Speaker 1: This is Wins and Losses with Clay Trevis. Clay talks
Speaker 1: with the most entertaining people in sports, entertainment and business.
Speaker 1: Now here's Clay Trevis. Welcome in to out kick the
Speaker 1: coverage the Winds and Losses podcast, where we can have
Speaker 1: some long form conversations with a variety of different figures
Speaker 1: that I find to be interesting in the world of sports, business, politics, media,
Speaker 1: you name it. We've had a lot of awesome ones.
Speaker 1: I encourage you to go back and listen to them.
Speaker 1: And this week's guest is Ben Shapiro at Ben Shapiro
Speaker 1: on Twitter. He's got a new book coming out which
Speaker 1: I'm about halfway through, How to Destroy America in Three
Speaker 1: Easy Steps. I also read his most recent book, I Believe,
Speaker 1: which was which One the Right Side of History, How
Speaker 1: Reason and moral purpose made the West Great? Super interesting
Speaker 1: and entertaining books. Ben obviously has a wildly successful show
Speaker 1: and podcast as a part of the Daily Wire team. Ben,
Speaker 1: thanks for the time. I imagine releasing a book and
Speaker 1: this day and age is is a little bit wacky,
Speaker 1: even though you've released several before. Uh, this is a
Speaker 1: different kind of vibe, right, I was definitely weird. Um
Speaker 1: and I will admit that when I first wrote the book,
Speaker 1: I thought I'd be relevant prior to the election, and
Speaker 1: then COVID hit and I thought this is gonna do
Speaker 1: wildly irrelevant before the election, and then the entire world
Speaker 1: went up in flames. And it turns out its relevant again.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I just sent the news cycle properly. All Right,
Speaker 1: I want to dive into sports with you, because I've
Speaker 1: been on your show before talking about sports, and I
Speaker 1: know you're a pretty big sports fan, and we talked
Speaker 1: as a jumping off point to a lot of different
Speaker 1: people with sports as a sort of the connective tissue
Speaker 1: or fabric. So let's start here. You grew up a
Speaker 1: fan of which teams in which part of the country
Speaker 1: when you were a kid. So I grew up in
Speaker 1: l a and I'm a Chicago White tox fan primarily.
Speaker 1: And then in terms of secondary sports for me, um
Speaker 1: Boston Celtics fan and in Chicago Bears fans. I picked
Speaker 1: up all my dad's allegiances. It's really the short story there.
Speaker 1: My dad's from Chicago. When he was growing up, there
Speaker 1: really wasn't a Chicago basketball team. He went to college
Speaker 1: in Boston. Uh and because he did that he'd became
Speaker 1: a Celtics fan. So I was. I grew up with
Speaker 1: Celtics fan in l A, which went well for me
Speaker 1: during my childhood. It was really great. So how big
Speaker 1: of a sports fan were you? I mean, obviously you
Speaker 1: went on to law school like I did, and uh,
Speaker 1: and many people go on to more serious things in life.
Speaker 1: Sports is kind of always the toy chest of life.
Speaker 1: But when you were a kid growing up, were you a, Hey,
Speaker 1: in the morning, I'm going to put on Sports Center,
Speaker 1: see who won the night before, watch the highlights while
Speaker 1: breakfast before I go to school. How committed would you
Speaker 1: say you were to the teams you grew up rooting for?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I was. I was. You know, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: run out to the I'm gonna run out of the curve,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna grab the box scores, I'm gonna come back
Speaker 1: and I wake up at six am to watch the
Speaker 1: early Sports Center. So yeah, I mean I was. I
Speaker 1: was a sports nut, uh, in particularly baseball. My dad
Speaker 1: and I actually co wrote a book about the about
Speaker 1: the Chicago I talked two thousand and five World Serious season.
Speaker 1: So a huge, huge sports fan. I mean, yesterday I
Speaker 1: was watching and I'm so desperate for content. At this point,
Speaker 1: I was watching the pre season Socks and Cubs game
Speaker 1: in an empty stadium, watching backup relievers get raked. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I remained a very large I made a
Speaker 1: very large sports tin. Did you play growing up? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I'm I'm a five nine jew now, so I
Speaker 1: was never I'm a good contact hiner, So I was
Speaker 1: I was gonna ask. I think it feels like every kid,
Speaker 1: and basically everybody who's listening to us, with a few
Speaker 1: exceptions who actually ended up being professional athletes. But you
Speaker 1: have this sort of harsh realization for all kids at
Speaker 1: some age, and for some of us it comes a
Speaker 1: lot younger than others. For a lot of them, you know,
Speaker 1: it comes in high school, whenever it might be. Do
Speaker 1: you remember the age you were when you suddenly realized, hey,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I'm not going to end up being
Speaker 1: a major league baseball player. Yeah, I was thinking it
Speaker 1: was probably thirteen, and it was pretty devastating. I mean,
Speaker 1: I played in Little league and I was I was
Speaker 1: pretty good. I mean I played second bags and I
Speaker 1: was I could switch hit, and I was able to
Speaker 1: go to the cage even hit an eight miles an hour,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't like I had any sort of power,
Speaker 1: and my arm wasn't strong enough for me to make
Speaker 1: the third base throw, you know, really on the line.
Speaker 1: And so at that point I was like, Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: this one's pretty much done, so I'm gonna go to
Speaker 1: the traditional Jewish pastimes of violin and laying. So that's
Speaker 1: that's where it was. I've been a violent since I
Speaker 1: was five. Anyway, it was okay, I can let these
Speaker 1: groundballs wrap up my hands, or I can continue to
Speaker 1: play violent like a good Jewish kid. When did when
Speaker 1: did you? Where did you go to college? I went
Speaker 1: for college, and then I went to Harvard to law school. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so okay, so when you were at U c l
Speaker 1: A for college. So I went back recently and found
Speaker 1: the very first thing that I had ever had published
Speaker 1: under my name. Uh and I didn't find it. Actually
Speaker 1: one of my listeners did, but I told the story.
Speaker 1: I was eighteen years old. I was a freshman in
Speaker 1: college at George Washington UM, and there was a front
Speaker 1: page article because there was a protest over an executive
Speaker 1: I guess it was body vice president or something of
Speaker 1: the school who would use the phrase rule of thumb.
Speaker 1: And somebody was offended about the use of the phrase
Speaker 1: rule of thumb, and so I wrote in talking about
Speaker 1: how ridiculous it was. And I went back and I
Speaker 1: read that letter to the editor to the student newspaper,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of amazing to see at you know,
Speaker 1: I'm forty one now, but twenty plus years ago I
Speaker 1: was fighting the same battles that I feel like i'm
Speaker 1: fighting now for people out there who are like, oh,
Speaker 1: you've changed. Literally, other than maybe using a few bigger
Speaker 1: words when I was eighteen because I was trying to
Speaker 1: show off my vocabulary, I really am not very much
Speaker 1: different in the way that I would think about the
Speaker 1: First Amendment and many other different issues than I would
Speaker 1: have when I was eighteen. That's not to say that
Speaker 1: I have perfect, you know, opinions or anything else. It's
Speaker 1: just there's a consistency there for you. When you went
Speaker 1: away to college at eighteen, had you developed your own
Speaker 1: political philosophy at that point or was it still evolving?
Speaker 1: I mean I think it was. It was still evolving
Speaker 1: a little bit. It was fairly well developed. I mean
Speaker 1: I went to college, not sixteen, So I started UCL.
Speaker 1: I went out of sixteen, and I was living at
Speaker 1: home and my first piece that I wrote was about
Speaker 1: Israel because I had walked on campus and the first
Speaker 1: thing I saw was a piece in the student newspaper
Speaker 1: that compared to drill untime Minister Auriol Rod with Adolf
Speaker 1: by Ahmen Nazi uh. And I thought, well, this doesn't
Speaker 1: sound right. So I started walking into the Daily brewin
Speaker 1: offices and I wrote a counterpiece. Uh. And then a
Speaker 1: few weeks later I was walking through and I was
Speaker 1: the only person who's relatively conservative they never heard of.
Speaker 1: So as I was walking through the office, they were like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we've got this piece that somebody's writing about how sanctions
Speaker 1: on towns and stander bad. You want to write the
Speaker 1: counterpoint and to turn into sort of a point counterpoint thing.
Speaker 1: And then I turned it into a normal column for
Speaker 1: the U c l I paper. Um, but yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean my my politics was I would say, you know,
Speaker 1: I was only sixteen, so it was somewhat well developed.
Speaker 1: I got more well developed as time went on. But
Speaker 1: I had a syndicated column when I was seventeen, and
Speaker 1: I had my first published at twenty, So I would
Speaker 1: say that I was more of a dick when I
Speaker 1: was like seventeen. But I'm not sure who wasn't when
Speaker 1: they were seventeen. So what was the reaction when you're
Speaker 1: the sixteen year old kid writing in the Daily Bruin newspaper.
Speaker 1: I mean that had to be uh, pretty energy. I mean,
Speaker 1: I would imagine pretty impressive to your parents, but also
Speaker 1: to you. It had to be pretty cool to be
Speaker 1: able to start to influence perceptions even if it's on
Speaker 1: a local student newspaper at that time. Yeah, it's pretty neat.
Speaker 1: I mean I I I really enjoyed it. It was
Speaker 1: a lot of fun. It became one of the most
Speaker 1: widely read columns on the paper because it's the only
Speaker 1: thing that wasn't sort of repeating party line. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then when I was seventeen, I turned to my dad
Speaker 1: and I've been writing for the Daily Run for maybe
Speaker 1: a year and a half, and uh, and I said,
Speaker 1: do you think that my stuff is good enough to
Speaker 1: be published in like a normal paper? And he had
Speaker 1: been reading I think it's Mona Charon who was syndicated
Speaker 1: by Creator Syndicate, And he said, let me let me
Speaker 1: see if they take submissions. So I just submitted my
Speaker 1: stuff cold to creator syndicate, and they came back three
Speaker 1: weeks later and offered me a weekly column. Uh, and
Speaker 1: they didn't know hold I was. They knew I was young,
Speaker 1: and they didn't know I seventeen. So my parents actually
Speaker 1: had to sign the contract team to sign a contract
Speaker 1: in California. So I actually started writing when I was
Speaker 1: a team for for the for the syndicate, and then
Speaker 1: that meant that it was going out to ten twelve papers.
Speaker 1: Now it's I've been writing every weeks since I was
Speaker 1: eighteen for them, So that means it's now been eighteen years.
Speaker 1: And that means that I've written, you know, hundreds and
Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of columns. It is the column it's
Speaker 1: it's still going, it's still printed and probably a hundred
Speaker 1: papers across the country at this point. Did you ever
Speaker 1: practice a law, Oh yeah, I did, So I went
Speaker 1: to I went to law school and then I and
Speaker 1: then I write. Out of law school, you got these
Speaker 1: big debts and and I thought, Okay, I figured I'll
Speaker 1: go into real estate. Well, I'll learn real estate and
Speaker 1: then make a bundle that way. So I joined up
Speaker 1: with a firm called Goodwin Procter in Los Angeles, which
Speaker 1: is a big Boston based firm. Um and Uh, I
Speaker 1: will say I have the worst interview record of anyone
Speaker 1: in the history of Howard Law School, I think. So
Speaker 1: I interviewed at thirty two separate firms. I got one offer,
Speaker 1: and what do yeah, what do you attribute that to? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was pretty obvious what it was about.
Speaker 1: It was. It was about the fact that on my
Speaker 1: resume I had the title of my books. So I
Speaker 1: had my first book was called Brainwash, How liberal Bias
Speaker 1: and doctrinates college Students or something like that. Uh. And
Speaker 1: my second book was about social liberalism and how it
Speaker 1: was bad. And so those were on and they're published
Speaker 1: by mainstream houses, right, But I put those on my resume,
Speaker 1: and so the interviews would go. I can get a
Speaker 1: couple of great kind of law school interview stories. So uh.
Speaker 1: And the way it works at Harvard is you don't
Speaker 1: go to the firm the interview. They come to interview
Speaker 1: you because you're a law student. So well, Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt
Speaker 1: Law School does the same thing. They have like these
Speaker 1: little bunker rooms. I don't know what it's like at Harvard,
Speaker 1: but they have the on campus interviews and you know,
Speaker 1: you walk in and you interview and everything else. So
Speaker 1: so yeah, I went through the same sort of process. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So Harvard they do to the childhood towel and then
Speaker 1: these really you know, beautifully apportioned rooms and you go
Speaker 1: in and people interview you. So I remember one time
Speaker 1: I was interviewing and gets some done and the partner
Speaker 1: is sitting in the room before I even sit down.
Speaker 1: The partner says, it's always been my like, it's pretty
Speaker 1: obvious I'm religious, right ma I war Yama publicly and
Speaker 1: all this before I even sit down. He says, it's
Speaker 1: always been my contention that conservatives and religious people in
Speaker 1: general have a Freudian fear of sex. Like before I
Speaker 1: hit down for the interview, and I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: well I'm clearly not getting that job. I just so
Speaker 1: just a userrated and so I would say half my
Speaker 1: interviews sort of weren't like that. And then I went
Speaker 1: back to the Harvard Law School officite career services that like,
Speaker 1: what's the deal, Like, I graduated, come loud from your university.
Speaker 1: I have several published books at this point, like what's happening?
Speaker 1: And they said, just take your book after your resume.
Speaker 1: I took my books after asume. I got two interviews
Speaker 1: next week. Oh that's amazing. So how so, So I
Speaker 1: practiced full time for about two years, and I was like,
Speaker 1: this is not for me. And I understand there's a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, so how long did you actually last? Oh?
Speaker 1: I lasted ten months. I was working. I was working
Speaker 1: in real estate off for ten months. And then I
Speaker 1: was so miserable. I just gotten engaged, I just bought
Speaker 1: a condo, and right before we're set to get married,
Speaker 1: I turned my wife and I said, I'm miserable. This
Speaker 1: is the worst job in the entire world. I'd also
Speaker 1: entered the real estate division and Echogan Proctor in September
Speaker 1: of two thousand seven. There is no way. It's a
Speaker 1: tough time been September two thousand seven. So I start
Speaker 1: working there and I'm literally sitting in this gorgeous office
Speaker 1: overlooking you know, Santa Monica, and you can see all
Speaker 1: the way out to the ocean. And I'm sitting up
Speaker 1: like ten hours a day doing nothing and then being
Speaker 1: yelled at by the partner for not building hours. And
Speaker 1: and like I remember, I came out of the bathroom
Speaker 1: one time and the partners standing right there. It was like,
Speaker 1: why aren't you building hours because you don't give ma
Speaker 1: anny work? He's like, won't go rain make Like what
Speaker 1: the first your associate, what are you even talking about?
Speaker 1: I do doc review right, Like what do you? What
Speaker 1: do you say? So, after ten months of his nonsense,
Speaker 1: I quit, uh, and I will. This is actually pretty funny.
Speaker 1: I sat down with a couple of the senior associates
Speaker 1: and one of them was trying to convince me not
Speaker 1: to quit, and the other one had played college baseball
Speaker 1: I think a uv A and he and he's sitting
Speaker 1: there trying to convince me not to quit, and I'm
Speaker 1: giving all my reasons why I want to quit. A
Speaker 1: miserable I hate this. I think it's a stupid job.
Speaker 1: And about halfway through him trying to convince me not
Speaker 1: to quit, he turns to the other senior associate and
Speaker 1: he goes, maybe I should quit. The other senior associates
Speaker 1: trying to explain to him by even though he's miserable,
Speaker 1: he shouldn't quit. And then I went into the partner
Speaker 1: told him that I wanted to quit, and the partner's
Speaker 1: first response was, you understand that you'll never make his money. Well,
Speaker 1: you'll never make as much money in whatever else you
Speaker 1: do the rest of your life as you're making right now.
Speaker 1: And I said, Okay, then I guess I won't make
Speaker 1: as much money. Um and uh. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I don't know what your starting salary was, but let's
Speaker 1: presume you're making around two hundred thou dollars. I bet
Speaker 1: you have. I've done a little bit better than that.
Speaker 1: Oh dude. I mean, I've been wanting for years to
Speaker 1: send my tax returns to this guy. Um but it's uh.
Speaker 1: So I quit there. I was out of work for
Speaker 1: maybe three months. I've been ghost writing for some people. UM,
Speaker 1: but I was out of work for a little while.
Speaker 1: I had a little bit of savings for my books,
Speaker 1: um and uh. And then I latched on as the
Speaker 1: in house attorney at Talk Radio Network, which was a
Speaker 1: syndicator for Laura Ingram and Michael Savage at the time.
Speaker 1: UM and I worked there, I was doing law. But
Speaker 1: the deal was I got paid literally a third of
Speaker 1: what I've been making, um, which was significantly less than
Speaker 1: six figures um and um. My deal was, I will
Speaker 1: do law for half the day, and for half the
Speaker 1: day I wanted to learn the production side of the business.
Speaker 1: So I'd sit there and outcut audio. I literally get up,
Speaker 1: but at five o'clock in the morning, I would highlight
Speaker 1: pieces for the various hopes that they had their show
Speaker 1: prep ready, and I would cut the pieces of audio
Speaker 1: that I thought relevant for the day. UM. And so
Speaker 1: I was, you know, doing half time like remow level
Speaker 1: production and halftime UH and halftime law. And after three years,
Speaker 1: I was executive as president of the company. Uh and UM.
Speaker 1: I looked at the h I sort of looked at
Speaker 1: the direction of the company and I was like, I
Speaker 1: think I'm down here. Uh. And I quit and um
Speaker 1: and then moved on to the succession and other job.
Speaker 1: And I started working at Andrew bright Bart's outlet, and
Speaker 1: then I started, uh, what's I called truth or bold uh?
Speaker 1: And then after that went to phone I started Daily
Speaker 1: Wire Daily Wires, where obviously everything has happened over over
Speaker 1: there right now, all right, So I want to circle
Speaker 1: back around here for a second, because one of the
Speaker 1: things we talked about on Winsdo Losses is being willing
Speaker 1: to take risk and to uh and to latch onto
Speaker 1: opportunity even if other people think you're crazy. You can
Speaker 1: imagine because we have somewhat similar backgrounds. I stopped practicing
Speaker 1: law after a couple of years. You're making good money, uh,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people look at you like you
Speaker 1: are crazy. That partner who told you you'd never make
Speaker 1: the salary that you were making then is emblematic of it.
Speaker 1: But I'm curious you mentioned your wife. How how important
Speaker 1: was it for her to support your decision? Do you
Speaker 1: remember other people who also said, hey, I believe in
Speaker 1: you've been even if you're taking a non traditional career path. Yes,
Speaker 1: my wife was super supportive. She was the one who
Speaker 1: actually told me to quit. So I would kind of
Speaker 1: like implying that I wanted to quit. Should listen, if
Speaker 1: you're this miserabation, just quit Like you got a Harvard
Speaker 1: law degree, You're smart guy, got a lot of contacts.
Speaker 1: You'll get another job. Don't worry about it. Um. And
Speaker 1: so I quit a month before we were married, having
Speaker 1: just taken on a mortgage and with you know, a
Speaker 1: little savings but not much. And she didn't like that.
Speaker 1: In my whole career, like, if you got to make
Speaker 1: the move, make a move. So I've been, you know,
Speaker 1: I've been very risk seeking. My entire career. Um My,
Speaker 1: I also figured, listen, I'm young, I can afford the risk.
Speaker 1: We didn't have kids at that point. Um but I
Speaker 1: always figured that if you bank on your own talent
Speaker 1: and it's a it's an area where you actually know
Speaker 1: what you're doing, then you'll do pretty well. My parents
Speaker 1: have always been incredibly supportive. This ares me being risk
Speaker 1: taking as well. So I think I can come from
Speaker 1: tons of money. But you know, my parents are probably
Speaker 1: probably upper middle class. I think it's fair to say
Speaker 1: when I was growing up we were kind of lower
Speaker 1: middle class middle class. Like I grew up in a
Speaker 1: two bedroom house in Burbank with three sisters. All of
Speaker 1: us shared one room in one bathroom. But by the
Speaker 1: time I was by the time I was in college,
Speaker 1: were probably somewhere between middle class and upper middle class.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't like I was coming from a place
Speaker 1: where things went wildly wrong. You know, I was going
Speaker 1: to be thrown into massive amounts of debt, So I
Speaker 1: was lucky that way for sure. Also, I would say this,
Speaker 1: though I'm some middle class as well, the dollars don't
Speaker 1: impress you as much. Like the first job that I
Speaker 1: ever had, I made more money as a lawyer my
Speaker 1: first year than my parents had ever made, right, and
Speaker 1: so it was like, oh wow, like I when you
Speaker 1: haven't ever gotten used to having extreme amounts of money.
Speaker 1: We talked about this recently, We do on the show
Speaker 1: sometimes about the idea of golden handcuffs, and a lot
Speaker 1: of young lawyers find themselves in golden hand cuffs because
Speaker 1: you're making more than maybe your parents ever made at
Speaker 1: the age of six years old, whatever it is. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, you're recognizing that you're not necessarily
Speaker 1: able to embrace your full talents. Yeah, that's right, I
Speaker 1: mean that's really what it was. It was. It was
Speaker 1: early on. The only thing I really had to pay
Speaker 1: for is I had paid for a car, but I
Speaker 1: just basically bought it. I used must say GP convertible
Speaker 1: two dousand and six baby boom. It was. It was,
Speaker 1: it was, it was. It was my car until until
Speaker 1: I got married, at which point it turned into Hundah court.
Speaker 1: It's all of our cars to uh. And but um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. I mean I never I had a basic
Speaker 1: clossy about money making, which is never spend a dollar
Speaker 1: being on top uh, And so I never I never
Speaker 1: gotten to bed I was. I was always very careful
Speaker 1: about a dollar. And and but I will say that
Speaker 1: when I said to my parents, my mom particularly that
Speaker 1: I wanted to quit the law firm, she was a
Speaker 1: little bit perturbed because not not like angry or anything,
Speaker 1: but like, are you sure about that? Because she'd been
Speaker 1: spending her entire career, you know, to get to the
Speaker 1: point where I was making that money. First year was
Speaker 1: coming out of coming out of law school, and um,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously ended up being the right decision. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't like she took like a hard and fast,
Speaker 1: this is the wrong move thing. My mom tends to
Speaker 1: be a much more risk averse person than I am. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so let's talk about risk. You end up with the
Speaker 1: Daily Wire, and I believe you guys are five years
Speaker 1: and wildly successful website. UM somewhat similarly, we started out
Speaker 1: kick and I had bounced around other places, whether it
Speaker 1: was dead Spin before they had gone full on Looney Left.
Speaker 1: I've been to FanHouse, I had been writing at CBS Sports.
Speaker 1: I felt like I understood the business model better than
Speaker 1: most who were in my position. What about you? What
Speaker 1: did you learn at the other places you wrote at?
Speaker 1: And worked for before you ended up at Daily Wire
Speaker 1: and how important was that to you and being able
Speaker 1: to build the success of your current company. So there
Speaker 1: are a few sort of specific skills that that learned.
Speaker 1: So one was, um, you know, I'd always written a
Speaker 1: lot of story selection with a huge one, so when
Speaker 1: I was an editor of Right Part, I kind of
Speaker 1: learned story selection. After about a year and a half,
Speaker 1: I really wos in the editorial chain anymore, but I
Speaker 1: had learned to write really good headlines since that obviously
Speaker 1: kim in very handy when I was when I was
Speaker 1: writing my own website. UM, I think that, you know,
Speaker 1: I learned also that you don't want to you don't
Speaker 1: want to staff me on your capacity to support, so
Speaker 1: you really want to grow slowly, you know, you want
Speaker 1: to grow to your grow to your audience. Um. And
Speaker 1: that means I think a big mistake that a lot
Speaker 1: of people make is when they do take a risk,
Speaker 1: they take a huge risk. So, yeah, I'm gonna start
Speaker 1: a business. I'm gonna hire twenty five people. We're gonna
Speaker 1: go full bore, We're gonna blow the entire chunk of
Speaker 1: change right at the gate. And that was something that
Speaker 1: I really learned not to do very early, which was, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we're we're gonna we'll hire a couple writers.
Speaker 1: We're gonna try out everybody. Everybody's got to spend a
Speaker 1: week writing for us. We'll pay them for their time,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna see if they actually can run through
Speaker 1: the paces. Uh and uh. And that was apology I
Speaker 1: started when on to Bright part but then we carried
Speaker 1: on when I was when I moved beyond Bright part Um.
Speaker 1: The sort of real key actually was something that occurred
Speaker 1: to both me and my business partner, Jeremy Boring. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that was marketing. Uh. And that is something that
Speaker 1: I think we mostly learned when we were running Truth
Speaker 1: of Bolts for for David Horror's Freedom Center, which was
Speaker 1: sort of the antimedia matters and the right uh. And
Speaker 1: what we what we really learned is that we had
Speaker 1: become largely dependent for our traffic on other websites linking us.
Speaker 1: And so at one point I turned to Jeremy and
Speaker 1: I said, what has probably since become our our company's
Speaker 1: business model, which is luck is not a business model. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you can't rely on other people to help
Speaker 1: you out. You really have to have a plan for
Speaker 1: how you are going to maximize your own business and
Speaker 1: what that really means. You have to focus to an
Speaker 1: extraordinary extent on marketing because most people tend to think
Speaker 1: the content is king well, content is kind of thing
Speaker 1: and kind of not. So you can write a great
Speaker 1: book and if nobody knows it out there, it will
Speaker 1: sell two copies. And you can write a pile of
Speaker 1: horse crap and if you put it between two covers
Speaker 1: and you have a lot of people covering it, it
Speaker 1: will sell in a lot of copies. Which is how
Speaker 1: you end up with, you know, Charles Barkley being questioned
Speaker 1: about a book, Yeah, misquoted in his own autobiography. I
Speaker 1: want to unpack a little bit of that because it's
Speaker 1: so fascinating. Be sure to catch live editions about Kick
Speaker 1: the Coverage with a Travis week days at six am Eastern,
Speaker 1: three am Pacific. You're listening to Wins and Losses. I'm
Speaker 1: Clay Travis. He's been Shapiro. One of the things that
Speaker 1: I learned was, uh, there's a great quote that's out
Speaker 1: there from I believe it's Michael Bay and they said, like,
Speaker 1: how do you know what the needle is? How do
Speaker 1: you move the needle, and he said, which one of
Speaker 1: the cockiest quotes of all time. I am the needle.
Speaker 1: And there's obviously two ways to look at that. Either
Speaker 1: you can make people you know, adjust to whatever you
Speaker 1: believe is important, or you have such a finely tuned
Speaker 1: calibration for what people are going to respond to that
Speaker 1: you know how to address their issues. And so I
Speaker 1: always like to say I'm a data guy. I like
Speaker 1: to go look at what people actually click on as
Speaker 1: opposed to what they claim that they are going to
Speaker 1: click on. Uh. And I bet you are as well,
Speaker 1: just based on the answer you gave. What surprised you
Speaker 1: that worked early on in your writing career on the internet,
Speaker 1: that if you didn't actually look at the numbers or
Speaker 1: the click through rates or the data might have been counterintuitive.
Speaker 1: So I think that everybody focuses on the writing and
Speaker 1: not the headlines. It is a huge So it's it's
Speaker 1: so you know, you like, I would write a really
Speaker 1: great piece and if without a crappy headline, it gets
Speaker 1: no traffic. I remember I was doing a panel at
Speaker 1: one of these big tech events and I was sitting
Speaker 1: on a panel with one of the head Vaccios, which
Speaker 1: is of course, another big news website, and they were
Speaker 1: complaining that they didn't get the kind of social media
Speaker 1: traffic to me, because we get an enormous social media
Speaker 1: kind of response to our stuff. And they were I
Speaker 1: was saying, well, can you read me like the last
Speaker 1: three headlines in person? You know, I looked up their
Speaker 1: headlines that said, well, you need to write better headlines,
Speaker 1: like not like the New York Times doesn't have great
Speaker 1: web traffic organically because their headlines stuck. All their headlines
Speaker 1: are you know, as the world turns blacks and Hispanics
Speaker 1: at hardest, It's like, well, how are you just to
Speaker 1: lead with the news? How about that? Like I just
Speaker 1: want to make a hardcore claim and make the hardcore
Speaker 1: claim right up front, Like there, I'm not even making
Speaker 1: a claim about their contents I'm just saying the way
Speaker 1: they phrase their contents is oblique. I don't do that.
Speaker 1: People want to wrack. People want to hear what we
Speaker 1: call the world in Hebrews. The topless they want to
Speaker 1: hear just the bottom line. They don't want to they
Speaker 1: don't want to be jerked around. And so the more
Speaker 1: outfront yard with your titles, the better it's gonna do. Uh.
Speaker 1: The other thing is that people don't I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a sad group of the world that people don't actually
Speaker 1: want good news. So everybody will tell you they want
Speaker 1: good news, but nobody wants good news. So if you
Speaker 1: if you cover the I mean, it's it's a truism
Speaker 1: that everybody in the media knows, but they won't tell
Speaker 1: anybody in the audience. So they also be like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I wish that the news were just filled
Speaker 1: with more stories about good things that are happening. Full
Speaker 1: crap you want, you don't click on it, That doesn't
Speaker 1: it doesn't activate your making. Last let's just be real
Speaker 1: about this. You don't want that stuff, but what you
Speaker 1: actually want is the stuff to freak you out right,
Speaker 1: which is why on COVID there's very little news about,
Speaker 1: you know, the fact that that rate is gone down,
Speaker 1: and the fact that hospitals are treating this thing significantly
Speaker 1: better than they were before, the fact that the caseload
Speaker 1: is rising but the hospitals are not overwhelmed. Like, all
Speaker 1: of that is more accurate than what you're generally seeing
Speaker 1: as the narrative. But that's not what you want to
Speaker 1: click on. What you want to click on is hospital
Speaker 1: is about to be overwhelmed. Stay in your home, we're
Speaker 1: all gonna die because that activates certain core parts of
Speaker 1: your brain. So if you want traffic, you know, then
Speaker 1: then that's where you go. Now, obviously you've gotta be
Speaker 1: honest about how you cover stuff. Um, but it is.
Speaker 1: It is just a fact of human nature, and people
Speaker 1: who are I think unscrupulous can certainly play on that.
Speaker 1: It's one of the reasons why for years and years
Speaker 1: and years, the going you know, the going polling has
Speaker 1: shown that people were worried about vast increases in crime,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that we're in the middle of a
Speaker 1: thirty year crime drop in the United Protectance of the
Speaker 1: last couple of years. No, it's a true and and
Speaker 1: I've labeled all the coronavirus coverage fear porn because that
Speaker 1: is oftentimes what motivated the analogy I use. You'll probably
Speaker 1: appreciate this is one day, although this is a little
Speaker 1: bit different for our audience, but uh, one day, we
Speaker 1: had a cancer patient announcing an NFL draft pick. St. Jude,
Speaker 1: which does incredible work in Memphis and around the country. Uh,
Speaker 1: they had a cancer patient who was going to be
Speaker 1: announcing an NFL draft pick. They gave that story to
Speaker 1: me to write, and I put it out on Twitter
Speaker 1: as an OutKick story, and I watched the traffic because
Speaker 1: you can sit in front of your Google Analytics or
Speaker 1: whatever internal analytics you have and see people react to
Speaker 1: whatever is out there circulating. And you know, we saw
Speaker 1: a little bit of a blip, but a lot more
Speaker 1: people said, oh, this is awesome than actually came to
Speaker 1: read about it. That same day, Aaron Murray, who was
Speaker 1: then the quarterback of the Georgia Bulldogs, had a brand
Speaker 1: new girlfriend and I was like, I put out you know,
Speaker 1: Aaron Murray's new girlfriend is super hot, and like the
Speaker 1: website traffic almost shut down the servers right so literally,
Speaker 1: like a couple of hours apart, we have good looking
Speaker 1: girl of a girlfriend of a quarterback and we have
Speaker 1: you know, cancer patient making a pick. People would say
Speaker 1: they want the cancer patient story, but it's like you
Speaker 1: can peel back their brain and the good looking girl
Speaker 1: like people like broke their self, you know, their screens
Speaker 1: on their phones to immediately click through on it. And
Speaker 1: we just had another story like that recently because s
Speaker 1: I had a fifty six year old swimsuit model and
Speaker 1: people are like, you know, I don't care about that,
Speaker 1: and you know, meanwhile the servers are, you know, hot
Speaker 1: lava because people can't click on that enough. It was
Speaker 1: our most read story last week and read as in
Speaker 1: quotation marks. But let's go back to uh, let's go
Speaker 1: back to sports for a minute, because you talked about
Speaker 1: being a big sports fan growing up. For me, I
Speaker 1: have talked with my aud it's about the Missouri race protest,
Speaker 1: which I believe happened back in if I'm not mistaken
Speaker 1: whatever that year was. Yeah, As for me, my red
Speaker 1: pill moment as a member of the sports media, because
Speaker 1: that was in my wheelhouse, Southeastern Conference college football, which
Speaker 1: is what I made my my living on. And I
Speaker 1: actually dove into that story and I saw the way
Speaker 1: that it was covered by the media, and I'm like, man,
Speaker 1: there is nothing that is actually here. And from that moment,
Speaker 1: I legitimately questioned everything in an aggressive way in the
Speaker 1: sports media in a way that I never had before.
Speaker 1: Was there a story for you in sports? And to
Speaker 1: the extent that I have evolved in any way in
Speaker 1: the way that I write and talk about sports, For me,
Speaker 1: that story was a transformative moment. I've always been skeptical.
Speaker 1: I'd always been, uh, you know, maybe more likely to
Speaker 1: adopt a devil's advocate perspective. Maybe that's the lawyer in me,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, but that for me was a was
Speaker 1: a life sort of altering moment in the way that
Speaker 1: I consumed news in the world of sports. Was there
Speaker 1: one for you in the world of sports where you said,
Speaker 1: my god, sports has become as political and as unclear
Speaker 1: and as agenda driven as the rest of politics news. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think that there's been hints of it
Speaker 1: for a long time, so I'm My parents gave me
Speaker 1: a Sports Illustrated subscription for my birthday when I five thirteen,
Speaker 1: and for I would take fifteen years. I was a
Speaker 1: subscriber to Sports Illustrated, and I wasn't just a subscriber.
Speaker 1: I would like sit there on Friday nights to stab
Speaker 1: it started, and I'd read this thing cover to cover
Speaker 1: like every single week. I didn't care if I liked
Speaker 1: the columns and care if if I was interested in
Speaker 1: the sport. I would literally sit there and just read
Speaker 1: the whole thing cover to cover, and it was kind
Speaker 1: of my my weekly break. Well. I remember, over time,
Speaker 1: a Sports Illustrated started covering more and more politics, where
Speaker 1: suddenly there was like a cover story on how global
Speaker 1: warming is going to affect baseball and how the Miami
Speaker 1: Marlins were gonna be playing from thirty ft underwater and
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff, and I remember thinking, Okay, I
Speaker 1: don't think that's true, but all right. They kind of
Speaker 1: the kind of breaking point for me came when they
Speaker 1: featured Caitlin Jenner on the cover of the magazine and
Speaker 1: they made a big deal out of this Caitlin, and
Speaker 1: I just remember thinking to myself, Okay, Caitlyn Jenner is
Speaker 1: an adult. He can I use people's biological pronouns, he can,
Speaker 1: he can do any laws to me. If if he
Speaker 1: thinks that he's a woman, then that's fine. If he
Speaker 1: wants to call himself Caitlin, and that's fine. I don't
Speaker 1: really care. But what in the f does this have
Speaker 1: to do with sports? Caitlin Bruce Cheddar has not been
Speaker 1: relevant in the American sports team because before I was born, like,
Speaker 1: why is this on the cover of a magazine? I
Speaker 1: I do not understand why this is happening. And that's
Speaker 1: what I realized that this had become just the thing.
Speaker 1: The thing was that the only stories that mattered were
Speaker 1: sports stories that as a particular narrative and that have
Speaker 1: been true for for that I remember this is true
Speaker 1: when um it was, um what what was the name
Speaker 1: of John Amici wasn't I think with the the the
Speaker 1: gay basketball player from the Orlando from the Atlanta Magica
Speaker 1: was it was put on the cover of Sports Illustrator.
Speaker 1: I remember thinking to myself, there's no one pretty, you know,
Speaker 1: famous gay people in society, Like I'm not sure why
Speaker 1: this is like a huge story, um, and but it
Speaker 1: was really the Caitlin gener things. At least hn and
Speaker 1: Mimi had been like an active player within the recent past. Um.
Speaker 1: The the Canlon Gender thing was like, okay, now, because
Speaker 1: now you're trying to promulgate a couple of things. One,
Speaker 1: you're trying to suggest that if I believe that Bruce
Speaker 1: Jenner is actually a man, or that Catlon Gender is
Speaker 1: a biological man, that I'm a biggot. And too, you're
Speaker 1: putting that on the cover of a sports magazine for
Speaker 1: that who has not been relevant or a person who's
Speaker 1: not been relevant in sports for literally four decades, like
Speaker 1: this is this is this clearly has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with anything and then it got to the point like
Speaker 1: that was when I had already been thinking of it,
Speaker 1: but that's when I was like, you know what, I
Speaker 1: don't need Sports illustrated in my life anymore. And I
Speaker 1: just canceled it because it was at least half politics.
Speaker 1: At that point, I started looking at the magazine and
Speaker 1: realizing half of the stuff I was reading with politics.
Speaker 1: And then I remember watching ESPN. I was, as you say,
Speaker 1: devoted to Sports Center like every day, and then at
Speaker 1: the gym I put on I put on ESPN, and
Speaker 1: every single story after the Missouri thing was the story
Speaker 1: of America's evil racist, evil racist orientation for minorities. And
Speaker 1: I thought, well, hold on a second, isn't ESPN like
Speaker 1: a an entire channel dedicated to athletic prowess, which is
Speaker 1: in many sports is heavily done in by minorities, but
Speaker 1: apparently America's evil and and it got to the point
Speaker 1: where it's like, Okay, I just don't want to watch
Speaker 1: this anymore. The only thing that I want to watch
Speaker 1: is the actual game. And you can see how in
Speaker 1: sports the entire narrative moved from the fringes into the
Speaker 1: actual sport, and that's that's kind of the story of
Speaker 1: the last five years, and went from Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: we have character studies of various players in sports illustrated
Speaker 1: for years. This person might not be that relevant, but
Speaker 1: but it's kind of an interesting character study. And even
Speaker 1: there you're like, okay, fine, then it got and now
Speaker 1: it's to the point where we're going to actually put
Speaker 1: the politics on the field. Right now, that was that's
Speaker 1: what's happened over the last three or four years. It
Speaker 1: was the politics of the players is interesting, but separate
Speaker 1: from what happens on the field. So you can watch
Speaker 1: a broadcast and go the entire broadcast, so that hearing
Speaker 1: the politics. And now it's you know, we're gonna put
Speaker 1: it on the sideline. And then right even a few
Speaker 1: years ago, it's this Kaepernick. It was on the sideline,
Speaker 1: and then it moved to okay, it's gonna be during
Speaker 1: and it's gonna move to before the game with the
Speaker 1: hand up, don't shot stout at the same it's rams
Speaker 1: same year, and then it was going to be okay,
Speaker 1: now that's gonna be in the game itself. Now when
Speaker 1: I turn on the NBA, I have to watch Black
Speaker 1: Lives Matter throw up an alley to defend the police,
Speaker 1: and I'm out man like I I can't do that.
Speaker 1: Like I'm happy to watch the basketball, but if you're
Speaker 1: going to spoon feed me a particular brand of politics,
Speaker 1: well I do it. Like I just wonder, if you're
Speaker 1: on the left and I'm running a sports league, do
Speaker 1: you really want to see pro life throw up, throw
Speaker 1: up an alley you to lower my taxes? That's something
Speaker 1: that you're up for? Are you up for me? Are
Speaker 1: you up for watching lead where quarterback biological women exist,
Speaker 1: goes back to throw a hail Mary to strengthen our
Speaker 1: military funding? Like, what are we talking about here? This
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with anything. It is amazing to
Speaker 1: think about and and and really, in the last ten
Speaker 1: days or so, I think people have started to recognize
Speaker 1: the inherent hypocrisy here. And I thought the Adrian Wodanarowski
Speaker 1: response of just f you immediately sent to Missouri Senator
Speaker 1: Josh Holly when he asked about the inherent contradictions in
Speaker 1: the NBA being willing to take billions of dollars from
Speaker 1: a Chinese communist government, which, if you truly want to
Speaker 1: analogize a global power to Nazi era, which is always
Speaker 1: a freighted difficult historical conversation to have, But the Chinese
Speaker 1: would be it, right. I mean, if you think about
Speaker 1: what they are doing, it most clearly, I would argue
Speaker 1: of any country in the world right now, curious if
Speaker 1: you would agree analogizes to Nazi Germany. Yet NBA is
Speaker 1: willing to take billions of dollars from communist China, which
Speaker 1: has got concentration camps and is taking over land and
Speaker 1: is taking away rights, literally pulling books out of libraries,
Speaker 1: and yet they're gonna lecture us about American politics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty amazing. I mean again, it's it's pretty amazing
Speaker 1: to hear from the NBA, which is heavily blackly because
Speaker 1: so many towns of players are black, saying that Americans
Speaker 1: are deeply endemically racist, and we're all tuning in to
Speaker 1: watch the NBA specifically because we just wanted the athletic contents, right.
Speaker 1: There was an amazing exchange today between Senators Ted Cruz
Speaker 1: and mar Cuban, the owner of the als Average, where
Speaker 1: Cuban was saying something Nashew to Cruz and crews came
Speaker 1: back and he was like, you know, they're very brave
Speaker 1: on a lot of these shoes. But I'm just wondering,
Speaker 1: do you have the guts just tweet like free Hong
Speaker 1: Kong or anything about what's going on in China right
Speaker 1: now and immediately Cuban tweets back, while you know what
Speaker 1: happens internally in different countries is in their own business
Speaker 1: and also black lives matter, It's like, okay, so you're
Speaker 1: just misdirected. Now. The reality is that you know, we
Speaker 1: there's lots of tid about the NEA brutality in this country,
Speaker 1: but the threat to Black Americans in this country there
Speaker 1: is nowhere on the order of what's happening to the
Speaker 1: Chinese weakers the hands of the Chinese government, but one
Speaker 1: you're willing to say something on because it has cost
Speaker 1: free to you, not only to cost free, because it
Speaker 1: actually plays into a certain marketing perspective that you want
Speaker 1: to have with regard to the NBA, and the other
Speaker 1: one you literally will not even say that. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's tape that has emerged of of the weakers being
Speaker 1: loaded after having a headship onto trains to go to
Speaker 1: concentration camps where they will be sterilized and mark Cuban islay. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's an internal political issue. Okay, yeah, sure, I totally
Speaker 1: believe your virtue signaling about the cruelties of America and
Speaker 1: are brutal human rights violations. Fox Sports Radio has the
Speaker 1: best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of
Speaker 1: our shows at Fox Sports Radio dot com and within
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app search f s R to
Speaker 1: listen live. We're talking to Ben Shapiro. The new book,
Speaker 1: by the way, How to Destroy America and Three Easy
Speaker 1: Steps is a good read. I'm working on it right now.
Speaker 1: Encourage you to follow him on Twitter as well at
Speaker 1: Ben Shapiro. Um you were, And by the way, this
Speaker 1: is the Winds and Losses podcast. I'm Clay Travis and uh.
Speaker 1: It also ties in with Jamal Hill. We're talking on
Speaker 1: Monday afternoon. Yesterday afternoon evening, Jamal Hill tweeted out that
Speaker 1: if you vote for Donald Trump, you are a racist.
Speaker 1: Uh and you'll appreciate this. I had our crew at
Speaker 1: out Kick reach out to ESPN because they now have
Speaker 1: hired Jamal Hill to be a producer of a Colin
Speaker 1: Kaepernick documentary, which is the very essence of propaganda. Right.
Speaker 1: We know already what they are going to allow him
Speaker 1: to say and what that story will be that will
Speaker 1: be told. But they're literally giving millions of dollars to
Speaker 1: Kaepernick and Jamal Hill. And so we said, uh, you,
Speaker 1: I hadham phrased it. I said, do you basically agree
Speaker 1: that Jamal Hill's position of everyone who votes for Donald
Speaker 1: Trump is racist? ESPN's response was no comment. So they're
Speaker 1: not even willing to say there are some people in
Speaker 1: America who might be voting for Donald Trump that are
Speaker 1: not racist, I mean, including her mom, right you guys
Speaker 1: also ye, which is absolutely speak active. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: the first of all, I'm not sure why Jamal Hill
Speaker 1: is suddenly an expert on American policing. But I just
Speaker 1: I just think there's not a ton of crossover here
Speaker 1: between like my understanding, which maybe maybe she's not. I
Speaker 1: don't know what. My understanding is that she made her
Speaker 1: kind of fame and fortune doing sports, not doing not
Speaker 1: doing the politics specifically. Now, listen, she's in pentical opinion.
Speaker 1: I'm not one of these shut up and seeing kind
Speaker 1: of people like I think that you should be able
Speaker 1: to speak on whatever you want to speak about. But
Speaker 1: I'm not sure why her opinion carries so much weight
Speaker 1: on on these matters when she has provided little to
Speaker 1: no statistical evidence in many of the contentions that she
Speaker 1: is making in the teams that she's brought on TV
Speaker 1: commuarly to castigate large crowds of people she doesn't know
Speaker 1: is racist. I mean, she did the same thing a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago after the bubble wall. It's non news.
Speaker 1: Or she suggested that everybody who watched NASCAR was a
Speaker 1: Confederate flag waving racist. I mean, it's just like this,
Speaker 1: this is her stick, and it's it's a pretty incredible stick.
Speaker 1: By the way, what a great country this is, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it really is a phenomenal country where you
Speaker 1: can be a quarterback who leaves your team to the
Speaker 1: super Bowl and then the next season everybody figures the
Speaker 1: figures the out that you can't make a secondary read
Speaker 1: and you kneel and you can make millions of dollars
Speaker 1: top of that, while declaring that the country cat you
Speaker 1: in his racist like, that's an unbelievable scam. It's fan
Speaker 1: freaking pastic. This is just like anyone can make a
Speaker 1: fortune here no matter how, no matter what you do,
Speaker 1: but particularly if you just crap all over the system
Speaker 1: that is paying tons of money There's no other country
Speaker 1: in the world that I can think of where somebody
Speaker 1: could just say the country is fundamentally racist, it's an
Speaker 1: awful place, and make more money doing that than they
Speaker 1: would to actually be a pro athlete. I got a
Speaker 1: couple of facts for you. I think you're going to
Speaker 1: enjoy and also want your opinion. A few weeks ago,
Speaker 1: ESPN decided to give over their programming for the evening
Speaker 1: to Social Justice Warrior programming. It was like ESPN Woke
Speaker 1: Center in the extreme. Okay, uh. It was the lowest
Speaker 1: rated prime time programming in twenty five years and probably longer.
Speaker 1: Literally literally, the audience is telling ESPN, we don't want this,
Speaker 1: We do not have any interest in you guys deciding
Speaker 1: to be I think, as you initially coined, MS, ESPN,
Speaker 1: this uh the worldwide leader in sports and left wing politics.
Speaker 1: Why do you think in a market based economy, markets
Speaker 1: responding as they are, is still leading ESPN down this
Speaker 1: pathway of woke center destruction when all the evidence is
Speaker 1: telling them, Hey, your fans, your audience don't want this. Well.
Speaker 1: I actually did a bit of a statistical study on
Speaker 1: this a few years ago to look at the percentage
Speaker 1: of coverage that was being devoted by sports on ESPN,
Speaker 1: and they heavy heavily disproportionately because on the NFL and
Speaker 1: the NBA, much less on the n L the almost
Speaker 1: nothing on the NHL um And what that says to
Speaker 1: me is that ESPN is specifically catering to particular racial
Speaker 1: demographics that they think are going to spend more money
Speaker 1: with their advertisers. Which makes perfect sense, right on. If
Speaker 1: you're if you're ESPN and you get a lot of
Speaker 1: money from Nike for advertising, and people who are disproportionately
Speaker 1: likely to buy Nike are young black males, and young
Speaker 1: black males want companies that cater to their particular brand
Speaker 1: of politics, then it all sort of crosses over. Right,
Speaker 1: There's a reason that Nike decided to hire Kaepernick, and
Speaker 1: it's not because Nike suddenly decided to get wonks because
Speaker 1: they wanted to make more money. So capitalism always wins
Speaker 1: until it doesn't, right, I mean, this is sort of
Speaker 1: the in the short term capitalism always win. ESPN can
Speaker 1: afford a bad night of programming in order to signal
Speaker 1: to their to their constituency that we are on your
Speaker 1: side when it comes to politics and us your your
Speaker 1: brand loyalty will be that much higher. But they are,
Speaker 1: and they are betting that a huge percentage of the
Speaker 1: population just won't turn out the ESPN, And I don't
Speaker 1: think that's right. I think that there are a lot
Speaker 1: of people who did this with the NFL, with annealing stuff.
Speaker 1: I did it with the ESPN. I used to watch
Speaker 1: ESPN regularly. I haven't watched ESPN in years. I think
Speaker 1: Spin is also recognizing a simple truth, which is that
Speaker 1: so many people are cutting the cord at this point
Speaker 1: that they have to double down on the audience as
Speaker 1: they do have. Because if you are if you if
Speaker 1: you're younger, chances are pretty good that you're just gonna
Speaker 1: go online for your for your sports anyway, or you're
Speaker 1: gonna buy, Like for me, I have an MLB TV
Speaker 1: subscription because all I care about some baseball. So the
Speaker 1: fact that, um, you know, the fact that ESPN decide
Speaker 1: the program instruction there there's natual market reasons that makes
Speaker 1: the sense here. But I think that that's that's the
Speaker 1: part of this that's so hilarious is all the woke
Speaker 1: schools who are out there sharing ESPN, sharing Disney sharing,
Speaker 1: all of these major corporations who guts they hate because
Speaker 1: suddenly they think that the corporations have turned woke, when
Speaker 1: in reality, the corporations are just making a quick buck
Speaker 1: off of them. Do you think that athletes understand where
Speaker 1: the money from their salaries come from? Because I keep
Speaker 1: circling back around to this being the essential major issue
Speaker 1: out there, which is that the athletes themselves they don't
Speaker 1: understand where the money is coming from anymore. You know,
Speaker 1: they look at their social media feeds. They pull up Instagram,
Speaker 1: they pull up Twitter, they see what it's likes. They're
Speaker 1: busy playing sports otherwise, and it's as if they have
Speaker 1: forgotten who actually pays their salaries, which are the people
Speaker 1: who are willing to buy courtside seats in the NBA,
Speaker 1: which by the way, are really really expensive. The people
Speaker 1: who are buying luxury suites, A huge percentage of them
Speaker 1: would not vote in the same way that the athlete would.
Speaker 1: Is that just a fundamental disconnect in terms of not
Speaker 1: understanding the business that they're in. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that's right. I think that the problem is that they
Speaker 1: don't get directly paid by the sands. Right they got
Speaker 1: directly the fans, then they would actually be then they
Speaker 1: would actually have to cater to the fan base, but
Speaker 1: they're paid by the owners because the owners are the
Speaker 1: ones to actually end up reaping the benefits. So they
Speaker 1: look at the owners and they're like, oh, you owners
Speaker 1: are shutting me down. You're stopping me from speaking my mind.
Speaker 1: And it's all because you're an old white guy. And
Speaker 1: the old white guys like, wait a second, I hired you,
Speaker 1: and I'm happy to have you on the team, but
Speaker 1: you know, I can only pay you the money that's
Speaker 1: coming in. And they look at the old white guy
Speaker 1: who's worked a lot of money and they said, hey, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you're worth billions of dollars and all you have
Speaker 1: to do is dip into your Scooge McDuck piggy bank
Speaker 1: and you can just so they swim around and every
Speaker 1: night and pay me a little less from one and
Speaker 1: he won't do that because woke reasons. And listen, if
Speaker 1: if if people were actually subjected to the market decisions
Speaker 1: they make the rest play they make very very different decisions.
Speaker 1: At my company, everybody sort of knows where the where
Speaker 1: the money comes from, where it comes from our subscribers,
Speaker 1: it comes from the advertisers. But athletes are not trained
Speaker 1: to think like that. That's that's not how they think.
Speaker 1: And frankly, they shouldn't have to think like that, because
Speaker 1: it used to be that your literal job was just
Speaker 1: to go and play ball, right, Your your job was
Speaker 1: not to be a social justice warrior. But then it
Speaker 1: became that the media created all of these advertising incentives
Speaker 1: to be bigger than your actual athletic profile and would
Speaker 1: allow It used to be that if you've got a
Speaker 1: big advertising contract, the way you got a big advertising
Speaker 1: contract was you were good at the support that you played.
Speaker 1: Now that you get a big advertising contract, is your
Speaker 1: mediocre too decent at the support that you play, but
Speaker 1: you say a couple of super woke things and you
Speaker 1: go in social justice rally. I mean, my guess is
Speaker 1: that Dwayne Wade, who was an amazing player in his prime,
Speaker 1: they're probably getting just as many advertising contracts are close
Speaker 1: to it now for being a social justice warrior as
Speaker 1: he was when he was in his prime with the heat.
Speaker 1: Be sure to catch live editions about Kicked the Coverage
Speaker 1: with Clay Travis week days at six am Eastern, three
Speaker 1: am Pacific. We're talking to Ben Shapiro. I'm Clay Travis.
Speaker 1: Wins and lost his podcast where you talked about about
Speaker 1: five or six years ago you noticed this stark evolution.
Speaker 1: I agree with you on the timing, uh, And where
Speaker 1: does it go from here? Do fans ultimately the markets
Speaker 1: ultimately react and and athletes end up recognizing wait a minute,
Speaker 1: this might not be best business? Or are we pass
Speaker 1: the point if we crossed the rubicon, so to speak,
Speaker 1: and there's no way to go back. I think across
Speaker 1: the rubicon at this point, and I think that you know,
Speaker 1: as you know, we both trended on Twitter for saying
Speaker 1: exactly this, But I think, oh, it's amazing, it will
Speaker 1: come up. It's unbelievable. But there there will come a
Speaker 1: point here where so many people have tuned out, Like
Speaker 1: I still love the sport of basketball, I just don't
Speaker 1: want to be lectured to about politics with which I disagree.
Speaker 1: So there will come a point where if the league's
Speaker 1: don't figure out that people like the sport but they
Speaker 1: don't like the politics, where people will just form alternative
Speaker 1: leagues where they banned the politics. I mean, David Sturne
Speaker 1: us to recognize this, right, I mean he stopped, he
Speaker 1: stopped the player on the Nuggets from from from sitting exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, like this is this This used to be
Speaker 1: kind of well understood, and then they forgot about it
Speaker 1: because now they're sort of micro targetting audiences as opposed
Speaker 1: to broadcasting. It's sort of the difference that happened in
Speaker 1: television one cable began. Instead of broadcasting, you narrowcast it,
Speaker 1: and so sports are now narrowcasting. Well, somebody's gonna come
Speaker 1: along and eat their lunch by by broadcasting and saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna go out and we're gonna hire the five
Speaker 1: best players and the and the rule is going to
Speaker 1: be that there's just there's no politics on the field,
Speaker 1: and we'll show out a few bucks begause. I mean
Speaker 1: the a there's one point where the USFL basically tried
Speaker 1: this with Steve Young. They just did it wrong. But
Speaker 1: the but the notion that you could start a rival
Speaker 1: sports league by signing some of the best players for
Speaker 1: a few million bucks and draw the eyeballs there and
Speaker 1: then not insult the viewers. I mean, I think there's
Speaker 1: a lot of money to be made there. So it's
Speaker 1: it's ugly for the country because I don't think that
Speaker 1: you should have to have two separate sports flags and
Speaker 1: one for non politics and one for politics, or one
Speaker 1: for right wing politics and one for lessian politics. Like
Speaker 1: it kills the water cooler, because if we're watching separate
Speaker 1: sports games, then what exactly do we talk about when
Speaker 1: we disagrand every thing else? But it seems like that's
Speaker 1: inexorably the direction in which we're oving. Talking to Ben Shapiro,
Speaker 1: whose new book is How to Destroy America Three Easy Steps,
Speaker 1: you can follow them on Twitter at Ben Shapiro. Uh,
Speaker 1: when you look at at that sort of eventual reality,
Speaker 1: a large part of it, I would argue, is being
Speaker 1: driven by social media. I think social media has been
Speaker 1: good for certainly people like you and me, because it's
Speaker 1: allowed us to broaden our audience, but for the nation
Speaker 1: as a whole. How destructive do you believe social media
Speaker 1: has been and how much of our current chaotic situation
Speaker 1: is directly connected to the evolution and creation of social media.
Speaker 1: Social media has been really instructive in that it got
Speaker 1: rid of normal human relationships. I mean, the notion was
Speaker 1: that you could be from some people across the aisle,
Speaker 1: but now because you get retweets and likes for for
Speaker 1: being a jackass, Basically what I've said about Twitter is
Speaker 1: the Twitter is a place to dunk and be dunked upon.
Speaker 1: And so if you're not dunking, they're being dunked upon.
Speaker 1: You're basically wasting your time. Right, you're shooting twall foot jumpers,
Speaker 1: midrage shumppers, and nobody nobody gets rich shooting closed midraye jumpers. Right,
Speaker 1: take the three or door dunk. And so that's that's
Speaker 1: really what what Twitter is all about. To incentivizes extreme
Speaker 1: right record, incentivizes people to be church and it gives
Speaker 1: you all sorts of credit for saying the thing that
Speaker 1: is unstable, except that the most stable things on Twitter
Speaker 1: are the unstable things. Right, If you're truly unstable, you
Speaker 1: can't say it. So it's it's created all sorts of
Speaker 1: weird insensive structures. So and I'm real grateful as you
Speaker 1: say that social media is there because it allows alternative
Speaker 1: points of views to get out there. But I will
Speaker 1: say that the one of the things that it's also
Speaker 1: done in terms of general general sports level is made
Speaker 1: people have expectations of athletes they never would have had before.
Speaker 1: So it's happening in the in the athletic world is
Speaker 1: basically what happened in Hollywood in the nineties, sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1: For a long time, there's a studio system in Hollywood
Speaker 1: that basically said, our stars are our stars. Their private
Speaker 1: lives are up limits. They are in the movies. We
Speaker 1: create these images for them, and those are the glitzy, glamorous,
Speaker 1: glamorous images. That's why the oscars used to get big
Speaker 1: ratings because that was the only time you saw the
Speaker 1: stars when they weren't actually on your on your film screen.
Speaker 1: And then in the sixties and seventies they started to
Speaker 1: do politics that he can every day kind of players
Speaker 1: in politics, and they were in your news paper and
Speaker 1: they're on TV, and it radically changed the way that
Speaker 1: Americans think about politics and about Hollywood. Now you're seeing
Speaker 1: the same thing happened in sports. It used to be
Speaker 1: the only time you saw Michael Jordan's when he was
Speaker 1: on the field, or when when he was on the court.
Speaker 1: Rather the only time you saw Drew Brees is when
Speaker 1: he was on the field. Well, social media has democratized
Speaker 1: the ability to get out a message that you want
Speaker 1: to promulgate. So now it's turned into well, you're not
Speaker 1: messaging strongly enough. Right now, there's an expectation that that
Speaker 1: athletes are going to be political, and if they're not political,
Speaker 1: then it's not that they're being smart. The athletes are
Speaker 1: not speaking out loudly enough. And this is how you
Speaker 1: see all of the bullying that takes place of people
Speaker 1: who haven't put up the check mark, haven't put up
Speaker 1: the blue square or the black square, people who haven't
Speaker 1: message in a way that we want, and so we're
Speaker 1: now going to bully them into it. Like thirty years ago.
Speaker 1: That makes no sense because none of the athletes were
Speaker 1: saying any of this stuff. Now the expectation is that
Speaker 1: you have to say this stuff. And if you don't
Speaker 1: say this stuff, then simply by process of process and
Speaker 1: elimination and expectation, we know that you're not truly woke.
Speaker 1: What's the thing that the last couple of questions for you,
Speaker 1: you mentioned the fact that we were trending. I went
Speaker 1: on your show, we talked about I don't even remember
Speaker 1: what the latest controversy was, but I was talking about
Speaker 1: the latest sports controversy with you. Um, I you know,
Speaker 1: I get in bed, I'm about to go to sleep,
Speaker 1: and I uh, and I happened to get some text,
Speaker 1: Hey you're trending, and I'm like, I have no idea
Speaker 1: what I'm trending for, right, And you say and do
Speaker 1: a lot of things every day now too, and sometimes
Speaker 1: you'll find out you're trending for something that you might
Speaker 1: say twenty times a day, and for some reason somebody
Speaker 1: clipped in and went up, what's the funniest or most
Speaker 1: unbelievable thing that you have found yourself trending for? Is
Speaker 1: there one that stands out? I one actually was pretty
Speaker 1: good because that one I literally like we were trending
Speaker 1: because I think the contention I was making is I
Speaker 1: don't like my sports from politics. That's pretty much the
Speaker 1: entire thing. You were trended for that, And I thought
Speaker 1: that's proposition in the Yeah, I don't think that they're
Speaker 1: they're like that many people who are like I desperately
Speaker 1: need my basketball with the side of commentary on the
Speaker 1: racial situation in America. Um, but that one was pretty ridiculous. Um.
Speaker 1: There's been a few. I mean there there's I think
Speaker 1: I trended on Saturday because I put up a map
Speaker 1: of massing in the United States alongside the map of
Speaker 1: the the caseload in different places of the United States,
Speaker 1: and I said, there's a pattern here, and then my
Speaker 1: follow up tweet was the pattern here is that where
Speaker 1: there's a high caseload, people are putting on masks because
Speaker 1: people act rationally. And that's trended because people decided to
Speaker 1: take the first tweet out of context and suggest that
Speaker 1: are saying masks don't work, which I explicitly said is
Speaker 1: not what the case in the second week, right, And
Speaker 1: so they waited like six hours both tweets were already up,
Speaker 1: and then they trended it so that that one was
Speaker 1: pretty good. Um, they've been just a bunch. And there's
Speaker 1: one on on COVID where I pointed out that the
Speaker 1: people who are dying of COVID are disproportionately elderly, and
Speaker 1: that's that there's a different public policy consideration than if
Speaker 1: a bunch of thirty or twenty year olds were dying.
Speaker 1: People like, are you saying that you want to kill grandma? Like,
Speaker 1: of course, I'm not saying that hell's wrong with you people.
Speaker 1: By the again twitters, it's the dumbest place on earth.
Speaker 1: And I just figure I'm gonna trend once every two
Speaker 1: weeks no matter what. And the good news is that
Speaker 1: after you've trended, there's basically like a two week grace period.
Speaker 1: It feels like where Twitter has some sort of algorithm
Speaker 1: where they don't let your trend for a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: so they trend to be on Saturday. It's I completely
Speaker 1: easy for a couple of weeks. Do you enjoy being
Speaker 1: in the five it every day? I do. I like
Speaker 1: kind of throwing punches. I like being in the mud,
Speaker 1: the muck, whatever you want to call it, because I'm
Speaker 1: a big First Amendment guy. And I also feel like
Speaker 1: if there weren't people making the arguments that I'm making,
Speaker 1: almost no one in all of sports media would be
Speaker 1: making them, which is it blows my mind. But Jason
Speaker 1: Wentlock and I talked about this a lot in relation
Speaker 1: to out Kick. If we didn't exist, there's literally no
Speaker 1: one out there who would be making the arguments, which
Speaker 1: I believe are correct arguments, by the way, But it's
Speaker 1: not even that, uh, you know that other people would
Speaker 1: be fighting these battles. It's like it would just be
Speaker 1: a totally abandoned battlefield. There would be no one arguing
Speaker 1: what we are arguing. It blows my mind sometimes and
Speaker 1: I imagine for you, you feel the same way in
Speaker 1: the world of politics, Yeah, I mean, I think that's right.
Speaker 1: I will say that I think that the world of
Speaker 1: politics is more wearying than the world of sports, because
Speaker 1: I think that, you know, at least every so often
Speaker 1: you get to take a break and talk about fun stuff.
Speaker 1: You occasionally get to talk about the game. But but
Speaker 1: for me, because it's politics all the time, it definitely
Speaker 1: gets tiresome at some point when you're thinking, like, why
Speaker 1: is it even controversial? Why is it even remotely controversial?
Speaker 1: Like I do, honestly, God, do not understand why COVID
Speaker 1: policy is particularly controversially. Right answer to this, everybody, you know,
Speaker 1: out of an abundance of caution, where where masks the
Speaker 1: the we can't stay lock in our homes forever, and
Speaker 1: we would like to make it safe for our kids
Speaker 1: to go to schools and buy and launch. Kids are
Speaker 1: not being disproportionate, are not being affected like nearly at
Speaker 1: all by this thing Like these are all I feel
Speaker 1: like they should be one percent propositions, and somehow everything
Speaker 1: turns into rockham Stockhem robots. So at a certain point
Speaker 1: when it's an important issue, I love the Fike right
Speaker 1: when it's when it's the lack of the process in
Speaker 1: the Kavanaugh hearings, when it's the when it's you know,
Speaker 1: the the nineteen project bullcraft that's being promulgated on, like
Speaker 1: that's that's simes when I feel like the fight's important.
Speaker 1: What's really tiring is when it's a minor, stupid issue
Speaker 1: and it becomes the the issue of the day, and
Speaker 1: suddenly I'm forced to talk about whether we ought to have,
Speaker 1: you know, whether mandatory masking is going to solve COVID,
Speaker 1: and whether Donald Trump is a is a very very
Speaker 1: bad to Orange man for his late and dumb tweet
Speaker 1: when we all know it's just a stupid tweet that
Speaker 1: he sends every five seconds. He's been Shapiro. I'm Clay
Speaker 1: Travis is the Wins and Losses podcast. Check out the
Speaker 1: book How to Destroy American Three Easy Steps. Follow Ben
Speaker 1: at Ben Shapiro on Twitter and appreciate all of your time.
Speaker 1: Go check out the other Wins and Losses episodes that
Speaker 1: we have. I think you'll enjoy them. Thanks, Ben. Thank
Speaker 1: That is the latest. We're gonna try to get more
Speaker 1: and more of these done long form conversations. Let me
Speaker 1: know who you'd like to hear from. Go rate us,
Speaker 1: give us five stars and we'll be back with another
Speaker 1: Wins and Losses soon. In the meantime, go subscribe to
Speaker 1: the OutKick the Coverage podcast as well as Outkicked the Show,
Speaker 1: and as always, check out out kick dot com for
Speaker 1: the latest this has been Wins and Losses Clay Travis
Speaker 1: and Ben Shapiro. Fox Sports Radio has the best sports
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