Dan Crenshaw challenges simulation theory’s abstract claims, arguing it lacks practical answers despite Joe Rogan’s defense of exponential tech progress and sentient AI realities. They critique modern healthcare debates—Crenshaw warns Medicare for All would stifle innovation with price controls, citing Canada’s/UK’s wait times, while Rogan questions uninsured patients’ reluctance to seek care. Crenshaw’s HSA proposal and Georgia’s voter ID law clash with leftist narratives, exposing ideological manipulation like the Lincoln Project’s donor-driven attacks on Trump supporters. Border chaos under Biden, he argues, exploits legal loopholes while ignoring rule-of-law fairness, contrasting with bipartisan successes in Colombia and Texas Democrats’ pragmatic stance. Polarization stems from utopian centralization vs. classical founding principles, with Crenshaw urging rational discourse to bridge divides—though Congress’s gridlock remains a hurdle. [Automatically generated summary]
And we agree that we have fantastic technology that's indistinguishable from magic, if you brought it to three, four hundred years ago, right?
Okay.
What we experience now is nothing in comparison, especially as the laws of technology and they expand at an exponential rate.
If you look at what we can do now and look at what we're going to be capable of a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now, It's going to be impossible to distinguish between reality and simulated reality.
They will develop an alternative virtual reality that's impossible to distinguish from.
So the question is, how do you know if that hasn't already taken place?
And maybe that's how the universe works.
Maybe the idea of things being concrete and physical that you can touch and things that you can weigh is just the experience that we've currently been accustomed to.
Maybe that's not the whole way the universe works.
They turn into multi-celled organisms as they evolve.
And then eventually you get something that's sentient and also can alter its environment.
That's human beings.
That thing starts creating these virtual worlds.
And these virtual worlds are run by artificial intelligence that becomes sentient as well.
So that artificial intelligence continues to create newer and better virtual worlds, and then it's a self-sustaining system.
And this self-sustaining system becomes a new version of reality.
If you think about the idea of multiple dimensions and even multiple universes, There's an infinite number of possibilities for not just life, but life-creating technology that we can't even wrap our heads around.
If there's things on other planets...
Let's imagine a solar system where they don't have the issues that we have with meteors and asteroids.
Maybe they don't have the super-volcano issues that we have.
So they're not dealing with extinction events every X amount of years.
So they've had the ability to go from becoming a primate or whatever it is on their planet that's similar to becoming this super advanced thing without any hiccups.
And they've gone on for millions of years.
So we've been human beings in this form For hundreds of thousands of years, if you go back and you take a guy from 100,000 years ago and you dress him up in a suit and put him in a movie theater, not that you go to movie theaters anymore, put him in a restaurant in Texas where it's legal, and then you wouldn't notice.
He would just be a guy.
He wouldn't be any different than you are physically, other than he probably would be starving to death.
The difference in the world between 100 years ago and now is insane, right?
Well, if you think about what it could be like if you go a million years from now, there's no hiccups.
We don't nuke ourselves.
We don't get hit by an asteroid.
We don't have a supervolcano.
We could have technology that's impossible to even imagine today.
Even in Star Trek, they didn't imagine the internet.
I mean, there's so many things that we can do now.
And they were beaming themselves up in a board.
But the point is that if you keep going and nothing interrupts it...
Your imagination can't even...
There's not even a way for you to think of what's possible when you have hundreds of millions of people innovating without interruption, and they go on for millions of years.
What's possible is just...
Your imagination is not going to be able to grasp it.
I talk to a lot of smart people and I remember some of the shit they said.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
I can pull it off.
But the idea is that There's an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of planets, an infinite number of possibilities in terms of intelligent life forms creating things.
And was it Nick Ballstrom?
Is that the guy who was on?
He tried to explain it to me.
He was saying that through probability theory...
It is more probable that we are in a simulation than not.
Yeah, I've also heard it explained that the reason why it changes is because there's a method that you're using, you're interacting with it when you're observing it, and that's what's changing it.
It's not that it's actually changing because you're observing it, it's because you're interacting with it while you're observing it.
There's a lot of people that believe that you can sort of manifest reality and that reality and the quantum world is somehow entangled with your consciousness in some sort of a weird, spooky way.
My point is that a lot of people will take advantage of this weirdness and sort of apply laws and rules to this weirdness that they have sort of a script for and that you should follow and then next thing you know you're in a cult.
In fact, I think it's more likely, and this is going to get real strange, I think it's more likely that it's an inevitable possibility rather than it's a reality.
I think it's an inevitable possibility.
I think if we don't blow ourselves up, there's going to come a point in time where, did you ever see Ready Player One?
That's probably 50 years in the future where you're going to be able to put on a haptic feedback suit and some sort of VR goggles and you're going to enter into some incredibly advanced artificial reality, virtual reality that's amazing.
And then it's going to be a new trick of, well, how do we prevent people from, I don't know if we can prevent people, or how do we deal with this obvious problem where the virtual reality becomes the preferred lifestyle, which is, it already is for a lot of people, playing video games or on social media or whatever it is.
I mean, it seems like the people that want to go back to the hunter-gatherer days, like, you know, we're better off for hunter and gathering.
Oh, yeah, without all that books and medicine and all that confusing shit.
Like, what are you talking about?
No, we're better off right now.
Like, right now is the best time to be alive.
Even though we just got through a fucking horrible year, that year exposed a lot of weird shit about our civilization.
It exposed a lot of weird shit about a bunch of really freaked out people that are just paranoid and schizophrenic and how many people that are just fragile.
And I was blown away that the conversation about how to deal with the last year became the division...
The division fell upon partisan lines, right, about whether to lock down or not to lock down, about whether people liked masks or didn't like masks.
And at first, that seems really odd.
And so I spent a lot of time analyzing this because it shouldn't be that way.
It should be mixed.
You would think about just because what you're really talking about is somebody's risk assessment and how they perceive risk and how they want to deal with that and how they think everybody else should deal with that.
And It's strange.
I think there's a lot of factors involved.
I do think that there was some political opportunism.
I think that if Trump says something, people reactively say the opposite.
See, the problem is once people get committed to an ideology or committed to a narrative, just because Trump lost and now Biden's in power, it's not like everybody just abandons this narrative and creates a new reality based on objective truth.
I think some of it is the fact that Democrats tend to congregate in urban areas and it might be, you know, the virus is more in your face in an urban area than in a rural area.
But it really boils down to, and there's studies on this, where our brains light up differently when assessing risk.
Now, it doesn't mean that the behavioral outcomes of these studies are a change.
Basically, they would take liberals and conservatives and they would give them a betting, what amounts to a betting game.
And see how they react differently.
Now the actual behavioral outcomes, what they choose, didn't change all that much.
But when they're doing the MRI scans, they see that their brains light up differently.
So that's interesting.
So we clearly assess risk differently somehow.
So I looked at data on the kind of jobs that we choose.
And it turns out, and this is intuitive, you would guess this, that the vast majority of dangerous jobs are mostly populated by conservatives, lumberjacking Hard labor, military, law enforcement.
So it's obvious that we're choosing to engage in risk differently, just overall, in the aggregate.
And so I think that gets at why we think differently about this.
I think we're truly wired differently.
And on top of that, the natural disposition of a liberal to believe in some sort of collective action Whereas the natural disposition of a conservative is to believe that government can only do so much, right?
There's life out there, and sometimes it's dangerous, and it's up to you as an individual to generally assess that.
And that's also the most efficient way to do things in order to get the best outcomes in the aggregate.
So these are two dispositions that are always present, and they manifest in policy outcomes all the time.
And in this case, it's pretty obvious how they manifested into the way we dealt with coronavirus.
And I think that kind of explains it.
And think about it this way, too.
When a more left-leaning public health official talks about it, they always give you the worst-case scenario.
Well, it's possible that if you're 15, you could die.
Yeah, it's possible, but it's also far more unlikely than even if you got the flu.
They leave out that part.
They leave out the context.
They leave out the probabilities.
This is why I've been so frustrated with our public health officials.
Give us the whole truth.
Don't just give us the most dangerous truth.
Don't tell us the tail end of the probability scale.
That's not useful information to us.
It's been very frustrating to watch how we've dealt with this over the last year, around the world, not just in America.
Frankly, we've had it better than a lot of countries.
But that's so accurate is that what a lot of people are afraid of is being alone.
They're afraid of being attacked.
And one of the things about today's culture, particularly with social media, is that it's an attack culture.
It's a bully culture.
And a lot of these people that are doing the attacking and they're doing the bullying, they've been bullied in the real world.
So they want payback.
So they're trying to bully people online.
And that's what you see.
There's a lot of like low status males, a lot of like really weak people who have never really overcome physical adversity or they're not successful, but they found a way online to gather up a group of people that resonate with some of their opinions and they can attack people.
Sometimes it's older men who have failed their life.
Same, yeah.
They've decided that this is their stand.
This is their line in the sand they're going to draw.
Now they're going to be anti-racist or they're going to be anti-homophobic or anti-transphobic or whatever it is, and they're going to attack all these people.
There's so many different ideological pathways that you could choose, that you could get a group of people that agree with you, and then you fight against anyone that opposes these ideas, and you do it in a really...
Aggressive and nasty way, which is something that we should push back against, period.
Ideas should be something that you should be able to discuss and debate and analyze.
You should be able to sit down and go, why do you believe in the simulation theory?
We shouldn't be like, well, you're a fucking idiot, Joe Rogan.
That's why you agree.
It should be like, yeah, I'm a fucking idiot.
But that's not why I agree with this.
That's not why I look at this.
I look at this because I'm curious.
I see all the various components.
I think there's a lot of truth on both sides.
But the problem is when you ignore the truth on a side that doesn't fit with your ideology, then you're not interested in truth.
You're interested in what Chris Rock is talking about.
I always say that you're either wearing a blue jersey or a red jersey, and then you act accordingly, and you repeat these sort of mantras that you think you're supposed to repeat in order to gain favor within that group, make sure they know you're part of the loyalists there.
And if you don't say the things, then that group gets distrustful of you.
But this is a problem we have on the right, right?
So I think the left is power-hungry.
I think the right is paranoid.
And we tend to look for betrayers in our midst, right?
I mean, look, I recognize that not all liberals are risk-averse to an extraordinary degree.
I recognize that.
We're all on a spectrum, from the left to the right.
But in the aggregate, this is sort of what we see.
And then in politics, as you're talking about, we put on these jerseys.
And so I'm just talking in generalities.
Of course the left can be ultra-paranoid.
And of course the right, in its extreme form, can exhibit more power-hungry tendencies.
But it tends not to be.
And if we look at the policies actually being implemented, that tends not to be the case.
But what I see on my side, because I'm always dealing with my side, We tend to be looking, instead of thinking how to persuade, this is the problem I have and I'm trying to change, not that I have, I mean that I think we have.
We talk about fighting all the time.
And I say, look, we have to define fighting as persuasion.
Persuasion is the name of the game in politics.
Look, I can go charge a hill as a seal, and that's fighting, right?
I mean, it looks cool, but I'm going to die.
What I really should do is communicate, maneuver, and kill the enemy that way.
In politics, the fight must be persuasion.
And too often, we get more concerned with saying the things, saying the slogans, saying the things that make us feel good, that make us...
That help us recognize one another as part of the same team wearing the same jersey.
I think that's what he's getting at.
If somebody veers from that, well, they're a traitor.
They're not one of you.
And then they're automatically wrong.
And instead of saying, I knew you were going to say that.
Let me tell you why it's wrong.
Let me explain it to you.
Let's have a debate about it.
We get really mad.
And we go online and we call names because we haven't actually done the background work to at least understand why we think what we think.
And when you understand why you think what you think, that's how you can persuade people.
That's the name of the game.
And the reason I say we're paranoid is because, and we're always looking for rhinos on our side, right?
And so whether you're calling somebody a rhino or establishment or sellout, this is not useful.
This is not useful.
Even if you think it's true, then explain why it's true on that particular issue.
And what tends to happen, and this happens certainly on both sides, is that sort of Puritan thinking drives out that more moderate member of the party.
And I think if there's someone in the community that's hurting because of bad circumstance or bad fortune, we should be able to take care of them.
The same way we're able to keep the power grid up, the same way we're able to fix the bridges, we should be able to provide health care to the members of our community.
So the question is how we get there.
Here's where I get conservative.
I think we should also make people personally responsible for their own health.
I think you should step up and say, hey, I want you to have healthcare based on your current circumstances, but I also want you to do the work to get your health better.
And that's where I think we need to make a division.
And I'm as left as I am right, because I'm left on so many things, but I'm right on so many things, too.
Like Chris Rock said, I'm pretty fucking conservative on crime.
I get angry when I see lax crime or lax law enforcement, when I see people not supporting law enforcement or not understanding the nature of crime or not understanding what happens when criminals realize that there is no law enforcement.
And to say that incentives matter, it might be a conservative position.
I think you could also say it's a classically liberal position.
If I were to try to categorize you, Joe, I'd put you in a lot of classically liberal areas, believing in free speech and free debate.
And these classically liberal ideas that our country was founded on, it does seem to me now that the Republican Party is the only one defending these more classically liberal ideas.
Now, in healthcare, again, sometimes this is what I always say.
Look, we have to – and I think Jordan Peterson puts this the best way about the balance between chaos and order and the balance between the left and the right.
The left representing chaos, the right representing order.
Now, it's not derogatory to say that they're representing chaos.
It just means they're representing constant change.
But that's unhealthy left by itself.
Just like maybe an adherence to pure hierarchical order is also unhealthy left by itself.
And so a balance is needed.
But to solve problems that you want to solve and to get to the change that we agree that we want to make.
I'm not sure that's associated with the particular discussion about welfare necessarily.
But going back to healthcare.
So that's one trade-off.
It's expensive.
And the second trade-off is that if you're talking about Medicare for all, and under these bills that they propose, you are reimbursing doctors and hospitals at a Medicare rate.
Okay, that's a really important part of it.
That effectively means price controls.
That's how you maintain that budget that you say you're going to stick within.
That's how Canada does it.
That's how the UK does it.
That's how all these countries do it.
So there's a particular reimbursement rate.
We're going to pay you this much for this service.
We're going to pay you this much for this drug.
That's price controls.
Anytime you have price controls, you have less supply.
That's an economic truth that you can never escape.
If I say that I'm only going to pay you a certain amount per episode, you're recalculating how many episodes you're going to do, no matter what.
Everybody controls their supply based on a price.
Now, if you think you can get more for that price, you'll increase your supply.
This is always true in healthcare.
It's why during the pandemic this was made really clear.
We have more ICU beds per capita than any other country, for instance.
We have more ventilators per capita than any other country.
We have access to far more drugs than any other country.
Right, because we make it, and that pharmaceutical company might offer it to Australia or the UK, but the UK says, well, we're not going to pay you that much for it, and so they just don't get it.
So, depending on what country you're looking at, a lot of times you'll see, like Australia I think has access to maybe 60% of the drugs that the United States has access to.
So we get something, we pay too much for our healthcare, but we also get a lot for it.
You're much more likely to survive cancer in the United States, you're much more likely to survive rare diseases.
The left will throw out this stat that says, we pay, you know, double what other countries pay for healthcare, but our life expectancy is the same.
That's playing with statistics a little bit, because life expectancy also includes suicides, homicides, these things that have nothing to do with the quality of your healthcare system.
Now, those are problems, to be sure, but they have nothing to do with the quality of care that you're getting when you have a really, really rare disease.
Here in the United States, this is the place you want to be.
This is where people are coming from Canada when they have things that can't be solved there, because it takes them six months to get an elbow surgery.
So we are getting something for our profit-incentivized healthcare.
When you put price controls on it, you're going to get less of it.
I talk to independent clinics all the time.
They're like, we're just going to close.
If we have to take Medicare rates of reimbursement for the care that we're giving, we're just going to close.
We can't make a profit that way.
Hospitals probably won't close.
They've done a good job aggregating different hospitals together to make more profits, but they're going to fire doctors.
They're going to pay doctors less.
Now you have less of an incentive to go to medical school.
You definitely have less of an incentive to be a primary care doctor.
All of these problems start to compound and your healthcare system starts to look a lot like Canada or the UK. Specifically Canada for what Medicare for All is.
And Canadians flee there, again, when they need really, really specialized care.
Okay, so what's a better way to do this?
I mean, I would say simply...
The way Obamacare works and the way Medicare for All would work is it puts the money in the pockets of the insurance companies, in the case of Obamacare, or in the case of Medicare for All, simply it's a one-payer system right to the doctor or hospital, and then they negotiate that price.
A better way to do this, and this starts to look a little bit like, say, Switzerland, where you put the money in the pocket of the patient, the patient then controls it.
Now think about, here's something else we agree on that people need, food, right?
People need food.
And so what do we do?
Do we create these government-run food production facilities and distribution facilities?
Do we tell the grocery store, look, okay, this person's going to go buy some cereal and then we're going to reimburse you for that cereal on the back end?
No, we don't.
We give the person a food stamp, a voucher, and then they go buy what they want.
Yeah, so instead of spending all this money on Medicaid, for instance, take the people who are eligible for Medicaid, and even above that rate, and you could have a tiered program.
Instead of wasting all that money on a Medicaid program that doesn't have improved outcomes, by the way.
It means that when you compare people from the same socioeconomic status and they're in Medicaid enrolled or they have no insurance at all, their health outcomes are no different.
But is it true that people that have Medicare were more likely to go to a hospital to take care of stuff versus people that ignore that issue if they don't have health insurance?
So if you have no health insurance and you worry that this is going to put you into debt for the rest of your life, you're in the same line as someone who has medical insurance who can go to an emergency room, whatever it is, and deal with whatever personal issue they're dealing with and not worry about it being something that ruins them financially forever.
Isn't it a problem, though, that we're dealing with these giant numbers of people and we're trying to figure out what's the same action?
If you have someone who has health insurance versus someone who doesn't have health insurance, just naturally, I would assume, someone who has health insurance is going to get medical care more often or at least seek out medical care more often.
If we didn't need anything else, if we were at our maximum, if we were at the pinnacle of success when it comes to medical technology, then you might be able to make the argument, like a moral argument, okay, the government should just confiscate all of this technology and distribute it equally.
Maybe.
I still don't think it would work very well because you also have to conscript doctors and nurses and hospital administrators into this sort of system where you're forcing them to work the amount that you want them to work, which is problematic.
So how do you get both?
How do you maintain the incentive to innovate?
How do you maintain the incentive to hire more doctors and to compete with one another?
The only thing that drives better quality in a system is generally competition and some kind of choice associated with that.
So again, this is why I brought up the analogy with food stamps.
Because there's a way to do it.
And it's putting the money...
It's empowering the patient to make those choices.
Okay?
It's not saying we're going to leave you out to dry.
It's saying let's empower this patient.
Instead of putting them in this Medicaid enrollment...
Because the other problem with Medicaid, by the way, is a lot of doctors won't take it because of the reimbursement rates and because of how difficult it is to deal with the government.
Nobody likes dealing with the government.
The reason hospitals can make a profit at all is because insurance is why our insurance is so expensive.
Because insurance companies are paying...
150% of the cost of a procedure, whereas Medicare might be paying 60-70% of the cost of a procedure.
So if you make everybody pay 60-70% of the cost of a procedure, you're going to get less supply.
But if you say it costs X amount to repair an ACL surgery, if you blow your ACL out and you've got to repair it, if Medicare is only willing to pay 60% of that rate, what are they saying?
Are they saying you don't deserve any more money because it's not worth that much?
And this gets to another problem that The Trump administration fix was just price transparency, because this is the other thing.
Nobody seems to know how much anything costs, okay?
So the way we price out how much things cost in healthcare is based on these formularies that are derived from CMS, which is Medicare and Medicaid.
With CMS? It's Medicare and Medicaid.
It's the government organization.
And derived from private insurance.
And so that's how we sort of analyze what it costs.
But you go ask a hospital, not all hospitals, but many, and they're like, well, I can't tell you exactly how much it costs.
I'm like, well, what do you mean you can't tell me?
So price transparency something is a rule that was imposed recently that will fix this problem and get us to this point where we can finally start shopping around.
Now, some hospitals do do this and they make a big deal out of it.
They say, look, Here's our prices.
We're posting them.
A lot of independent facilities will do this as well.
This is what it's moving towards.
The direct primary care system that I was just talking about, that's getting at that truth.
It's like, look, this is what your care costs.
Here's all the services you get for $75 a month.
Again, it's not insurance.
It's not catastrophic.
But here's all the services you get.
Now you have a relationship with your doctor.
You never have to talk to insurance.
It's just he or she is there all the time.
So what do you do about insurance?
Go back to the food stamp analogy.
Put money in a...
Health savings account and allow you to choose what insurance works for you.
In the sense that we have private insurance out there and you've got to choose an Obamacare between gold plans and platinum plans and all these things.
But look, we have systems in place that score these plans as well.
And these are insurance plans, okay?
So I would categorize this in three phases as well.
Primary care, insurance, and then catastrophic and pre-existing conditions.
so say cancer and pre-existing conditions lifelong care needed we already have a system for that too that works rather well it's at the state level reinsurance programs meaning the government steps in and basically subsidizes that insurance plan when it gets too expensive okay and that's where we kind of pool our money that's the collectivism they do how so how does that happen like let's say you need your discs fused you have a spinal issue yeah like where's that money coming from um that's probably just insurance i mean
So the way a lot of states have innovated through this is getting waivers from Obamacare.
Because Obamacare legislation is extremely regulatory, is that a word?
Burdensome.
And so you get waivers and then you set up your reinsurance program at the state level.
What this basically means is when that dollar sign hits too much, in order to prevent the insurance company from increasing premiums on everybody, they basically pay them back on the back end.
The patient never really sees this.
So that's how you deal with those really, really catastrophic cases that do cost exorbitant amounts of money.
So there's an answer for everything on this.
And again, what do you get from this that you're not getting from Medicare for All?
You're maintaining the quality of the system.
You're maintaining those profit incentives.
And you're maintaining that choice and competition.
And you're empowering the patient to actually choose.
There's a lot of fraud and abuse that happens in all these government programs.
When you put trillions of dollars of taxpayer money into a program, there's a lot of people that have an incentive to try and extract as much money as possible out of those programs.
Human nature.
Human nature.
And they don't seem to have the outcomes that we'd like them to have.
It doesn't appear to anybody or To any of the people studying this who've done...
Again, there's a lot of university studies on this that would indicate what I said.
You don't get any better outcomes even though we're spending all this money.
So what might be a better way to do it?
And a lot of us think that empowering the patient with those funds, but also ensuring that they have that quarterback as well in the form of a primary care doctor...
Would have much better outcomes, maintain the profit incentives that actually make our healthcare system have the high quality that it does have, but also ensure that we meet the left's goal of getting people access to good quality healthcare.
And if we're not honest about the trade-offs with Medicare for All, we're going to go down this path, and you're going to end up in a place that is less than ideal.
I promise you that.
With much higher taxes...
It's not a good place to be.
But we can agree on the overall goal.
And again, that's where you have – conservatives do have to listen to the left sometimes.
And sometimes they do have these aspirations that I think are worth trying to attain.
But then you have to solve a problem within a framework.
And this is where I'm constantly criticizing my liberal friends is, what's your framework?
What are the principles by which you solve problems?
See, I can name my principles.
I can name the questions that I ask before I solve a problem.
How much does it cost?
Is that sustainable?
Am I infringing on anybody else's rights when I do this?
Am I... Am I adhering to the basic notions of checks and balances and the rights of localities and states to make their own decisions that might fit their population the best?
There's a series of questions.
The left doesn't tend to ask those questions, right?
It seems to me that every time they propose a solution To a problem that we agree is a problem that needs to be solved, that solution is sort of like the first thing that sounds good.
It is fascinating what you talked about earlier, that people who are involved in dangerous occupations, whether it's soldiers or fighters or firefighters, they generally tend to be conservative because they have these occupations where they test themselves.
Whether they're forced to be tested, whether they're forced to be tested, whether it's their will, their discipline, their ability to understand the consequences of whatever it is they have to engage in.
And there's real life risks, real risks.
And people who don't get tested and people who are maybe uncomfortable with the idea of physical risks or don't understand what the consequences of physical risks are because they don't engage in them.
Maybe they don't engage in anything physically.
Maybe everything they engage in is intellectually.
Maybe they don't blend the physical world with the intellectual world.
They tend to be more liberal.
It is really weird.
It's really weird how there's like this line in the sand where you ask a person, what do you do for a living, buddy?
And they go, well, I'm a Navy SEAL. I go, that fucking guy's gonna vote Republican.
You might choose, I mean, you probably do a lot of hard things.
You're an extremely productive individual, which means, by definition, you're doing something that is challenging in order to reach the next horizon, if you will.
But you're still loved as a member of the community.
But here's how you can feel better about yourself.
And one of the best ways to feel better about yourself is to push yourself into a realm where you didn't know that you had the capacity or the fortitude to enter.
Whatever the fuck it is.
Whether it's playing chess or whether it's swimming.
Whatever it is.
Push yourself.
Find a place where you didn't know that you can get to and get there.
And then you'll feel better.
Because life is bizarre.
And it's bizarrely challenging.
And if you decide to not engage in any challenges and you just want the benefits...
You just want accolades?
You just want love?
You just want respect for just existing?
Fucking frogs exist.
Everybody exists.
Trees exist.
They don't ask for anything.
You're asking for something because you want to...
In some way or another, you want to quantify and you want to figure out a way where whatever you're doing with your life is more valuable than what you realize you probably should be doing.
What you should be doing is pushing yourself.
What you should be doing is trying to figure out what makes you satisfied.
There's lows and highs.
There's peaks and valleys.
And unless you experience those valleys, you don't understand and you don't appreciate the peaks.
And some people don't want to experience the valleys.
They don't want to experience failure.
They don't want to experience the uncomfortable feeling of pushing themselves.
They don't want to experience that fucking darkness of not knowing if you can keep going.
But forcing yourself and then getting to the bright light of success Getting to the bright light of understanding your boundaries and your limitations and that these are flexible and that you can expand those boundaries and expand those limitations and become a stronger version of who you are today.
But people don't like that because it makes them uncomfortable.
So what they want to do is chastise all the people who are calling out for them to be better and get angry at all the people that are forcing them into a position where they have to look at themselves objectively and understand that they've got some flaws.
But we all have flaws.
But a guy like you, who's been through buds, who's a Navy SEAL, who's wearing an eye patch for a fucking reason because you're a blown up, right?
You're a guy who understands the real physical consequences of actual danger.
Real danger and real work.
Real hard work.
And overcoming those things.
And a lot of people don't like that.
They don't like being forced to acknowledge the fact that some people have experienced things that they couldn't possibly understand.
And, you know, at the end of Hell Week is the most elated that any man will be.
Because you end Hell Week on a Friday afternoon.
I mean, you've been through hell.
I mean, your body is swollen, it's beaten.
You look like a bag of shit.
It's really impressive what we do to these people.
And that they can sustain it.
It starts about Sunday and then ends Friday afternoon.
And you're elated.
But people, you would think that you'd go to sleep immediately.
But it's not what happens.
There's a problem where we have to get guys to sleep on Friday.
Because they have a...
It's almost like they're elated.
Yeah, there's a euphoric feeling and they won't stop talking.
I would not stop talking.
And then I ate a whole tub of ice cream and I threw it all up.
It was really weird.
And you don't really sleep that much anyway because your body's really bloated so you also pee all night.
But anyway...
Um, but yeah, so you don't sleep.
So you'd think you'd be tired, but you're not because at a certain point you're just, you get that brown shirt.
So that's what happens.
Like if you, if you haven't been through hell week, you wear a white shirt after, after, after hell week, you wear a brown shirt.
It's a very significant thing.
And, um, then you find out that, uh, the training just gets suckier.
And so that, that sucks.
So the euphoria is gone and then you get blown up and who knows, but, um, But that moment is special because there's value in suffering.
And in today's society, we have convinced ourselves that there is no value in suffering, that the entire role of, say, government is to end your suffering.
But this is a false promise.
Not only is it a false promise, but it will create a weak society that is unable to sustain itself.
That's a really important point, and I think there's deep truth in that.
This is why victimhood politics is so dangerous.
And I would say populism is too.
I think the two are almost indistinguishable from each other.
People are always trying to talk about populism on the right and the left.
And I say, look, here's what populism is.
It's telling you what you feel.
It's mirroring your feelings back to you.
It's telling you what you want to hear as opposed to the truth.
I think that's a decent definition of populism.
I don't like it.
I don't like people embracing it.
It doesn't just mean, hey, things that are good that people are for.
Well, you know what?
A lot of people are for $1,600 checks that are free.
And the kind of amounts to the, I think, drastic lurches in welfare policy or infrastructure spending and all of these things that we're seeing.
It's populism on steroids.
It's telling you what you want to hear.
And that's not truth.
That's not truth.
And we have to get back to truth.
And we have to get away from this victimhood mentality where we actually elevate this idea of being helpless.
See, that's what's changed.
That's what's changed in the last decade.
It used to be that, well, you might feel some shame if you were the type to, you know what, I need some help.
I feel bad about it.
I'm going to get back on my feet, but I need some help right now.
That used to be the sort of American way.
We need a safety net.
Nobody would disagree with that.
We need a safety net.
We need to help people who have truly fallen on hard times, who lost their jobs because of COVID. But does that also mean we need to provide a $1,400 check to somebody who never lost their job and whose biggest hardship has been Zoom meetings?
Of course not.
But over 100 million people were getting checks that never lost their jobs.
No, no, no, because we already have a system for that.
It's unemployment insurance.
Our system works fine for that.
And this is always my thing.
It's like, look, I'm in favor of temporarily boosting payments to those who are unemployed on unemployed insurance.
Usually state-run unemployment insurance runs at a formula that would make sure that you're not making more than you would have if you were already employed.
Because you don't want to have a disincentive to go back to work.
What we did in the initial stages of the pandemic was increase that to an extra $600 a week if you're unemployed.
I'm okay with that for a few weeks during hard times.
The problem is Democrats want to keep it forever.
And now every business I talk to is like, I can't hire people.
I have so many job openings right now.
Can't hire anybody.
Because we still have it.
It's $300 a week, but we still have it.
It means people are getting paid to stay home.
They're making a purely rational financial decision.
But again, that's one conversation.
That's at least a debate to be had during hard times.
But it gets to the cultural argument that we're talking about.
There was no backlash for this.
Even on the right, I remember I was a little frustrated with the president, or the ex-president, Donald Trump, the president I voted for, that he was pushing for those $2,000 cash payments.
Maybe it's those mean corporate giants and now those corporate giants are trying to get all woke and get on the Democrats' good side like they always do because they want to maintain their little piece of the pie.
But is that just because they're trying to push this narrative to maintain power or to try to push people into this position where they believe what they're saying?
I know a lot of people that were terrified of being trapped in lines.
I know, I know, I have friends on the left that didn't want to vote in person because, no, I'm telling you, I know- But did they go to a grocery store?
If you wanted voted in person, this is what it would have looked like.
You would have talked to somebody, would have shown them your ID, they'd give you a little piece of paper, you go to a machine, and you vote, and then you leave.
Because every whatever it is, every X amount of days where you have to go to the grocery store and get your goods, you can do that and figure out a way to avoid people and put a double mask on.
I'm saying for people that are risk averse, for them that one day was like, is there a way that I can avoid large groups of people?
There is.
That is mail-in ballots.
So the Democrats were enforcing this concept that if you...
Mail in your ballot.
That's why way more people mailed in their ballot on Democratic sides.
That's why Pennsylvania was so weird, right?
Because in the beginning, the first counts were the people that showed up, and those people were predominantly Republican.
But then as time went on, they started counting in the mail-in ballots, which were predominantly Democrat.
I mean, Kyle Kalinske called this out.
We had a podcast we did, Election Night, with Tim Dillon and Kyle Kalinske, and Kyle explained exactly how it was going to go down.
He said, Pennsylvania's going to look like it's going to be Republican in the beginning, and then it's going to eventually turn towards the Democrats because they're going to start counting the mail-in ballots late.
Well, he explained exactly what happened.
And he also said there's going to be a lot of people that call shenanigans.
Well, those people were the fucking president.
Donald Trump was saying all overnight, all of a sudden, I got all these votes that were for the fucking Democrats.
How'd that happen?
Well, it happened because if you understood the process of mail-in ballots versus people showing up in person, you should have expected that.
That, hey, this is the thing we say, so we say it.
And we just say it over and over again.
Voting is dangerous.
Right, but when so many people do that because they do believe that, Yeah, I don't see how you can say that you're the one who follows the science and then also say that it's less dangerous to go to the grocery store than it is to go voting.
My perspective is, why is it okay that I bank online, but I can't vote online?
If I use Apple ID, Face ID, and I look at my phone, I can get into my phone, I can check my email, I can do all the different things that I do with my phone.
And supposedly it's secure because it recognizes my face.
Or if you have an Android phone, you can use your thumbprint.
Why can't we do that to vote?
If your thumbprint is a unique signature of the individual, we agree with that.
We agree that Apple ID, they allowed me to go to a store and buy hundreds of dollars worth of food with my face.
You know, online banking, mostly secure, but banks still segregate about, you know, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year for banking fraud, right?
The WNBA, there's no argument that they should be getting paid as much as LeBron James.
If anybody tried to bring that up, it would be shot down so quickly, because who the fuck is going to see, unfortunately, who's going to see the WNBA? Certainly there's a lot of fans, but it's a small amount in comparison to the actual NBA. That's where it gets weird.
So the idea that the President of the United States would say that women whatever should be paid the same as male whatever, that's like saying women comedians should be paid the same as Dave Chappelle.
Well, that doesn't make sense because more people go see Dave Chappelle because he's more famous.
And so they'll take you to the landing zone, they'll put you on a raft, and they say, okay, go turn yourself into Border Patrol, if you have kids with you.
If you don't have kids with you, you're a single adult, you might have to pay more, because now you need Coyotes to actually get you across and escape Border Patrol.
And part of that is there is something about the Colombian culture with an adherence to a basic sense of Western justice and rule of law that they were eventually able to climb out of this.
And then it goes to the Mexican drug cartels, who are some of the most elite organizations on the planet, and they're right south of our border.
It's easy to get into a fight with ISIS and the Taliban.
That's actually easy.
I know sometimes you lose an eye, but it's generally easy.
Mexican drug cartels are serious.
I mean, these are well-trained, well-funded organizations that are very, very serious people.
And the reason they charge money to go across the border, well, because they can, because they have power, but also it's risk-free.
See, it's risky to transport drugs across a border or personnel or whoever you want to transport because you might get caught.
When you get caught, you're definitely going to jail.
Single adults, our system works okay.
We generally deport those back.
It's very difficult for us to deal with family units.
There's a long history for this.
I can explain it in detail if you'd like.
It basically started in 2014 because of a court settlement case that made it impossible for us to hold people and then adjudicate their claims and then deport them, at least on a timely basis.
So it initiated the catch and release process that we see today.
Trump basically fixed it, more or less, in the last year.
Biden immediately reversed his policies.
So, when you're charging about $300 a person and you have 100,000 people crossing every month, that's $30 million.
It's a really good business.
And it's risk-free and it's extremely easy.
So, to answer the initial question about how they got t-shirts, I mean...
That's a good guess.
A lot of people will be like, well, Soros organization's paid for it.
Maybe.
I actually don't know.
They do tend to advocate for open borders, so it's totally possible.
And they obviously have the ear of Joe Biden because he reversed the policies they want him to reverse.
Anything's possible.
I'm just saying the most likely scenario is these smugglers organize these people and they get them through.
I mean, it might not be perfect, might make some changes here and there, but we basically have to have a system.
Because if you surveyed the entire world at any given moment, and I've actually seen surveys on this, they estimate maybe about 40 million people would snap their fingers and arrive in the U.S. right now.
They'd just leave their home in that second.
40 million.
So you obviously can't deal with that at any given moment.
So you have to have a process.
So the left is constantly trying to deteriorate that process to the greatest extent so that more and more people come across, and then they call it compassion.
Well, there's nothing compassionate about it.
And here's why.
Because you're cutting in line in front of people who actually go through the process.
My stepmom's Peruvian.
Everybody around us knows somebody who's a legal immigrant who just got their citizenship and how proud they are when they get it.
There's lots of people who have valid asylum claims, too.
African countries especially.
What about the Chinese Uyghurs?
Speaking of the Georgia thing, you know what really ticks me off?
You got Coca-Cola, you got Apple creating statements against the Georgia voting law and how they're so mad about it and they're going to do something about it.
Meanwhile, they are happy to advocate against a bill in Congress that would help protect Uyghur Muslims in China.
Because it hurts their supply chains.
These people are so full of shit, it's hard to imagine.
And if you believe the answer is no, then what you need to do is help them get IDs, because they need IDs for everything.
If you really believe this was a problem, and I know they don't, because they're disingenuous, but if they really did...
And the obvious answer would be to help them get IDs.
And I'm working on legislation that would give grants to states who implement voter ID laws and have it free to get an ID, a government-issued ID. It needs to be free.
It needs to be accessible because you need it for everything.
Because it seems like we're arguing from one position, right?
Well, A, me, I'm just curious, and you understand it.
And so I'm saying, I'm reading this, and am I wrong?
I'm reading this, and it's just about ID. It seems like you should be able to get ID. And we're not talking about, like, immediately, like, you need it next week to vote for the President of the United States.
Well, the stated reason that they give is because they call it voter suppression and they say it's harder for minorities to get ID. Now, any logical thinking person immediately refutes that.
Four out of five Americans believe voter ID is a good idea.
Every time voter ID laws are implemented, or any election integrity laws are implemented in Republican states, minority vote share goes up.
It continues to go up.
There's no evidence of suppression.
There's literally zero.
So they invoke these Jim Crow era visuals for people because they want you to believe that we're racist and they want to pit you against each other.
They want the identity politics.
I mean, if you're asking me what I think they really think, this is what it is.
It's, you're a victim, you're being oppressed by somebody else, and your only way to fight back is to vote for me, because I'm going to give you all the stuff.
I'm going to make sure that you make it.
Now, it's always a lie.
I'm going to end your suffering.
It gets back to our original conversation.
I'm going to end your suffering.
This is populism.
I'm going to mirror your emotions.
If you're down, well, it's not because of something you did.
It's never because of something you did.
It's always because of something somebody else did, and they happen to be on the other side of the political spectrum.
If you vote for me, I'll fix it for you.
I'm going to give you things.
Free this, free that, free this.
And I'm going to keep you angry.
And you can never solve this.
That's the other dirty little secret.
You can never solve this set of problems that is delivered to people.
It's keeping people...
This is why I don't appreciate progressive politics.
Which is different from liberal politics, by the way.
I would distinguish between the two.
appreciate progressive politics because it is designed for power and the only way to keep power is to make people believe that they must give it to you and that they're not empowered themselves what's the best way to make people somebody feel like they're disempowered to make them feel like a victim we're talking about the differences between the way the left looks at things and the right looks at things and the manipulation that goes on getting people to vote for the left How do we bring everybody together?
Playing on the concept of you don't want to be classified as one of the most abhorrent things that someone could be classified as.
A racist.
So what's the best way to show that you're not?
Well, become compliant and follow our guidelines.
And then you have these grifters that cling on to that, that use this as their platform in order to elevate their own social status and elevate their own profile.
There's a thing that happens, whether you're left or you're right, where you're looking to be a part of this group, and you can sort of sell the other side out in order to gain access to this other group.
So they started out as this, like, where are the ones who are, and like Bill Kristol's in this category as well, a bunch of other, like, supposed conservatives that were like, you know, we're trying to maintain the integrity of the conservative movement, and we think Donald Trump is terrible, so we're going to start a PAC against him.
That's how it started.
And it's like, okay, well, I can kind of see...
Fine.
I disagree with you, but at least you're making some kind of rationale.
But then they're going after, like Susan Collins, they're going after the most moderate Republicans possible.
And it becomes pretty clear that they have no intention of maintaining the integrity of conservatism even a little bit.
They've just found out that all their dollars come from liberal donors, and they need to keep perpetuating those mantras, those slogans, those things that...
Yeah, they just totally shift.
They totally sell out the principles they supposedly stood for, and frankly, they've fallen off pretty quickly.
But there was also a fascinating aspect of it is that after the election was over, they wanted to attack the people that were supporters of Trump and then make lists.
The biggest lie of this century is that there's this, like, American right-wing fascism.
The only fascism I see is, well, I mean, those blatant examples is the Antifa crazies who deliberately engage in fascist tactics to implement their little form of utopia.
But also, like, what we're talking about in Georgia, all these woke corporations engaging in what they're engaging in, this is fascism.
A political philosophy movement or regime such as that of the fascists that exalts nation and often race above the individual and stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader Severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition.
Okay.
Forcible suppression of opposition is the way most people think of...
It's what most people think of when they think of fascism.
Because there's a big difference between the right-wing of America and the right-wing of Europe.
The right-wing of Europe does tend to be hyper-nationalistic in an ethno-nationalistic way.
And that's what they're feeding upon.
And so they say, well, you're on the right wing of the spectrum here, so you must be the same thing.
And now, of course, that just ignores basic facts and a basic sense of history and geography.
But that's what they're doing.
And if you're actually being objective about the definition of fascism, and let's use that definition, what you're seeing is in this sort of unholy alliance between CEOs, education institutions, Hollywood, late night comedy.
It is a forced conformity.
Cancel culture is a tool in that forced conformity.
And so this is what we have to be awake to.
In my opinion, that's what's happening surrounding this sort of dispute around the Georgia voter laws.
Now, they're choosing that battleground because Georgia is a swing state, because it's politically expedient for them to choose that battleground.
And also, I think these CEOs are just really afraid of like a thousand Twitter comments.
Now, you and I see that and we're like, that doesn't mean anything.
In Georgia, by the way, in Georgia, the last thing they did in the state legislature in this last week was remove the tax break that they'd given Delta Airlines.
So now it's getting serious.
Now it's getting serious.
And do I like legislative action for political speech?
No, I don't.
I don't like where this is going, but I hope that sends a message.
You need to stop this.
You need to stop taking such a deliberate side in the culture wars.
It's one thing to lobby for your company's, look, hey, this bill affects my company's bottom line.
I mean, look, you need to know this because now I have to lay off 100,000 people.
That's a perfectly fine.
I think that needs to happen.
But if you're going to come into the political arena the way they are in such an extravagant fashion, well, now you're in it.
And to call somebody that is such an extravagant form of insult.
You know, so, and when we do, and this is why I do, I try to go a few layers deep when I argue for why I voted against a bill.
You know, I do these kind of here's the truth videos on my Instagram.
And they're on YouTube and everything.
But, you know, just why did I vote against it?
Because it's easy to say the talking point, like, well, it would reduce jobs, right?
It would reduce investment in jobs and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
But people want to know why.
People generally want to know that next layer of reasoning.
It's easy to provide that for them.
And so I do.
And the Democrats tend not to, and they're very good at singling in and focusing in on that emotional, just that heart string, and they're tugging on it.
Because to call somebody a racist is an extreme statement.
The incentive would be to appeal to the center, to people that are rational but...
They look at some of the things—that was a problem with Donald Trump, is that he's so polarizing that people who maybe would lean right don't want to vote for him because he stands for a lot of things that they don't like.
Right, but it epitomizes— What their opposition is.
Is that he's saying, go there and have a strong presence, and then you get these QAnon fuckheads, and they burst through and take pictures with their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's office.
That's what a lot of people on the right are looking for.
They're looking for a reasonable person who has their shared beliefs, but who's not a rude person, and also a person that they can identify with or support, because that person, they represent hard work and conservative values, but also like a unity of the United States, not...
People punish you unfairly or unfairly for any given externality that might happen.
He was, I think, unfairly treated.
I was a big defender of Trump's policies during the pandemic.
Now, that's different from his press conferences.
I think one of the reasons he lost popularity was because of those press conferences that eventually stopped.
But it didn't work for people.
People didn't like him.
Now, I see past it, because I'm not an emotional guy.
I've never seen Trump in this emotional light.
I just don't.
So I look at, well, what is this administration doing, and what's he really saying?
That's what I look at, and I think it was entirely defensible, and I defended it vehemently.
I'm very much against lockdowns.
I'm very much against mandates.
I think the federal government did exactly what it should have done, which is invest a lot of money into helping or at least creating a customer base for vaccines, create a PPE distribution network, help people get free healthcare for COVID, did exactly what it should have done.
It's weird, too, because, and you're seeing this in Austin a little bit also, which is this culture around being a vagrant.
Because in San Francisco, we would have training trips there.
I know the area pretty well over the last decade or so.
And those training trips forced me to walk around the city a lot, all parts of the city.
And what I noticed was these are not necessarily people, a lot of them are, maybe have mental illness or drug addiction, but a lot of them are young, able-bodied people engaging in what looks to me like a vagabond culture.
And I saw it when I was driving here to see you in Austin.
Where I'm like, oh, who are these young guys waving to people in tents under the underpass?
It's really interesting.
They don't look like vagrants in the traditional sense.
They don't look like people with mental illness.
They don't look like people who have truly fallen on hard times.
They look like they like living.
This is weird.
They're young, able-bodied people, so what is going on here?
And if people are allowed to live in an environment where you don't have to figure out a way out of your problem, where you can just sort of slide into some sort of predetermined Yeah.
And I understand the struggle of being disciplined.
I understand where these people are coming from.
But I just think we have to find some fucking middle ground.
That's what concerns me about our culture right now, our country, our community.
And I think a lot of this is accentuated by social media and these echo chambers that people engage in.
People are more and more inclined to dig their heels into the sand instead of to look at what the other side is saying and go, is there any validity to what they're saying?
I'm looking at this Georgia thing where everybody's opposing it, and I'm like, is there any validity to this?
It's like maybe the fucking...
If there is some sort of a compromise, maybe that compromise is like, let's help people get IDs.
Instead of saying that this is all racist and terrible, how much time do we have until the next vote in Georgia?
Can't we have some community outreach program where we help people get IDs?
You have a DUI. And you need to get something, or a government ID, because the question isn't necessarily a driver's license, but a government ID. Right.
Because nobody says, hey, it only can be a driver's license.
Nobody says that.
It's always government ID. Right.
So if that's the problem, then by all means, let's fix that.
There's a lot of people that don't want to get the vaccine because they're worried about the government.
That exists in minority communities and in more poor communities.
What are your thoughts about this vaccine passport concept?
Because a lot of people find that deeply problematic, giving the government this ability to let people travel or not travel based on whether or not you've been vaccinated.
The left cannot let go of COVID. They can't let go of it.
They want it around.
They want to keep spending money based on this sort of moral stance that we need to keep supporting communities because of COVID and that we need to keep doing things and taking excessive action because of COVID. They cannot let it go.
What Chris Rock was saying, though, about, like, gangs.
Like, you have, like, I'm a conservative, and I believe...
You have these predetermined patterns of behavior that people subscribe to, without any independent thinking, without any objective thinking.
It's a real problem with human beings.
I think ultimately what everybody wants is what's good for the community.
They want for themselves selfishly, but they also want for their friends and neighbors and loved ones and family members.
They want what's good for everybody, but they can't agree in what is good for everybody.
And then when people don't have, they look at people who do have, and they go, well, how the fuck do they have?
And then some grifter will come along, and they have because they've taken from you.
And therein lies the problem.
Because if you're not educated, or if you haven't deeply researched the ideas, especially with an objective perspective, you can sort of believe a lot of these grifters, a lot of these people that come along, and they say crazy shit like, tax the rich, or eat the rich, and like, oh, Jesus Christ.
I'll eat you.
How did they get rich?
Did they get rich from stealing or did they get rich from discipline and hard work and decades, decades in the trenches?
Well, a classically liberal philosophy would ask that question because there's a sense of justice involved with any question.
And that sense of justice is, did somebody infringe on your rights?
And what are rights?
Well, life, liberty, property, generally speaking, in the classical sense.
Now, you can go further back in time before classic Enlightenment principles came about.
In the, you know, 18th century.
But then you're dealing with feudalism.
Then you're dealing with tribalism.
Then you're dealing with what I think a lot on the left want to bring us back to.
The sort of subjugating people into different identities and hierarchies based on those identities.
That's a really bad place to be.
They want to bring us back to that moment in history.
What the Enlightenment period did was say, look, you can keep dividing people up all day long.
Eventually you just get to an individual.
So maybe we should look at how individuals act and then have a really rational structure about how we define incentives and how we define justice.
And justice should be defined as person A infringing on the rights of person B. Or person A making it in a hierarchy for unworthy reasons, something other than a meritocracy.
A lot of the well-intentioned people on the left, they're well-intentioned, but they do tend to live like they're still in grad school.
I know because I went to Harvard in a policy school.
I went to the Harvard Kennedy School after the military.
There's an infatuation with being able to design the perfect policy on paper.
Now, that's the first step, of course.
Now, the second step is how do you implement it?
And also, again, whose rights are you infringing on when you implement these things?
These are the questions they don't ask.
This is what a conservative always asks.
Again, when I talk about how to solve problems through a framework of limiting principles, this is what I mean.
You have to ask these questions.
And so what is the practicality of this?
And it's not practical at all, frankly, depending on what they mean by a COVID passport also.
Maybe we should define that first.
But it's one thing to ask people, like, hey, I don't know, wear a green bracelet if you already got the vaccine and you've already had COVID or both, either or.
But I know how crowded they are every time I'm there, and yeah, there was definitely a time period where there were ghost towns, but that hasn't been the case for many, many, many months.
I have a friend who lives in Nevada and their community was ravaged by suicide with young kids and they're devastated by it and they're trying to figure out like what there's a massive escalation of suicides in high school age kids because of the pandemic and the lockdown.
It was a real weird thing because once you lie about that publicly because you're doing it for the greater good of all the people, then they're going to go, well, what are you saying now?
And why are you saying that now?
And then when Rand Paul confronted him and said, why are you wearing two masks when you've been vaccinated?
It's a real confusing thing because you're dealing with something that, for the most part, most people, other than people who are obese or with pre-existing morbidities, I think the average of people who died from COVID, it's 2.6.
For people who die, you know, we're not discounting people that have long-term issues with it.
But we're also, I mean, this is something me, as a person who has literally dedicated most of my life to fitness and health and wellness, it's infuriating to me that you don't take into account that a healthy body can deal with this.
And a healthy body can...
Your immune system works.
It's a real thing.
And this idea that there's nothing you can do other than put three masks on and hide, that's not true.
Your immune system varies depending upon your rest, your vitamin intake, water intake, exercise.
And she was on here last week, and she realized at the height of the pandemic, at the beginning of it, that most of the people that were dying or that were hospitalized were obese.
So she lost 40 pounds.
And she put herself through this rigorous exercise routine, restricted her calories, and she feels so much better now.
And I'm like, you should be a spokesperson.
You should be the person expressing to people.
Personal responsibility.
She lived most of her life.
She's 36 years old.
She lived Most of her life like this.
And now, all of a sudden, she realizes, like, oh my god, I could die!
Not to mention all the other health benefits associated with this.
You know, COVID's only the third leading cause of death.
The first is still heart disease, which is primarily, you know, often caused by obesity, just being unhealthy, then cancer, then COVID. And cancer also, a lot of it is caused by inflammation, obesity, poor diet choices.
Everything causes cancer, but this whiskey causes cancer.
When you're carrying around all that excess tissue, you're compromising your systems.
All of your systems, your cardiovascular system, your immune system, everything is compromised by this massive amount of excess body mass and inflammation.
You're dealing with a lot of different issues that compromise your health.
You compare COVID numbers from California and Texas, and California and Texas are always really good two states to compare, because one is completely controlled by Republicans at the state level, and one is completely controlled by Democrats, maybe at every level.
Okay?
And they're both similar in size.
We're both border states.
We're both major, major states.
Okay.
And so, comparison of policies is always a nice thing to see.
That's why we're always talking about Texas and California.
When you look at COVID trends, they're basically the same.
But the problem with LA is it's always been liberal.
So it's like there's no competition.
It's like everyone in the Hollywood business, in the movie industry, in the television industry, you are punished if you have any other ideology other than progressive and liberal.
I think we need people who listen to what the left want.
Like, again, like, they want some kind of change, and you gotta, like, you gotta listen to it, because a lot of times it's...
You know, it's expressed in a very emotional way, and maybe it's healthcare, and healthcare is just a great example, because it's like, yes, maybe we should get people access to better healthcare.
Why not?
People who are falling on a hard time should be helped, but if they take advantage of the system, should they also be helped?
People want a better life, so should they be able to process themselves through our immigration system?
Yes.
But should they be able to just claim that they have some kind of asylum and then cut in front of the line in front of everybody else who has waited years?
Right, but if you're dealing with exceedingly poor people that are from another country that are trying to do better for their life to get across the country, it's very difficult to get asylum, right?
And in the end, only about, especially from these Northern Triangle countries, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, only about 10 to 15% end up making that cut.
Now, if you're coming from Ethiopia, I bet that percentage goes a little higher.
If you're a person that lives in Mexico, and maybe you're not persecuted, but you want to do better for your family, and you go, you know, United States, there's a lot more possibilities, there's a lot more opportunity.
And so the question is you cannot advantage somebody just because they have the geographic advantage of being able to walk across our border.
It's not fair to the rest of the world.
If our moral high ground is sustained because we believe that people who are being persecuted truly have a right to come into our country.
It's within our laws.
Then you have to make it fair for everybody, and you can't clog up the system for people who are clearly taking advantage of it.
Look, two years ago when this crisis was happening, because it bubbles up every once in a while when they think they can get away with it, and I went, and because I speak Spanish, I was able to talk to a whole line of migrants that was there right at the Texas border.
I talked to some families from Guatemala and asked them why they're there.
And they give their line, like, well, we're fleeing poverty.
I mean, it sucks.
Basically, it really sucks down there.
And I believe them.
They're obviously telling the truth.
Then I get to the end of the line of this Cuban man, and there's no way that I do have training in telling somebody who's lying and being able to interrogate somebody.
This guy was not lying.
This guy was a trained engineer in Cuba, been jailed multiple times, managed to escape, escaped to Central America and eventually made it up this way, claiming asylum for that reason.
That's a pretty good story.
And it was pretty clear as he broke down in tears that he was probably telling the truth.
It's pretty obvious that people who have talking points written down when they're turning themselves into Border Patrol about what to say because the first step to this process is...
It's proving that you have some kind of claim to asylum.
It's not adjudicated yet.
You still have to go to a judge, but you have some kind of claim.
Now, the way the Trump administration got a hold of this problem was to say, okay, fine, you have a claim?
Great.
Let's have a portion of you at least remain in Mexico, in Mexico City.
It ends up being maybe 5% to 10% of people who are claiming asylum.
We're going to have some of you wait down there, and you'll get your hearing down there.
We'll make agreements, asylum cooperation agreements, with Northern Triangle countries like Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador, and we'll say, look, you can actually apply down there or apply in a neighboring country.
So you think that most of the people that are progressive that look at this immigration issue and are more liberal and they're more open to this idea of open borders, the reason why they're doing it is because they're kind of compassionate, but they haven't looked at the actual statistics of what this means and what happens and why and what's the incentive?
Anybody who even links themselves to socialism, they're like against.
So, you know, again, I don't know.
I just know...
That's not...
I'm not...
Hyper-concerned with the political ramifications of it, because in the end, if they end up becoming citizens, fine, I'll just convince them to vote for me.
But the question is about justice.
What is fair?
What is moral?
And do we give people a free pass because they had a geographical advantage to take advantage of our system, claim a sign when they had none, end up here?
Because here's the problem.
I don't know that I really finished this thought.
But what Trump did was basically disincentivize people coming across by saying, hey, adjudicate your claims down there.
What Biden says is, hey, let's reinstitute catch and release.
So 90% of the people coming across now in family units, by the way, that's an important statistic.
I'm not going to get fact checked on this.
Single adults still get sent back.
There's still a lot of deportations happening.
But if you're in a family unit, if you have children with you, that's your ticket.
And that's because of a Flores settlement agreement that happened in 2014. It's a court case, and I won't get into that, but that's why it happens.
So you get catch, you get release, and they say, hey, come back for your court date.
Now, who really shows up for their court date?
Not many.
The left claims a lot due.
They're lying.
They're relying on certain studies that took place only in New York City, very specific population.
A much better indication of this would be a pilot study in 2019, I believe, that DHS did, that showed that out of about 7,000, I think 7 or 9,000 migrant families, 90% didn't show back up for their court cases, because why would they?
What incentive do you have to show back up?
Even if you show back up for that first one, why are you going to show up for the second and the third?
And definitely not going to adhere to your deportation order.
When we do a deportation order in America, we don't, like, lock them up and put them on a plane.
This is infuriating to a lot of people because if you're an American and you go overseas, you still need a negative test to come back into the United States.
Guess what?
You absolutely do not need that to be an illegal immigrant.
When people are getting tested and you're hearing about these numbers, like dozens and dozens of people tested positive, that's because NGOs are probably testing them.
What's an NGO? Like a non-government organization, like a church or some other immigrant activist organization that's helping these people.
Like, what if someone makes it across the border illegally, they get detained, and they turned out to be positive for COVID? Well, they're already past that point.
I think it's proof that the Biden administration is now dealing with, which is when you have an incentive for thousands and thousands of people to cross the border every day, it's really difficult to deal with.
But isn't it also that they were politicizing this idea that Trump was detaining people and separating families and then putting people in these cages?
The way to stop that would be to make these places, if you find the primary places where people illegally immigrate from, what would be the best way to enhance those places to make that less likely?
No, we passed bipartisan legislation in the last session along these lines.
Let's invest in this.
This is a worthy investment.
Plan Colombia, which is the U.S.-led plan that got Colombia to where it's at right now, It's an extremely amazing success story.
And it's now, again, you've got a Colombian people and a government that you can work with.
And so that's a requirement anytime you do this.
And it's rare, unfortunately.
Do you have the same thing with Northern Triangle countries?
Yeah, you kind of do.
I mean, look, you had...
What was it?
Which president was on the Tucker Carlson show recently?
Are there Honduras or Guatemala?
No, it was El Salvador.
It was El Salvador president.
And this is obviously a guy we can work with who wants to work with us.
The Mexican government, you know, they're going down an interesting track right now, which I don't quite understand.
However, they definitely don't want caravans of people coming through their country, and they definitely don't want to keep empowering on a financial basis the Mexican drug cartels.
They want to work with us.
This is why the Trump administration was so easy for them to engage in these agreements with them.
And the fact that the Biden administration just ripped them up on day one was absolute insanity.
That was a request from immigration activists from the far left that want more illegal immigration for maybe political purposes.
And that's all that these Democrat politicians are listening to.
Now, not all of them.
You always ask me for, who's on the left who's saying something different?
Well, there's actually multiple Texas Congress members, Democrat Congress members, who at least have somewhat spoken out against the Biden administration for what they're doing.
Henry Cuellar is probably the best.
He's probably the most bipartisan member that I can think of.
I mean, he's on gun legislation with me, that guy.
There's a ridiculous polarization between the two sides.
A ridiculous right versus left narrative.
How do we come together?
How do we join together?
Because...
whether it's a guy like Trump or whether it's a person like Biden, these people that pull us in the left or pull us towards the right and then make being in the center a crime or make being in the center something that's chastised.
The nature of politics is opposing sides, and you're never going to escape them.
You have different dispositions, and those dispositions are rooted in psychology.
They're rooted in human history.
In today's manifestations, we call them the left and the right.
We call them Democrat and Republican, but they've been longstanding for a very long time.
And there's two different dispositions.
One believes fundamentally in a good-natured way that if we just had enough power in a centralized way that we could form humanity into a more utopian reality.
I don't believe that.
That's not my disposition.
My disposition is I think you should structure government with a set of incentives and with a light touch, simple rules for a complex society, and that you should acknowledge that bad things can happen and that risk can happen, but that the best possible outcomes come with that simple approach to governance and a simple set of incentives, and that you cannot fundamentally transform human nature the way you'd like to.
Because these different dispositions will always manifest, no matter what.
That's the first truth.
And so those dispositions always manifest into different policies.
And we will disagree on those policies.
And it's not clear what the center is, necessarily.
There's people who have left-leaning tendencies and some right-leaning tendencies.
Maybe they claim that they're fiscally conservative but socially liberal.
It's something you hear a lot.
That doesn't actually turn out in the data the way I would like it to.
So I don't know how to campaign to that group, necessarily.
They're not a base that you can rely on for voting.
They're just people with different ideas.
Sometimes they have different ideas because they just don't know all of the facts, and sometimes they just legitimately do know all the facts and they just legitimately have different ideas.
Either way, I don't know how to differentiate, and so it's very difficult for a politician to rely on that as a voting base.
You're always going to have your voting bases.
These are some truths that you cannot escape.
And another one would be it's very hard to define the middle.
None of this is bad.
None of this is wrong.
We have differences in our politics and our ideas.
And we created a system.
The masterful thing about the American system is that we've created it in a way that allows us to have these debates in a vigorous way and transfer power in a peaceful way.
Even if it was messy this time, it's still transferred.
And we dealt with it.
And that's an amazing thing.
No constitution is older than ours.
Can you imagine that?
There's a lot of countries that are way older than ours, but no constitution is.
No constitution enshrines inalienable rights the way ours does.
There was some genius in the founding.
We should appreciate that.
That's the center, I suppose, is that classical founding that we agreed upon at one time, where you can't tell me what to do You can't infringe on my rights.
It's a live and let live philosophy.
That's the American way.
The more we try to veer from that, the more we're going to end up in these pockets.
Because the more the left goes extreme, the more the right feels it needs to go extreme to respond to that.
I think that's what I see happening, generally speaking.
And so what's the best way out of that?
It's tone, I think.
I think it's tone.
I think it's, look, know why you believe what you believe.
And be able to express it in a rational way.
If you can't then you shouldn't trust that person.
And debate.
And debate heavily.
And if Congress is gridlocked, then Congress is gridlocked.
That's fine.
Remember, those are laws that must affect every single person in America.
There's nothing wrong with gridlock in Washington.
Okay?
Because guess what?
You can still solve your problems at the state level and the local level.
You can still go vote in your school board elections.
You know how people vote in their school board elections?
Like 3%.
You know how people complain about their education system?
Even my supporters will be like, I'll go to like an event and I'll be taking pictures with people and somebody will say to me, oh man, I give you so much hell online.
I'm like, why?
Because they're bored.
They're losers.
You obviously like me, but you're contributing, and this is from my own side, you're contributing to the toxicity that we're all feeling.
And look, I do think, I'm speaking from my own partisan hat here, but I do think the Democrat Party has taken on positions that they never would have taken on 10 years ago.
I think they've moved way to the left.
I don't think the Republican Party has.
I can't distinguish my current Republican Party from a policy perspective from Reagan's.
Now, the tone is different, and that's what needs to change.