#1732 - Ben Shapiro

Ben Shapiro (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Good to see you, buddy.

Ben Shapiro (0:15)

It's good to see you outside LA.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

I know, I'm a free man now, and as are you. We've escaped the criminal communist state of California.

Ben Shapiro (0:24)

We both look about 25% happier.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

I'm definitely happier. It's way easier to live here. It's like less traffic. Just forget about all the draconian COVID restrictions and dealing with an inept bullshit government, which is what it is.

Ben Shapiro (0:40)

You save yourself some money, too.

Joe Rogan (0:41)

It's that, but people are nicer.

Ben Shapiro (0:43)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (0:44)

It's like you're living in a regular folks, like California is so polluted by show business.

It's hard to really reconcile it. It's hard to really understand how bad it is until you leave. And then you go, oh, okay, that's not normal. This is normal. It's just regular people.

Ben Shapiro (1:03)

It's crazy. So I grew up in LA, right? I mean, I was in LA all the way up until last year, basically. And the only three years I wasn't in LA, I was in Boston for law school. So I've only been in like big blue cities my entire life.

And when you grow up in LA, it's like there's no other place. It's like growing up in New York. There's no other place that exists in the country. And then you leave, you're like, whoa, the rest of this country is kind of fantastic. And people are, they're way nicer, just way nicer. Like in LA, there's a thing you do where you walk down the street, if you're not driving, you walk down the street, you spot somebody who you don't know, you kind of lock eyes with them. The first thing you do is you look away, right? You don't catch eyes with somebody and have a conversation with them just in the normal course of business in LA or New York.

You move outside LA or New York, you're walking down the street, you lock eyes with somebody, like, hey, how are you?

Joe Rogan (1:46)

Yeah, they say hi.

Ben Shapiro (1:47)

It's crazy. It's like a crazy thing.

Joe Rogan (1:49)

Well, there's a thing that happens when you just get too many human beings living together where people become a nuisance.

You know, it's just the population density of Los Angeles is replicated in rat population density studies that they've done. Have you ever seen those?

Ben Shapiro (2:03)

No, I haven't seen these.

Joe Rogan (2:04)

They're really fascinating because what they do is they've taken rats and they take them and they have a certain number of these rats together and they behave fairly normally. And then as they increase the population of rats, you start seeing what you see in large cities. You start seeing rats, like, huddled in the corner, nodding and shit. You see, like, mental illness. You see violence.

You see all kinds of stuff that you see in populations of humans. And it's just, it becomes, they become a factor and a negative factor instead of, you know, obviously rats aren't communicating like people do, where it becomes a community and you look forward to seeing those people. But, you know, they have some sort of a communal relationship with each other.

Ben Shapiro (2:44)

It feels like there's sort of a background level of threat that just exists when there are tons of people who you don't know who are around you all the time. And in small communities, it's not replicated that way because you actually know your neighbors, you know the people you're dealing with on a regular basis. But if you're walking around a big city, just the kind of lizard part of your brain has to constantly be on alert. Again, the next person who walks down the street could be the person who stabs me in the eye. And in LA, that's actually not a wild consideration considering that they've let every mentally ill drug addict out onto the streets and then said that it's a civil right for them to stay there, like right outside people's houses. It's crazy.

Joe Rogan (3:16)

If you were a real conspiracy theorist, if you're a real tin foil hat, dyed in the wool conspiracy theorist, you would look at the LA district attorney and you would go, what the fuck is going on here?

Like, is this a plot to ruin the city?

Is this, I mean, is this like, has China hired this guy? Like, what is going on? That Gascom guy?

Ben Shapiro (3:34)

Between that and San Francisco, yeah. Between that and San Francisco, taking beautiful cities.