Clay talks with Ben Shapiro

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, 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 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 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 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 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?

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

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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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,

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 the Coverage with a Travis week days at six am Eastern, three am Pacific. You're listening to Wins and Losses. I'm Clay Travis. He's been Shapiro. One of the things that I learned was, uh, 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 believe is important, 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 claim 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 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 not the headlines. It is a huge So it's it's so you know, you like, I would write a really great piece and if without a crappy headline, it gets

no traffic. 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 to me, 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 headlines in person? You know, I looked up their headlines that said, well, 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 to

lead 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, I'm not even making a claim about their contents I'm just saying the way they phrase their contents is oblique. 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

outfront 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 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, you don't click on it, That doesn't it doesn't activate your making. Last let's just be real about this. You don't want that stuff, but what you actually want is 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 is gone down, and the fact that 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 gonna 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 gotta be honest about how you cover stuff. Um, 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 Protectance of the last couple of years. No, it's a true and and I've labeled all the coronavirus coverage fear porn because that

is oftentimes what motivated 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 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, 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 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 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 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 aud it's 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 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 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 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 parents gave me a Sports Illustrated subscription for my birthday when I five thirteen, and for I would take 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 it started, and I'd read this thing cover to cover like every single week. I didn't care if I liked 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 remember, over time, a 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 were gonna be playing from thirty ft underwater and this kind of stuff, and I remember thinking, Okay, I

don't think that's true, but all right. They kind of the 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 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 laws to me. If if he thinks that he's a woman, then that's fine. If he wants to call himself Caitlin, and that's fine. I don't

really care. But what in the f does this have to do with sports? Caitlin Bruce Cheddar has not been relevant in the American sports team because before I was born, like, 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 what what was the name of John Amici wasn't I think with the the the gay basketball player from the Orlando from the Atlanta Magica was it 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 Caitlin gener things. At least hn and Mimi had been like an active player within the recent past. Um. The the Canlon Gender thing was like, okay, now, because now you're trying to promulgate a couple of things. One, you're trying to suggest that if I believe that Bruce Jenner is actually a man, or that Catlon Gender 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, but that's when I was like, you know what, I

don't need Sports illustrated in my life 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 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 done in 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, 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 illustrated 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 actually 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 the field. So you can watch a broadcast and go the entire broadcast, so 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, it's 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 shot stout at the same it's rams 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 have to watch Black Lives Matter throw up 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? That's something that you're up for? Are you up for me? Are you up for watching lead where quarterback biological women exist, goes back to throw a hail Mary 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, I think people have started to recognize

the inherent hypocrisy here. And I thought the Adrian Wodanarowski 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 Nazi era, which is always a freighted difficult historical 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 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 towns of players are black, saying that Americans are deeply endemically racist, and we're all tuning in to watch the NBA specifically because we just wanted the athletic contents, right.

There was an amazing exchange today between Senators Ted Cruz and mar Cuban, the owner of the als Average, where Cuban was saying something Nashew to Cruz and crews came back and he was like, you know, they're very brave

on a lot of these shoes. 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, while you know what happens internally in different countries is in 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 tid about the NEA 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 weakers the hands of the Chinese government, but one you're willing to say something on because it has cost free to you, not only to cost free, because it actually plays 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's tape that has emerged of of the weakers being loaded after having a headship onto trains to go to concentration camps where they will be sterilized and mark Cuban islay. Oh, it's an internal political issue. Okay, yeah, sure, I totally believe your virtue signaling about the cruelties of America and are brutal human rights violations. Fox Sports Radio has the

best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at Fox Sports Radio dot com and within the I Heart Radio app search f s R to listen live. We're talking to Ben Shapiro. 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 Losses podcast. I'm Clay Travis and uh. It also ties in with Jamal Hill. We're talking on

Monday afternoon. Yesterday afternoon evening, 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 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, I hadham phrased it. I said, do you basically agree that Jamal Hill's position of everyone who votes for Donald Trump is racist? ESPN's response was no comment. So they're not even willing to say there 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 ye, 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 I just think there's not a ton of crossover here between like 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 pentical 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 on on these matters when she has provided little to no statistical evidence in many of the contentions that she is making in the teams that she's brought on TV commuarly 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 wall. It's 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. 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 can make 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, 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, 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 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 heavy heavily disproportionately because 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 racial demographics that they think are going to spend more money

with their advertisers. Which makes perfect sense, 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 wonks because

they wanted to make more money. So capitalism always wins until it doesn't, right, I mean, this is sort of the in the short term capitalism always win. 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 that's right. I think that there are a lot of people who did this with the NFL, with annealing stuff. I did it with the ESPN. I used to watch ESPN regularly. I haven't watched ESPN in years. I think Spin 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, chances are pretty good that you're just gonna go online for your for your sports anyway, or you're gonna buy, 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 natual market reasons that makes

the 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 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 up Twitter, they see what it's likes. 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. 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 sands. 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.

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 McDuck piggy bank and you can just so they swim around and every night and pay me a little less from one and

he won't do that because woke reasons. And listen, if if if people were actually subjected to the market decisions they make the rest play they make 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 not 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 you've got a big advertising contract, the way you got a big advertising contract was you were good at the support that you played.

Now that you get a big advertising contract, is your mediocre too decent at the support that you play, but you say a couple of super woke things and you go in social justice rally. I mean, my guess is that Dwayne Wade, who was an amazing player in his prime, they're probably getting just as many advertising contracts are close to it now for being a social justice warrior as he was when he was in his prime with the heat.

Be sure to catch live editions about Kicked the Coverage with Clay Travis week days at six am Eastern, three am Pacific. 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 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 think that you know, as you know, we both trended on Twitter 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 with 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 will just form alternative

leagues where they banned the politics. I mean, David Sturne us to recognize this, right, I mean he stopped, he stopped the player on the Nuggets from from 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 of the difference that happened in television one cable began. Instead of broadcasting, you narrowcast it,

and so sports are now narrowcasting. Well, somebody's gonna come along and eat their lunch by by broadcasting and saying, 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 begause. I mean the a there's one point where the USFL basically tried

this with Steve Young. They just did 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 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 wing politics and one for lessian politics. Like it kills the water cooler, because if we're watching separate sports games, then what exactly do we talk about when we disagrand every thing else? But it seems like that's inexorably the direction in which we're oving. Talking to Ben Shapiro, whose new book is How to Destroy America Three Easy Steps,

you can follow them on Twitter at Ben Shapiro. Uh, when you look at at that sort of eventual reality, a large part of it, 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 instructive in that it got rid of normal human relationships. I mean, the notion was that you could be from some 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, they're being dunked upon. You're basically wasting your time. Right, you're shooting twall foot jumpers,

midrage shumppers, and nobody nobody gets rich shooting closed midraye jumpers. Right, take the three or door dunk. And so that's that's really what what Twitter is all about. To incentivizes extreme right record, incentivizes people to be church 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 and 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 is made people have expectations of athletes they never would have had before. So it's happening in the in the athletic world is basically what happened in Hollywood in the nineties, sixties and seventies.

For a long time, there's a studio system in Hollywood that basically said, our stars are our stars. Their private lives are up 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 big ratings 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 in politics, and they were in your news paper and they're on TV, and it radically changed the way that Americans think about politics and about Hollywood. Now you're seeing the same thing happened 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 is 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, 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. And if you don't say this stuff, then simply by process of process and 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 fact 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 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? I one actually was 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 from politics. That's pretty much the

entire thing. You were trended for that, And I thought that's proposition in the 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 one was pretty ridiculous. Um.

There's been a few. I mean there there's I think I trended on Saturday because I put up a map of massing in the United States alongside the 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 caseload, people are putting on masks because

people act rationally. And that's 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 what 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's that there's a different public policy consideration than if a bunch of thirty or twenty year olds were dying. 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 twitters, 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 where they don't let your trend for a couple of weeks, so they trend to be on Saturday. It's I completely easy for a couple of weeks. Do you enjoy being in the five it 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, 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. 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. You occasionally get to talk about the game. But but for me, because it's politics all the time, it definitely gets tiresome at some point when you're thinking, like, why is it even controversial? Why is it even remotely controversial? Like I do, honestly, God, do not understand why COVID

policy is particularly controversially. Right answer to this, everybody, you know, out of an abundance of caution, where where masks the the we can't stay lock in our homes forever, and we would like to make it safe for our kids to go to schools and buy and launch. Kids are not being disproportionate, are not being affected like nearly at all by this thing Like these are all I feel like they should be one percent propositions, and somehow everything

turns into rockham Stockhem robots. So at a certain point when it's an important issue, I love the Fike right when it's when it's the lack of the process in the Kavanaugh hearings, when it's the when it's you know, the the nineteen project bullcraft that's being promulgated on, like that's that's simes 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 to Orange man for his late and dumb tweet when we all know it's just a stupid tweet that he 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 Ben 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 know who you'd like to hear from. Go rate us, give us five stars and we'll be back with another

Wins and Losses soon. In the meantime, go subscribe to the OutKick the Coverage podcast as well as Outkicked the Show, and as always, check out out kick dot com for the latest this has been Wins and Losses Clay Travis and Ben Shapiro. Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at Fox sports Radio dot com and within the I Heart Radio app search f s R to listen live.