Joe Rogan on the Decline of LA w/Ben Shapiro

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 I see this. 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 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 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 like there's what 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 those goofy Sunday things like what do you guys want to do today? Let's go get donuts. So we went to downtown LA. Holy shit. Literally shit. Human shit on the streets. Everything smelled like piss. Bums everywhere. And I'm like, OK, stay close to me. Stay over here. If anybody comes near you, move or move closer to me. Jesus Christ. Like this is crazy. I don't want him 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 like I worked in the L.A. D.A.'s office for a summer when I was when I was in law school, it's been like 2007. So it's 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, OK, well, this 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, is it 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. 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 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 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 call one of those things. Call we were lifts up. Oh, anyway, we're filming some fear factor stunt. And as we got up, we could see people smoke and crack. And I go, 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. They're like, is that real? They're really smoking crack going. 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. Right. 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 I didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where you're on like Winnetka off the one on one. And there's 80 fucking tents and they put a porta potty there. They put a porta potty. We're doing real building and real development here in Los Angeles. Not apartment buildings. We got some porta potties. We put every underpass shall have a porta pottie. Thanks to Mayor Eric Garcetti. You pay attention to politics far more than I do. And in 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 shit if it was on the sidewalk. If people had a bunch of stuff that was on the sidewalk and they're 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, and the court you do such good work sometimes. And the court 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, things are 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're seeing. 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 six 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 one p.m. They shut down Rodeo Drive at one p.m. So that people could run up and down Rodeo Drive talking about how capitalism sucks while tweeting from their iPhones. While stealing, stealing Nikes.