it's just a respect for the office itself and the location. | ||
| And that's why when Megan Rapinoe said the fucking White House, It's like the White House is a symbol that represents everything that's good and great about America, including the rights that allowed you to become such a dominant women's soccer player to begin with. | ||
| And by the way, and you know this better than me, I believe on election to enter the White House for the first term, Trump is the most gay LGBT friendly president. | ||
| Ever! | ||
| Literally, well, first off, he was basically pro-gay marriage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Which, remember, Barack Obama, again, first time around. | ||
| Was not, in 2008. | ||
| He was on stage with a freakin' gay pride flag a week before the election. | ||
| Peter Thiel at the RNC, a proud gay man, gets a standing ovation. | ||
| Nobody even knew what to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So yeah, it's all just bananas. | |
| And so that is what is so problematic and disappointing to me in many respects is, what does she actually disagree with? | ||
| And that's the question where I think the sports media often does not go the next level. | ||
| They cover the surface level virtue signaling, right? | ||
| OK, the next question for Megan Rapinoe is, OK, what do you specifically disagree with Donald Trump that he has done? | ||
| Not just like a mean tweet that he sent or something like that, a tangible decision. | ||
| And why would you not take the opportunity to sit with the most powerful man in the world and talk to him about it? | ||
| Because if anything, Trump has proven to actually listen to some of these arguments, right? | ||
| Is the Catch-22, though, for, not for you, because you can do what you want and you can control the content you're creating, but for ESPN, I get it, they can do it at sort of the base level, but then the more they were to do of that, it's the more that a guy like me, who, I don't really care about soccer, I was telling you right before we started, I think, that I just now flick through, like I see it's been, and it's so, I used to, even five years ago, I would always stop on ESPN, what's going on, and now it's just like, I know that whatever is on right now, I could not care less about. | ||
| I think what would happen is the athletes would get exposed, by and large, because you would find out. | ||
| But that's not the business ESPN wants to be in, right? | ||
| But what you would find out is there's no depth to their actual political opinions, because they're doing other things full-time, right? | ||
| I think if LeBron James, who is obviously super woke right now, because I think he gets positive feedback on social media and everything else, if you sat him down and said, okay, LeBron, you called the president a bum, Explain why specifically you think the president is a bum and what you would change differently if you were in the White House. | ||
| You would realize, wait a minute, like he would just him and Haw and he wouldn't have any answers. | ||
| Like you or I or any number of people, and maybe that athlete does have some depth to them. | ||
| And that's why I've always offered, you know, like I offered Colin Kaepernick. | ||
| I offered LeBron James. | ||
| I offer Megan Rapinoe. | ||
| Like, come on my show and actually make your arguments that you believe you have this platform to make. | ||
| We never see that happen, right? | ||
| We hear people say, oh, I've got to use my platform. | ||
| Well, how are you using your platform? | ||
| To advocate for, like, an actual change or some sort of detail. | ||
| I never see that actually happen. | ||
| It's interesting, your point about how Trump would be happy to take these meetings, because you're right, he does take these meetings with these people. | ||
| All the time, especially with famous people when it's good television ops, right? | ||
| Trump sitting with Megan Rapinoe on the other side of the desk in the Oval Office, he'd let all the meetings, like he did with Kanye and Kim Kardashian, right? | ||
| Trump is very cognizant of the amount of attention that he can get, and the more famous a person he meets with, the more attention he's gonna get, particularly in the world of sports. | ||
| Whether it's Jim Brown, whether it's he just announced that the logo, Jerry West, he's bringing in, Tiger Woods, Trump's a sports fan, right? | ||
| And I think he enjoys Tom Brady, obviously, all of the talk about the Brady and Belichick relationship and everything else. | ||
| And so I think he enjoys being able to interact with him as president. | ||
| And yeah, I think he would always have that meeting if you wanted to have that meeting. | ||
| Do you get any feedback from women in the sports broadcasting world that are sick of the wokeness when it comes to all the gender stuff? | ||
| That, to me, is the most obvious one. | ||
| We can argue about some of the racial stuff and numbers and things like that, but this one now where we're seeing trans wrestlers beating the crap, basically, out of genetically female women, and it's like, Now the feminists are for that. | ||
| It's like, what are we doing? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's, you talked about how do you blow it up. | ||
| I think you have to follow the logical collapse of the argument, right? | ||
| And to me, choosing your gender is, it's wild to me that we're okay with choosing your gender, but choosing your race is wildly offensive, right? | ||
| Like, so Rachel Dolezal is like a social pariah. | ||
| But if Rachel Dolezal was a woman who decided to be a man, we would all have to respect that decision. | ||
| And my thing is, it seems easier to choose to align yourself with a racial group than it does to change your gender, right? | ||
| But the next step from the world... You're going to be a soul man? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Oh, can you imagine that coming out today? | ||
| That would be amazing. | ||
| But to me, the next step that you take that is fascinating here is, Caitlyn Jenner is a great example. | ||
| ESPN gives Caitlyn Jenner an ESPY. | ||
| What would have happened if in the 1970s when Caitlyn Jenner is dominating, Bruce Jenner | ||
| is dominating in the Olympics, he had then decided, "I'm going to become a woman and | ||
| I'm going to come back and I'm going to compete against all the women." | ||
| He would have dominated even more, right? | ||
| This is the greatest athlete in the world as a man. | ||
| If he flips over and becomes a woman, he's going to dominate even more. | ||
| So this idea that you can choose your gender and that you should then be allowed to compete | ||
| as that gender, it's like they made a joke movie about this. | ||
| Do you remember like Juwanna Man back in the day? | ||
| That's the logical fallacy of the argument. | ||
| I cannot wait until some 42-year-old, washed-up NBA guy who played like seven seasons and scored three points a game becomes the MVP in the WNBA and you guys are going to have to take it. | ||
| Yeah, look, I mean, and I think that's honestly what you need to have happen in order for the logical fallacy of the argument to fall apart, right? | ||
| And I think that's ultimately what spells the end of wokedom in the world of sports, is what you were just talking about. | ||
| There are going to be a lot of dads and moms who have watched their daughters train their entire life to be able to win the Sprint State Championship. | ||
| And then there suddenly is a 17-year-old who is a male that has decided to identify as female and wins the competition by 20 yards, right? | ||
| Because this is, again, men are better athletes than women. | ||
| Like, I've got people right now, my Twitter mentions talking about the U.S. | ||
| women and the U.S. | ||
| men debate, and they're like, oh, if the U.S. | ||
| women played the men, they'd win. | ||
| And I'm like, the U.S. | ||
| women lost to a 15-and-under boys all-star team from Dallas, right? | ||
| Like, men are better at all sports than women are. | ||
| That's not sexist. | ||
| That's biology, right? | ||
| So, therefore, men who are bigger, stronger, and faster than women, who suddenly decide to identify as women, are going to be better. | ||
| And even if they get all the complicated hormone stuff. | ||
| You're still built physically in a way that most women are not, right? | ||
| You've got all the height advantages of testosterone, all the shoulder strength, everything else. | ||
| It's ludicrous. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| It's not offensive to say that. | ||
| When a woman dunks in the WNBA, which has only happened a handful of times, it's like a miracle. | ||
| Every NBA player can dunk. | ||
| I'm pretty sure John Stockton dunked once. | ||
| This is again in my book, Republicans Buy Sneakers 2, John McEnroe got criticized for saying Serena Williams would be the 700th best men's player in the world. | ||
| I talked to a bunch of men's tennis players, pros, and they're like, she couldn't make a men's college tennis team. | ||
| Doesn't mean she's not an outstanding women's tennis player. | ||
| But her talent doesn't translate into the arena with men. | ||
| And that doesn't mean that women are inferior to men in life. | ||
| It means that athletically, men are superior to women. | ||
| Well, you saw the way they were going after Martina Navratilova when she wrote that piece. | ||
| And that speaks to, I think, the danger of actually interjecting yourself into the conversation. | ||
| Because Martina Navratilova could have just said out of it. | ||
| I think she wrote an op-ed piece for a British newspaper. | ||
| Yeah, I remember there was one season, right, maybe the first or second season of the WNBA, you remember Cynthia Cooper who was on the Houston Comet, and she was like running circles around everything. | ||
| She had great handles, she had all these sick moves, and I remember watching her and I was like, could this girl possibly make it in the NBA? | ||
| And in my mind I thought that maybe she could, but that's just it. | ||
| It's crazy. - It's ludicrous. | ||
| It's just crazy. | ||
| It's like the argument, and this goes into Title IX, that I've always found would be fascinating | ||
| from a legal perspective. | ||
| You talk about extending the logical fallacy of the argument. | ||
| Football is not a men's sport. | ||
| Like, if you really think about it, every scholarship that you get in college | ||
| to play football is open to women. | ||
| Like, softball is a women's sport. | ||
| Baseball is a men's sport. | ||
| Men's basketball, men's sport. | ||
| Men's basketball, I mean, women's basketball, women's, you're right? | ||
| They're defined by their gender. | ||
| Football is open to everyone. | ||
| If Bill Belichick could find a 5'4 woman who could be the takeover or 6'4 woman or whatever it is for Tom Brady, he would sign that person to play in the NFL. | ||
| And so would every college coach. | ||
| Those women don't exist. | ||
| So is that the sickest twist to this whole thing? | ||
| That sports really, because of rules, Yes. | ||
| Is the great equalizer. | ||
| One billion percent. | ||
| I have never played basketball. | ||
| It's the ultimate meritocracy. | ||
| You know, I think I maybe told you this last time you were here, but Sue Bird went to the same high school as me. | ||
| She was younger than me, but every now and again she would come out to the courts where I was playing, and she'd run circles around everybody. | ||
| She was awesome. | ||
| I have no problem saying that. | ||
| She was freaking awesome. | ||
| And it's like, that doesn't mean she's going to go to the NBA. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we can acknowledge that within the skill set playing against all of us, yeah, she freaking killed us. | ||
| To me, it's like looking at the scatter plot or the bell curve, right? | ||
| Like most people People are somewhere in the range of the top, right? | ||
| And then there's outliers. | ||
| If you put male and female athletic ability on that same chart, it doesn't mean that some | ||
| women are not substantially better even than most men when it comes to athleticism. | ||
| But when you look at the extremes, which are the people who end up making a living, the | ||
| men athletically are on a totally different stratosphere than the most athletic women. | ||
| So when you say Sue Bird's a great example, Sue Bird can be a lot better than most men | ||
| at basketball and nowhere near the extreme of the most talented men's basketball players. | ||
| All right, we only got a couple minutes left, so let's just hit a couple other things. | ||
| So there's also been a little through line here that sort of as people like you are doing their own thing out of the institutions and as the institutions are crumbling, I've come to the belief that sort of the platforms, that all of this is going to crumble, that none of these things are sustainable, and it'll be on creators and innovators to figure out how to reach their communities. | ||
| Do you kind of view the future of the internet that way? | ||
| Because we're also in the middle of that game right now, which is just, what is all of this going to become? | ||
| Yeah, I think a lot about that, because what am I ultimately in the business of? | ||
| Words, right? | ||
| I produce, that's why the money that I've made, I've tended to roll into buildings, right? | ||
| Because everything that I do is so ephemeral. | ||
| But I think we're in an era when, and I don't know when it's going to be, I think it's going to happen soon, you will get into your car, which you may not be driving at all, but would be transporting you somewhere, and you will hopefully say, play me the most recent Clay Travis, right? | ||
| And boom, it's ready to go. | ||
| Now podcasts kind of have that, but I think that all audio is going to converge, right? | ||
| I think radio, I think podcast, I think You know, shows like this, which can exist in both audio | ||
| and video format, everything converges and it becomes an opportunity to distribute your | ||
| content in a way where there's almost no top-down, right? | ||
| Everything sort of becomes bottom-up. | ||
| And what can eventually happen is bottom-up can become massive. | ||
| And I think the ability of companies to create stars is going to be diminished and almost | ||
| everything is gonna be rising from a bottom-up. | ||
| And then big companies will say, "Oh, I see this person, they're successful," and they'll | ||
| try to attach to them. | ||
| But I think all the time about, for instance, on television, I think you'll come in and | ||
| you'll sit down and you will click on the latest app uploads from... | ||
| You know, maybe it'll be people like you and me all coming together and like we'll have our own brand and it'll be under this brand umbrella, right? | ||
| You can go kind of check because you know if people like you they might like me and you kind of get an affinity that way. | ||
| Everything is so competitive and to me Reed Hastings has said it so brilliantly, our competition is not HBO, it's sleep. | ||
| And I think we're all competing against sleep. | ||
| I think there's so many, you know, I was talking about this with a buddy the other day, sports used to be in the summer, I'd sit around and watch the Braves on TBS, I'd watch the Cubs on WGN, whatever other game, because everything else was a rerun on television in the summer, right? | ||
| Nowadays, I think baseball struggles because Stranger Things 3 is coming out, right? | ||
| Like, my kid's watching Stranger Things right now. | ||
| My oldest is. | ||
| My two younger would be terrified, I think, if they got to watch it. | ||
| So we're all competing everywhere simultaneously. | ||
| I think the amount of audience will diminish, but I think the intensity of that audience will grow such that people really, really love the things that they love. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting how when you're in these things, even though we're in sort of different worlds that obviously have a lot of overlap, that you start thinking about the same things. | ||
| Because I've been getting offers left and right, and what I keep coming back to is For the first time now, just because of the craziness with YouTube and everything else, I'll consider distribution offers, where it's just, I just want my stuff to get out there. | ||
| I don't care whether it's that you hopped in your automatic car and you can just say, play Rubik's board, or it's some other way, but that appeals to me rather than the reverse of the top-down thing. | ||
| I don't want... | ||
| I'm gonna have you on my podcast. | ||
| I think some people will hear you on my show and they'll be like, I never knew that guy existed. | ||
| sort of end up hovering around the same ideas. | ||
| Yeah, and look, I mean, the reason why I love doing your show is I do think there's cross-pollination. | ||
| I think people, like I'm gonna have you on my podcast, I think some people will hear you on my show | ||
| and they'll be like, I never knew that guy existed. | ||
| Oh, I like him, right? | ||
| And so I think it's gonna be incumbent upon creators to find other creators that they like | ||
| and sort of allow those two audiences to intermingle in some way to create bigger audiences | ||
| for people of like minds. | ||
| Let's just wrap with one other thing. | ||
| We talked about it right before we started. | ||
| Just the way money is completely out of control right now in all these leagues. | ||
| I kept asking, who's the guy that just signed that crazy deal? | ||
| He said, Denny Green. | ||
| And this guy, he's won a couple championships, good three-point shooter, decent player. | ||
| I don't think he's ever, maybe made an All-Star team. | ||
| The Lakers gave him $30 million. | ||
| $30 million for two years. | ||
| $15 million each. | ||
| These numbers are getting so out of control that at some point, People are gonna go to these, I mean I haven't been to, I didn't go to one NBA game last season for the first time in my life. | ||
| I was just more because I was busy, but it's like at some point these things will just price themselves out and everyone's just gonna be like, I'm not buying these $80 jerseys anymore, I'm not buying $12 sodas. | ||
| Yeah, I think what athletes are gonna have to recognize is who pays their salary. | ||
| And I think this is, I think, an important lesson for anybody employed by anyone. | ||
| Who pays your salary? | ||
| Where does the money come from, right? | ||
| Following that thread to knowing how you get paid. | ||
| I think a lot of athletes have become comfortable alienating the fan bases that define their paychecks because they don't see that direct connection, right? | ||
| Because the television contracts are signed for 10 years, because their contracts are guaranteed for multiple years. | ||
| But ultimately, it's the fan pulling money out of his or her pocket that is justifying what you are allowed to make. | ||
| And I think whether it's Colin Kaepernick, whether it's LeBron James, alienating fans, Megan Rapinoe, for any reason, is just bad business, right? | ||
| And that's kind of the essence of my argument, is that Michael Jordan had it right when he was asked, how come you don't get intensely political? | ||
| Because Republicans buy sneakers too. | ||
| He's not in the business. | ||
| Of needing for everybody to know what he thinks about politics from one day to the next. | ||
| And I think as athletes are trying to turn into repositories for political ideas, good, you know, left, right, indifferent, whatever they are, it's bad for their brands and it's bad for the leagues overall. | ||
| All right. |
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