Matthew Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans, argues U.S. dominance hinges on population growth via immigration and family support, despite pushback from conservatives (e.g., IRERA law) and progressives over "degrowth." He dismisses density fears, citing Texas’s zoning flexibility, but acknowledges urbanization’s trade-offs—like health disparities—while valuing in-person interactions over remote work. Rogan counters with pandemic-era missteps, vaccine skepticism, and agricultural sustainability concerns, including CAFOs and topsoil depletion, questioning whether a billion Americans is feasible without systemic reforms. Yglesias insists policy fixes—like redirecting farm subsidies—can solve ecological and economic challenges, framing child allowances ($98B/year) as efficient welfare tools, though Rogan doubts government oversight. Ultimately, their debate reveals tensions between growth optimism and pragmatic sustainability in maintaining global influence. [Automatically generated summary]
So the concept is that there should be a billion Americans.
I like to keep it simple.
So here's the idea, right?
So we got China.
It's growing out there.
There's a lot of concern, you know, internationally about America's role in the world.
We've also got a lot of polarization in our politics, a lot of sort of gridlock, deadlock, kind of stagnation and infighting.
And I'm a politics guy.
I live in D.C., cover Congress.
I wanted to write a book that kind of elevates beyond that, thinks about America's role in the world and says the way we are going to meet this challenge of rising international competition is the way we became such a great power historically.
And that's by growing our population with more openness to immigrants, doing more to support parents and young families.
And then everything that comes downstream from that, you know, where are people going to live, how are we going to get around, how are we going to solve those problems?
Because it seems like a lot of people think that overpopulation is a giant problem.
And then when you say, we should triple plus the amount of people in the United States we want to compete with the rest of the world, I would imagine a lot of people are like, what are you smoking, Matthew Iglesias?
But there's a strain of sort of eco-apocalyptic thinking, where people say, oh, we can't handle it.
Only degrowth is going to save us.
And I just don't think that's right.
I am bullish on technology.
We've got more and more clean energy sources.
We've got better and better electric cars.
There's more stuff we can do with electrification.
We need to take those steps.
prosperous, sustainable society that has plenty of people in it, that has high living standards, things like that.
So we don't need to worry about that.
A lot of Americans also just overestimate how many people are here.
So a billion sounds like a lot.
It's about triple our current population.
But that would give us the population density of France and It would give us about half the density of Germany, way less than half the density of the United Kingdom.
And if you've ever been to the UK, it's a nice country.
They got London, big city.
They got countryside.
They got rolling hills.
They got sheep.
You go up to Scotland, there's fucking nobody there.
So we could have all kinds of places with a billion Americans, countryside, suburbs, cities, all kinds of stuff.
When you're talking about China and the NBA and Hollywood movies, a lot of people think of those things, the interactions that Hollywood has and the NBA has with China as being insidious.
They don't think it's a good thing at all that China has that kind of an influence.
And they also think it's embarrassing.
Like a lot of people think that it's embarrassing for the NBA when the negative tweets, when they're in support of Hong Kong, And then all of a sudden there was some pushback and the NBA was removed from viewership in China and there was a lot of sponsorships being pulled and it became a giant issue.
And then all of a sudden you saw the NBA kind of backtrack and kind of kowtow and a lot of people found that to be pretty disgusting.
We don't want the United States to ever be a country that's doing that to China, right?
If China has a bunch of, I don't know what they're really into over there, ping pong players?
So imagine if Chinese basketball becomes super popular in the United States and then the Chinese basketball players in the United States start talking shit about how Apple uses slave labor.
And we go, hey, hey, watch your fucking mouth, bro.
We won't pay for your Chinese basketball anymore.
And then all of a sudden China backs off.
We would think of that as being pretty gross by the United States of ignoring some human rights violations or trying to whitewash them and trying to economically attack another country.
So like the saying that it's a positive that China has all these people and using as an example the fact they strong arm Hollywood and they strong arm the NBA.
A lot of people think that's moving in the wrong direction, me included.
All their companies, you're talking Volvo, Scania, Spotify, they're dependent on a global marketplace.
They need access.
If China is the biggest market in the world, ultimately, they're going to find themselves playing by China's rules.
If America stays the biggest market in the world, then we can play by our rules.
And not that we should use the way China does, right?
We shouldn't say like, no, nobody can say bad stuff about America.
America, we've got a great tradition of free speech here, despite some tensions.
It's a world difference from China.
And we carry so many other countries, smaller countries from Europe, Canada, Australia, on our backs in that regard as creating a sort of cornerstone of openness as a leading market in the world.
That's how it's been for so long that people don't even think about it.
But if we go into a world where China is the number one economy, where that's the number one market, where that's what every company cares most about China's rules, then we're going to be in trouble.
We're going to be in trouble here.
The Swedes are going to be in trouble.
And I don't think that's a world we should look forward to.
Well, one of the things that I think and one of the things that I've said about Austin in particular is that I love the fact that there's friendly people and I think one of the reasons why they're friendly is there's not that many of them.
They value people more.
I think people get devalued when you get high population densities.
I'm not saying that it has to be like Los Angeles in order to reach 3 billion or a billion people in this country rather.
I don't think it does, right?
It's not like you're trying to turn the whole country into Los Angeles.
But there's a problem with Los Angeles.
And I think one of the problems with Los Angeles is there's an insane amount of people.
Jammed into one area.
And when you're on the highway, like if you drive and you have to go to Orange County and you're on the 405, you just want Godzilla to come out of the ocean and just start heating cars.
You're like, this is fucking ridiculous.
There's so many people.
And it never ends.
It's like every time you want to go, if you want to go to Orange County, say if you want to go to Disneyland or something like that and take your family, you've got to leave hours earlier.
Hours earlier than you think you need to.
You want to be there by 5 p.m.?
Oh, Christ.
You've got to leave at like 2. You've got to leave maybe at 1.30 if you want to be safe.
Leave at 1.30 and you'll be stuck in fucking insane traffic and never-ending road construction and it never ends.
And a lot of people get real testy when there's that many people.
This has been recreated in rat population density studies.
I'm sure you've probably gotten into some of this when you started looking at the population.
But it does, when they have these rat population density studies, it does mimic what happens in big cities in terms of violence, in terms of mental illness.
Like when you have a certain amount of rats in a large containment, you know about all this, right?
So what they're studying there, I think, is crowding.
You know, which is not exactly the same as density because we, you know, like we build buildings, right?
So people in New York have small houses by American standards, but big houses by European standards or Japanese standards, right?
We're still taking up space because we're sort of building structures.
So I think we have to look at what we're doing with our housing laws, with our land use laws.
One of the reasons Texas has been such a center of growth, so many people are coming here, is that the Texas legal framework actually lets you come here, right?
You want to throw up some houses in the Austin area, Houston, Dallas.
You can do it.
So you can get affordable space, and more and more people are coming in, and it's an asset for the state, right?
People like you, all kinds of folks come in here.
The governor brags about it all the time.
I think Hewlett Packard is coming to Houston or something.
And it's really good.
It's a big kind of success story.
And in California, they got terrible, terrible problem where a lot of people want to go there because it's nice.
California is nice, right?
But they can't find a place to live.
They can't get space and they can't sort out their transportation infrastructure.
Los Angeles poured all this money into building out the LA Metro, but then they didn't align their zoning, you know, so people don't live near the stations.
But also, I mean, you can't take a train if it doesn't go where you're going.
If you don't live by it, right?
So, you know, my cousin, she was taking the metro to work for a while.
And, you know, good for her.
But it was, like, very unusual out there.
I live in D.C. now.
A lot of people ride the metro there, right?
You know, it's people from all over.
People are used to cars.
But when you have a well-designed system where people live near the stations, where the jobs are near, where they come together, you know, people do it.
It's convenient.
You can, you know, read a book, something like that.
Well, we don't want to encourage people to read on their commute.
And I do think that focusing on what brings us together versus some of the other governments out there and on the possibilities of growth...
Me as well.
But I get pushback from people, you know, quote unquote, on my side, just about the idea of patriotism in the book, the idea of national greatness, the idea that America should want to be number one.
But I think that's something that's important to a lot of people, moderate people, conservative people.
Well, and I think it's part of inclusiveness, right?
Like, what holds...
This country together, people with different religions, people different ethnic backgrounds, people with different ideas, is loyalty to, you know, certain concepts, right?
Like high level political concepts.
And it's not bad to be a little corny, and, you know, wave the flag a little bit if that's how, like, we can all be Americans together.
And I was surprised doing some of the virtual touring on this at how much conservative people were like, wow, I can't believe you wrote this book.
And how much some people on the left were just skeptical of not like the specific ideas, but of the general concept of like wanting America to be awesome.
Something's happened over the last decade where you say the word nationalism and somehow it gets equated at least peripherally or in the neighborhood of white nationalism.
And it's antithetical to the sort of racist and exclusionary visions that people have.
But it's important to hold to that, right, to that notion of an inclusive nation that has a national identity, I think, rather than sort of surrender the idea to the most right-wing people.
Yeah, I think the idea of America should be like the greatest house party ever.
Like everybody can come over.
That's what it should be.
White nationalism is just fucking stupid.
I mean, you're just fools.
Like the idea that only melanin, that's what counts, and only European heritage, that's what counts.
Everything else, it's nonsense.
It's one of the dumbest ideas ever.
And then...
It's also...
It's a scared person's version of America.
And the problem with the concept of nationalism being equated to white nationalism...
You're giving that word up to cowards.
White nationalists, you're a coward.
You're afraid of...
What are you afraid of?
You're afraid of brown people, black people, yellow people?
You only like white people.
I only like people who look similar to me.
That's one of the dumbest ideas of all time.
And the fact that that idea is still...
It's so prevalent that you have to argue against it.
That it's one of those things that you know it's really...
Until Charlottesville happened, when you see those guys walking with their tiki torches going, they will not replace us.
I was like, that's never going to happen again.
If that hadn't happened, I would have said, there's no way after the civil rights movement, after all we've been through, particularly today with the internet and the way people can exchange ideas, there's no fucking chance you're going to have a bunch of assholes that only think that America is supposed to be about white people and they're walking down the street with Home Depot torches.
It's like one of the dumbest things I've ever seen in my life.
They don't replace anybody when they come in, right?
It's an additive thing.
You know, there's like cool stuff.
I went...
In the suburbs of D.C., there's a lot of Vietnamese people, a lot of Vietnamese restaurants out there.
The last time I went out to get a banh mi place, there was a Viet Cajun crawfish broil thing, which comes from Houston because Vietnamese people came there.
Louisiana people came to Houston.
They got this fusion cuisine.
Now they exported it to other Vietnamese enclaves around America.
Well, what I do is with leftovers, I take leftover Thanksgiving turkey and I just take a plate and dunk some habanero sauce all over the plate and then dip the pieces of turkey in that habanero sauce and woo!
There's something about cooking with that indirect heat from the smoke.
It's not like cooking over a regular grill.
Because the smoke is really doing all the cooking for you.
It's almost like a And they seal so good that it's like you're not losing moisture and you've got this amazing retention of heat so the temperature stays at a good...
But having the turkey brined first, man, that made such a big difference.
It was so juicy and delicious.
It made me think like, okay, so hey, assholes, if you just do this with all turkeys...
Then people would be ordering turkey all over the place.
chicken in every pot and then we got the depression yeah uh but yeah chicken was high end now i saw unfortunately my uh my knowledgeable friends say that the chickens are in horrifically cruel conditions many are that's how they got so cheap so that's true i don't know but you can buy free range chickens you just have to make sure that you're ethical and your pursuit of you know where your chickens are grown find the good ones yeah it's but even then be a backyard chicken person
It took a long time, but they eventually got them all.
We also went through a fire, and the fire actually burned down our chicken coops, but the chickens got out while the fire was burning their chicken coop.
It created a hole, and they got out, and they were wandering around the yard, and so we saved them from that and then put them into a smaller chicken coop.
But the area that we lived in, there was so much fire that I think the amount of animals was greatly reduced.
And the coyotes, they got very clever and they literally pulled the chicken wire off of the chicken coop and created a small hole big enough for them to get inside.
If you want to really get into what happens when animals get pressured and different methods of adaptation, there's a great book by Dan Flores called Coyote America.
And it's all about the coyote and how one of the reasons why they spread across the country, they were persecuted first by wolves.
Like when wolves would encounter coyotes, they would kill the coyotes.
When coyotes do it, when the female coyotes recognize that coyotes are missing, all of a sudden her egg production ramps up and she gives birth to more pups.
So when more coyotes are missing, they don't just come into estrus.
They actually produce more puppies.
And so then they expand their range.
So they were originally persecuted in the West.
That's where they really existed, in the Southwest, in the West.
They're mad about what they want you to be versus what you actually are sometimes, you know?
And then they're also – you're dealing with – it's not a large number of people that are mad.
It's a small number of very aggressive people that want to affect the way you do things and want to change the way you talk and change who you talk to and change what you do.
It's just a small percentage of people that have got into this idea of platforming and deplatforming and going on someone's platform and amplifying someone's broadcast.
Like, there's all these terms that people are using now.
That is really just...
It's separatism in a weird way.
It's ideological separatism.
And what we're doing is we're taking these echo chambers and putting walls up around them.
And enforcing it by yelling at people and being angry at people for having...
Like my friend Tim Dillon had a podcast recently with Candace Owen.
And he's like, holy shit, dude.
The blowback was stunning.
So many people were angry with him talking to her.
And maybe some of it was angry that he didn't push back on some of the things that she said that they...
They believe are untrue or biased or distorted or what have you.
But I think conversations with people that have fundamentally different values are important for us.
It's interesting to watch how a person's thought process expands.
Well, and there's a fantasy that you can sort of make disagreement go away if you, you know, try to shut down certain cultural avenues.
I mean, I think you saw that a lot in the election that just happened, and you continue to see it in politics, that it's frustrating to people that they can't just win everything and have all their ideas go through.
I mean, one of the reasons why people have this perception that it's a good idea to not go on someone's platform and not talk to people...
Whoa, good save.
Good reflexes, buddy.
It's because some people have been deplatformed.
People like Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McGinnis and Alex Jones.
There's people that have been removed from these significant portals, whether it's YouTube or Twitter.
And so people, they understand that that's effective.
And now they want to expand that.
And once they learn how to do that, then they want to do it to others.
I mean, I've seen people argue for people being deplatformed for just having dumb ideas.
Like, you should deplatform him.
I've literally seen that in podcasts.
And it's so frustrating.
It's like, God.
That's not how to handle things.
We're supposed to have debates.
We're supposed to have discussions.
And I think because we've accepted this idea of censorship and de-platforming as a viable alternative to listening to things that upset you, just get rid of them.
Shut them off.
And also that reinforces the echo chamber.
It's people with a very limited understanding of history in terms of what happens when you do that to people and also a very limited understanding of just general human nature.
The best way to get people to listen to your point of view is to express it eloquently and accurately and in a way that resonates.
You say something to the people that are listening that they might be on one side or another.
I mean, there's a lot of people that are kind of left and kind of right.
And something can come along and they go, well, and they like doing this.
They like going, well, fuck this.
I'm Trump now.
Or fuck this.
Biden's my man now.
Trump's got to go.
And it could be one thing.
There's a lot of people that don't have nuanced perspectives.
They People don't have an educated, long-term idea of what people are and how to communicate.
I watched a podcast, not a podcast, a debate yesterday with William F. Buckley and Noam Chomsky.
And it's from 1970 or something.
I don't know when it's from.
And it's an amazing conversation.
It's amazing.
Because you have two completely opposing viewpoints.
You have William F. Buckley, who's this kind of pompous right-wing guy.
And you have Noam Chomsky, who was young and vital Noam Chomsky.
And it's amazing.
Watching Noam Chomsky shut down William F. Buckley's ideas and have him challenge the points where Buckley was wrong on.
And it's a great fucking conversation.
And there's a lot of people today that would not want that conversation.
Because Noam Chomsky would be Ben Shapiro or whoever.
And you'd be like, oh my god, why is Noam Chomsky, or excuse me, William F. Buckley would Sure, yeah.
Well, and what I think really ideological people don't understand is that most people – like the technical term, political scientists call it, is they're cross-pressured.
Right?
So like you have some ideas that fit one way, some ideas that fit another way.
You have some identities that go one way, some that go another way, right?
And so people change over time, right?
And you have voters who voted for Barack Obama, right?
And then they vote for Donald Trump four, eight years later.
And then people who are really ideological, they say like, well, Trump, like he said all these outrageous racist things.
So all these people who vote for them, they must be racist too.
And you're like, well, okay, but like they voted for the black guy four years ago.
Like how racist could they be?
They're like, no, no, no, it's racist, racist.
And then four years later, well, Trump has actually gained some Latino support, right?
So, okay, so they're white supremacists too, but like, no, right?
And probably they don't agree with what Trump said about Mexican immigrants.
It's also, there's a tendency to embrace this polarization and to almost solidify it.
Even AOC, after the election, wanted everybody to put together a list of people that were supporting Trump and that voted for Trump and donated to Trump.
I'm like, Jesus Christ, are you really asking people to make lists?
I think what you're saying is you want people to actually understand what they're arguing about, and the people that are going to actually understand what politics are all about are going to be really into it.
Court in Russia has banned Moscow's Church of Scientology, saying it does not comply with the federal laws on freedom of religion.
According to Russia's TASS news agency, the country's justice ministry brought the case against the church, which is heard in Moscow.
So— So, Scientology, it says, why is Scientology banned in Germany?
The German government does not recognize Scientology as a religion.
Rather, it views it as an abusive business masquerading as a religion and believes that it pursues political goals that conflict with the values enshrined in German constitution.
This stance has been criticized by the U.S. government.
So it does, but it says, why is Scientology banned in Germany?
His crazy is that he believes that if you see a car broke down the side of the road, you've got to go over and help them because you're a Scientologist.
And that's what you do.
Like, he's fucking super intense and dialed in and he wants to do sit-ups as soon as you're done talking with him.
All my friends that have met him, I'm like, dude, the guy looks at you, he remembers your name, he's got like fucking laser beams shooting out of his eyeballs.
But what I genuinely like to do is have conversations with people.
I just like to talk to people.
It's fun.
It's interesting.
I want to know why you think the way you think.
And especially this subject, because I keep going on about how I think there's something about...
Let's go back to this rat population density thing.
What they did was they took these rats, they put them in a large container, a large area, and they only had a couple of rats and the rats just behaved like rats.
And then as they ramped up, it mirrored essentially all of the problems you see in big cities.
They started getting more violence.
They started getting mentally ill rats that would literally sit in a corner and rock themselves back and forth.
Things that just didn't exist when there's small amounts of rats in a containment area.
I think people react to the people that are around them in a very tangible way.
And one of the things they use to demonstrate this is they've taken...
And there was a very good Radio Lab podcast that talked about this where they took cameras and they would put a camera on one end of the street and a camera on the other end of the street.
And they would time people walking from one end to the other.
So they would track their footsteps.
And then through that, when they have a certain amount of data, they could accurately determine how many people lived in the city just by how quickly someone moved from point A to point B.
So if you listen to a certain amount of people form sentences, you can get a very accurate number, like really close, to what the population density or what the population of that area is, which is really interesting.
Yeah, so there's a reaction that we have to each other.
Too many people makes people walk faster and talk faster, and some people love that.
And my friends that live in New York City that love it, one of the things they say is the city's got so much energy, so much energy.
And I agree.
You go there, you're like, wow, so much energy.
But you're reacting to other biological entities, right?
It's like there's weird things that happen with people when they're around other people.
Like women, when they're around other women, get coinciding menstrual cycles, right?
We don't really totally understand that.
We know it's like pheromones, and they're reacting to each other.
I think there's strange things that are happening around people.
I think it's one of the reasons why podcasts in person are far better than podcasts through Zoom.
It's great to be able to talk to people that otherwise I couldn't talk to through that, but there's an impersonal, sort of disconnected...
And I think that, you know, the move to doing everything remotely because of the pandemic, you know, I think has really hurt sort of like morale in a lot of institutions, harder for people to get along, hard for people to relate to each other.
I actually think when you look at innovation, right, like big, like, you know, inventions, new ideas, new developments, they tend to come out of urbanized areas, right, where people are bouncing off each other.
You know, maybe like drinks after work, maybe at a party somewhere, people who, you know, work broadly in the same field are just able to see each other and interact randomly, right?
And that kind of energy generates a lot of energy.
You know, where our sort of growth comes from as a kind of a modern society.
And there's nothing wrong with, you know, people living in small towns, people living in the countryside.
There's a lot of great stuff out there.
Obviously, also, we need food.
We'd be kind of fucked as a society.
But there's a reason why you see a trend toward urbanization over thousands and thousands of years.
You know, people trying to find more ways to have more interactions with each other.
Because I think we're not rats, ultimately, right?
Like, you put those rats in the crowded thing, and, like, they don't invent shit, you know?
The latency is a killer, but the latency is not as bad if you have headphones on, if both of you have headphones on.
The problem is oftentimes one person has speakers and the other person is using headphones and when the one person is talking, the way Zoom works and Skype works, It's very difficult for you to hear the other person talking while you're talking.
It sort of drowns everything out and it fucks up.
I've had some brutal conversations with people where they literally don't even hear what I'm saying.
Like, they're saying something wrong.
I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
What are you saying?
And they just keep going.
I'm like, hold on, hold on.
Hold on!
You can't.
That's not real.
Like, stop.
And you're like, oh, Jesus.
And then you realize, okay, they can barely hear me while they're talking.
I can't really talk.
Whereas if you're talking and I'm like, what?
And you hear it.
It's like we're in the same room.
We're also wearing headphones together, which is better than even being in the same room and not having headphones on.
Because your voice in my ears...
There's a couple times I've talked to you earlier where I realized it as I was doing it.
I was like, oh, I don't want to do that.
It's just the thing of learning the rhythm of people communicating.
But...
When the headphones, your voice is as loud as my voice, and it's at the same, it's right there in the ears, so it locks you in.
Yeah, yeah, and I'm Jewish mostly, and, you know, New York, New Jersey, and, you know, it's a stereotype, but, like, we're always talking over each other at dinner, you know, family, and my wife, she's a waspy person, a little more reserved, and I think the first time she came home to see my family, she was like, what's going on here?
Like, Everybody's just yelling constantly.
But to me, it's a very natural way to communicate.
Yeah, to have a little overlap, right?
And part of being human is understanding those cues.
And when you intersperse the technology and the latency and the lags in there, it's a very different experience.
And professional interviewers figure out how to do it because they're pros, but it's not normal.
Yeah, you have to work with it, and it's difficult, and oftentimes professional interviewers, they actually use that to talk over each other.
If you're watching CNN, if there's opposing viewpoints, oftentimes these fucking anchors just talk over people, and they don't let the person get their point out, and they also know that they only have seven minutes, and they're also working towards a soundbite.
As much as they're having a conversation, they're probably more likely setting traps or anticipating outcomes and working towards some sort of gotcha moment, and this is...
And they tell you if you get, you know, I've gotten media training, you know, to go on cable, right?
And then what they tell you is before you go on cable, because you're only going to be on there for a couple minutes, you decide what you want to say, right?
You distill it to a few quick talking points, and you just make sure to say that no matter what question you get asked.
And that's training.
That's the advice they give to the pundits, the talking heads who go on.
To the politicians who come on.
And worst case, you say, well, you know, Wolf, I think the real issue is...
And then, boom, you just do your talking points.
And that's terrible.
It's a terrible product.
You watch those shows, and you are not learning anything.
Because the people are sent on their program to do that.
That's what the pros tell you you should do as a guest.
I'll watch some clips sometimes on YouTube, but I never watch it live on television unless I'm at a fucking airport or something.
That's the only thing on.
I think it's a nonsense way of communicating.
I think it's a terrible way to express ideas, and it's one of the reasons why I don't do any of those shows.
I won't do it.
I don't want to do any of those shows where you sit down at a panel and a bunch of people yell over each other.
I'm not interested.
I'm not interested in being right.
I just want to talk.
If I go on one of those shows and I have a viewpoint or a perspective that's definitely different than the person who has a perspective, I want to listen to that person.
I don't want to just be right.
I might be right and I might think I'm right and I might be really looking forward to telling them that I think I'm right.
But I really want to listen to them too.
I want to know what the fuck they think and why they think what they think.
And the only way to really have a good argument against it is to have a real clear understanding of what that person is saying.
And I want to look at it through their perspective.
I want, like, there's a lot of times people have said, oh, you know, you take the side of your guests a lot of times.
Even if, you know, you've taken different sides before, I'm like, that's not what I'm doing.
It might seem like that's what I'm doing.
What I'm really doing is I want them to fully express what they think.
So I want to find out why they think that way.
So I want to think the way they're thinking.
So if they start saying something like, oh yeah, so you feel like we should do it this way.
Sometimes people will say things, and I had an idea of what I believed before I started talking to them, and then they start talking, and I go, oh, that makes sense.
I get it now.
And maybe I did have a different opinion a week ago, but...
I'm not married to my opinions.
When you're on those fucking cable shows, you have to be married to your opinions.
You're just talking over each other.
And it's so many gotcha moments.
It's just gross.
If I ever had someone over my house and they talk to me like that, I'd be like, get the fuck out of here.
Well, what I hate about it is you put you on like that, right?
And so you're supposed to be repping your team, right?
Yeah.
If you ever concede that the other perspective might have some merit or that you don't have all the answers, then you're taking the L for your team.
And people are going to be disappointed in you.
And I don't ever want to be in that...
That's not interesting.
As a thinker, as a writer, as a host, to just be out there as a cog in the machine playing the role, it's boring.
I mean, the world is a complex place.
I change my thinking about things a lot because, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm stupid, but I like it.
It's because stuff happens, right?
And you want to live and participate in the world of ideas, not as a combat sport.
I mean, you argue with people.
You get passionate about things sometimes.
But the idea is to learn, to persuade, to become smarter, to help your audience become smarter— And that's not about trying to beat the other guy into submission.
But so much, I mean, really on television, media is constructed that way as this, like, spectacle.
And I'm not above why.
In other arenas, like, it's amazing.
To just watch two sports teams go at it and see who's going to win.
The only way they have conversations is if it's an echo chamber and there's two people like Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo agreeing on something and they have some thing and they agree about and they talk.
That's a conversation, sort of.
But even that's bullshit because it's pre-planned out and they've gone over what they're going to say in advance.
They're not just talking about things.
And I also think that most ideas...
Or like an idea that's controversial, like your idea of a billion Americans.
Like this is an idea that I think should be expressed in a long-form conversation because it's the best way to look at all your perspectives and see why you...
And I think, you know, like right away, my perspective was I don't think that that's a good idea because that's too many people.
But I see what you're saying and I listen to what you're saying and I go, oh, okay.
I'd have a fat internet cable, and I'd hire someone to drill through the ground to whatever the fucking nearest point is, and I'd be on a mountain.
Not that I don't like people, but I really, really like nature.
I mean, I like to go, but the thing is, like, outside of the pandemic, my job involves enormous groups of people together, right?
I'm a stand-up comedian, and I do these giant places where there's thousands of people, and then I do the UFC, so I do commentary, and there's thousands of people.
That shit's overwhelming sometimes.
And then there's millions of people that listen to the podcast.
That shit's overwhelming sometimes, too.
And the antidote for that, for me, is nature.
And so to be in a place where I can see mountains and I can just hear birds and I can see trees...
When you catch a fish, there is a weird thing that's going on in your brain that is ancient.
It's ancient.
And even though fishing tackle is very modern, using a spin casting reel, and you've got monofilament line, and these hooks that have been designed and engineered...
You're pulling in this fish.
There's something about catching a fish that ignites a primal part of whatever part of you that's left over from back when this was the only way you were going to survive is if you caught a fish.
And it was probably when you were catching it with a net or with a stick or whatever the fuck they figured out how to use back then.
Or ancient hooks.
That part gets ignited because it's a part of what we are.
Also part of what we are is we lived in nature.
Humans always lived in nature until X amount of thousands of years ago when agriculture and cities and condensed living, people were tribal and they stuck together and they were mostly hunters and gatherers.
That shit is in our DNA, and it's very hard to get out.
And I don't think you can.
And as a grown adult, I think one of the things we should do is recognize that we have some requirements.
And one of the requirements is to be around nature.
Like, there's a physical requirement, and you feel like a better person.
You feel like a better version of yourself when you can go on a hike in the mountains.
Well, it's weird, though, because it's like, I mean, this is like the worst thing, but, you know, it's so boring being on an airplane, and that's just what people want to do.
I think my opinion that this pandemic is bad is not that interesting.
I honestly had not had a chance to really reflect on it until I was there at the airport.
I've been to that airport a million times in normal reality, and you recognize things, but they're so surreal.
Everybody's acting weird.
Everybody's nervous.
There's these hand sanitizer stations everywhere.
Who knows?
We should all wash our hands more, probably, going forward, just like our kindergarten teachers told us.
But it's been such an incredibly stressful time, and I will be fascinated to see when people start getting vaccinated, Like, how bananas do things get?
Like, people are gonna be really excited to, like, get back out to the club, you know, to, like, have fun, go to shows, have just, like, huge parties.
It's Nicholas Christakis, who was a professor at Yale, wrote a book about the pandemic called Apollo's Arrow.
He and I talked about it, and one of the things that he thinks is that once the...
in and then there'll be this time that'll be like the roaring 20s which is coincidentally a couple years after the spanish fluid ended yep and it'll be sort of a similar type situation like is it coincidentally well coincidentally sort of no no no I mean, with us.
It's basically probably the same impetus, the same reason.
I mean, people were locked up for a year or so, and it was a far more disturbing pandemic because it was killing really young, healthy people with powerful immune systems.
Their immune system is actually attacking them.
That was a really scary, dangerous time for this country.
And the bounce back was appropriately wild, right?
The problem that a lot of people have is that this was fast-tracked, and they get nervous about possible potential side effects.
And we don't know what those are going to be.
And then there's a lot of people that are very uncomfortable with the idea of getting very sick after they take the vaccine, which seems to happen with 80% of the people that take it.
Yeah, I mean, well, I can't say, I don't know, you know, I mean, I've read the sort of report, the readout from Pfizer and Moderna, BioNTech, and they said there were very few serious side effects.
If that is all it is, it's just you have severe chills and you feel like shit for a couple days, that is way better than getting the coronavirus and risking the potential death and side effects and long haul people.
In one study, 84% of the people that were in the ICU had deficient levels of vitamin C and only 4% had sufficient levels of vitamin D. Vitamin D is a huge problem.
And it's not just a vitamin.
It's a hormone.
You know, when Mackey was on the other day, he was trying to say that it's a precursor to a hormone.
So I had to look it up.
That's not true.
It's a hormone.
Vitamin D is actually a hormone.
And it's weird because we call it a vitamin, but it regulates so many things in the body and it has a significant impact on the immune system.
But you never hear anybody telling you to supplement with vitamin D. You're not seeing this from any of the leaders, any of these politicians that are shutting things down.
Even Fauci has said it recently that vitamin D does seem to have a pretty significant impact.
But health experts, like people that study the mechanisms of disease and vitamin supplementation, particularly Dr. Rhonda Patrick had a A thing on her Twitter where she published a study that showed positive outcomes in COVID. Vitamin D is a huge factor.
They don't have double-blind, you know, what do you call it?
Clinical trials.
Which I guess...
What are the things that we've seen?
I mean, obviously, it's important to do those kind of studies.
But I do think that one thing we've seen throughout this pandemic is doctors are a little too hesitant to draw conclusions based on lower quality studies when that's the best evidence that's available.
You know what I mean?
It's like, when you have a problem, you want to...
These aren't lower quality studies that are indicating that vitamin D is good for your immune system.
What it's saying is that there's no way to do double-blind, placebo-controlled studies on vitamin D with people with COVID. You'd have to give them COVID. It's a real issue, right?
But what they are showing is that people with significant levels of vitamin D, people that have sufficient levels of vitamin D, have overall, the percentage of people that have a better outcome is huge.
84% is a big number.
When you look at the number of people that have insufficient levels that wind up in COVID units, when you're looking at what vitamin D does, that's well understood, its impact on the immune system.
It's weird to me that people don't take care of their health and don't actively make conscious decisions to make their body healthier, but are relying only on science to come along and give them something.
Give them a medicine.
Give them a vaccine.
Give them a thing.
When there's so much evidence that shows that you can significantly increase your chances for a good outcome if you do catch this disease and maybe even possibly ward off catching it with a stronger immune system.
Like, I am one of the many, many, many Americans who does not do as much as they should to, like, be a healthy person.
And it's a big problem, like, in our society.
You know, like, Americans, we have...
One of the richest, most technologically advanced societies that exist out there, but our population health is not great, right?
Primarily because of what we eat and the amount of physical exercise that we do.
I think in our lives and in our politics, it's not the subject of enough emphasis because it's less comfortable than kind of hoping for pharmaceutical breakthroughs.
Although fortunately, we are getting some pharmaceutical breakthroughs, it looks like.
I'm not picking on you, but you understand that the way people would criticize this They would look at you and look at the choices that you've made and say, this is crazy.
This guy just wants to get a shot in the arm and doesn't want to do the other things that could significantly impact your health.
You've decided to, for whatever reason, just say, I'm going to get this shot and then I'm going to be good.
Whereas there's a lot of evidence that shows that you could increase your health.
And they changed the laws about smoking in bars and stuff like that.
It was like a little kick in the butt to actually try to get my shit together in that regard.
How old were you when you quit?
26, 27. How long ago was that?
So it would have been like 12 years ago.
And it was like...
It was so fucking hard, you know?
I mean, I did it, right?
And lots of people...
Lots of people have quit smoking over the years.
But something that was helpful is that at that time in the history of our society, it was becoming kind of stigmatized.
You know, like, you couldn't smoke anymore in a bar or restaurant.
They were getting rid of, like, the smoking sections in the airports and stuff.
So already before I quit, it was like I knew I was out there, like, on the margins, you know, like, standing outside in the cold and the pouring rain, being like, what am I doing?
Like, this, like...
Right?
Like, I should get it together.
And so it was hard.
It was hard to quit.
It was hard to stay away from, you know, friends and people doing that kind of thing.
I don't know how much of that is accurate because I'm just basing it off that movie, but from the things that I've read, the articles about, like, they researched the actual chemicals that they're putting into cigarettes when they were making that movie, and it's based on a real scientist who actually was working for the tobacco companies and was worried about his life because he was testifying about these chemicals that they're putting into these cigarettes that make them even more addictive than just regular cigarettes.
Like, if you take, like, American Spirits or one of those home-rolled cigarettes you can make, those are bad, but they're not as bad.
Well, and you know what was actually the best thing for my health about this pandemic was just working from home.
Because I used to work in one of those offices where they would have, like, snacks in the office.
And I hated it.
I mean, I loved it, but I hated it.
And I always wanted to say, like...
Like, why do we have M&Ms in the office?
Now, some people can just walk between the men's room and a stack of M&Ms and their desk all day, every day, and not stuff their face with M&Ms.
I was not succeeding with that.
But I never find myself sitting in my basement being like, what I ought to do right now is stop working, go walk three blocks to the store, buy a bunch of M&Ms, and eat a bunch of sugar and gross quality chocolate.
I think one good thing that may come out of this, if there is any good thing that would come out of this, is that in the future, if another pandemic arises, we'll be much better prepared for it.
I think we'll be more accustomed to the idea, and people will take precautionary steps quicker than they did back in, you know, April.
I mean, one of the more unfortunate things that happened was Fauci told people not to wear masks, and the masks aren't going to help you.
And the reason why he did that is because he didn't want people buying masks and them not being available for first responders.
Obviously, the problem with that is now you know that they're willing to lie if they think it's within everybody's best interest if they tell you something that's not true.
And the problem with that is, of course...
Then everybody's like, well, what the fuck?
Now, how do I know when to believe you?
Like, don't believe me back then, because I only said it back then because I didn't want you to buy them all up.
But now that they're available everywhere, yes, you have to wear them.
Just like, logically, I remember a tweet from the Surgeon General, and he said, like, in one tweet, Oh, you don't need to go buy masks.
They're not gonna be helpful to you.
Also, we have shortages for healthcare workers.
And so when somebody says something like that, right, it's like us in journalism, right?
You're supposed to be saying, hey, that doesn't make sense.
What's going on?
And the most reliable source of information at that time was just people living in Asia, you know, people living in Hong Kong, in Taiwan.
They had much better information over there.
They were broadcasting it.
And if you listened at that time, you know, you would know about masks, you would know about the efficacy of quarantines, you would know about aerosolization and ventilation and stuff like that.
And we were just really slow and got to be smarter.
Yeah, it definitely was not our finest hour, like you said.
One thing that I think we've got to really talk about, Jamie, we wanted to talk about this before.
There's a thing that's going around that it's a video clip that's been edited, and it's edited to make it seem like Bill Gates is saying that he's pushing this vaccine because it's extremely profitable, and that there's a 20 times the amount you put in, you benefit from it financially.
That is not what he's saying.
This is really important.
What he's saying is in vaccinating people and preventing illness, the health benefits to the economy overall has a tremendous impact in a positive manner and is explaining this with third world countries and he's talking about it purely from a humanitarian perspective.
He's not talking about it from this profiteering vulture perspective It's a social prophet.
He's saying it, and it's really disingenuously edited, and it was passed around to a lot of people.
I watched the video, and I was like, who would fucking say that?
What is he, crazy?
Why would he describe it like this publicly?
He didn't.
It's not what he was saying.
It's edited.
What he was saying is, when you vaccinate people and prevent these diseases...
Let's hear it, just because it's really important, because a lot of people have sent this to me, and they need to hear this.
Is it not working?
Do you have a Mac?
Doesn't it show it in your bar where you can rewind it?
It's been $100 billion overall that the world's put in.
Our foundation is a bit more than $10 billion, but we feel there's been over a 20 to 1 return.
So if you just look at the economic benefits, that's a pretty strong number compared to anything else.
So, you know, we're here with a pretty strong message that although all these other issues are very important, let's not forget about the great success in global health and maintaining that commitment.
unidentified
I think the numbers that you ran through were if you had put that money into an S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, you'd come up with something like $17 billion, but you think it's $200 billion.
When you take these vaccines, get them to be very inexpensive by making big volume commitments, have that right relationship with the private sector, Get the delivery system so they're really getting the coverage out there.
You literally save millions of lives.
And 20 years ago when we created these new multilateral organizations, Gavi for the vaccines, Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria, we didn't know they'd be successful.
They've gone through lots of challenges about making sure the money gets there, making sure the efficiency is right.
But as we look at upcoming replenishments for those, And we've got so much distractions politically that the international needs like this could get eclipsed if we're not careful.
We see a phenomenal track record.
It's been $100 billion overall that the world's put in.
Our foundation is a bit more than $10 billion.
But we feel there's been over a 20 to 1 return.
So if you just look at the economic benefits, that's a pretty strong number compared to anything else.
The human benefit in millions of lives saved.
So, you know, we're here with a pretty strong message that although all these other issues are very important, let's not forget about the great success in global health and maintaining that commitment.
unidentified
I think the numbers that you ran through were if you had put that money into an S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, you'd come up with something like $17 billion, but you think it's $200 billion.
And, you know, people have edited that and they're passing it around like, oh, my God, this guy's a monster just wants to give you this vaccine because he wants to make money.
Clearly, that's not what he's saying.
There's this weird narrative.
There's this weird meme.
There's this weird conspiracy that Bill Gates is some fucking demon that just wants to make money off of vaccines and he's pushing vaccines.
And what he's talking about is trying to think smarter about philanthropy.
So he's a rich guy.
Like a lot of rich guys, he gives a lot of money away.
But traditionally, you get a lot of put your name on the wing of a museum, just give money to somebody who seems nice.
And Gates has really been a leader in trying to think more analytically about what's a high value.
He calls it their investment in making the world a better place.
There's an organization...
Some people I'm friendly with run called GiveWell, and they do all this kind of analysis.
And so they show that giving insecticide-treated bed nets to people in West Africa to keep malaria off them, that's incredibly cost-effective.
A group called Deworm the World, and they help kids in, I think, Central Africa with these intestinal worms that make it impossible to sort of be well-nourished because you've got parasites living in you.
And it's a hard problem, right, to understand not just how can you help people, but what's the best way to help people.
And, you know, what Gates is saying is that childhood vaccinations are really up there.
They're high on the list of high return public health interventions because when you could save a kid's life, that does so much good, you know, broadly speaking.
But it's bizarre that someone was willing to edit that clip and make it look like a completely different thing that he was saying.
And that this is one of the things that's going around today, is that Bill Gates is somehow or another this evil person that wants to vaccinate everybody because he wants more money.
Also, they prey on our reinforcement of our echo chambers.
People love that.
If you can solidify your position within an ideology, like this ideology accepts me, I'm a part of this tribe, I'm going to say some shit, that guy's a fucking Nazi.
Yes!
Go Matthew!
You call him a Nazi, that's what you're supposed to do.
And the emotional commitment that you have to it and the connection.
Like Jamie Kilstein is a guy who used to be like a deep social justice warrior and then he got attacked by them and ostracized for like Not even anything that makes a lot of sense.
But then was really kind of open about how crazy he was while he was doing it.
He was like, I would post something on Twitter and then I'd be incessantly checking it throughout the day and walking down the street checking it and trying to respond and see who's responding to me and then feeling when someone was angry at you like, ah!
And then like getting involved in that and...
Just the anguish and anxiety that...
I look at so many people that fight on Twitter, and I don't argue with people on Twitter at all anymore.
I very rarely even respond to people.
But what I do do is I'll follow a few people that are mentally insane, like literally genuinely mentally ill.
They're intelligent people that have gotten lost in the Twitter web, and they're stuck.
I'll go to their timeline just to reinforce that this is actually what's happening, and I'll see the degrading of their mental clarity over time, the fighting with people that goes on all day long.
And you'll see 11 hours a day.
Literally, you look at their posts from the beginning when they start to when they end for the day, and it's 11 hours of fighting with people on Twitter.
And you think about, what else could you have done with that time that would have been productive?
Did you learn anything about people during this time?
Did you score points?
Should you be playing video games instead of this?
What do you need to do?
Go fucking get a pickup game of basketball going or something.
What do you need to do that will give you some sort of a competitive feeling that instead you're risking your emotions and I think taxing your mental health?
I think there's a lot of...
I don't like the term mentally ill, but it is an illness.
It's an illness.
You're trapped.
Just the same way a gambling addict is mentally ill...
Twitter addicts are mentally ill.
There's something wrong with that.
It's not good for you.
And so many people are involved in it.
So many people are locked into these really weird, condensed conversations where you're getting what Alan Levinovitz calls processed information.
And he's like, it's bad for you the same way processed food is bad for you.
It makes sense.
The way you describe it that way, I'm like, oh, that is a fantastic way of describing it.
I've come to have dialogue with Nobel Prize winners, with businessmen, with successful politicians, with a lot of interesting writers and thinkers and academics.
Scholars, but then I've also gotten sucked into being mad that nobodies are dunking on me.
But I do think a lot of Americans don't understand how Russian nationalists see the world, right?
And they feel that there was a bait and switch after the Cold War, that it was supposed to be that communism was bad, that the Soviet dictatorship was bad, and that they liberated themselves from this bad regime, and that they were going to now have a better country.
But then it flipped to America, quote unquote, won the Cold War.
And then there was an ongoing process of anti-Russian American foreign policy that continued forward.
And so that instead of disbanding NATO because the Cold War was over, it expanded, right, to the Czech Republic, to Estonia.
You know, there was war in Yugoslavia against Russia's traditional ally in Serbia, all these different kinds of things.
I don't, I don't really endorse this point of view.
I mean, I'm not a Russian nationalist.
But it's interesting to hear from Russian patriots, how they see this, that they feel that the United States, instead of saying, hey, congratulations, You're not under communism anymore.
There's not a Cold War anymore.
That we sort of doubled down, right, on geopolitical rivalry after then, and that they are just pushing back.
So they're pushing back by undermining democracy and pretending to be various groups and having them meet up and compete against each other and starting conflict.
You say, well, how does it help to be trying to sow racial chaos in the United States?
Who is the winner here?
So that's why I say, like, I don't endorse it.
But I do think that Americans benefit from, I mean, not just Russia, but just, like, trying to understand what the world looks like to some of these other countries that are, like, the bad guys, quote-unquote, in our narratives.
I mean, have you, you know, Brian Fogel, the guy who did that documentary, Icarus, you know, he has a new documentary coming out called The Dissident about the Khashoggi.
it, that maybe there's a way that with this idea that you have of having a country with a billion people, do you think that this would force more of a melting pot type situation and have less polarization, that maybe it would be better if there was more that maybe it would be better if there was more of us?
I mean, the idea is that it would be better to have a big aspirational goal, right?
And so that kind of growth, that we are going to triple the population, that we are going to support people having bigger families or families at all, that we're going to be more open to immigrants, that we're going to build the infrastructure transportation-wise that it takes, that we're going to dedicate ourselves to being number one forever and not kind of slipping behind China and India.
Because it gives us something to work on together, right?
It's like going to the moon or facing down the Soviet Union.
It's a project that right now for the past 10, 15 years, all of our politics is picking at the scabs of Of sort of division that exists in our society, which are real, you know, like, lifestyles are different, values are different.
I mean, everybody knows that you go around.
But we have a lot in common.
I mean, I started talking about, you know, China is trying to use their market power to sort of censor Americans.
And nobody in America thinks that's good.
Right?
Like, nobody is like, yeah, I think it's great that, like, Marvel had to take a Tibetan character out of Doctor Strange.
bind in that regard but it's you know it's troubling right like when you see the olympics right on nbc like the broadcast was referring to taiwan as chinese taipei which was like some kind of international yeah and you're watching like this is bs you know like it's fine if the ioc itself because like you want to have china in the olympics It's a big country.
And so, you know, they want to be a pain in the ass about it.
I don't know.
Maybe you've got to give in.
But, like, an American television broadcaster, it's like, have some self-respect.
But they don't know that there's Chinese censorship until after the fact we find out, well, Doctor Strange's mentor was actually supposed to be a Tibetan man.
Tarantino, one of the rare directors with the power to demand final cut on his relatively expensive films, reportedly has no intention of re-editing the picture.
Not for Shannon Lee, not for Chinese censors squeamish about the film's graphic violence, not for any reason.
Yeah, he refuses to re-cut for the Chinese market.
He refused to edit the Bruce Lee scene out in order to secure a theatrical release in China.
Yeah, the Bruce Lee scene is a problem.
For Bruce Lee fans who know of the historically wise Bruce Lee.
Bruce Lee was very wise.
And they made him look like a fucking idiot in that movie.
And it's kind of unfortunate.
He's kind of doubled down on the criticism of that.
But I don't think he was a Bruce Lee fan.
I think if you're a deep fan of Bruce Lee...
You could say, because of some things that he said, that maybe he was arrogant.
I would argue that he's very confident, and one of the reasons why he's very confident is he was, at the time, the premier martial artist of the generation, and reintroducing martial arts, and also a pioneer of this eclectic style of martial arts, which was...
Completely taboo and forbidden.
Martial arts were always very segregated.
The people who did kung fu felt like what they did was the best.
The people who did karate thought what they did was the best.
And you did not share information, exchange techniques, and you did not incorporate them together into one system.
What he did was like completely taboo.
And it turned out to be the very best way of expressing martial arts.
What he did was he's literally the founder of mixed martial arts, putting all these styles together.
But to sort of characterize him as this cartoonish, arrogant buffoon, it's like it's not accurate.
Than looking at Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and saying, oh, well, these are movies about criminals in Southern California who say funny stuff to each other.
I want people to know that the United States is a very low population density country right now.
I am not talking about us pushing the frontiers beyond what is possible in human societies.
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, to say the country's proper name, those are all much denser than even a billion Americans.
So...
I don't think we need, like, off-the-wall science to address these kind of things.
Number one, absolutely 100% real drawback is traffic.
You know, it's, like, the pettiest thing.
Like, ugh, traffic jams.
But it is 100% true that the more people you have, the worse your traffic issues kind of get.
So I love transportation policy.
And my original draft of the transportation chapter, my editor was like, it's a bit much, Matt.
You gotta...
You gotta reel it back here.
There's a lot that we could do to have better transportation infrastructure in terms of pricing our roads, in terms of being smarter about how our commuter rail works, in terms of being smarter about how we locate houses.
I mean, if you like to nerd out on transportation stuff, the book is in it for you.
But it is true that this would be tough.
That America does not have a great record at its civil engineering.
Our projects are incredibly more expensive than what people in Europe and Asia spend on them.
And getting control of that and executing things that really make sense would be challenging.
Because when you look at our fast-growing cities, I mean, we've talked about Los Angeles, but, you know, you look at Atlanta, you look at Dallas, places that a lot of people are rushing to.
It's not...
There's nothing wrong with those places.
Like, they're great thriving cities, but the infrastructure build-out is not great.
They sort of take what works for medium-sized cities and then just do more and more of it.
And it's a big problem, you know?
I don't think people are wrong to be concerned about those kinds of things.
But, you know, we're getting better at those kind of pollution things, right?
The air and the water are much cleaner than they were a couple generations ago.
We are, you know, even beyond like the electric cars and all that really good stuff, even our gasoline powered stuff has gotten cleaner, which is all really good.
And, you know, so I don't think that we have sort of unmanageable waste problems or are going to in the future, particularly because you consider, look, if more people move here, it's not like there wouldn't be waste, like, back where they were coming from.
He's from Argentina and he didn't understand that when you deal with rain and the runoff, you literally shouldn't be in the ocean because it's toxic.
And he got really sick.
Because he basically got poisoned because he's in this water that's just filled with pollution because it's all coming down the LA River, which is really just a fucking cement tube.
So it's in plastic and garbage and all the oil from the water, or the oil from the roads rather, because it never rains.
And when it does rain, you're dealing with layer upon layer upon layer of oil that's just seeped into the city streets.
And all that shit, all the pollution, all the brake dust, everything, it's washed off into the ocean.
Imagine that with three times the number of people.
This is like an area that I wish I knew more about.
I know that in the part of the country where I live, that there used to be much, much more severe problems with wastewater runoff into the Potomac River, into the Chesapeake Bay.
And there was a big effort to mitigate it, and I honestly don't know exactly what it was.
This is like, you know, I got to do a good interview.
But it's...
It is doable, is I guess what I'm saying.
A lot of East Coast rivers, the Hudson, around where I grew up, have gotten much cleaner over time by trying to manage the wetlands, things like that.
I don't know what the Los Angeles situation is exactly.
But so, I mean, this is definitely the area where I kind of take the most heat from people, is on these environmental, ecological-type issues.
And...
I get it.
At the same time, I don't think we can have a solution for our society that involves shrinking and having fewer people, right?
Or just wishing away the desire for economic development in the third world, right?
Or developing world, I guess is the polite phrase for it.
Either we are going to be able to come up with You know, the electric vehicles, the clean fuels, the next generation nuclear stuff, all those kinds of things that let us have a prosperous, clean planet or else we're not.
But saying, well, we're going to like shrink our country or not allow people to move here.
But you know there's also a real problem with topsoil.
There's a diminished topsoil in this country that is pretty significant, and they don't really have a way to replenish it.
Other than the people that are doing regenerative agriculture, which is a different way of farming than monocrop agriculture.
Monocrop agriculture, when they're growing hundreds or thousands of acres of corn, It's totally unnatural.
It's not normal.
And they have to replenish that soil with nitrogen.
They have to do different things to try to fertilize the ground.
but there's an estimation of the number of years that we have of topsoil left and i think it's less than 60 i think some crazy low number of years that we can continue with the process that we're currently using and you know there's a lot of scrambling because a lot of people feel like we're regenerative agricultural even though you can buy food from these farms that essentially has almost a zero carbon impact like overall because that's the way animals are supposed to live
they're supposed to eat the grass and then shit the manure becomes a part of the fertilizer it's all alfalfa yeah it all like grows into a ton and they're also not supposed to have monocrops right but But you can't feed enough people with fast food and all the things that people desire today with the structures that are in place in terms of delivering chicken to Chick-fil-A and beef to Jack in a Box.
You're not going to get that through the same kind of regenerative agriculture because it doesn't yield the same amount of animals per acre.
You'd have to have much more ground and you'd only have a certain amount of areas that are capable of doing this.
You have to have areas that are growing a lot of grass naturally.
You have to have areas where these cattle can live year-round.
There's going to be a lot of issues about agriculture.
This is not really about population growth, but about the sustainability of the food system and also I mean, we were talking before.
It's not good for us to have...
Like, the processed food machine is an incredible business success story, but it's not good for us as people and probably not sustainable as a sort of soil management thing.
So, you know, I agree.
Like, we need to go back to that.
But the world on a calories basis just has an incredible amount of food to sustain human life.
But we are on the wrong side already of that curve, right, in terms of these, like, meat yields and factory farming and overuse of the antibiotics and stuff there.
If we were to pull back on those kind of things that are problematic for completely separate reasons, that actually increases the amount of, like, grain and acres and stuff that's available because meat is this incredibly inefficient use of the land.
Yeah, but you're saying this like you're the Chinese government and not individual farmers and businesses that have set up a life of doing things a certain way.
Like, this is not like you can have some national government mandate where the...
They come in and tell you, this is what you're growing now.
This is why, you know, when all the trade stuff was going down with China, right?
The issue was always the farmers.
We made these huge payments to American farmers to make up for their sort of loss of those external markets.
Because Americans don't buy enough food to keep the American farm sector in business.
But then you raised, I think, the excellent point.
This is not in the book.
But just like the farm system that we have is kind of dysfunctional.
You know, like we could just continue with soybean monocultures and exporting all this corn oil all around the world.
You know, we are sending corn to Mexico now as a result of NAFTA, right?
And A, I mean, it's like they traditionally cultivated corn in Mexico.
It's a very Mexican thing to have corn.
Also, we're the rich country and they're the poor one.
And normally trade would go in the other direction, right?
Exports would come, you know, raw materials from the less developed countries.
But America is just such an incredible farm...
Superstar.
The other really weird thing is that we're the world's number one agricultural exporter.
Number two is the Netherlands, which, you know, that's like a tiny-ass country, super-duper crowded.
But that's because their farming operates on totally different principles from ours.
Everything's in greenhouses, and the yield per, what do they call it, hectare over there is astronomical compared to what we do because it's a much more capital-intensive system.
So it's more expensive.
But, you know, they get staggering amounts of fruits and vegetables and things like that grown out of very, very small areas of land over there.
So there's a lot of different things you can do with an agricultural system.
But our way is just great at using land lavishly because we have a lot of land and not a lot of people want to work on farms.
Yeah, but the growing of all that food is beneficial to society.
And the reason why they received subsidies in the first place was this all post-World War II. You know the whole reason for it, because they thought that there was going to be legitimate—they really thought there was going to be a problem with the food supply.
And so to subsidize the farmers meant that, listen, we're going to make sure that we put money into this so we have a stable food supply so that we have stockpiles.
Something has to be done where we – I don't know if it's even possible to, again, turn that battleship around and make these enormous monocrop agriculture organizations, these huge companies, change how they do things.
But there has to be a way to use regenerative agriculture where there's a natural method, and the natural method is how the world works in terms of the wild.
The animals chew the grass, they shit it out, it fertilizes, and because of that, in the wild you have rich soil in a lot of the places where there is grass and these animals grazing.
You don't really have that when you beat that ground into the dirt, you know, literally and figuratively, over and over again.
Some method has to be devised in order to make that soil...
I don't know what that would be.
I mean, it seems like there's a problem with growing what we're growing now for the population that we have now.
But you're saying that we give away or we outsource or ship out, export two-thirds of the food that we make.
I was in Denmark one time, and so people took me to see a factory or some kind of facility where they were turning pig shit into biodiesel to run, you know, fuel trucks.
And it was the most foul-smelling thing that I've ever seen.
When people talk about a healthy way of life, they talk about sustainability.
They talk about having a communal farm that the neighborhood shares.
They talk about...
You know, figuring out a way to incorporate animal manure and agriculture and food waste and use that for composting and to have some sort of a natural way of living and dealing with the land.
Now, look, I mean, I think these like agricultural questions are really, really fascinating for the sort of long term environmental picture of the planet.
I mean, as you say, it is difficult politically to get people to change anything, but we have a lot of money, right?
There's a lot of federal policymaking going into the agricultural process, and we probably have to put more into it because, you know, you're going to ask people to change.
And then, as you say, we've got to tell you, look, if you want to get this money, you have to move to these more integrated methods where you don't have the same crop in the same field year after year after year.
Well, I don't think there's a big problem with the smaller, they call it specialty crop kinds of things.
I mean, I might be wrong, but my impression is that these problems come from the large, like, one-crop enterprises that are sort of dominant in the Midwest.
That's not historically how farms have been But it's very effective labor-saving technique.
You know, because if everything's the same, you can run a giant tractor off it.
The other question is, moving a bunch of people into the country that don't exist here right now, what would change with the quality of life for the people that live there?
I mean, I talk a lot in the book about the studies of the, it's called Mario Boatlift, sort of influx of people from Cuba into Miami circa 1980. Scarface.
a lot of cocaine over there man there was just a look at all of these Venezuelans who have moved to Colombia because of the sort of terrible stuff that's happening in Venezuela I And it was the same thing.
It was like wages for Colombians didn't go down.
There was a study about Hurricane Maria which drove a lot of people from Puerto Rico into the Orlando area.
And so pay for construction workers went down, but pay for people who work in restaurants and retail stores went up to offset it.
So I think that kind of immigration, like, it just can be great.
I mean, it enriches culture.
It's fine economically.
Of course, you don't want 600 million people to just, like, come tomorrow.
Well, you're talking about people having more kids.
So just in Trudeau's government, they implemented a policy like this in Canada last year, maybe two years ago.
They do a phase out, you know, like you were suggesting.
So it's only people, I think it's like the bottom 60 or 70% of the Canadian income service from Get It.
It's a very effective way to combat child poverty.
The Trump administration, they wouldn't put it this way, but they, in their tax law, they expanded the child tax credit and sort of took a step in this direction.
So it's, I think, less radical than you might think.
I mean, if the Senate Republicans were doing it, at least moving in that way, It's a pretty liberal idea.
I mean, Democrats, Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennett had a proposal that's similar to this.
They call it the American Families Act.
So there's a fair amount of political support for these kind of ideas.
And I think it could do a lot to reduce child poverty, which is good.
I think it's sad to have kids growing up in poverty and to strengthen families, which is something conservative people care about, as well as more progressive-minded people.
Well, I certainly am in favor of doing anything that's possible to lessen child poverty and child starvation and hunger and child health care and making sure that people are taken care of.
But when you're dealing with a billion people and you've got X amount of hundred dollars per month That's going to how many hundreds of millions of families?
Well, desperation is the mother of invention, right?
When people are desperate, they do things that make them, you know, they work harder to try to get ahead.
And a lot of times people with families...
And they realize that, oh my god, I have to take care of this family and these people that I love so dearly, I'm gonna really bust my ass and work hard.
I think you are still easily at the margin where going out and working and having some more money makes a real difference in your life and in the life of your family.
And do you think that this will strengthen- Poverty.
You know, also economically speaking, right, it's like the value of having somebody work 70 hours a week as opposed to 40 as a low paid retail worker.
Like that's not high to society.
Like there's no need for people to be working like crazy hours.
The best case scenario is that they work their way up.
So they work really hard in the beginning and then they use that money to get themselves out of a jam and then they keep improving their condition.
That's the best case scenario.
Obviously there's examples that we could both pull of pro and con.
You know, where it works and where it fails miserably and, you know, people's lives fall apart and you don't take care of your children and they grow up all fucked up because their parents aren't home because they're working for a small amount of money.
Yeah, I mean, he's talking on the very low level of, you know, the developed world and basic vaccinations.
But yeah, I mean, to say to somebody in Kenya, like, well, if you want your kids to not get sick and die, like, maybe go work a little fucking harder, man.
There's a lot of suspicion of the government in America.
This is not a country of people who love the state, have a lot of confidence in government programs.
I think at the same time social security is something that people really like and appreciate because actually cash benefits are much more transparent than the idea that like – sometimes people will say it's very fashionable in the business world to be like, well, we need these like complicated like job training programs and we're going to give people the skills they need.
You know what sounds great?
Like, I would like people to have skills.
I could use some skills.
I don't know.
But, like, does anyone really believe that, like, Congress is going to sit down and, like, make a program that trains everyone?