Wins and Losses - Clay talks with Ben Shapiro

This episode of Wins & Losses with Clay Travis features Ben Shapiro as the guest. Clay and Ben talk about his upbringing in Los Angeles as a huge die hard sports fan. Clay asks Ben about his educational upbringing, and Ben shares that he began his college career at the age of 16 at UCLA, where he wrote for the school newspaper, and later attended Harvard Law. Ben explains why he quit practicing law after 10 months, and shares the steps he took that led him to where he is today. Clay and Ben finally get into sports and how political the sports arena has gotten, touching on the NBA and China situation, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Wins and Losses with Clay Trevis. Clay talks
with the most entertaining people in sports, entertainment and business.
Now here's Clay Trevis. Welcome in to out kick the
coverage the Winds and Losses podcast, where we can have

(00:24):
some long form conversations with a variety of different figures
that I find to be interesting in the world of sports, business, politics, media,
you name it. We've had a lot of awesome ones.
I encourage you to go back and listen to them.
And this week's guest is Ben Shapiro at Ben Shapiro
on Twitter. He's got a new book coming out which
I'm about halfway through, How to Destroy America in Three
Easy Steps. I also read his most recent book, I Believe,

(00:48):
which was which One the Right Side of History, How
Reason and moral purpose made the West Great? Super interesting
and entertaining books. Ben obviously has a wildly successful show
and podcast as a part of the Daily Wire team. Ben,
thanks for the time. I imagine releasing a book and
this day and age is is a little bit wacky,
even though you've released several before. Uh, this is a

(01:10):
different kind of vibe, right, I was definitely weird. Um
and I will admit that when I first wrote the book,
I thought I'd be relevant prior to the election, and
then COVID hit and I thought this is gonna do
wildly irrelevant before the election, and then the entire world
went up in flames. And it turns out its relevant again.
Sometimes I just sent the news cycle properly. All Right,
I want to dive into sports with you, because I've
been on your show before talking about sports, and I

(01:32):
know you're a pretty big sports fan, and we talked
as a jumping off point to a lot of different
people with sports as a sort of the connective tissue
or fabric. So let's start here. You grew up a
fan of which teams in which part of the country
when you were a kid. So I grew up in
l a and I'm a Chicago White tox fan primarily.
And then in terms of secondary sports for me, um

(01:53):
Boston Celtics fan and in Chicago Bears fans. I picked
up all my dad's allegiances. It's really the short story there.
My dad's from Chicago. When he was growing up, there
really wasn't a Chicago basketball team. He went to college
in Boston. Uh and because he did that he'd became
a Celtics fan. So I was. I grew up with
Celtics fan in l A, which went well for me
during my childhood. It was really great. So how big
of a sports fan were you? I mean, obviously you

(02:15):
went on to law school like I did, and uh,
and many people go on to more serious things in life.
Sports is kind of always the toy chest of life.
But when you were a kid growing up, were you a, Hey,
in the morning, I'm going to put on Sports Center,
see who won the night before, watch the highlights while
breakfast before I go to school. How committed would you
say you were to the teams you grew up rooting for?

(02:36):
Oh yeah, I was. I was. You know, I'm gonna
run out to the I'm gonna run out of the curve,
I'm gonna grab the box scores, I'm gonna come back
and I wake up at six am to watch the
early Sports Center. So yeah, I mean I was. I
was a sports nut, uh, in particularly baseball. My dad
and I actually co wrote a book about the about
the Chicago I talked two thousand and five World Serious season.
So a huge, huge sports fan. I mean, yesterday I

(02:57):
was watching and I'm so desperate for content. At this point,
I was watching the pre season Socks and Cubs game
in an empty stadium, watching backup relievers get raked. So yeah,
I mean I remained a very large I made a
very large sports tin. Did you play growing up? Yeah,
but I'm I'm a five nine jew now, so I
was never I'm a good contact hiner, So I was

(03:21):
I was gonna ask. I think it feels like every kid,
and basically everybody who's listening to us, with a few
exceptions who actually ended up being professional athletes. But you
have this sort of harsh realization for all kids at
some age, and for some of us it comes a
lot younger than others. For a lot of them, you know,

(03:41):
it comes in high school, whenever it might be. Do
you remember the age you were when you suddenly realized, hey,
wait a minute, I'm not going to end up being
a major league baseball player. Yeah, I was thinking it
was probably thirteen, and it was pretty devastating. I mean,
I played in Little league and I was I was
pretty good. I mean I played second bags and I
was I could switch hit, and I was able to

(04:02):
go to the cage even hit an eight miles an hour,
but it wasn't like I had any sort of power,
and my arm wasn't strong enough for me to make
the third base throw, you know, really on the line.
And so at that point I was like, Okay, you know,
this one's pretty much done, so I'm gonna go to
the traditional Jewish pastimes of violin and laying. So that's
that's where it was. I've been a violent since I
was five. Anyway, it was okay, I can let these

(04:23):
groundballs wrap up my hands, or I can continue to
play violent like a good Jewish kid. When did when
did you? Where did you go to college? I went
for college, and then I went to Harvard to law school. Yeah,
so okay, so when you were at U c l
A for college. So I went back recently and found
the very first thing that I had ever had published
under my name. Uh and I didn't find it. Actually

(04:44):
one of my listeners did, but I told the story.
I was eighteen years old. I was a freshman in
college at George Washington UM, and there was a front
page article because there was a protest over an executive
I guess it was body vice president or something of
the school who would use the phrase rule of thumb.

(05:05):
And somebody was offended about the use of the phrase
rule of thumb, and so I wrote in talking about
how ridiculous it was. And I went back and I
read that letter to the editor to the student newspaper,
and it was kind of amazing to see at you know,
I'm forty one now, but twenty plus years ago I
was fighting the same battles that I feel like i'm
fighting now for people out there who are like, oh,

(05:26):
you've changed. Literally, other than maybe using a few bigger
words when I was eighteen because I was trying to
show off my vocabulary, I really am not very much
different in the way that I would think about the
First Amendment and many other different issues than I would
have when I was eighteen. That's not to say that
I have perfect, you know, opinions or anything else. It's
just there's a consistency there for you. When you went

(05:48):
away to college at eighteen, had you developed your own
political philosophy at that point or was it still evolving?
I mean I think it was. It was still evolving
a little bit. It was fairly well developed. I mean
I went to college, not sixteen, So I started UCL.
I went out of sixteen, and I was living at
home and my first piece that I wrote was about
Israel because I had walked on campus and the first
thing I saw was a piece in the student newspaper

(06:10):
that compared to drill untime Minister Auriol Rod with Adolf
by Ahmen Nazi uh. And I thought, well, this doesn't
sound right. So I started walking into the Daily brewin
offices and I wrote a counterpiece. Uh. And then a
few weeks later I was walking through and I was
the only person who's relatively conservative they never heard of.
So as I was walking through the office, they were like, oh, yeah,
we've got this piece that somebody's writing about how sanctions
on towns and stander bad. You want to write the

(06:31):
counterpoint and to turn into sort of a point counterpoint thing.
And then I turned it into a normal column for
the U c l I paper. Um, but yeah, I
mean my my politics was I would say, you know,
I was only sixteen, so it was somewhat well developed.
I got more well developed as time went on. But
I had a syndicated column when I was seventeen, and
I had my first published at twenty, So I would
say that I was more of a dick when I
was like seventeen. But I'm not sure who wasn't when

(06:52):
they were seventeen. So what was the reaction when you're
the sixteen year old kid writing in the Daily Bruin newspaper.
I mean that had to be uh, pretty energy. I mean,
I would imagine pretty impressive to your parents, but also
to you. It had to be pretty cool to be
able to start to influence perceptions even if it's on
a local student newspaper at that time. Yeah, it's pretty neat.

(07:13):
I mean I I I really enjoyed it. It was
a lot of fun. It became one of the most
widely read columns on the paper because it's the only
thing that wasn't sort of repeating party line. Uh. And
then when I was seventeen, I turned to my dad
and I've been writing for the Daily Run for maybe
a year and a half, and uh, and I said,
do you think that my stuff is good enough to
be published in like a normal paper? And he had
been reading I think it's Mona Charon who was syndicated
by Creator Syndicate, And he said, let me let me

(07:35):
see if they take submissions. So I just submitted my
stuff cold to creator syndicate, and they came back three
weeks later and offered me a weekly column. Uh, and
they didn't know hold I was. They knew I was young,
and they didn't know I seventeen. So my parents actually
had to sign the contract team to sign a contract
in California. So I actually started writing when I was
a team for for the for the syndicate, and then

(07:56):
that meant that it was going out to ten twelve papers.
Now it's I've been writing every weeks since I was
eighteen for them, So that means it's now been eighteen years.
And that means that I've written, you know, hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of columns. It is the column it's
it's still going, it's still printed and probably a hundred
papers across the country at this point. Did you ever
practice a law, Oh yeah, I did, So I went

(08:18):
to I went to law school and then I and
then I write. Out of law school, you got these
big debts and and I thought, Okay, I figured I'll
go into real estate. Well, I'll learn real estate and
then make a bundle that way. So I joined up
with a firm called Goodwin Procter in Los Angeles, which
is a big Boston based firm. Um and Uh, I
will say I have the worst interview record of anyone
in the history of Howard Law School, I think. So

(08:39):
I interviewed at thirty two separate firms. I got one offer,
and what do yeah, what do you attribute that to? Yeah,
I mean it was pretty obvious what it was about.
It was. It was about the fact that on my
resume I had the title of my books. So I
had my first book was called Brainwash, How liberal Bias
and doctrinates college Students or something like that. Uh. And
my second book was about social liberalism and how it

(08:59):
was bad. And so those were on and they're published
by mainstream houses, right, But I put those on my resume,
and so the interviews would go. I can get a
couple of great kind of law school interview stories. So uh.
And the way it works at Harvard is you don't
go to the firm the interview. They come to interview
you because you're a law student. So well, Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt
Law School does the same thing. They have like these
little bunker rooms. I don't know what it's like at Harvard,

(09:21):
but they have the on campus interviews and you know,
you walk in and you interview and everything else. So
so yeah, I went through the same sort of process. Yeah, exactly.
So Harvard they do to the childhood towel and then
these really you know, beautifully apportioned rooms and you go
in and people interview you. So I remember one time
I was interviewing and gets some done and the partner
is sitting in the room before I even sit down.
The partner says, it's always been my like, it's pretty

(09:44):
obvious I'm religious, right ma I war Yama publicly and
all this before I even sit down. He says, it's
always been my contention that conservatives and religious people in
general have a Freudian fear of sex. Like before I
hit down for the interview, and I was like, okay,
well I'm clearly not getting that job. I just so
just a userrated and so I would say half my
interviews sort of weren't like that. And then I went
back to the Harvard Law School officite career services that like,

(10:06):
what's the deal, Like, I graduated, come loud from your university.
I have several published books at this point, like what's happening?
And they said, just take your book after your resume.
I took my books after asume. I got two interviews
next week. Oh that's amazing. So how so, So I
practiced full time for about two years, and I was like,
this is not for me. And I understand there's a lot. Yeah,

(10:27):
I mean, so how long did you actually last? Oh?
I lasted ten months. I was working. I was working
in real estate off for ten months. And then I
was so miserable. I just gotten engaged, I just bought
a condo, and right before we're set to get married,
I turned my wife and I said, I'm miserable. This
is the worst job in the entire world. I'd also
entered the real estate division and Echogan Proctor in September

(10:47):
of two thousand seven. There is no way. It's a
tough time been September two thousand seven. So I start
working there and I'm literally sitting in this gorgeous office
overlooking you know, Santa Monica, and you can see all
the way out to the ocean. And I'm sitting up
like ten hours a day doing nothing and then being
yelled at by the partner for not building hours. And
and like I remember, I came out of the bathroom
one time and the partners standing right there. It was like,

(11:08):
why aren't you building hours because you don't give ma
anny work? He's like, won't go rain make Like what
the first your associate, what are you even talking about?
I do doc review right, Like what do you? What
do you say? So, after ten months of his nonsense,
I quit, uh, and I will. This is actually pretty funny.
I sat down with a couple of the senior associates
and one of them was trying to convince me not

(11:28):
to quit, and the other one had played college baseball
I think a uv A and he and he's sitting
there trying to convince me not to quit, and I'm
giving all my reasons why I want to quit. A
miserable I hate this. I think it's a stupid job.
And about halfway through him trying to convince me not
to quit, he turns to the other senior associate and
he goes, maybe I should quit. The other senior associates

(11:50):
trying to explain to him by even though he's miserable,
he shouldn't quit. And then I went into the partner
told him that I wanted to quit, and the partner's
first response was, you understand that you'll never make his money. Well,
you'll never make as much money in whatever else you
do the rest of your life as you're making right now.
And I said, Okay, then I guess I won't make
as much money. Um and uh. And by the way,

(12:10):
I don't know what your starting salary was, but let's
presume you're making around two hundred thou dollars. I bet
you have. I've done a little bit better than that.
Oh dude. I mean, I've been wanting for years to
send my tax returns to this guy. Um but it's uh.
So I quit there. I was out of work for
maybe three months. I've been ghost writing for some people. UM,

(12:31):
but I was out of work for a little while.
I had a little bit of savings for my books,
um and uh. And then I latched on as the
in house attorney at Talk Radio Network, which was a
syndicator for Laura Ingram and Michael Savage at the time.
UM and I worked there, I was doing law. But
the deal was I got paid literally a third of
what I've been making, um, which was significantly less than
six figures um and um. My deal was, I will

(12:53):
do law for half the day, and for half the
day I wanted to learn the production side of the business.
So I'd sit there and outcut audio. I literally get up,
but at five o'clock in the morning, I would highlight
pieces for the various hopes that they had their show
prep ready, and I would cut the pieces of audio
that I thought relevant for the day. UM. And so
I was, you know, doing half time like remow level
production and halftime UH and halftime law. And after three years,

(13:16):
I was executive as president of the company. Uh and UM.
I looked at the h I sort of looked at
the direction of the company and I was like, I
think I'm down here. Uh. And I quit and um
and then moved on to the succession and other job.
And I started working at Andrew bright Bart's outlet, and
then I started, uh, what's I called truth or bold uh?
And then after that went to phone I started Daily
Wire Daily Wires, where obviously everything has happened over over

(13:38):
there right now, all right, So I want to circle
back around here for a second, because one of the
things we talked about on Winsdo Losses is being willing
to take risk and to uh and to latch onto
opportunity even if other people think you're crazy. You can
imagine because we have somewhat similar backgrounds. I stopped practicing
law after a couple of years. You're making good money, uh,
and a lot of people look at you like you

(14:00):
are crazy. That partner who told you you'd never make
the salary that you were making then is emblematic of it.
But I'm curious you mentioned your wife. How how important
was it for her to support your decision? Do you
remember other people who also said, hey, I believe in
you've been even if you're taking a non traditional career path. Yes,

(14:22):
my wife was super supportive. She was the one who
actually told me to quit. So I would kind of
like implying that I wanted to quit. Should listen, if
you're this miserabation, just quit Like you got a Harvard
law degree, You're smart guy, got a lot of contacts.
You'll get another job. Don't worry about it. Um. And
so I quit a month before we were married, having
just taken on a mortgage and with you know, a
little savings but not much. And she didn't like that.
In my whole career, like, if you got to make

(14:42):
the move, make a move. So I've been, you know,
I've been very risk seeking. My entire career. Um My,
I also figured, listen, I'm young, I can afford the risk.
We didn't have kids at that point. Um but I
always figured that if you bank on your own talent
and it's a it's an area where you actually know
what you're doing, then you'll do pretty well. My parents
have always been incredibly supportive. This ares me being risk
taking as well. So I think I can come from

(15:02):
tons of money. But you know, my parents are probably
probably upper middle class. I think it's fair to say
when I was growing up we were kind of lower
middle class middle class. Like I grew up in a
two bedroom house in Burbank with three sisters. All of
us shared one room in one bathroom. But by the
time I was by the time I was in college,
were probably somewhere between middle class and upper middle class.
So it wasn't like I was coming from a place
where things went wildly wrong. You know, I was going

(15:25):
to be thrown into massive amounts of debt, So I
was lucky that way for sure. Also, I would say this,
though I'm some middle class as well, the dollars don't
impress you as much. Like the first job that I
ever had, I made more money as a lawyer my
first year than my parents had ever made, right, and

(15:46):
so it was like, oh wow, like I when you
haven't ever gotten used to having extreme amounts of money.
We talked about this recently, We do on the show
sometimes about the idea of golden handcuffs, and a lot
of young lawyers find themselves in golden hand cuffs because
you're making more than maybe your parents ever made at
the age of six years old, whatever it is. But

(16:06):
at the same time, you're recognizing that you're not necessarily
able to embrace your full talents. Yeah, that's right, I
mean that's really what it was. It was. It was
early on. The only thing I really had to pay
for is I had paid for a car, but I
just basically bought it. I used must say GP convertible
two dousand and six baby boom. It was. It was,
it was, it was. It was my car until until

(16:27):
I got married, at which point it turned into Hundah court.
It's all of our cars to uh. And but um, yeah,
that's right. I mean I never I had a basic
clossy about money making, which is never spend a dollar
being on top uh, And so I never I never
gotten to bed I was. I was always very careful
about a dollar. And and but I will say that
when I said to my parents, my mom particularly that
I wanted to quit the law firm, she was a

(16:49):
little bit perturbed because not not like angry or anything,
but like, are you sure about that? Because she'd been
spending her entire career, you know, to get to the
point where I was making that money. First year was
coming out of coming out of law school, and um,
you know, obviously ended up being the right decision. But
it wasn't like she took like a hard and fast,
this is the wrong move thing. My mom tends to
be a much more risk averse person than I am. Yeah, okay,

(17:09):
so let's talk about risk. You end up with the
Daily Wire, and I believe you guys are five years
and wildly successful website. UM somewhat similarly, we started out
kick and I had bounced around other places, whether it
was dead Spin before they had gone full on Looney Left.
I've been to FanHouse, I had been writing at CBS Sports.

(17:30):
I felt like I understood the business model better than
most who were in my position. What about you? What
did you learn at the other places you wrote at?
And worked for before you ended up at Daily Wire
and how important was that to you and being able
to build the success of your current company. So there
are a few sort of specific skills that that learned.
So one was, um, you know, I'd always written a

(17:53):
lot of story selection with a huge one, so when
I was an editor of Right Part, I kind of
learned story selection. After about a year and a half,
I really wos in the editorial chain anymore, but I
had learned to write really good headlines since that obviously
kim in very handy when I was when I was
writing my own website. UM, I think that, you know,
I learned also that you don't want to you don't
want to staff me on your capacity to support, so

(18:16):
you really want to grow slowly, you know, you want
to grow to your grow to your audience. Um. And
that means I think a big mistake that a lot
of people make is when they do take a risk,
they take a huge risk. So, yeah, I'm gonna start
a business. I'm gonna hire twenty five people. We're gonna
go full bore, We're gonna blow the entire chunk of
change right at the gate. And that was something that
I really learned not to do very early, which was, uh,

(18:38):
you know, we're we're gonna we'll hire a couple writers.
We're gonna try out everybody. Everybody's got to spend a
week writing for us. We'll pay them for their time,
but we're gonna see if they actually can run through
the paces. Uh and uh. And that was apology I
started when on to Bright part but then we carried
on when I was when I moved beyond Bright part Um.
The sort of real key actually was something that occurred
to both me and my business partner, Jeremy Boring. Uh.
And that was marketing. Uh. And that is something that

(19:01):
I think we mostly learned when we were running Truth
of Bolts for for David Horror's Freedom Center, which was
sort of the antimedia matters and the right uh. And
what we what we really learned is that we had
become largely dependent for our traffic on other websites linking us.
And so at one point I turned to Jeremy and
I said, what has probably since become our our company's
business model, which is luck is not a business model. Yeah,

(19:21):
you know, you can't rely on other people to help
you out. You really have to have a plan for
how you are going to maximize your own business and
what that really means. You have to focus to an
extraordinary extent on marketing because most people tend to think
the content is king well, content is kind of thing
and kind of not. So you can write a great
book and if nobody knows it out there, it will
sell two copies. And you can write a pile of

(19:42):
horse crap, and if you put it between two covers
and you have a lot of people covering it, it
will sell in a lot of copies. Which is how
you end up with, you know, Charles Barkley being questioned
about a book. Yeah, misquoted in his own autobiography. I
want to unpack a little bit of that because it's
so fascinating. Be sure to catch live editions about Kick
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and the AD Council. You're listening to wins and losses.
I'm Clay Travis. He's been Shapiro. One of the things

(21:38):
that I learned was there's a great quote that's out
there from I believe it's Michael Bay and they said, like,
how do you know what the needle is? How do
you move the needle? And he said, which one of
the cockiest quotes of all time, I am the needle.
And there's obviously two ways to look at that. Either
you can make people you know, adjust to whatever you

(21:59):
believe is in poor or you have such a finely
tuned calibration for what people are going to respond to
that you know how to address their issues. And so
I always like to say, I'm a data guy. I
like to go look at what people actually click on
as opposed to what they claimed that they are going
to click on. Uh. And I bet you are as well,
just based on the answer you gave. What surprised you

(22:22):
that worked early on in your writing career on the
Internet that if you didn't actually look at the numbers
or the click through rates or the data might have
been counterintuitive. So I think that everybody focuses on the
writing and alph headlines. Yeah, so it's so, you know,
you like I would read a really great piece and
I with out a crappy headline, it gets no traffic.

(22:42):
I remember I was doing a panel at one of
these big tech events and I was sitting on a
panel with one of the head Vaccios, which is of
course another big news website, and they were complaining that
they didn't get the kind of social media traffic because
we get an enormous social media kind of response to
our stuff, and they were I was saying, well, can
you read me? Like the last three have lines in person?
You know, I looked up their headlines that said, well

(23:03):
you need to write better headlines, like not like the
New York Times doesn't have great web traffic organically because
their headlines stuck. All their headlines are you know, as
the world turns blacks and Hispanics at hardest, It's like, well,
how are you just leave with the news? How about that?
Like I just want to make a hardcore claim and
make the hardcore claim right up front, like there that
I'm not even making a claim about their contents. I'm
just saying the way they phrase their contents is oblique.

(23:24):
I don't do that. People want to wrack. People want
to hear what we call the world in Hebrews the
topless they want to hear just the bottom line. They
don't want to They don't want to be jerked around.
And so the more out front yard with your titles,
the better it's gonna do. Uh. The other thing is
that people don't I mean, it's a sad group of
the world that people don't actually want good news. So
everybody will tell you they want good news, but nobody
wants good news. So if you if you cover the

(23:46):
I mean, it's it's a truism that everybody in the
media knows, but they won't tell anybody in the audience.
So they also be like, well, you know, I wish
that the news were just filled with more stories about
good things that are happening. Full crap. You want your
own quite on it. That doesn't it doesn't activate your
maga lass. So it's just be real about this. You
don't want that stuff like what you actually wanted the
stuff to freak you out right, which is why on
COVID there's very little news about you know, the fact
that that rate has gone down and the fact that

(24:08):
hospitals are treating this thing significantly better than they were before.
The fact that the caseload is rising but the hospitals
are not overwhelmed. Like all of that is more accurate
than what you're generally seeing as the narrative. But that's
not what you want to click on. What you want
to click on is hospital is about to be overwhelmed.
Stay in your home, we're all going to die because
that activates certain core parts of your brain. So if
you want traffic, you know, then then that's where you go. Now,
obviously you've got to be honest about how you cover stuff. Um,

(24:30):
but it is. It is just a fact of human nature,
and people who are I think unscrupulous can certainly play
on that. It's one of the reasons why for years
and years and years, the going you know, the going
polling has shown that people were worried about vast increases
in crime, despite the fact that we're in the middle
of a thirty year crime drop in the United States
for the last couple of years. No, it's unders true.
And and I've labeled all the coronavirus coverage fear porn

(24:53):
because that is oftentimes what motivate and the analogy I
use you'll probably appreciate this is one day, although this
is a little bit different for our audience, but uh,
one day, we had a cancer patient announcing an NFL
draft pick. St. Jude, which does incredible work in Memphis
and around the country. Uh, they had a cancer patient
who was going to be announcing an NFL draft pick.
They gave that story to me to write, and I

(25:15):
put it out on Twitter as an OutKick story, and
I watched the traffic because you can sit in front
of your Google Analytics or whatever internal analytics you have
and see people react to whatever is out there circulating.
And you know, we saw a little bit of a blip,
but a lot more people said, oh, this is awesome
than actually came to read about it. That same day,
Aaron Murray, who was then the quarterback of the Georgia Bulldogs,

(25:37):
had a brand new girlfriend, and I was like, I
put out you know, Aaron Murray's new girlfriend is super hot,
and like the the website traffic almost shut down the
servers right so literally, like a couple of hours apart,
we have good looking girl of a girlfriend of a
quarterback and we have you know, cancer patient making a pick.
People would say they want the cancer patient story, but

(25:59):
it's like you can peel back their brain and the
good looking girl like people like broke their self, you know,
their screens on their phones to immediately click through on it.
And we just had another story like that recently because
s I had a fifty six year old swimsuit model
and people are like, you know, I don't care about that,
and you know, meanwhile, the servers are you know, hot
lava because people can't click on that enough. It was

(26:19):
our most read story last week and read as in
quotation marks. But let's go back to uh, let's go
back to sports for a minute, because you talked about
being a big sports fan growing up. For me, I
have talked with my audience about the Missouri race protest,
which I believe happened back in if I'm not mistaken
whatever that year was. Yeah. As for me, my red

(26:41):
pill moment as a member of the sports media, because
that was in my wheelhouse, Southeastern Conference college football, which
is what I made my my living on, and I
actually dove into that story and I saw the way
that it was covered by the media, and I'm like, man,
there is nothing that is actually here, And from that
moment I legitimately questioned everything in an aggressive way in

(27:06):
the sports media in a way that I never had before.
Was there a story for you in sports? And to
the extent that I have evolved in any way in
the way that I write and talk about sports. For me,
that story was a transformative moment. I've always been skeptical.
I'd always been, uh, you know, maybe more likely to
adopt a devil's advocate perspective. Maybe that's the lawyer in me,
whatever it is, But that for me was a was

(27:28):
it a life sort of altering moment in the way
that I consumed news in the world of sports. Was
there one for you in the world of sports where
you said, my god, sports has become as political and
as unclear and as agenda driven as the rest of
politics news. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's been
hints of it for a long time. So I'm My

(27:50):
parents gave me a Sports Illustrated subscription for my birthday
when I was five thirteen, and for fifteen years I
was a subscriber to Sports Illustrated. And I wasn't just
a subscriber. I would like sit there on Friday Nights
to stab hath started and I would read this thing
cover to cover like every single week. I didn't care
if I like the columns and care if if I
was interested in the sport. I would literally sit there
and just read the whole thing cover to cover, and
it was kind of my my weekly break. Well. I

(28:12):
remember over time and Sports Illustrated started covering more and
more politics, where suddenly there was like a cover story
on how global warming is going to affect baseball and
how the Miami Marlins we're gonna be playing from thirty
feet underwater and this kind of stuff, and I remember thinking, Okay,
I don't think that's true, but they kind of. They
kind of breaking point for me came when they featured
Caitlin Jenner on the cover of the magazine and they
made a big deal out of this Caitlin, and I

(28:33):
just remember thinking to myself, Okay, Caitlyn Jenner is an adult.
He can I use people's biological pronouns, he can, he
can do any loans to me. If if he thinks
that he's a woman, then that's fine. If he wants
to call him self Caitlin, and that's fine. I don't
really care, but what in the f does this have
to do with sport? Caitlin Bruce Cheddar has not been
relevant in the American sports team because before I was born, like,

(28:54):
why is this on the cover of a magazine? I
I do not understand why this is happening. And that's
what I realized that this had become just the thing.
The thing was that the only stories that mattered were
sports stories that as a particular narrative and that have
been true for for that I remember this is true
when um it was um uh what what was the
name of John and Michi? Was it? I think with

(29:15):
the the the gay basketball player from the Orlando from
the Atlanta Magic was was put on the cover of
Sports Illustrator. I remember thinking to myself, there's no one pretty,
you know, famous gay people in society, Like, I'm not
sure why this is like a huge story. Um and
but it was really the Cantlon gender things. At least
Gihon and Michi had been like an active player within
the recent past. Um. The the Cantlon genner thing was like, okay, now,
because now you're trying to promulgate a couple of things.

(29:37):
One you're trying to suggest that if I believe that
Bruce Jenner is actually a man, or that Cantlon Genner
is a biological man, that I'm a biggot, and too,
you're putting that on the cover of a sports magazine
for that who has not been relevant or a person
who's not been relevant in sports for literally four decades,
like this is this is this clearly has nothing to
do with anything. And then it got to the point
like that was when I had already been thinking of it,

(29:57):
But that's when I was like, you know what, I
don't need Sports illustrated me like anymore, and I just
canceled it because it was at least half politics. At
that point, I started looking at the magazine and realizing
half of the stuff I was reading with politics. And
then I remember watching ESPN. I was, as you say,
devoted to Sports Center like every day, and then at
the gym I put on I put on ESPN, and
every single story after the Missouri thing was the story
of America's evil racist, evil racist orientation for minorities, and

(30:22):
I thought, well, hold on a second, isn't ESPN like
a an entire channel dedicated to athletic prowess, which is
in many sports is heavily dominated by minorities, but apparently
America's evil and and it got to the point where
it's like, Okay, I just don't want to watch this anymore.
The only thing that I want to watch is the
actual game. And you can see how in sports the
entire narrative moved from the fringes into the actual sport.

(30:45):
And that's that's kind of the story of the last
five years and went from Okay, you know, we have
character studies of various players in sports filtrated for years.
This person might not be that relevant, but but it's
kind of an interesting character study. And even there, you're like, okay, fine,
then it got and now it's to the point where
we're going to act really put the politics on the
field right now. That was that's what's happened over the
last three or four years. It was the politics of
the players is interesting, but separate from what happens on

(31:07):
the field. So you can watch a broadcast and go
the entire broadcast for that hearing the politics. And now
it's you know, we're gonna put it on the sideline.
And then right even a few years ago with this Kaepernick,
it was on the sideline and then it moved to okay,
it's gonna be during and it's gonna move to before
the game with the hand up, don't shoot stout at
the same it's rand same year, and then it was
going to be okay, now that's gonna be in the
game itself. Now when I turn on the NBA, I

(31:29):
have to watch Black Lives Matter throw up in an
alley to defend the police. And I'm out, man, like,
I I can't do that, Like I'm happy to watch
the basketball, But if you're going to spoon feed me
a particular brand of politics, well I do it. Like
I just wonder if you're on the left and I'm
running a sports league, do you really want to see
pro life throw up throw up an alley you to
lower my taxes? Like, is that's something that you're up for?

(31:50):
Are you up for me? Are you up for watching
the league where quarterback biological women exist? Goes back to
throw a hail Mary too to strengthen our military funding?
Like what are we talking about here? This has nothing
to do with anything. It is amazing to think about
and and and really, in the last ten days or so,

(32:10):
I think people have started to recognize the inherent hypocrisy here,
and I thought the Adrian Wojnarowski response of just f
you immediately sent to Missouri Senator Josh Holly when he
asked about the inherent contradictions in the NBA being willing
to take billions of dollars from a Chinese communist government, which,
if you truly want to analogize a global power to

(32:34):
Nazi era, which is always a freighted difficult historical, uh
conversation to have, but the Chinese would be it, right.
I mean, if you think about what they are doing,
it most clearly, I would argue, of any country in
the world right now, curious if you would agree analogizes
to Nazi Germany. Yet NBA is willing to take billions
of dollars from communist China, which has got concentration camps

(32:57):
and is taking over land and is taking away rights,
literally pulling books out of libraries, and yet they're gonna
lecture us about American politics. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I
mean again, it's it's pretty amazing to hear from the NBA,
which is heavily blackly because so many talented players are black,
saying that Americans are deeply in endemically racist, and we're
all tuning in to watch the NBA specifically because we

(33:19):
just wanted to see athletic provias. Right. It's that There
was an amazing exchange today between Senators Ted Cruz and
mar Cuban, the owner of the Alice Mavericke, where Cuban
was saying something Nashew to Cruz, and Cruise came back
and he was like, you know, they're very brave on
a lot of these issues, but I'm just wondering, do
you have the guts just tweet like free Hong Kong
or anything about what's going on in China right now?
And immediately Cuban tweets back, well, you know, what happens

(33:39):
internally in different countries is their own business, and also
Black lives matter. It's like, okay, so you're just misdirected. Now.
The reality is that, you know, we there's lots of
we said about the lea brutality in this country, but
the threat to black Americans in this country there is
nowhere on the order of what's happening to the Chinese
leakers the hands of the Chinese government, but one you're
willing to say something on because it is called free too,

(34:00):
not only to cost free, because it actually glazed into
a certain marketing perspective that you want to have with
regard to the NBA and the other one. You literally
will not even say that. I mean, there is tape
that has emerged of of the weaker being loaded after
having their head ships onto trains to go to concentration
camps where they will be sterilized and Mark Huban play god.
It's an internal political issue, Okay, yeah, sure, I totally

(34:21):
believe your virtue signaling about the cruelties of America and
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(34:43):
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Find a forest near you and start exploring. I Discover

(35:03):
the Forest dot Org. Brought to you by the United
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if you could find a way to get inside each
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(35:25):
for some that feeling lasts more than a moment. We
can change that. Learn how it belonging begins with us
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Mile in the shoes. Look to your children's eyes to
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(35:48):
see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched
to the sky. They see treasure in pebbles, They see
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see you. They're fearless. Side is this fascinating world? Find
a forest near you and start exploring a Discover the
Forest dot org brought to you by the United States
Forest Service and the AD Council. We're talking to Ben Shapiro.

(36:11):
The new book, by the Way, How to Destroy America
and Three Easy Steps is a good read. I'm working
on it right now. Encourage you to follow him on
Twitter as well at Ben Shapiro. Um, you were. And
by the way, this is the Winds and Watses podcast.
I'm Clay Travis, and uh it also ties in with
Jamal Hill. We're talking on Monday afternoon. Yesterday afternoon evening,

(36:31):
Jamal Hill tweeted out that if you vote for Donald Trump,
you are a racist. Uh, and you'll appreciate this. I
had our crew at out kick reach out to ESPN
because they now have hired Jamal Hill to be a
producer of a Colin Kaepernick documentary, which is the very
essence of propaganda. Right. We know already what they are

(36:51):
going to allow him to say and what that story
will be that will be told. But they're literally giving
millions of dollars to Kaepernick and Jamal Hill. And so
we said, uh, you know, I HadAM phrased it. I said,
do you basically agree that Jamal Hill's position of everyone
who votes for Donald Trump is racist? ESPNS response was
no comment. So they're not even willing to say there

(37:13):
are some people in America who might be voting for
Donald Trump that are not racist, I mean, including her mom, right,
you guys also, which is absolutely speak active. Yeah, I mean,
the first of all, I'm not sure why Jamal Hill
is suddenly an expert on American policing. But I just

(37:34):
I just think there's there's not a ton of crossover
here between. Like my my understanding, which maybe maybe she's not,
I don't know what. My understanding is that she made
her kind of fame and fortune doing sports, not doing
not doing the politics specifically. Now, listen, she's in pitt opinion.
I'm not one of these shut up and seeing kind
of people like I think that you should be able
to speak on whatever you want to speak about. But
I'm not sure why her opinion carries so much weight

(37:54):
on on these matters when she has provided little to
no statistical evidence in many of the contentions that she
is making in a team that she's brought on TV
merely to castigate large crowds of people she doesn't know
is racist. I mean, she did the same thing a
couple of weeks ago after the bubble walls non news
or she suggested that everybody who watched NASCAR was a
Confederate flag waving racist. I mean, it's just like this,
this is her stick, and it's it's a pretty incredible stick.

(38:15):
By the way, what a great country. This is right.
I mean, it really is a phenomenal country where you
can be a quarterback who leaves your team to the
super Bowl and then the next season everybody figures the
figures the out that you can't make a secondary read
and you kneel and you can make millions of dollars
top of that while declaring that the country cat you
in his racist like that's an unbelievable scam. It's fan
freaking pastic. This is just like anyone who can make

(38:38):
a fortune here no matter how, no matter what you do,
but particularly if you just crap all over the system
that is paying tons of money. There's no other country
in the world that I can think of where somebody
could just say the country is fundamentally racist, it's an
awful place, and make more money doing that than they
would to actually be a pro athlete. I got a
couple of facts for you. I think you're going to
enjoy and also want your opinion. A few weeks ago,

(38:59):
ESPN decided to give over their programming for the evening
to social Justice Warrior programming. It was like ESPN Woke
Center in the extreme. Okay uh. It was the lowest
rated prime time programming in twenty five years and probably longer.
Literally literally, the audience is telling ESPN, we don't want this,

(39:22):
We do not have any interest in you guys deciding
to be I think, as you initially coined, MS, ESPN
this uh the worldwide leader in sports and left wing politics.
Why do you think in a market based economy, markets
responding as they are, is still leading ESPN down this
pathway of woke center destruction when all the evidence is

(39:46):
telling them, Hey, your fans, your audience don't want this. Well.
I actually did a bit of a statistical study on
this a few years ago to look at the percentage
of coverage that was being devoted by sports on ESPN,
and they have you heavily disproportionately focused on the NFL
and the NBA, much less on the n L, the
almost nothing on the NHL um And what that says
to me is that ESPN is specifically catering to particular

(40:09):
racial demographics that they think are going to spend more
money with their advertisers, which makes perfect times right on,
if you're if you're ESPN and you get a lot
of money from Nike for advertising, and people who are
disproportionately likely to buy Nike are young black males, and
young black males want companies that cater to their particular
brand of politics. Then it all sort of crosses over. Right,
There's a reason that Nike decided to hire Kaepernick, and
it's not because Nike suddenly decided to get wont because

(40:31):
they wanted to make more money. So capitalism always wins
until it doesn't, right, I mean this is sort of
in the short term, capitalism always wins. ESPN can afford
a bad night of programming in order to signal to
their to their constituency that we are on your side
when it comes to politics and us your your brand
loyalty will be that much higher. But they are, and
they are betting that a huge percentage of the population
just won't turn out the ESPN. And I don't think

(40:53):
that's right. I think that there are a lot of
people who did this with the NFL with a kneeling stuff.
I did it with THEESPN. I used to watch ESPN regularly.
I haven't watched ESPN in a year. I mean. ESPN
is also recognizing a simple truth, which is that so
many people are cutting the cord at this point that
they have to double down on the audience as they
do have because if you are if you if you're younger,
chance are pretty good that you're just gonna go online
for your for your sports anyway, or you're gonna buy

(41:15):
Like for me, I have an MLB TV subscription because
all I care about some baseball. So the fact that, um,
you know the fact that ESPN decide the program instruction there,
there's some actual market reasons that makes them sense here.
But I think that that's that's the part of this
that's so hilarious is all the woke schools who are
out there sharing, ESPN sharing, Disney sharing, all of these
major corporations who guts they hate because suddenly they think

(41:37):
that the corporations have turned woke, when in reality, the
corporations are just making a quick buck off of them.
Do you think that athletes understand where the money from
their salaries come from? Because I keep circling back around
to this being the essential major issue out there, which
is that the athletes themselves they don't understand where the
money is coming from anymore. You know, they look at
their social media feeds, they pull up Instagram, they pull

(41:59):
up to or they see what gets like they're busy
playing sports otherwise, and it's as if they have forgotten
who actually pays their salaries, which are the people who
are willing to buy courtside seats in the NBA, which
by the way, are really really expensive. The people who
are buying luxury suites. A huge percentage of them would
not vote in the same way that the athlete would.

(42:21):
Is that just a fundamental disconnect in terms of not
understanding the business that they're in. I mean, I think
that's right. I think that the problem is that they
don't get directly paid by the fans. Right they got
directly the fans, then they would actually be then they
would actually have to cater to the fan base. But
they're paid by the owners because the owners are the
ones to actually end up reaping the benefits. So they
look at the owners and they're like, oh, you owners
are shutting me down. You're stopping me from speaking my mind.

(42:44):
And it's all because you're an old white guy. And
the old white guys like, wait a second, I hired you,
and I'm happy to have you on the team, but
you know, I can only pay you the money that's
coming in. And they look at the old white guy
who's worked a lot of money, and they said, hey, yeah,
but you're worth billions of dollars and all you have
to do is dip into your scooge mccup piggy bank
and you can just so they swim around and every
night and pay me a little extra money. And he
won't do that because woke reasons. And listen, if if

(43:05):
if people were actually subjected to the market decisions they
make the rest play that makes very very different decisions.
At my company, everybody sort of knows where the where
the money comes from, where it comes from our subscribers,
it comes from the advertisers. But athletes are not trained
to think like that. That's that's not how they think.
And frankly, they shouldn't have to think like that, because
it used to be that your literal job was just
to go and play ball, right, Your your job was

(43:25):
not to to be a social justice warrior. But then
it became that the media created all of these advertising
incentives to be bigger than your actual athletic profile and
would allow it used to be that if he got
a big advertising contract the way you got a big
advertising contract with you're good at the support that he played,
Now that you get a big advertising contract, is your
mediocre to decent at the support that you play but
you say a couple of super woke things and you

(43:46):
go in social justice rally. I mean, my guess is
that Dwyane Wade, who was an amazing player in his prime,
it's probably getting just as many advertising contracts are closed
to it now for being a social justice warrior as
he goes when he was in his prime with the heat.
Be sure to catch live editions about Kicked the Cup
Edge with Clay Travis week days at six am Eastern,
three am Pacific. And we're live here outside the Perez

(44:07):
family home, just waiting for the and there they go,
almost on time. This morning. Mom is coming out the
front door strong with a double arm kid carry. Looks
like dad has the bags. Daughter is bringing up the rear. Oh,
but the diaper bag wasn't closed. Diapers and toys are everywhere.
But mom has just nailed the perfect car seat buckle

(44:29):
for the toddler. And now the eldest daughter, who looks
to be about nine or ten, has secured herself in
the booster seat. Dad zips the bag clothes and they're off,
but looks like Mom doesn't realize her coffee cup is
still on the roof of the car, and there it goes. Oh,
that's a shame that mug was a fan favorite. Don't

(44:49):
sweat the small stuff, just nailed the big stuff, like
making sure your kids are buckled correctly in the right
seat for their agent's eyes. Learn more n h t
s A dot gov slash the Right Seat visits NHTSA
dot gov slash the Right Seat brought to you by
NIZZA and the Ad Council. We're talking to Ben Shapiro.
I'm Clay Travis wins and lost his podcast where you
talked about about five or six years ago you noticed

(45:11):
this stark evolution. I agree with you on the timing, uh,
and where does it go from here? Do fans ultimately
the markets ultimately react and and athletes end up recognizing,
wait a minute, this might not be best business or
are we pass the point if we crossed the rubicon,
so to speak, and there's no way to go back.
I think across the rubicon at this point, and I

(45:32):
think that you know, you know, we both trended on
tutter for saying exactly this, but I think, oh, it's
amazing it will come up. It's unbelievable, but there there
will come a point here where so many people have
tuned out, like I still love the sport of basketball,
I just don't want to be lectured to about politics
in which I disagree. So there will come a point
where if the league's don't figure out that people like
the sport but they don't like the politics, where people

(45:54):
will just form alternative leagues where they banned the politics.
I mean, David Sturne used to recognize this, right, I
mean he's stopped. He stopped the player on the nuggets
from from me from sitting exactly. I mean, like this
is this This used to be kind of well understood,
and then they forgot about it because now they're sort
of micro targetting audiences as opposed to broadcasting. It's sort

(46:16):
of the difference that happened in television one cable began.
Instead of broadcasting, you narrowcast it, until sports are now narrowcasting. Well,
somebody's gonna come along and eat their lunch by by
broadcasting and say, Okay, we're gonna go out and we're
gonna hire the five best players and the and the
rule is going to be that there's just there's no
politics on the field, and we'll show out a few bucks,
because I mean, the a there's one point where the
USFL basically tried this with Steve Young. They just did

(46:37):
it wrong. But the but the notion that you could
start a rival sports league by signing some of the
best players for a few million bucks and draw the
eyeballs there and then not insult the viewers, I mean,
I think that there's a lot of money to be
made there. So it's it's ugly for the country because
I don't think that you should have to have two
separate sports flags and one for non politics and one
for politics, or one for right wind politics and one
for lesbian politics, Like it kills the water cooler, because

(46:57):
if we're watching separate sports games, then what exactly do
we talk about when we disagree on everything else. But
it seems like that's inexorably the direction in which we're moving.
Talking to Ben Shapiro, whose new book is How to
Destroy American Three Easy Steps. You can follow him on
Twitter at Ben Shapiro. Uh, when you look at at
that sort of eventual reality, a large part of it,

(47:17):
I would argue, is being driven by social media. I
think social media has been good for certainly people like
you and me, because it's allowed us to broaden our audience,
but for the nation as a whole. How destructive do
you believe social media has been and how much of
our current chaotic situation is directly connected to the evolution
and creation of social media. Social media has been really

(47:38):
destructive in then it got rid of normal human relationships.
I mean, the notion was that you could be front
people across the aisle, but now because you get retweets
and likes for for being a jackass. Basically, what I've
said about Twitter is the Twitter is a place to
dunk and be dunked upon. And so if you're not
dunking or being dunked upon, you're basically wasting your time. Right,
you're shooting twaall foot jumpers midray schumpers, and nobody, nobod
gets rich shooting twelve mid ray schumpers, right, take three

(48:00):
or or dunk. And so that's that's really what what
Twitter is all about. To incentivizes extreme rhetoric and incentivizes
people to be jerk, and it gives you all sorts
of credit for saying the thing that is unstable, except
that the most stable things on Twitter are the unstable things. Right,
if you're truly unstable, you can't say it. So it's
it's created all sorts of weird, insensive structures. So listen,

(48:20):
I'm real grateful as you say that social media is
there because it allows alternative points of views to get
out there. But I will say that the one of
the things that it's also done in terms of general
general sports level, it has made people have expectations of
athletes they never would have had before. So it's happened
enough in the athletic world is basically what happened in
Hollywood in the nineteen sixties and seventies. For a long time,
there's a studio system in Hollywood that basically said, our

(48:43):
stars are our stars. Their private lives are off limits.
They are in the movies. We create these images for them,
and those are the glitzy, glamorous, glamorous images. That's why
the oscars used to get the gratings, because that was
the only time you saw the stars when they weren't
actually on your on your film screen. And then in
the sixties and seventies they started to do politics that
he can every day kind of players and politics, and
they're in your newspaper and they're on TV, and it
radically changed the way that Americans think about politics and

(49:06):
about Hollywood. Now you're seeing the same thing happen in sports.
It used to be the only time you saw Michael
Jordan's when he was on the field, or when when
he was on the court, rather the only time you
saw Drew Brees when he was on the field. Well,
social media has democratized the ability to get out a
message that you want to promulgate. So now it's turned
into well, you're not messaging strongly enough. Right now, there's
an expectation that that athletes are going to be political,

(49:26):
and if they're not political, then it's not that they're
being smart. The athletes are not speaking out loudly enough.
And this is how you see all of the bullying
that takes place of people who haven't put up the
check mark, haven't put up the blue square or the
black square, people who haven't message in a way that
we want, and so we're now going to bully them
into it. Like thirty years ago, that makes no sense
because none of the athletes were saying any of this stuff. Now,
the expectation is that you have to say this stuff.

(49:48):
And if you don't say this stuff, then simply by
process of process of elimination and expectation, we know that
you're not truly woke. What's the thing that the last
couple of questions for you, you mentioned the that we
were trending. I went on your show, we talked about
I don't even remember what the latest controversy was, but
I was talking about the latest sports controversy with you. Um,
I you know, I get in bed, I'm about to

(50:09):
go to sleep, and I uh, and I happened to
get some text, Hey you're trending, and I'm like, I
have no idea what I'm trending for? Right, And you
say and do a lot of things every day now too,
And sometimes you'll find out you're trending for something that
you might say twenty times a day. And for some
reason somebody clipped in and went up, what's the funniest
or most unbelievable thing that you have found yourself trending for?
Is there one that stands out? That one actually was

(50:31):
pretty good? Because that one I literally like we were
trending because I think the contention I was making is
I don't like my sports rep politics. That was pretty
much the entire thing. You were trended for that, and
I thought, that's proposition in the state. Yeah, I don't
think that they're they're like that many people who are
like I desperately need my basketball with the side of
commentary on the racial situation in America. Um, but that

(50:53):
one was pretty ridiculous. Um, there's been a few. I
mean there's I think I trended on Saturday, UM because
I put up a map of masking in the United
States alongside a map of the the caseload in different
places of the United States, and I said, there's a
pattern here, and then my follow up tweet was the
pattern here is that where there's a high caseloads, people
are putting on masks because people act rationally. And that's

(51:14):
trended because people decided to take the first tweet out
of context and suggest that are saying masks don't work,
which I explicitly said is not the case. In the
second week, right, and so they waited like six hours
both tweets were already up and then they trended it
so that that one was pretty good. Um, They've been
just a bunch and there's one on on COVID, where
I pointed out that the people who are dying of
COVID are disproportionately elderly and that that there's a different

(51:35):
public policy consideration than if a bunch of thirty or
twenty year olds were dying, and people like, are you
saying that you want to kill grandma? Like, of course,
I'm not saying that hell's wrong with you people. By
the again, Twitter, it's the dumbest place on earth, And
I just figure I'm gonna trend once every two weeks
no matter what. And the good news is that after
you've trended, there's basically like a two week grace period.
It feels like where Twitter has some sort of algorithm

(51:56):
where they don't let you trend for a couple of weeks.
So they trended me on Saturday. It's that completely easy
for a couple of weeks. Do you enjoy being in
the fight every day? I do. I like kind of
throwing punches. I like being in the mud, the muck,
whatever you want to call it. Because I'm a big
First Amendment guy. And I also feel like if there
weren't people making the arguments that I'm making, almost no
one in all of sports media would be making them,

(52:17):
which is it blows my mind. But Jason Wentlock and
I talked about this a lot in relation to out kick.
If we didn't exist, there's literally no one out there
who would be making the arguments, which I believe are
correct arguments, by the way, But it's not even that,
uh you know that other people would be fighting these battles.
It's like it would just be a totally abandoned battlefield.
There would be no one arguing what we are arguing.

(52:39):
It blows my mind sometimes, And I imagine for you
you feel the same way in the world of politics. Yeah,
I mean, I think that's right. I will say that
I think that the world of politics is more wearying
than the world of sports because I think that, you know,
at least every so often you get to take a
break and talk about fun stuff, and you occasionally get
to talk about the game. But for me, because it's

(53:01):
all politics all the time, it definitely gets tiresome at
some point when you're thinking, like, why is this even controversial?
Why is it even remotely controversial? Like I do I,
honest to god, do not understand why COVID policy is
particularly controversial. Really great answer to this. Everybody, you know,
out of an abundance of caution, where where masks the
the We can't stay locked in our homes forever, and

(53:21):
we would like to make it safe for our kids
to go to schools and buy launch. Kids are not
being disproportionate, are not being affected like nearly at all
by this thing like these are all I feel like
there should be one percent propositions, and somehow everything turns
into Rockham Stockham robots. So at a certain point, when
it's an important issue, I love the fight. Right when
it's when it's the lack of due process in the
Kavanaugh hearings, when it's the when it's you know, the

(53:43):
the nineteen project bullcrap that's being promulgated on, like that's
that's kinds when I feel like the fight's important. What's
really tiring is when it's a minor, stupid issue and
it becomes the the issue of the day, and suddenly
I'm forced to talk about whether we ought to have,
you know, whether mandatory masking is going to solve COVID,
and whether Donald Trump is a is a very very
bad Orange man for his late and dumb tweet. When
we all know. It's just a stupid tweet that he

(54:04):
sends every five seconds. He's been Shapiro. I'm Clay Travis
is the Wins and Losses podcast. Check out the book
How to Destroy American Three Easy Steps. Follow been at
Ben Shapiro on Twitter and appreciate all of your time.
Go check out the other Wins and Losses episodes that
we have. I think you'll enjoy them. Thanks Ben, Thank
That is the latest. We're gonna try to get more
and more of these done long form conversations. Let me

(54:27):
know who you'd like to hear from. Go rate us,
give us five stars, and we'll be back with another
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and as always, check out out kick dot com for
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(54:48):
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