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Feb. 16, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:14
THROUGH THE ROOF Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep272
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Quick announcement, guys.
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Now, today, I'm going to talk about how inflation is actually putting a heavy burden on a lot of families, but especially poor and lower middle class families.
And Democrats, far from trying to help the problem, have ways of making it worse.
Does Mark Cuban, the billionaire Mark Cuban, the sports team owner, the liberal Mark Cuban, have the solution to ridiculous drug prices?
The answer is maybe.
Michael Reagan, President Reagan's son, is going to be joining me.
We're going to talk about the legacy of his dad.
And I'm also going to introduce the landscape against which Dante's great epic, The Divine Comedy, was written.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We now have the kind of runaway inflation that we haven't seen in America since really the late 1970s and very early 1980s.
I mean, I've been in the United States now for 40 years.
So this is a kind of a historic bad thing that's happening.
And Biden, in that sense, is picking up sort of where Jimmy Carter left off.
The latest data, Consumer Price Index, up 7.5%.
Wow. And what does that mean for ordinary families?
Well, the average US household is paying an additional $250 a month.
So that's...
$3,000 a year.
And this burden, now for some people, you know, if you're in the upper middle class or well-off, well, you're like $250.
It's a little bit of an annoyance, but it's not going to change my lifestyle dramatically.
Plus, affluent people have ways to also, through investments and other types of shelters, benefit from inflation.
So things go up, but their portfolios also go up.
For working class families, though, that's not really the case.
By and large, inflation is almost, in every respect, a negative.
And why?
Because working class families spend a disproportionate share on their income on kind of necessities.
Here's a kind of a list.
The number one cost for working class families of their monthly budget.
Shelter. Number two, groceries.
Then utilities and fuel.
Then health insurance, vehicle purchases, gasoline and other fuels, home furnishings.
So we've seen rapid price increases in these key areas.
And people are really feeling the burden.
So even if they got a COVID check or a modest...
Wage increase, it's being more than offset over time by this way in which inflation is just depleting your resources.
One silver lining, and it's a small silver lining.
Here's Joe Manchin talking about whether the new infrastructure bill, the so-called Build Back Better plan, can be revived.
And he goes, quote, this is not a time to be throwing more fuel on the fire.
We have inflation. We have an economy that's on fire.
You don't throw more fuel on a fire.
So I think what Manchin is saying is, if you're looking for my vote to bring this thing back, this gargantuan spending bill, the answer is no.
That's a good thing. So how do we get inflation?
It's kind of funny. It's almost like we've lost, forgotten the lessons of the past.
And you now have discussion, rather abstract discussions about COVID choke points and supply chains.
That's not really the main factor.
Inflation is not something that kind of comes out of nowhere.
Inflation is not something that is inevitable.
It's not part of the business cycle.
I think it was Milton Friedman who said in earlier Mises before him that inflation is policy.
Inflation is the result of what people do.
And which people? Not corporations.
Not individuals. Not entrepreneurs.
Government. Inflation is the result of what government does.
So how do you get inflation?
Well, you get inflation because of a single institution, the Federal Reserve.
Now, the Federal Reserve is responding to political pressures in the country.
Political pressures to do what?
Well, to print money.
The Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, was asked about this, and he kind of freely admitted it.
Here's the question. You flooded the system with money.
Powell, yes, we did.
Yes, we did. And then he was asked by a reporter who evidently didn't know, where does this money come from?
Did you just print it? Well, it turns out it's a little more complex than that, and Powell gives the answer.
He goes, quote, we print it digitally.
So as a central bank, we have the ability to create money digitally that actually increases the money supply.
Think about it. An institution has a chance to create money, in a sense, through the computer.
We also print actual currency and we distribute that through the Federal Reserve Bank.
So let's just say there's $10 in circulation.
The Federal Reserve, on its own, by essentially hitting a button on a keyboard, can make it $15.
And what does that do?
Well, now the number of goods in the society is exactly the same.
So suddenly you have more money and the same number of stuff, the same number of products, and so that pushes the price up.
It's simply the law of supply and demand.
So this is how we get inflation.
It has been caused by the Biden administration and caused by the Biden Federal Reserve.
If we want to stop inflation, the answer is spend less money for the federal government, and it is also for the Federal Reserve to start tightening the money supply.
Now, in the short term, and this happened in the 1980s as well, It drives up interest rates, so there's no painless way to get rid of inflation.
But the painful, although justified, way of choking off inflation is to tighten the money supply, recognize that that's going to put some constraint on the economy, but nevertheless, that will bring prices down, that will stabilize the economy, and that will set a path for the economy to start growing in a healthy way again.
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This is a guy with a big heart.
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Can the billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban actually play a critical role in driving down drug prices, particularly prescription drug prices?
Now, I'm not a super fan of this guy Cuban.
I'm not impressed when I see him in the media.
He's a cultural liberal.
He's usually making absurd statements about Black Lives Matter.
He's not even all that impressive on the TV shows he appears on.
I believe he's on... Honey, is he on Shark Tank?
I think I've seen him on Shark Tank.
And so this guy seems to me to be a little bit of a bloviator and someone who is not thoughtful about the way he approaches public affairs.
Now, nevertheless, he is a very successful entrepreneur.
And I do respect him for that.
And he's come up with an idea that is actually, I think, has a chance to work.
And if it does work, it'll be a very good thing for the country.
Basically, what he wants to do is to create a nationwide online pharmacy for generic medications that cuts out the bureaucracy and cuts out the middleman and offers a very simple formula.
Now, he's not doing this out of his philanthropy.
This is not a save the world scheme.
But this is, let's reduce drug prices by running a drug business, a prescription drug business that is reasonable.
And Mark Cuban is counting on the reasonable thing to also be the profitable thing.
So he's doing it to make money. And what he wants to do is have drug prices at a very simple 15% markup.
A drug costs $1 to acquire.
It should be selling for $1 plus 15%.
$1.15.
So he set up this cost-plus drug company.
And the key to this is to eliminate a kind of secret force in the drug industry that is called the PBMs.
If you haven't heard this term, well, there's kind of a reason you haven't heard of it, because these guys operate in the kind of murky middle in between the pharmacies on the one side and the insurance companies and the drug manufacturers on the other.
These PBMs are very influential organizations, and I'm going to talk in a moment about what they do.
But what they do, in a nutshell, is they control the supply of prescription drugs and they also control the price.
So, if you want to know why prescription drugs are so exorbitantly expensive, it's not just that you have a middleman that's taking a bite out of the apple.
That's part of it.
But the middleman is also playing a game, a game that really benefits the drug manufacturers and the insurance companies, by the way.
And the insurance companies and the drug manufacturers are also operating in league with the government.
So you've got three, let's call them greedy entities.
The government, which has its own interest in controlling healthcare.
Obviously the drug manufacturers would like to get the biggest price possible.
The insurance companies want to pay as little as possible.
And so in this murky mess, in this treacherous current come this group called the PBMs.
So what do these characters do?
Well, first of all, these prescription drug pharmacy benefit managers, what they do is they are appointed By the insurance companies, which, by the way, will not pay if you don't do business.
They tell the pharmacy, listen, if you want to get money for the drugs, you've got to negotiate with these guys.
They are our designated negotiators.
And so these guys come in and they decide, listen, these drugs will be covered by insurance and these drugs won't.
This is going to be the level of the co-payment.
They decide which pharmacies get which plans, and they also decide how much to reimburse the pharmacies for certain drugs.
So they control what the pharmacies do.
And they drive up the price of drugs also through a process that is called price-spreading.
So price-spreading means that they will charge the plan sponsor more than the cost of a drug and then they will keep the difference as a profit.
So all of this is a crony operation, which involves kickbacks and rebates, and as a result, you have medications that are exorbitantly expensive.
Here's an example. Here's a 30-count, 30 pills to treat leukemia and other types of cancer.
$2,500, $2,502 in the pharmacy.
Mark Cuban can get the same drug.
He says... And sell it for $17.10.
That's his 15% markup.
The markup's already in the $17.
So this gives you an idea of how, and people sometimes think, drug companies are ripping us off.
In a market that's hard to do, the way that you corrupt the market is you introduce crony capitalism.
Crony capitalism is a kind of nasty arrangement between the government and the private sector in which, instead of competing, what you have is the government and the insurance companies and the so-called PBMs are all in it together, regulating the market and controlling the price.
It's kind of a cartel.
And what Mark Cuban wants to do, and I hope he's successful in doing it, is he wants to break the cartel.
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A small piece of hopeful news, good news, out of San Francisco.
The city has voted decisively, this is the voters, more than 70%, in a recall vote to throw out three of the members of the city's school board.
And the vote was not close.
Alison Collins recalled by 78% to 21%.
Gabriela Lopez, 74% to 24%.
Fauga Moliga recalled 71% to 27%.
So this is massive majorities, liberal majorities, have decided to give these three scoundrels the boot.
So, you might ask, what's going on in San Francisco?
Well, by and large, the city school board has kept the schools in complete shutdown.
And parents are getting increasingly restless.
My kids aren't getting a proper education.
They're essentially being cognitively deprived for the larger part of two years.
When are the schools going to open?
But instead of focusing on that, what the city school board was focused on is renaming the schools.
Apparently these three characters were leading a drive to rename a whole bunch of schools in...
In San Francisco, the Abraham Lincoln School, the George Washington School, the Thomas Jefferson School, the Theodore Roosevelt School, the Robert Louis Stevenson School, the Paul Revere School, all renamed.
And the decision to rename them was taken literally in seconds.
Apparently they had a sort of a research committee, the School Names Advisory Committee.
They did no real research.
They did basically Google and Wikipedia.
And they just decided, Abraham Lincoln, well, yeah, he freed the slaves, but who cares?
You know, the American Indians didn't do very well under Lincoln.
Boom, he's gone. And this was the methodology.
No debate, no consultation with historians, no effort to sort of do a balanced assessment.
The only time a balanced assessment came up is somebody said, well, wasn't...
Wasn't Malcolm X kind of a racist in the early part of his career?
And they were like, yeah, but he got better later.
So we're not going to take his name off the school.
And so evidently kind of a double standard applied to protect the Malcolm X name while everybody else was one strike and you're out.
So this was a disgraceful process.
At the same time, and perhaps equally significant, the This is the same school board that took Lowell High School—by the way, Lowell High School is a school that was based upon merit, based upon—it was a public school where you could get a high-quality education if you were smart, selective admissions policy, and they decided no more requirements.
By and large, no more grades, no more test scores.
The school's policies, its selective policies, have a disproportionately negative impact on minorities, and so merit is out the window.
Well, I think even in San Francisco, the progressives decided, we've had enough of this nonsense.
Apparently, a powerful force in this recall election were the Chinese.
And the Chinese, by and large, are willing to go along with just about anything.
But here's Ann Su, HSU, a San Francisco resident who was one of the organizers of this recall petition.
And she goes, education is the key lever of social mobility.
She goes, quote, that's been ingrained in Chinese culture for thousands of years.
So her point is, how do the Chinese families expect to get their kids ahead if you don't have merit-based education?
So it's the Asian Americans who, by the way, are hurt by the abolition of all these selective requirements, by this idea that, listen, we're going to decide schools based upon race and ethnicity, not based upon talent.
So, it seemed for a while, and it probably still is to a large degree, that San Francisco is progressivism run amok.
And it seemed for a while that there was no limit to this.
It's like crazy meets crazier.
And just when you thought you got crazy enough, you figure out something even more absurd down the road.
The parents of San Francisco have decided we've got to put a stop to this nonsense.
They're sending a message.
Whether the message will be heard loud and clear remains to be seen.
But this, I think, is an important first step.
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Guys, I've really been looking forward to this one.
Michael Reagan is the eldest son of former President Reagan.
He was, for two decades or more, a conservative radio talk show host.
I was delighted to have done a number of shows and segments with him.
And he's now the chairman and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.
Michael Reagan, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
We've lost touch over the years.
I think we used to cross paths a lot more.
Well, when I was writing the book about your dad, which became Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
I was hanging out at the Reagan Library.
I, of course, through Young America's Foundation, visited the Reagan Ranch.
And then I'd come on your show periodically to talk about issues.
But how have you been?
I've been great. Thank you very much.
And just to let your audience know, I'm still a conservative.
I'm just not a radio talk show host.
Just to let people know.
I don't want them to get confused.
I left both of them. I've been great.
You know, I left radio in 2009.
My sister Maureen, when she was dying of melanoma, and we had that brother-sister talk, and she said, you know, Michael, if you get a chance, will you promise me you'll leave radio when you can afford to do that?
Because the legacy of our father is so important, we can't leave it to the historians.
Will you please carry it?
And I promised my sister about three months before she passed that I would do that, and I left radio in 2009.
Wow. And you have been, in a sense now, you're devoted to helping promulgate a better understanding of who your dad was and what he stood for.
I've got to start with a funny line, though, that has been attributed to you, and I'm going to have to see if this is true.
The line has to do with Reaganomics.
And someone came up to you, evidently, according to the story, and said to you something like, they were trying to explain Reaganomics to you, believe it or not.
And you apparently said something like, don't talk to me about Reaganomics.
I've been living under it all my life.
Did you actually say that?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
That's exactly what I said.
I tell people, you know, I used to ride out to the ranch with my father.
Well, I always rode out to the ranch, but I would be in the right front seat of the car, 8, 9, 10 years old.
And he would sing to me every pimp.
Marine Corps hymn, Navy, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard.
And he taught me about America by singing these to me.
But I remember one time I'm riding out there, and my parents only gave me a dollar a week allowance when I was a kid.
And you couldn't keep up with the Hope kids and the Crosby kids and all the Beverly Hills kids on a buck a week.
So I said to my dad, I need a larger allowance.
And my dad, for the next 10 minutes, told me about the tax system in America.
I'm eight years old.
Just tell me, are you going to give me more money?
And he says to me, he says, you know, the government takes 90 cents out of every dollar that I make.
And with that 10 cents is left.
I've taken care of your mother, you, your sister, Maureen, my new wife, Nancy, our new daughter, Patty, the ranch, the foreman and the horses.
I felt so sorry for him driving into the race that day.
I actually offered him back half my allowance.
And he says to me, he says, when a president's elected that gives me a tax break, I'll give you a larger allowance.
Well, the Kennedy tax break went into effect, 1964 by Lyndon Johnson, as you know.
My dad remembered what he told an eight-year-old kid and raised my allowance from $1 to $5.
I lived under Reaganomics.
That's just downright amazing.
And, you know, I think as we think about your dad, who was very unique in so many ways, but part of the way to understand your dad is that he was a product of the Depression and World War II. And isn't it a fact that the values of the so-called greatest generation were phenomenal?
Forged in that era, the sense of frugality, the sense of deferred gratification, the sense of a certain respect that pervaded the society, that came out of the unique experience of scarcity and war, didn't it? Absolutely right.
Of course, being born and raised in Illinois, Tappico, Illinois, Dixon, Illinois, those values that were instilled in him by his family and the people around him, And what have you, instilled all of these things into my dad.
And he carried it through his whole life, which was amazing.
And, you know, again, tried to teach it down to his children and what have you.
But he was so involved and so loved the people of that generation that he never forgot who they were.
Hence the speech he gives at Point to Hawk.
1984, the boys appoint the hock.
And all those speeches, if you really listen to the speeches my dad gave, he spoke to us in parables.
He spoke to us in parables.
Nobody speaks to us in parables today.
They speak at us, to us, around us.
But dad spoke in parables and then prayed to God you understood what the heck he was telling you.
Well, I think this may be the clue to how he won 44 states in 1980 and 49.
I mean, think of how inconceivable it would be today for anyone, Republican or Democrat, to have those kinds of margins.
The other thing I think is interesting is that You know, we hear today about how Republicans are becoming, and there's some truth to this, increasingly the party of the working class.
But I think your dad had a very good feel for what life was like for the ordinary, hardworking guy.
Now, do you think that he got that from his days at General Electric?
Or where did your dad, because you know how insulated Hollywood people typically are from the rest of the country, But your dad had a very good feeling for what it was like to work on a dock or work as a foreman or run a tractor.
And I'm trying to get a sense of how did your dad have that common man feel throughout his career?
You know, I remember him telling me, you know, years ago.
He said, you know, in our family when I was raised, he said, we didn't know we were poor until the government told us we were poor.
And really think about what he said.
We didn't know we were poor until the government told us we were poor, which is so much what we're living through today.
He was a man who loved America from the ground up.
And what I see, and I think what he would say to you today, is the fact we forgot to love America.
We have forgotten to love America.
And we need to find that love for our own country again and have someone who can instill that in us if we're going to move forward.
But you're right. You know, I rode out to the ranch with him, as I was telling you, for years.
And we'd go out to the ranch.
He wouldn't just ride horses. He'd chop wood.
He'd build barns.
The house at the ranch that you went and you've seen, or the ranch everybody saw during the presidential years, he built most of that.
All the railings around, he built most of that.
He was a builder. We need builders again.
We don't have a builder anymore.
And he was a great builder.
And try to instill that into me and all the kids by way of whether it be an allowance or what it might be.
And I thank God for that.
Let's take a pause, Mike.
When we come back, I want to talk more about your dad and relate some of his qualities to some of the challenges we face as a country now.
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Feel the difference. I'm back talking to Michael Reagan, eldest son of Ronald Reagan, and now chairman and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.
Mike, I've got to tell you a funny story, and that is I was, you know, I had sort of a standard speech, which I gave after I wrote my book on your dad.
library to give a speech and Nancy Reagan, your stepmom, was in the audience.
But because I was giving my standard speech and in the Q&A somebody asked me, they said something like, you know, was Nancy the power behind the throne?
Was she the one telling Reagan what to do?
And I used a line I'd been using on campus that worked really well, but I forgot that Nancy was in the audience.
And I said, well, I think that Ronnie's hero was Calvin Coolidge and Nancy's was Calvin I'm inclined, you know?
And the audience, of course, roared, and then I looked down and I see Nancy Reagan looking up at me, and I couldn't tell from her expression if she thought it was amusing or not, but a sort of slight chill of terror went down my spine when I did that.
But that was, I still remember that very vividly because of how odd it was.
She might have thought Calvin Klein was a downgrade.
Oh yeah, that's right.
That's why she was looking at you in that way.
Dad was a great reader of history.
I tell kids that come to the Young Americans Foundation all the time, I say, readers are leaders.
And Ronald Reagan, if anything, was a great reader of history.
The books in his library, he actually read those books more than one time.
And that's important, because we don't read that much anymore.
We watch the news, we watch this, we watch that, but we don't read.
And readers are, in fact, leaders.
You know, a story about my dad, and again, talking about him and World War II, great generation.
You know that he was legally blind.
He was one of the first ones to wear contact lenses.
And he wanted to be in the Army.
He was in the cavalry, wanted to be in the Army, but he knew he couldn't pass the eye exam.
So he went and he memorized the eye exam.
And when he went to go for his test, and they said, close your right eye or left eye, read line three, he had it memorized.
I never heard that.
Really? He couldn't see it, couldn't see it, but he had it memorized.
And that's how he got into the Army, retired as a captain, doing 300 films for the military during World War II. You know, interestingly, over the years, I think the intellectual respect for Reagan has increased.
I remember the historian Doug Brinkley, who had written the book about Jimmy Carter, and he had a rather dismissive view of Reagan.
And I told him, I said, listen, why don't you go over to the Reagan Library or the ranch, go pick up the books off the shelf, Reagan's own books, and look inside them.
You'll see Reagan's own markings in there.
And then go read the letters of Reagan.
And so Doug did that to his great credit.
And I think wrote the important book, The Reagan Diaries, which I think, coming from a liberal, Rice University, helped the intellectual class to see that Reagan was no dummy, even though a lot of people had portrayed him as such.
Oh, absolutely true. Just read him.
All you have to do is read him and you will really, truly understand him.
And that's why I think it's important...
For me to do the things that I do with the Reagan Legacy Foundation, the scholarship program we have for the kids on the USS Ronald Reagan that we've been doing since the early 2000s when she was, you know, commissioned and what have you, and the brick project we have at St.
Mary Gliese Normandy, France, where people can go online to walkwaytovictory.com and purchase a brick in the name of a loved one who served the European theater during the Second World War.
And see it placed in the ground at St.
Mary Gliese, which was the first town freed by America on D-Day.
If you saw Saving Private Ryan, that's where all the paratroopers were going.
If you saw The Longest Day, Red Buttons is hanging from the church steeple in the center of St.
Mary Gliese. And so we've been doing that now for about the past five, six, seven years with this bread project.
And it's amazing to see these 99 and 100-year-old Men who bailed out of airplanes at 17 years old go to St.
Mary and look down and see a brick, you know, with their name on it.
And we'd be doing that. And that's the way I try and help carry the legacy of my father for what he did at Point to Hawk with that speech at Point to Hawk and carry it forward because he has such a heart for those who saved the world.
When Margaret Thatcher was asked about your dad's legacy, she said he won the Cold War without firing a shot.
What I find interesting about Reagan was that he was very hawkish toward the Soviet Union in the first term.
This was the term of the evil empire speech, the arms buildup, the MX missiles, strategic missile defense.
But in the second term, it's almost like your dad pivoted And began to work with Gorbachev, whom he recognized had something different about him.
And I'm wondering if in thinking about all that, you would say of your dad that he distrusted...
He saw evil in the empire, but he was also able to be optimistic about the human spirit.
And so he had the sense that Gorbachev was capable of steering that evil ship, if you will, in a more...
In a better direction.
What explains your dad's pivot from the first term to the second term?
It looks to me, in retrospect, he was right in the vote times around.
But many conservatives liked him in the first term, and then they're like, he's too soft on Gorbachev.
But your dad, and only your dad, was right the whole way through.
He was right the whole way through, but he knew that Gorbachev was the only way to finish the Cold War and end it.
And he knew his term was coming to an end also.
If I have time for a real quick story, 1976-ish, my dad loses the nomination.
I'm with my dad in the upper room of the hotel that night.
And I say, why are you even running for this position?
He said, Michael, for so long I've watched American presidents sit down with secretary generals of the Soviet Union.
And every time we sit down with them, they ask us to give up something to get along with them.
He said, I wanted to be the first president to sit down with the secretary general.
I was going to let him pick the table, the chairs, and the place, because, Michael, that's how they do those things at that level.
And as he was telling me what it was, I was going to have to give up to get along with them.
I was going to get up from my chair, walk around the other side of the table, lean over and whisper in his ear, nyet!
I want to be the first president to say nyet to a Secretary General of the Soviet Union.
Ten years later.
Now, remember, Nancy had not told him he was going to run in 1980 yet.
All right? So, ten years later in Reykjavik.
He is there. And Mikhail Gorbachev, they're there to sign SALT. Mikhail Gorbachev says, you have to give up SDI or Star Wars.
We've all seen the photograph of my dad turning away.
What did my dad say? Yeah, I was the only one on the planet to do what the answer was going to be.
And a year later, Mikhail Gorbachev came to Washington and signed that agreement.
Unbelievable. Wow.
Michael, you're going to have to come back and do more of this.
This is fascinating and a real window into, you know, a truly great man that I think will go down in history as one of our greatest presidents.
And you obviously have had a close-up seat, not only into Reagan the leader, but also into Reagan the man.
Thank you. Anytime you want me on, listen, I'm available.
I love it. I love to tell the stories.
They're awesome. I love to tell the stories.
He was a great man.
I was very, very lucky.
To be, you know, part of it and to be there as history is being made.
Awesome. Thank you very much.
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There's a new and interesting twist in the Spotify controversy involving the singer Neil Young and others and Joe Rogan And that twist is that Neil Young is apparently back on Spotify.
Now, for a while there, I was making the comment that it's very good that the left was unsuccessful in canceling Joe Rogan, because if they had succeeded on essentially no basis, it would mean that they have the power even to take the number one podcaster in the country and cancel him essentially for no reason at all.
Just because we can, we're showing that we're going to do it.
And so it was very important that that project be defeated, and it was.
And so I thought, well, I guess the price you pay is that some of these losers, some of these guys like Neil Young, it's either Joe Rogan or me.
Well, I think Neil Young realized you're not as relevant as you maybe thought you were because Spotify goes, well, I think we'll take Rogan.
And there were some others who took the same thing, it's either Joe Rogan or me.
Okay, well, there's the door.
So this didn't really work out too well for them.
And now, apparently, tail between his legs, Neil Young is like, well, on second thoughts, I think I'll leave my music on Spotify.
No big deal. Which kind of shows what frauds these people are.
They're not people of principle.
Their idea is, listen, I'll put some pressure on Rogan.
Maybe I'll get some other, some fellow 75-year-old singers.
You know, uh, uh, uh, uh, you know, and we'll all gang up on him.
It's kind of like a 75-year-old mob.
And we'll try to get him, but if we don't get him, we know that's okay, you know, we'll just essentially pick up our walking sticks and go home and basically put our music back.
And pretend it never happened.
What, that wasn't me.
That must be another Neil Young who did that.
So this is what's going on.
So apparently Joe Rogan's original sin was having an interview with Robert Malone to talk about COVID. And now I see Fox Business is calling Warner Brothers.
Warner Brothers has the Neil Young songs to say, Hey, what happened?
We noticed he's back on Spotify.
Warner Brothers, no comment.
We're dealing with a very senile individual.
We don't really want to say anything about him.
So, you know, I don't know what's going on with Neil Young.
My guess is that Neil Young recognizes now that Spotify is actually a very important platform for music.
And maybe Neil Young decided to look at his bank account and he goes, oops, I mean, at this rate, some of my checks are going to bounce.
I better put my music back on Spotify, you know?
So this is kind of a way to stick to your convictions, Neil Young.
You're proving to be a highly principled character.
So, look, I'm not unhappy that Neil Young is back on Spotify.
I mean, I object to these kinds of cancellation campaigns in the first place.
I'm glad this one succeeded.
And if the geezer can make a few pennies off of Spotify, you know, 99 cents a download.
More power to you, Neil Young.
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Several days ago I did a segment on the podcast toward the end and the subject was the fly.
And I raised what I thought was a very interesting question, kind of what good is a fly?
What is the point of a fly?
But then I got home and Debbie checks our email to the website and she goes, take a look at this.
And some guy writes, he goes, Dinesh, why are you talking about the fly?
He goes, you've been promising for some time now that you're going to do some stuff on like Dante.
And he's like... Let's do Dante.
Let's focus on the important things, Dinesh.
And this kind of got me, and I was like, well, yeah, I probably should begin a series on Dante and carry it through for a little while.
So I'm going to start a little bit of a Dante reading, focusing on his great work that is called The Divine Comedy.
The title itself is important because the word comedy suggests that we're going to be, well, not laughing all our way through, but comedy here used in the sense of a work, an epic work, that has a happy ending.
Traditionally, epic is associated with a tragedy, and we can think of epic tragedies.
But this is not a tragedy.
This is a Christian epic.
In fact, I would say one of the two great Christian epic works ever written, the other being Milton's Paradise Lost.
You could do not just a segment or even a lecture.
You could do a whole course on Dante and Milton.
Milton, by the way, doesn't really refer to Dante, but is very well aware of him.
I think he viewed Dante almost as a sort of Catholic competitor.
Milton, of course, representing the Puritan and, to many degrees, anti-Catholic Reformation wing.
But the Divine Comedy is widely considered to be the greatest Christian epic ever written.
Milton's Paradise Lost, the greatest Christian epic in the English language.
Dante writes not, by the way, in Latin, which was kind of the language of the church, the kind of high language of the time, but writes in vernacular Italian.
So he chose to write in the native language, in his own native language, even though he's fully capable of writing in Latin.
Now, The Divine Comedy is an incredible work, and a work that is, well, you can read it on your own, straight through, and I think if you did, you'd still get a lot out of it.
But it's a work that needs assistance.
It needs, if you will, a guide.
By the way, in The Divine Comedy and in the journey that Dante takes through hell, inferno, Through Purgatory, Purgatorio, and to Paradise, Paradiso, Dante has a guide, or he has actually more than one guide.
In the beginning and for most of the journey, his guide is a poet named Virgil, Virgil the poet, the Roman poet of the Aeneid.
Virgil is accompanying Dante on this journey.
Now, there's a point at which Virgil can't go any further, and we'll come to that later, and then Dante needs other guides.
There's a woman named Beatrice.
She becomes his guide almost to the finish line, and then at the finish line, Dante has a different guide.
So Dante is not doing this journey by himself, but what's really interesting is that he's doing it.
In other words, Dante is the hero of his own poem.
Kind of interesting. This is not, by the way, the normal way of doing it, right?
I mean, Homer is the poet, but of course, in the Iliad, his hero is, to some degree, Achilles.
He also, you could say, Hector.
Homer writes The Odyssey, and The Odyssey, of course, focuses on Odysseus.
He's the hero of The Odyssey.
If you turn to a work like The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, the hero is a guy named Christian.
And so Bunyan is describing Christian's journey.
But here Dante takes the unusual step where Dante, the poet, Dante, the composer of this poem...
has a hero and his hero is Dante himself, a younger version of himself whom we're going to call Dante the Pilgrim.
Now, we got to say something really odd and somewhat outrageous about this poem because typically a poet is a kind of imaginer and poetry is a flight of the imagination and one might think in this context That what Dante is doing here in this poem is he's kind of sitting back and closing his eyes and trying to think of what it might be like if he,
Dante, or a younger version of himself, were to undertake this remarkable journey and that he is essentially conjuring up through the breadth of his mind a kind of landscape that he's now going to describe poetically.
But Dante insists, and this is part of the audacity of the poem, that that is not what's happening here at all.
Dante insists, and you can choose not to believe him, but he says that he is describing a journey that he, in fact, took.
So Dante says, in a sense, that I, Dante, the pilgrim, went to hell, and I saw it.
And then I went to purgatory, and I saw it.
And I met people there, and I talked to them.
And then I went to paradise, and I went, in a sense...
Almost to the point of seeing the face of God.
I did those things. And in this poem, I'm going to describe what that experience was, and I'm going to meditate upon it.
Now, if you think about it, what Dante is really saying, I think, The truth about heaven and purgatory and hell were revealed to him.
That's what he means when he says, I went.
The analogy here is nothing less than the Christian Bible, because if you think about it, How did the early prophets and how did the people who wrote the Bible...
Moses is traditionally believed to be the person who wrote the first five books of the Old Testament.
John Devine wrote the book of Revelation.
Well, how did they know to write those things?
And, of course, I think the idea here with John is that God showed it to him.
God showed him the end of the world.
Now, God didn't dictate it to him.
He wrote it down as he saw it.
But he did see it.
He saw it, in fact, happen.
He saw it, in a sense, by divine permission and by divine revelation.
And Dante seems to be saying the same thing, that his work he's claiming, again, outrageously, is on a kind of par with the Bible.
Not in the sense that it displaces the Bible.
He's not saying that, like, you know...
The Koran or the Book of Mormon.
This is some addition to the Bible.
Not at all. Dante is writing in a very orthodox mode.
But I think what he's saying is that this is a work that was inspired by God in the same way that the Bible was inspired by God.
Now, interestingly, Milton in Paradise Lost makes the same claim for his work.
I'm going to read a few lines from Milton.
And Milton makes the claim explicitly.
Here's Milton. This is the opening lines of Paradise Lost.
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe, with loss of Eden till one greater man restore us and regain the blissful seat.
Sing, heavenly muse.
Now think about that. All of that is the preface to what Milton is going for here, which is sing, heavenly muse.
Milton is calling on a heavenly inspiration to descend on him.
And he says, it's the same muse that, quote,"...didst inspire that shepherd who first taught the chosen seed in the beginning." How the heavens and earth rose out of chaos.
So who's that shepherd?
Moses. Milton is referring to you.
He says the same inspiration that came down to Moses to write the first five books of the Bible.
Milton says, I want that same inspiration from my poem.
So here's Milton claiming very explicitly that he wants and is claiming divine inspiration.
Think about it. His work is, quote, he says, that to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to man.
Wow, what a mission.
So, Milton is, again, saying that he is, in a sense, giving you God's side of the argument.
And Dante, without ever doing this kind of thing so explicitly, I think is claiming something of the same thing.
Now, I'll just say a word or two more, and then tomorrow I'm going to talk more about how we read Dante, who was Dante, but let me just say a word about the poem itself.
It is divided into three parts.
They're called inferno.
That's the first part. That's hell.
Then purgatory and then paradise.
So it is a descent to hell followed by an ascent, a climbing of the purgatorial mountain and then rising up into paradise.
And you have to sort of take in the whole thing because sometimes you think like, okay, I'll just read Inferno.
I kind of get the picture, kind of get what Dante's getting at.
But no, the ideas of the Inferno are sort of modified when you get to Purgatorio.
You begin to realize that there are, just as there are sinners in hell...
There are sinners in purgatory.
There are sinners in heaven. But why are they in purgatory then and not in hell?
It's not that hell is full of sinners and heaven is full of people who never sinned.
Not at all. There are sinners in all three places.
And so we begin to understand Dante's views of sin and atonement and redemption and all of this relevant to Dante's own time, relevant to our time, and I would argue relevant for all time.
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