Lindsay Clancy murdered her three kids. This is not disputed, but the internet is doing what it always does, turning a horrific tragedy into a dumb morality play. The hot takes that you're seeing everywhere, are pretty much all garbage. This is a very specific case with a very specific fact pattern. Is Lindsay Clancy guilty of cold blooded murder or was she suffering from postpartum psychosis so dire that she was not responsible for her actions? That is the only question that matters here. The rest of this stuff is just clickbait facts first narratives later. We'll get into all the facts regarding the Lindsay Clancy murder case, plus the death of Hayden Pennetier, and whether you should be freaking out about flock cameras, this is the Ben Shapiro show. Okay, so I haven't discussed this horrific and tragic case. This Lindsay Clancy case, this is the case of the then 32-year-old labor and delivery nurse who murdered her three kids, Korop 5, Dawson 3, and a newborn baby, Callan. Those, of course, are the real victims, the dead children. This is not disputed. The kids are the victims. Very difficult to look at the pictures. I mean, just terrible, obviously. The question here is not about whether the kids were victims. They were. The question is, legally speaking, what they were victims of. Lindsay Clancy herself, premeditated murderous, or Lindsay Clancy's severe and crippling mental illness. That is the entire case. The case is about mental illness and postpartum psychosis and a field of medical care psychiatry that is way less competent and knowledgeable than people very often believe. By the way, many psychiatrists will tell you this. The human brain is a mystery. It is a mystery. We don't know very much about it. It is not like a broken leg. It is not as really a hurt your spleen. When it comes to the human brain, we just don't know that much. We're getting to all of that, but here is what this case is not about. You, unless you're suffering from postpartum psychosis, not depression, which is very common, psychosis, which is really, really, really uncommon. This case is not about you or people like you. Unless you are suffering from either postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis, none of this has anything to do with your understanding of self-discipline or the generalized selfishness of modern women or some others such nonsense. This isn't about whether postpartum depression exists or whether it's exaggerated. First of all, she wasn't even suffering from postpartum depression. She claimed she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, in which she had actual voices telling her to kill her children. Postpartum depression affects some around one eight women, according to the CDC, about 13% of women. Postpartum psychosis affects one in 1,000 new births. It's about 0.1%. So you're two orders of magnitude off when you see people online saying, well, this is just like how I felt when I had almost assuredly it is not almost assuredly, it is not. These are not the same condition. Postpartum depression is caused by deficits in neuro steroid signaling, where progesterone and estrogen levels during pregnancy and then postpartum, they drop suddenly, like after the pregnancy, causing a failure in nervous system inhibition and stress response, dysregulation. And that, of course, is exacerbated by tremendous lack of sleep caused by newborns. We have a newborn right now. It's terrible. I'm just telling you, having a brand new baby, my wife is kind of a wreck because she's up every three hours nursing the baby. That's rough. And when you add that on top of the drop in progesterone and estrogen, that's really rough. And I can cause postpartum disorder. And for someone, some postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, it causes our similar, but the effects are wildly different. That post-birth drop in estrogen and progesterone, it triggers hypersensitive dopamine pathways, and that precipitates acute manic, delusional, and psychotic states in some susceptible women. Postpartum psychosis overlaps very often with bipolar spectrum disorders, so somebody had bipolar before and then extreme sleep deprivation further triggers acute psychosis. People who have bipolar are really negatively impacted by sleep deprivation. So often, postpartum psychosis is the revelation of or exacerbation of an already acute underlying condition. Now, what's the difference? What the symptoms are not the same. Again, when it comes to modern psychiatry, we tend to think of it like, "Oh, I have a psychiatric problem. I'm going to go to the doctor. The doctor will fix it with drug. Okay, it is not the same thing as pretty much all other medicine." And again, psychiatrists will tell you this. You can't just do an MRI until most brain conditions. Instead, we have to diagnose by symptoms. That's how it works. The way that you can tell whether somebody, for example, has OCD, is there's an actual checklist that you go down and you self-assessing people around USS, and that's how we tell you have OCD. Okay, that is not true of a broken leg. A broken leg, we stick you in the X-ray machine and then you have an X-ray and we can tell your leg is broken. Brain problems are not the same. And this is really important when you come to cases like this, because people have unrealistic expectations of what psychiatry does or what it can do. And these are not the same fields of medicine. Okay, so back to postpartum depression versus postpartum psychosis. The symptoms are totally different. Again, postpartum depression involves intense insidious or anxiety, a loss of interest in daily life while staying grounded in reality where you're not delusional. It looks like depression. That's why it's a form of depression. In contrast, postpartum psychosis is a rare psychiatric emergency that involves a severe break from reality includes hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and rapid mood swings. So in other words, if you had postpartum depression in committed a murder, that would make you would still be legally liable for the murder. If you have postpartum psychosis and you commit a murder, that's a different thing. It's the difference between a voice talking to you and telling you to murder people and you being severely depressed because of hormonal changes. So you're seeing online a lot of women saying, "When I had postpartum depression, I felt the same thing she did. I promise you you didn't. Even if you have the fleeting thought that you don't like your kids or this is annoying, I wish my kid weren't here, that is not the same thing that happened according to Lindsey Clancy, too Lindsey Clancy. And to the people, the people around her are saying the same thing. According to her, voices were telling her to murder her children. So please don't conflate these things because that's stupid. And for any men and a few women who are saying that postpartum depression generally is somehow lack of willpower or that postpartum psychosis doesn't cause people to do violent things or that postpartum depression is because of the selfishness of modern women or something. Please, please, please stop being a moron. You don't know what you're talking about when you say these things. Period. And now to the actual law, to understand the legal controversy, we need to understand why it matters. Okay, the reason why the medical issue matters here is because of the state of the law. So there is something called the insanity defense. Now the insanity defense is rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition. I say Judeo-Christian because it is true in Judaism and it is also true in Christianity. The idea that your state of mental health actually has some sort of association with your actions, that goes all the way back to home, you know, to times in Judaism and it goes well prior to Aquinas and Christianity as well. So again, this is not something like newfangled secular theory of how criminal law should work. It is deeply rooted in Western philosophy that you are only responsible for the acts that you are capable of willing. So in Massachusetts, the insanity defense is rooted in Commonwealth versus McCool, which establishes, again, very similar standards pretty much across the United States. Most are based on the McNaughton standard. They establish that a defendant is not criminally responsible. If at the time of the offense or as a result of the mental disease or defect, they lack substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongful answer to the conduct or have the cognitive ability to understand that their action was wrong or illegal, right? They literally don't know the murderer is wrong. That's how mentally ill they are. And too, the volitional ability to control their behavior, even if they knew it was wrong, right? So you know it's wrong, but you literally have no ability to control your behavior because you're having a psychotic break. Now again, because of this a criminal case, as always, the burden of proof is on the prosecution, not the defense. So what does that mean? It means that the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that postpartum psychosis did not cause Lindsey Clancy to do this. That's a very, very high burden of proof, a very high burden of proof. The insanity defense in Massachusetts can't be used for voluntary intoxication. So if you take angel dust and then you go kill somebody, you can't use the insanity defense because you're the one who got yourself intoxicated. And it also cannot be used for anti-social conduct. So if you just keep doing criminal acts over and over and over and over and over, then you can't just blame mental illness for that. But that's not what we're talking about in this particular case. We'll get to more on all of this in a moment. First, think about the things you've owned for 20 years. It's probably kind of a short list. Your phone disappeared, computers become obsolete, cars get traded in, half the stuff we buy eventually ends up in a drawer somewhere. There's something appealing about owning something that's actually designed to last. So you know, I have like some wristwatched, I have a violin, I have some stuff that I've had for probably 20 years, but it's rare. And that's part of what I find interesting about physical golden silver. You can hold them. You can keep them. You can pass them down. These have been recognized as stores of value across generations. And if you've ever thought about owning physical precious metals, take a look at golden crest metals. They're boutique, founder, lead firm, real people, not a giant call center, transparent pricing, no hidden markups or surprise fees. And they focus on widely recognized coins rather than private label products. Like buy, you can sell. Right now, golden crest will send you a free investor kit. If you have free portfolio review with no pressure or obligation, and you can receive up to $25,000 in free silver on qualifying purchases, text Ben to metals at 638257 go to golden crest metals.com/ben or call 888-429-3999. That's 888-429-3999. Is that brings us to the actual fact of the case. Like here to walk me through the timeline is linden Blake. She is the host of that. So criminal. She's going to walk us through the timeline of what we know about this case, what actually happened in the case. So linden, thanks so much for taking time. I really appreciate it. Of course, I mean, this case is everywhere and it's truly just a tragic situation, Ben. I know you've been following it and I cannot wait to get your legal analysis on this.
So why don't you just walk us through the timeline of what exactly happened, just the facts of the case. So the facts of the case and a lot of this became apparent and in stone yesterday after testimony from Lindsey Clancy's mother and her sister. So in the summer of 2022, this is before the murders in January 2023. Lindsey's mother testified that she was normal, that summer was fine. And both her mother and her sister and her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy started noticing a decline in Lindsey's demeanor in the fall of 2022 around October 2022. This is where Lindsey started verbalizing that she was unwell, that she didn't think her anxiety medication was working. And by Thanksgiving of 2022, is when Lindsey's sister said that she looked physically unwell. And by December of 2022, is when Lindsey told Patrick and her mother that she had thoughts of harming the children. We know in December of 2022, is when she started seeking out help and treatment. She started reaching out to shore health and South Shore Health, rather she started to try to check her in into these facilities for help. And it was in New Year's Eve and to New Year's Day of 2022 and to 2023 where she did go and check herself in to this psychiatric hospital. And then she said that she was feeling fine, that she wasn't having these suicidal thoughts anymore and she wanted to get home for her daughter, Kora's birthday, so she was in released. And then also in January of 2023, Lindsey's sister testified that she started to act normal, that she felt that she was okay. Lindsey's sister is a social worker, so she has this mandate that if someone's capable of harming themselves or someone else and the person notices that, they need to notify someone. And during the cross examination on Monday of Lindsey's sister, she said, Lindsey seemed fine, I never thought about turning her in because she seemed to be getting better. On that fatal day in January of 2023, Patrick saying that it was one of her best days. And that's when we all know, even following the trial, that Lindsey sent Patrick to run some errands. And that's when she lowered her three children ages five, three, and eight months down to the basement and strangled them one by one with exercise bands before going to the second story and trying to take her own life by jumping out the window. And then as when Patrick came home, he found Lindsey first, found her lying on the snow in January and Massachusetts, and then started searching for the kids, found them in the basement, found Dawson, the middle child in his office. So the prosecution are saying that he ran from Lindsey because they saw these acts taking place. Now she's paralyzed from the waist down. And now she is on trial for first degree murder. And the big question is, and this is what the defense is going to continue to try to prove this week, was was she having a postpartum psychosis episode at the time of the killings? Which can last hours, today's the very peak violence of a psychosis episode can last that long. And the prosecution's argument then is that there was intent there that she was aware that she she made a plan to get Patrick out of the house to lure the children down and to murder them. And that's a big debate here is this mental health or mental health intersects with law and how to move forward from this tragic case. So yeah, obviously the online discourse has become unbelievably stupid around all of this. You've seen people who are conflating postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. Those are not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination. Now 13% of American women will get postpartum depression. Again, these are real conditions and postpartum psychosis is one in every thousand live births. It's incredibly rare. And psychosis itself, these things are are diagnosed by symptomology there. There is no MRI where we stick your head in a machine and suddenly we know whether you're suffering from nothing depression or psychosis. The only way that you can tell what somebody has is by the sort of vague symptomatic descriptions of what is going on. We do know, as you say that she checked herself into a mental hospital just a couple of weeks before that she'd been obviously having symptoms of psychosis well before this. We do know that people have occurrences of this. Now what's amazing about this is honestly, I have a hard time seeing precisely how the prosecution is going to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this was not an episode of psychosis because my understanding is they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this was not an episode of psychosis or at least the psychosis itself was not severe enough to obliterate the requirement under law, which is that she know the difference between good and bad and know what she was doing at the time. Yeah, I've said since early last week that I do think that she's not going to be charged with first degree murder in this case. And I was speaking to a legal analyst yesterday and she was saying that these people that are so, so concerned about Lindsey Clancy entering society in 40 days, whenever she, if she's found not guilty, that's just not the case. At the end of the day, the court understands that three children were murdered by their mother, the person that's supposed to protect them the most and that she will have an indefinite lock up, a different type of locked away if she's found not guilty at a mental institution where she is going to be evaluated over and over again. And even if she starts showing these signs, because again, it's a roller coaster. She had good days, she had bad days. I think the day these three children were killed. I think the prosecution is going to have a hard time too. And what we've seen from the defense already is they're going to try to get that misdiagnosis where you had these medical professionals testify for the prosecution and say, yes, she wasn't displaying signs of psychosis. We did not diagnose her with psychosis. Well, you're going to have the defense saying, look at this witness, a former coworker testified yesterday saying that the case of Andrea Young, the woman back in 2001, that drowned her children in a bathtub and was having a psychosis episode when they were discussing this at work, which Lindsay was a nurse worked around children. Lindsay was crying and saying, how could a mother hurt her children? She was very disturbed by this case and the defense used that witness to say, look, Lindsay's natural state was not who she was leading up to these murders. It is unimaginable. I think that's what's so hard. The online true crime community that is just doing conspiracy after conspiracy and now they're blaming the husband. I mean, this is just ridiculous sidebar. If the husband had anything to do with it, why would the prosecution or defense even like go go for it? I mean, this has not been brought up by family. The courtroom. Anybody. People just don't listen to what's going on in the courtroom. They just take this fabrication and run with it. But anyways, the defense is going to continue to say this, she tried to tell you. She tried to check in. She tried to do this. She was a normal mother. Her mom testified that she was a wonderful mother. She always wanted to be a mother. She was a lovely person, a happy person. Her husband was saying that, yeah, like she was completely different than who she was at the time. This happened. It was fascinating because everyone watching this case should want to get to the truth because you shouldn't have three kids. I don't know if you spend too much time looking at these children because I almost can't because they are a precious angels. And you should just almost quake at the thought of a mother in a different situation saying, hey, I have thoughts of harming my kids. I need to be checked into somewhere. And then to have her be turned away from one of the facilities or not given higher level care because she didn't have a suicide plan. So now we have to have a story board for how we're going to kill ourselves to get treatment. I mean, it really is fascinating and unmatchable case. And a lot of questions should be answered. And the truth should be sought out. So this truly can never happen again. Well, that's Lyndon Blake. Check out her podcast that so criminal. Appreciate it, Lyndon. Thanks. We'll get to more on this in a second. First, the summer heat is hard enough to tolerate during the day. When it keeps you up at night, it becomes an entirely different problem. You lower that thermostat position, the fan directly to bed. And then you spend the next several hours moving between being too hot under the covers and too cold without them. None of this helps. This is one reason my wife and I appreciate our helix mattress. It is breathable and it is firm. 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Okay, so back to the case again, the key here is that over the course of the month following, giving birth to her third child May 26, 2022. Lindsey Clancy started experiencing severe anxiety, depression and insomnia. And then over the course of that fall and up through January of 2023, she sought psychiatric help herself and received a bunch of different prescriptions from different doctors to help herself. Again, I'm not aware that she had a need sort of underlying bipolar diagnosis before any of this. So I'm not sure, but you know, sometimes it's only manifests as an after effect of postpartum. And again, there are lots of possibilities here. It is possible that this day result of her postpartum.
psychosis, it's a possible, it's a combination for postpartum psychosis and the drugs that she was taking because she was taking a bunch of drugs and in combination with each other, it is not truly crazy to think that going up or going down on the drugs has an impact on your mental health and could cause psychotic breaks. Again, when it comes to psychiatric medicine, it's kind of a black box. Many of the things that actually work, we even don't know why they work in terms of the brain pathways. We have theories, but we actually don't know why they work. So a lot of this stuff is just kind of like testing various berries when it comes to medications. For certain people, clonipin may work, for certain people, clonipin may really, really harm them. Everybody's brain reacts differently to these powerful psychiatric drugs. And of course, she did have apparently postpartum psychosis before that. So again, in January, she checked herself into a psychiatric facility and she disclosed thoughts of harming her children. Her husband testified at the case that Lindsey Clancy said she heard a man's voice telling her to kill the kids. A few days after this happened, did you receive a phone call from the defendant while she was at Brigham and Women's Hospital? I think it was like a week or so after, yeah. And what did the defendant say at that time about what had happened with the children? She didn't talk about our kids. She talked about what she went through. And what did she say about what she went through? She said she heard a man's voice telling her that if she didn't do it now, she would lose her chance. Okay. And then her mom also testified and read a text from Lindsey Clancy about three months before the murder of the kids asking for help. If this is a copy of the text that you're referring to. Yes, it is. Would you read that for the jury? Mom, will you please come up and stay with me for a bit? I'm really sick. Something is wrong. I had horrible insomnia all night and I just don't know how I'm going to get through the day. I started taking the medicine. My doctor prescribed for anxiety. And I think it's made things worse. It's just really scary and I don't want to be alone. Again, this is a person who is clearly suffering, obviously. Now again, people say, well, why aren't you talking about the victims? Yes, the kids are the victims. The question is, what are they the victims of of Lindsey Clancy, like Aslin's Clancy or Lindsey Clancy, a person who's suffering from a psychios, a serious psychiatric illness and a psychiatric psychotic break. For people who have never dealt with people who are mentally ill, I'm just going to tell you, when the Bible describes demons taking over people's bodies and that sort of stuff, I'm fairly certain that that is speaking about mental illness because people who are mentally ill, truly mentally ill are not themselves. They're legitimately not themselves. They do things they would never do. They say things they would never say. They act in ways that they would never act. It is though they have been taken over. This stuff is not fake. It is not some sort of weird voodoo. It is quite real. And Lindsey Clancy was apparently seeking help pretty much everywhere. She had filed prescriptions for 13 different meds in the four months leading up to the murders, including Sirokwell. Again, these are some of these are very powerful. Sirokwell is pretty powerful. Trazzodone, Adivan, Ballium, Amitriptolin, Clonopin, Remaron, Lemaktole, Ambien, Prozac, Busbrone, and Zoloft. At the time of the murders, she had six drugs in her system, including the anti-psychotic mags Sirokwell and Lemaktole. Sirokwell is very powerful anti-psychotic. It sometimes has the side effect of hallucination, like that's on the box, actually. Now, the trial testimony said that the dosages were within therapeutic limits, and not enough to be toxic or lethal. But that's not the question is whether they were toxic or lethal. The question is whether either the postpartum psychosis or the cocktail of drugs or the combination of both. Because again, when you have underlying psychiatric conditions and you go up or you even go down on the drugs, that can have impact on people. It can cause hallucinations among other symptoms. And the answer to that question is just on a medical level. It is possible. This is why I say the burden of proof on the prosecution here is really, really, really high. Because if you're asking reasonable doubt, honestly, I find it hard to believe they're going to be able to overcome the burden of reasonable doubt when it comes to this sort of stuff. Simply because psychiatric practice is again so rudimentary compared to the actual problems that people face. Now again, the story here is that January 24th, 2023, she asked her husband Patrick to run errands. He went away for 25 minutes while she was there. She strangled the three kids using exercise bands in the basement. The prosecution said she would have had to hold down each child for at least, I mean, it's horrific, for at least four minutes, unthinkably horrific this case. And then she cut her wrists and her neck and she jumped from a second story window in her home in a suicide attempt. So this wasn't some lady who was quote unquote trying to get away with it. I mean, this is a person who tried to kill herself and is now paralyzed from the waist down. Here is a her reaction when the medical examiner was testifying about what the kids, it's horrific stuff. And what about injuries? Hi, Councilor Kud. What are we taking for you? All right. All right. Again, this is why I find so much of the sort of narrative, hot take online really disturbingly stupid, disturbingly idiotic. And there are real questions that we have to ask about things like overdiagnosis of various conditions, things that we have to ask about, relations between male and female. And the difficulties of child bearing and rearing, that is not this case. And this case is a very specific set of facts. And the big takeaway for me at least is, mental illness is real. The practice of psychiatry is rudimentary. You have to take extraordinary care when you're dealing with people who have severe mental illness. And that includes psychiatrist, many of whom are very often, again, they have a very difficult job because they're dealing with people who legitimately are psychotic in many cases. But I will say that, you know, the care can be spotty. Sometimes it's not comprehensive enough. These are difficult, difficult problems. And there is sometimes not an easy solve. I know we're always looking for the easy take or the easy solve. Sometimes they're just isn't. So again, some of this has become a hot topic because Clancy's parents started to go fund me for their living expenses while they attended to Lindsay between her paralysis and the trial proceedings. It has a $2 million goal. About $850,000 was raised so far with most of the comments coming from moms sympathizing with Lindsay because of her postpartum psychosis. And again, I don't, I wish I had a hot take even on this. I really don't even have a hot take on this one, per se. Again, I think that if you are saying that it's just like me, it's just like no, it isn't. It's an actual psychological condition that is different from your own psychiatric condition. It's not the same thing. It is not. And then there are some morons on TikTok, some lib women on TikTok who are trying to argue that she shouldn't be prosecuted at all and that her husband is somehow the killer because we have all frontly lobotomized ourselves with the internet. We've made ourselves massively, massively dumber. And then there is the kind of generalized conservative response you sometimes see that Lindsay Clancy was not the victim, her children are again, no one is denying the victim, no one is the kids, no one, no one, no one. I can't even look at the pictures. I have five children in my own, including newborn. I can't look at the pictures. It's horrific. That is not the question in this case. The question is again, whether she was in her right mind enough to be held responsible for her actions in that way. And again, she is going to go to a psychiatric ward probably for the rest of her life because of this. So this idea that she's just going to be released and just be out on the street, waiting to kill again. That's not what we are talking about here. And then there are some people who say that we should get rid of the insanity plea altogether and just to execute psychotic killers. Again, that is a that is a vast gap, I will say. That is a vast gap between, shall we say traditional biblical response to the problem of human agency. That is a huge gap. If the solution were just if we were a binary between let's psychotic psychotic killers roam free or kill them, then I would choose kill them because again, you have to prefer the interests of society over the interests of the psychotic killer. But that is not the choice. One of the choices is involuntary commitment for as long as it takes in order to assure that the person is saying and that is likely to be in this particular case the rest of your life because the psychotic break can probably happen at any time. And as we know, she was under psychiatric care and then she was released and then she did the crime. Okay, all of this speaks to again, the difficulty that we have in not being able to deal with just the facts of life. Not all problems are immediately solvable, which brings us to this again, another tragic case of hidden penitier. So hidden penitier is an actress that we all know from shows like heroes. And she was found dead in her apartment complex west of downtown Greenville in South Carolina, apparently. The cardiac arrest was caused by an apparent drug overdose according to the New York Times. No signs of trauma. Now again, hidden penitier was somebody, I don't know if this is self-medicating. I don't know if she did this on purpose. No one knows that yet. But she had talked openly about her own postpartum depression, talked about how it was real and talked about how she gave up custody of her own kids because she was concerned about her safety around the kids, which of course is the responsible move here. What do you want people to know about postpartum depression?
that you think they miss. That it's real. That it's not something we make up. It's not something we want. It's not, you know, that we've lost our marbles and it's not something that we want to go through them. And we're not lying. When we tell you something strong and we're in tears for absolutely no reason, like, we don't have control over this. And this would be the last thing that we would ever want to experience or go through what we want to be with our child, our brand new child, and have filled with joy and feel like the luckiest person in the world. Again, psychiatric pain is real. It doesn't mean that in every particular case, it is well-founded. When it comes to these cases again, please let us not be stupid about these things. Please, please, please. Don't ask it. Independence here talked with Jay Shetty about the fact that she gave full custody of her child to the husband or to her to her long time partner because she was concerned about safety issues. I mean, the idea that anybody would think that I would just give away my child and be okay with it is heartbreaking. Couldn't be further from the truth. You know, as you said, I was struggling with mental health and anxiety and the postpartum and having to act my way through it and just feeling like I completely lost myself. And I think a misconception is that I have been in the past forced into treatment when in fact, I have been the one who is sotted out, who was saying, I desperately need. I know this is going to look terrible, but I cannot live like this. I believe she lost like advertising deals as a result of this interview because she talked openly about this sort of stuff, which again, that is ridiculous to me. That is ridiculous to me. A tragic case, really, really sad stuff. Tomorrow in this in-moment first, as you know, I don't get enough sleep. That's not a complaint. It's just math. Between work and five kids and one of them is screaming at all hours of the night right now because he's a baby. I'm not exactly getting 12 hours a night. So the hours that I do get, they need to count. That's one reason I'm extremely particular about my bedding. So because the baby is in the room, that means that I've been evicted sometimes to like the kids' rooms to sleep. And the thing that I bring with me is the bowling branch. The bowling branch must come with me. It comes with me on the road. But I like about bowling branch. They don't need some gimmicky cooling technology or chemical treatment. Their sheets are made from 100% organic cotton and woven specifically for airflow. So they are naturally breathable. Here's the unusual part. They actually get softer as you wash them. When you're already short on sleep, making your bed more comfortable is a pretty easy decision. I'm not getting more hours, but I can make the hours that I do have work better. Sleep cooler that summer with bowl and branch get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bowl and branch dot com slash Ben with code Ben. That's bowl and branch B O L L A N D B R A N C H dot com slash Ben and code Ben from lock 15% off. Alrighty. Meanwhile in the dumb controversy of the day because every controversy is now dumb, the party is very, very worried about flock. What is flock? Flock is just a series of cameras in public areas. So according to the New York Times, flock operates in about 6,000 municipalities across the country and in all 50 states, about 120,000 cameras, about 7,000 contracts of law enforcement agencies and other customers include HOAs, private sector customers like FedEx or Loads, shopping malls, retail chains, apartment complexes, gated communities, parking lot operas. It's the cameras that you see when you go inside your loads. Just pointed at the parking lot as well. And the Fox CEO, I'm Garrett Langley, disclosed a four month federal pilot program with border patrol and homeland security investigations for human trafficking and fentanyl trafficking in mid 2025. Now flock says local agencies have to grant flock networks access to their data in order for them to access it. So it's not just that flock and you know, get all of the, it's not as though there's like a flock central database where they're accessing police cameras and then they're just running all your data through, they actually have to access the data by asking the local agencies for control of it. And so for example, local police could conduct a flock search at ISIS request and then license plate reads on flock are run through the FBI's database is a baseline function of the system. So here's what flock cameras actually look like. You probably seen them around. He's again, a lot of them everywhere. It's a camera. Yep. We've had them for a while. I know brand new technology cameras in public places. Now here is a timeline view of flock cameras installed between January 2024 and now. As you can see, the answer is a lot. There are a lot of flock cameras that are that are around everywhere now. Which again, not a surprise and take technology that you know, you can see why a lot of people would want it. If you don't want people stealing crap from your lows, you probably want a flock camera. If you don't want people harassing each other in the parking lot, you probably want a flock camera. If you don't want your HOA being overrun by people, people just jump in the fence. You want a flock camera. So investor Mark Andreessen, who is an investor in flock explains what it is the flock does. There's a system called flock, which is one of our companies. And what they do, it kind of like in the movies, you take all the municipal cameras and traffic cameras and everything and you feed them into an AI and the AI is able to first find a license plate in real time. You can find that. But second, you can actually find a car even if you don't have a license plate. You can find like distinct marketing on the car. It'll track the car. And so this thing is deployed. It's sold to city governments. It's used all over the country. It solves crimes every day we get reports on. Car jacking is with kids in the backseat and their lives get saved because they track them down. So a lot of tons of cities have this and they love it. In cities like Austin, with the intense politics, they run into backlash on privacy and surveillance concerns. And then they have flock and then turn it off. Okay, so here's the problem as we will talk about in a second, when you turn off flock, especially in public areas with high crime, people do crimes. Turns out people don't do crime as much when they are on camera. Here's the floxy, you know, Garrett Langley talking about the distinction between surveillance and safety and the fact that, you know, we do have a right to safety, but also you don't want a gigantic surveillance state in which you are afraid that the government is tracking your every move when you are doing something non criminal. I think everyone in this room, probably as a cell phone. And what if I told you that someone with mediocre computer software skills could build a product that tracks your exact location in real time down to a few feet? Because all of you use Google Maps and Uber and any device that has extra location. And so I think about the tooling that we ask our local law enforcement to use and we give them a weapon, a gun, a taser, yet we're afraid to give them a camera that reads a license played on a public road. I'm not saying that it's not a choice. I'm just saying that for me, the tradeoff is, I don't know how many more 11-year-old girls need to be kidnaps or human trafficking rings or silver alerts or amber alerts. We have to go through before we say enough is enough. Now, the beauty of America, though, is that every city, state, county gets to pick. It's not my choice. I live in Atlanta. I vote. You should vote. Now, again, when it comes to public data, you do not have legally a reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place. Okay, you don't. That is the black letter law in the United States. Now, obviously, you don't want the government tracking your every move when you're doing something non-criminal, which, by the way, is why I worked in a prosecutor's office for a summer in LA when I was in law school. This is why when you are looking for significantly more significant data, you actually have to issue a search and seizure request, like backed by reasonable suspicion. Not all data requests are just automatically filled. We actually have laws on the books that prevent the misuse of search and seizure. If you think that cameras are the only thing that cops can use that are wrong, that obviously is untrue. The cops can use all sorts of systems. They can abuse all sorts of systems in order to track you. Charles Fane-Laman has a piece in the Atlantic talking about this. He says, "Smart regulations can help obviate these concerns. Without getting rid of flock cameras entirely." His one easy step would be to set limits on how long departments can retain data, something several states have already done. Flock defaults to a 30-day retention period, which some states have lowered by statute to 21, reasonable windows of time for catching criminals while avoiding creating a permanent record of everyone else's movements. Again, I don't even think that's necessary. But he says, "The point of high-tech policing using cameras in DNA databases is it can deter crime without such extreme measures and as a result, demand less overall punishment from the system as a whole." Now this seems correct to me. Here for example, is one criminal lamenting not being able to do a drive by anymore because San Francisco crime has dropped thanks to flaw. Just crime is not a stupidity. Oh my, oh my, oh my. So you feel like it's hell of a strick now? No, it's not a street. No, that's what. Because of the technology. No, that's down near really violating our rights. It is because now they got the speed in it. Like, if you guys are speeding,
They have the camera. So it is. That name is, that name is speaking tickets. I'm a keyboard. They're called. Look, as soon as you slide past them up, they'll start the plates, they're going to issue a warning to every SFPD station in that area, if not the entire city, right? And they're going to start dispatching to that area. And when they catch you, they're going to catch you. Now again, the black letter law on this is from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that automatic license plate reader queries, right? That's what flock is doing. It's tracking your license plate. You have no expectation of privacy in around a public road, duh. I mean, duh. And then there's another case called Carpenters versus United States, which says, "Pervasive tracking of a person's movements like using cell phone data requires a warrant, but an ALPR camera system does not trigger those sorts of protections." He's saying you're not tracking somebody's cell phone and they're phone moving around with them. You're just tracking the car that they are in presumably. Now, some of this stuff came to a head because there was a Super Bowl commercial which people freaked out about involving a lost dog and then people using the ring system 'cause there was a deal between ring and flock, that was going to allow the ring data to be accessed in order to track the lost dog. Here's the commercial and then people going crazy over it. - This is my low. - Hetzr family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now, one post of a dog's photo in the ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search party for rings uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. - Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the
[email protected]. - Okay, so the reason people freaked out about this is because they were sort of saying, "Listen, my front porch is not quite the same thing as an LPR camera that's on the street." Which I get, I totally got that particular complaint. But some people are just freaking out about this because again, there is a gigantic misconception. The number one, you have some sort of right to privacy when you're walking around in public, which you do not. Listen, as a celebrity, okay, I can say, that I am very often spotted. People take pictures of me. Unfortunately, they will take pictures occasionally of my children, which we ask them to delete. You know, all that sort of stuff is real. Okay, but the sort of catastrophism that is now emerging is going to make criminality easier because the result is going to be to get rid of the cameras in the places where you actually need the cameras. The Fox CEO, Langley, he explains, "Listen, we don't do facial recognition, we don't sell the data and we don't work directly with ICE." - We don't do facial recognition. - Okay. - We don't sell data, we don't have a contract with ICE. Those are simply not true. And so my goal tonight or today, let's tell people understand, we have one goal as a company. It's just to make people safe. - Okay, so, the flock has now taken additional measures in order to prevent the abuse of technology because it turns out that some cops have been using it to track down their girlfriends or track down their spouse if they're cheating with plumber or whatever. So, flock has now said, according to the New York Times, that they will allow individual police departments to restrict what other law enforcement agencies can see, allowing access to data to find stolen vehicles, for example, but not for immigration violations. And again, they are shortening that default time of data retention to a week from 30 days, departments could theoretically change those settings. Now, what you've seen is some backlash, some 50 to 95 municipalities have canceled their flock contracts, 20 to 53 happened this year, is according to Politico. Other cities are deactivating their cameras. With that said, 800 new municipalities have signed flock contracts this year so far, which again, makes sense because if you would like crime rates to go down, then it's good to be able to surveil the criminals. Now, you are seeing a sort of right wing libertarian push and a left wing libertarian push against the flock camera people freaking out about all of this. Oh my gosh, it's a surveillance day. Whatever are we going to do? Again, abuse of any system can happen. But if the idea is that having cameras on the roads is somehow a violation of your privacy, I don't think you know what the word privacy means. James Trishback who is campaigning for governor, he is running in the Republican gubernatorial race in Florida in the primary today and is likely to not do particularly well. He's been out there pushing flock because any online clause he will immediately jump on the back of the president says that flock is being studied and they'll have an answer from the Oval Office. And like I feel like this is a local issue. I'm not sure why precisely we're supposed to be doing this at the federal level. There's a lot of debate right now about these license plate scanners that are going up across the country. They're called flock cameras. People are worried that the police might misuse them. Have you heard of them? What's your status? Well, it's being studied right now. You know, you have pros and cons, right? It's being studied right now. We'll have an answer as to our views on it over the next couple of weeks. Okay, again, and the online trends do not make an actual problem. And this seems to me an exaggerated problem. Again, I understand these surveillance concerns. I'm all for decent limitations on the use of the technology. And if the fact that sometimes the law enforcement authorities abuse their power is a shock to you, I recommend that you actually pick up a book like at some point because it turns out, yeah, they've been abusing. It turns out people with power sometimes abuse it. And I find it ironic that many of the same people who are very much against the so-called surveillance state from flock are very much in favor of a centralized government pursuing the so-called common good. Seems kind of strange to me. Don't pursue the common good. Wouldn't a surveillance state be useful to you? Anyway, in the dumb technology story of the day, that was the somewhat dumb technology. Here's the actual dumb technology. It's a very interesting story of the day. So there is apparently a dating site called Bumble. Hey, how anyone thought this is a good idea is beyond me. Bumble, according to the Atlantic, was meant from the start to be feminist. In 2014, Whitney will have launched the platform to solve what she saw as a problem. An epidemic of aggressive men on dating apps. If women were the only ones allowed to initiate conversation, wolf heard's thinking what, they'd be in a position of power and agency for once they'd get to be the pursuers. And perhaps the Bumble man, knowing what he signed up for, being in a lighten type, content, content waiting patiently to be chosen. This was the dream of girl boss dating and how lovely it was while it lasted. It died this past Tuesday when Bumble announced that men will now be allowed to message women first. Two thirds of women said they would prefer not having to instigate each interaction. Younger women, especially reported that having to go first added pressure. Many said they were fed up with men who seemed to put little effort into romance. The company's share price has declined 57%. Now the app is launching new features, including one that will deliver a slightly chasening note who send perfunctory openers. The age of apt optimism is already over. Okay, so I'm just gonna point out that this was always an incredibly stupid idea, like a truly stupid idea. Of course women want men who initiate and of course men are the ones who initiate. This is not a shock in any way shape or form. Now many women may tell themselves that they want to be the ones who initiate with men, but I'm just gonna say they're not telling that truth to themselves. As a general rule, there may be exceptions. Those exceptions are few and far between. Men are more aggressive when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex and women are typically more passive and or defensive, which is the way that God made us all. That's not a terrible thing. And all these apps pretending that men and women are exactly the same are predicated on absolute stupidity. So many of these dating apps are just stupid in the way that they are put together. Now there are some dating apps that are designed for marriage and those are fine, but it seems to me that many of the dating apps which are designed for sex for people to meet up, men and women are expecting different things, shall we say, from these apps. It turns out that one of the great inventions in the history of mankind was marriage. Why? Because it turns out that men are actually quite simple. Note to all the ladies in the audience, men are not complicated, we are not complex, we are not nuanced, we are incredibly simple. All men want out of relationship with a woman is three things. Food, sex and respect, those are the three things. There are no more things. I know that sounds simplistic. And within each one of those categories, there are many different variations. And of course, some people are heavier on one of those factors than the other. Some people are happy with two of the three. Okay, but let's just be clear. The way that it works for men is different than the way that it works for women. Women are looking for love, they're looking for compassion. They're looking for care, they're looking for comfort, they're looking for protection, they're looking for emotional resonance, they're looking for all sorts of things. And so this is why the feminist revolution that basically said, what if we treat men and women exactly the same with regard to sex? Was the dumbest idea in the history of mankind because men and women are different. In fact, the reason that men typically initiate conversations with women and women are typically defensive is because evolutionarily speaking, sex led to procreation. Women needed to be pretty careful about who they had sex with because they might end up mothering the child of that person. And so that meant that women had to be significantly more discriminating about who they picked, which was good. And then it turned out that women in order to incentivize men to actually stick around and care for the child and be part of a family, the idea was you don't have sex until you're married because then you get all the benefits of the relationship. If you are the woman, you get the companionship, you get the compassion, you get the care, you get the length of relationship, you get all those things. And for the men, you get the things that you want. The food, the sex and the respect, right? Those were the things. That was the basic predicate for all of human history when it came to male female relations. And then we decided that we would shove our face into the oven as a society. And it turns out it doesn't work. It turns out that all of the women who said that they wanted to initiate dating conversations with men, they didn't. They wanted a man who was going to do the things
that they know that they want him to do, which is initiate the conversation. Again, men and women, not the same. My favorite social science study ever done. 1989, the Clark and Hatfield study. It was originally conducted in 1978 by Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield. And so here is what happened. Attractive male and female Confederates would approach total strangers of the opposite sex at a bar and they would ask one of three questions, would you go out with me tonight? Would you come over to my apartment or would you go to bed with me? Okay, so an attractive female will do that to a bunch of men at a bar and then an attractive male will do that to a bunch of women at the bar. When it came to dating, about half of both men and women agreed to go out on a date with a complete stranger. It was back in like 1978. When it came to apartment or sex, about three quarters of the men were like, "Yup, sounds great." And it turns out for the women, when an attractive man came up and said, "Zero," said sure, zero. Because again, men and women want different things. It is a hilarious, I wanna just review those stats again, 'cause they're important, 'cause they're funny and important. And they just, the way God made the world is a funny, he has a sense of humor. Okay, again, review those stats. Half of men were fine with the date. 75% of men were fine with the sex. That means that two in four men were fine with dating and three in four men were fine with the sex. That means at least one in four of those men was like, "Listen, I don't wanna talk to you. I just wanna bang." Right, I don't wanna, I don't wanna have the date. I just wanna go straight to the sex. And perhaps for the other two out of the four, they're like, "I would like to talk to you and also do the sex." Right, and for the women, they were like, "Listen, I wanna talk to you, "but I don't wanna do the sex." Right, I wanna do the date, but then I don't wanna go back to your apartment. Okay, this is the way men and women work, and every time people try to fix this thing, yeah, end up just destroying male-female relations. So, that should replicate this experiment. 45 years later. Right, so now, it's like 2025, and they're replicating this experiment. So what happened? Well, it turns out that many, many more men than women accepted the offer for the date. Okay, so what actually happened? What actually happened? The number of people who accepted the offer for the date had dropped radically. Okay, now, the numbers stayed the same for sex, but they dropped radically for the dating. Because that's what happens when you disconnect sex and relationships. The women still don't wanna go back to the due department, and the men still wanna go back to the ladies department, but now nobody wants to date. That's what happened. Great job, everyone. You did an awesome job completely destroying relations between the sexes by pretending that men and women are precisely the same. By the way, it is funny. Like the beginnings of the bumble brand, it's astonishing. Like the woke time of 2021, woke 1.0, as they say, was the dumbest time. And I say that advisedly because we may be living in the dumbest time, like every day, as I've said to, all of my producers, I feel like I'm living in the book of Deuteronomy. Each night, I think to myself, it can't possibly get any stupider. And then I wake up in the morning, and I think I wish it were just as stupid as it was last night. 'Cause it just keeps getting dumber, but an incredibly stupid time in human history was definitely 2020-2021. Time Magazine article about Whitney Wolfhard from March 2021. Bumble's brand is deeply embedded in the empowerment industrial complex, more youthful than lean in, less litigious than times up. Bumble represents a type of friendly, Sadie Hawkins feminism that is more about feeling powerful than wielding power. Her success at Bumble build as the dating app where women make the first move. At Casper, as the kill bill of the tech world, the yellow-clad woman seeking vengeance after men tried to bury her. Much of the coverage focused on her experience years ago is a co-founder at the dating app Tinder, where Wolfhard was allegedly harassed by an executive who was also her boyfriend. Got dumped and ousted from the company and went on to sue for sexual harassment. So she reacted to the fact that she didn't like her boyfriend by founding a company that is completely contrary to human nature. And it turned out not great. It turned out not great. Wolfhard says that they would have blocked Donald Trump from the app. Her husband maxed out donations to Trump in 2016 and 2017. So Bumble started off fast and then it turns out that none of the women were messaging the men and then they were getting annoyed with the men that the men weren't messaging them. So it turns out that passive aggressiveness as an app, even less popular than passive aggressiveness in real life. Again, amazing job everyone, amazing, amazing job. Okay, meanwhile, on the political level, John Ossoff, who is a senator in Georgia, he's currently running for reelection. He's very likely to win. John Ossoff is now trying to do the Gavin News something. So there are a lot of Democrats right now who want to run for president. And what they've discovered is that speaking in kind of normal platitudinous tones, they're going to do it. You have to say something insulting about president Trump. It's the only way. So John Ossoff at Arali in Atlanta decided to basically imply that the president of the United States is sleeping with his aide. I mean, that's what he's doing here, right? And then the idea, it's all bait, everything is bait, all day long, right? He's going to say that and then someone's going to say, he ought to apologize and then someone's going to say, why should he apologize? Trump says I kind of crap all of a sudden. Again, as I say, I thought the dumbest time was five years ago. Wrong I was. Here's John Ossoff. And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. So he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar. Okay, so again, he's implying that the president is having sex with his aide. Let's be clear, that's what he's doing. Okay, so the White House has asked about these comments and the president was unhappy. I said, you'd rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president. What is your response? John Ossoff. You mean Pee We Herman? Pee We Herman, look at it. No, I would much rather do other things. I think the president, listen, I'm with the president on this one, but I think that he needs a better, a better nickname for John Ossoff than Pee We Herman. I don't think the Pee We Herman thing is great. It's the, he can do better. The president's very, very good at insult comedy. He's like triumphed the insult comic dog, but the president, he can do better than that. And then the White House put out a statement. Someday your children will come up, this is to the reporter. Someday your children will come across you're discussing an inhumane question. They'll be sick and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and been fit. It's quite troubling. I don't know, man. Man, are we gonna do the umbridge thing? I get, I felt like we're beyond umbridge at this point. Well, then CNN put out its own umbridge-ridden tweet. Righteous indignation all around, drink. So here is a CNN quote. Kristen Holmes is one of the most respected and accomplished journalists covering the White House. This afternoon she did her job and asked the president of the United States to tough, relevant and newsworthy question on behalf of the American people. I love one journalist, just pat themselves on the back for asking normal questions. It's great. Personal attacks on journalists for asking questions. Are beneath the office and inconsistent with the principles of a free press? Oh, I'm so tired. I'm so exhausted, not just because I have a newborn, but also I'm just exhausted by all of you people. Can you just stop? Can you just calm your asses down? Seriously? Everybody needs to just take a chill pill. It's absurd. Yeah, again. Just when you think things can't get stupider, they definitely do. Already folks, you thought the show was over. You're wrong. It's not over. I have new tape of Justin Trudeau dancing. And if I had to watch this, you also have to watch it. He won't stop dancing and I don't understand why. Why won't this happen? Now again, you may say Ben, didn't you just a few moments ago? Discuss the differences between men and women. Yes, none of those applied Justin Trudeau. Justin Trudeau is the exception to the rule. Every rule has exceptions. We'll get to that. Plus the president paying tribute to a lifeguard. And also apparently James Salarico being James Salarico. We'll get to all that. If you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro. Check out for two months free on online. And you'll plans. Click that link in the description and join us. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
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