Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1512 - Ben Shapiro
Uploaded: 2020-07-22T19:00:05.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1512 - Ben Shapiro' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1512 - Ben Shapiro' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-22. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1512 - Ben Shapiro

Hello, Ben. Hey, how's it going, dude? We're here. We did it. We did. We're
both alive. First of all, congratulations on your thinness. Oh, thank you. You
look slender and healthy. You look good. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Turns
out running away from my children for four months straight will do that to you.
I literally took up running just to get away from my three children. Really?
Just going outside just for some mind space? It's L.A., man. You can't get
outside unless you're actively exercising or they come and arrest you. Oh, I
could have looted a footlocker, right? Then that would have been okay. Do you
run with a mask on? No. Does anybody yell at you?
No. No? No. Do you go to a track? Like, what do you do? No, I literally just
run around on the streets hoping that one day I will be hunted down by the rioters
so I don't have to go deal with my children screaming at me. But yeah, that's
the goal. Did you try to get healthier when COVID hit? Like, were you worried?
A little bit. It really wasn't about COVID. It was just I was eating out too
much. And when I was relegated to home, it was like I had to learn how to use
the barbecue, which I'd never learned how to use a barbecue, actually. And then
it turned out it was actually not that hard.
So I don't know what I was doing for years. I gotta give you some elk meat. Are
you barbecuing right now?
Oh, yeah. You still doing it? Yeah. I'll give you some elk sausages. It's very
easy. Well, I have to do kosher, right? So I have to like... Oh, that's not kosher
at all. I'll have to go get the elk and I'll have to actually like kill it
myself and get a rabbit. Is that what you'd have to do? You'd have to get the
elk and then you'd have to slice its throat or something like that?
Oh, yeah. It's good times.
What's the logic behind that?
So, I mean, not to get too fast into the biblical stuff, but the original logic
was that you were supposed to kill the animal in the most humane way was the
idea. Now, do I know if it's the most humane way now? I have no idea.
It's most certainly not, Ben.
Okay. Well...
Because you have to slice his throat.
Take it up with the rabbis, man. I don't know.
Yeah. I get it how back in the day, a very sharp knife going through the throat
would have been the most humane way because it's almost painless. And then the
blood just sort of pours out and that's a wrap.
Right. And you don't want the blood anyway because you're not allowed to eat
blood in Judaism, so.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
So, what do you do when you have a medium rare steak?
I mean, you salt the steak really heavily. This is why kosher meat's pretty
salty.
So, if you go to a steakhouse, are you allowed to go to a steakhouse?
A kosher steakhouse. There are kosher steakhouses.
God, you're so deep in that world.
I know, man.
But you're a logical, intelligent guy. Does every now and then...
I like how you juxtapose those.
But does every now and then it fuck with your head? You're like, what is this?
I mean, of course.
I don't know there's a religious person alive. I mean, who doesn't eventually
go like, okay, it's a little weird, but all right.
You got to embrace the system.
But you feel like for tradition and for just the whole Jewish culture, it's
worth doing.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you live the lifestyle.
And I feel like it ain't that big a sacrifice to eat at particular restaurants.
The restaurants are still good. They've still got good kosher restaurants.
One thing that we're seeing with society and culture in general,
and one thing that sort of does support the idea of maintaining these sort of
rigid disciplines,
is that when things start to slide just a little,
you lose like a little, these little incremental steps.
They slide and people go, oh God, what's the big deal?
What do you care?
And you're like, I see where this is going.
Like, this is, it's going down that way.
This is not going to stop.
It's sliding.
Oh yeah. And you saw it in LA.
I mean, I've lived in LA my whole life.
And the move from LA being a pretty safe, fairly nice city, suburban in
orientation,
to just overrun with horror shows is really, it was a lot faster than I thought
it would be.
But it's sort of a, you're right, it's a gradual decline and then it's just off
a cliff.
Well, you started to see tents and you didn't see them at all for decades.
And then all of a sudden I started seeing tents.
I remember I was doing Fear Factor in Skid Row in the early 2000s.
We would film down there and I'd be like, this is crazy.
Like, has anybody seen this?
Does anybody know this?
Because there was these homeless streets.
Like, you would go down these gigantic, and downtown LA back then, for people
who don't
live in LA, you would think, oh, downtown's like downtown New York or downtown
Cleveland.
No.
Downtown LA was a no man's land.
Nothing's going on in downtown LA.
It is now.
A little bit, yeah.
Well, it was pre-COVID.
It was like, there was some bars and there was some really cool upscale
apartment buildings.
It was kind of picking up.
But I took my family there before COVID, like four months before COVID or so.
We went to, we were going to go to, there's a famous donut place there.
So we said, just one of the most goofy Sunday things.
Like, what do you guys want to do today?
Let's go get donuts.
So we went to downtown LA.
Like, holy shit.
Literally shit.
Human shit.
On the streets.
Everything smelled like piss.
Bums everywhere.
And I'm like, okay, stay close to me.
Stay over here.
If anybody comes near you, move closer to me.
I'm like, Jesus Christ.
Like, this is crazy.
Like, I don't want them to be freaked out.
But I'm like, this is nuts.
Well, the thing is that that sort of disaster area stuff in LA was sort of
localized.
Right?
It really did.
Like, I worked in the LADA's office for a summer when I was in law school.
It's been like 2007.
So it was a while ago.
And I remember they had a giant tent city and you had to walk from the car.
They made you park a mile away and walk it.
And so you're walking through Skid Row.
And it's like, okay, well, this is really terrible.
And honestly, I feel bad for these people because I don't think the best
solution for people who are drug addicted or mentally ill is to live on the
street.
And a heavy percentage of people who are homeless are drug addicted or mentally
ill.
But, you know, for people who are living in the suburbs, like, this is at least
localized.
It's not like reaching into your life.
And then over the past 13 years, like, I live in a pretty decent suburban area.
And I'm seeing, like, open needles on the street.
Walked out of my house one day.
There's just a guy lying face down in the gutter like Edgar Allan Poe.
And I thought, well, this is falling apart rather quickly.
What do you think caused the slide or the expansion of the slide?
Because I agree with you that it was very isolated.
Skid Row was very isolated.
Downtown L.A. was very – I remember one time we were filming in downtown L.A.
And we were on a gurney or I guess that's what you – one of those things
called where it lifts up.
Oh, all right.
Anyway, we were filming some Fear Factor stunt.
And as we got up, we could see people smoking crack.
And I go, oh, look, there's people smoking crack right there.
And the guests on the show, like, a lot of them, they fly from all over the
country.
And they're like, is that real?
They're really smoking crack?
I'm like, that's crack.
That's a homeless person smoking crack.
Welcome to L.A.
It's right there.
But I didn't feel bad about it.
I felt like, look, it's unfortunate, but this is not, like, indicative of all
of L.A.
We're just in a shitty spot because it's really cheap to film here.
So here you go.
You know, you got a little gift.
You get to see some weird shit while you're here.
But I didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where you're on, like,
Winnetka off the 101.
Yep.
And there's 80 fucking tents.
And they put a port-a-potty there.
They put a port-a-potty there for the homeless people.
Hey, we're doing real building and real development here in Los Angeles.
Not apartment buildings.
We got some port-a-potties.
We put – every underpass shall have a port-a-potty thanks to Mayor Eric Garcetti.
You pay attention to politics far more than I do.
And law enforcement and all that.
What happened?
How did it get to this?
Well, on this particular problem, this actually started with a bunch of
lawsuits.
So the LAPD used to have the authority to move people's shit if it was on the
sidewalk.
If people had a bunch of stuff that was on the sidewalk and they were just
camping out there,
the LAPD could come and they could take their stuff away and they could rouse
them or they could arrest them for trespass or for loitering.
And then the ACLU actually sued.
And they said that this is a violation of people's personal property.
Oh, ACLU.
You do such good work sometimes.
And the courts ruled that you actually are not allowed to move people's stuff,
that that's actually personal property, even though it's in a public area.
And then they got a ruling from a court that you're allowed to live in your car
because for a while you weren't allowed to live in your car.
And then it was you're allowed to live in your car.
So now you're basically allowed to leave your stuff on the sidewalk and the
police are not allowed to move it.
And you're allowed to live in your car.
And then there was this sort of equity movement that said, OK, well, they do it
in business districts, but why can't they do it in like more suburban areas?
Why can't they just move into nicer areas?
After all, there's misery.
It should be equally spread across the city.
And that's kind of what you see.
I mean, this is there have been so many breaking points over the last year in
the city.
And for me, for me and my wife, I mean, we looked at the rioting and they shut
down the entire city at 6 p.m.
It's a county of 12 million people.
And they shut down the entire county so that douchebags could run around shattering
windows, pretending that they were standing up for social justice.
They shut down Beverly Hills at 1 p.m.
They shut down Rodeo Drive at 1 p.m.
So that people could run up and down Rodeo Drive talking about how capitalism
sucks while tweeting from their iPhone.
While stealing, stealing Nikes.
You know, there was two moments where I was like, this is a real opportunity
for us to come together.
And one of them was the moment the lockdown happened.
It felt to me very similar to right after 9-11, where everybody was confronted
with their own mortality.
Like, holy shit.
Like, we might be on the verge of a pandemic, like in a movie, where a lot of
the people we know die.
And here, we have to be kind to each other.
We have to be kind.
This is what's important.
Family's important.
And I remember thinking, I've never been closer to my family.
Never been closer to my friends.
We were calling each other all the time.
It was like, there was real hope in that.
I was like, if we get through this, we're going to be tighter.
We're going to know what means something, what counts.
Fuck stand-up comedy.
Fuck everything else, man.
What's important is love and friendship.
Then it started to get angry.
It only took, like, three or four weeks where people started getting, like,
they were scared.
So people started getting shittier with each other online.
And then I basically swore off Twitter.
I was like, this is just too toxic and too hostile.
The second moment where I thought we had the opportunity to come together was
George Floyd.
So George Floyd died and all of a sudden you have these Black Lives Matter
protests.
And I'm like, maybe we can finally make a dent on racism.
Maybe we can finally make a dent in police brutality.
Maybe this is a moment where we can come together and realize what's important.
It's community, solidarity.
We're all in this together.
Like, this is crazy.
And then the cops need to be reformed.
Like, they can't live like that.
And maybe we should take into ac