April 6, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:54:07
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day I have fury in this place This place, Austin? | ||
| No, your studio. | ||
| Oh, what's the theory? | ||
| Tell me the theory. | ||
| Well, it looks like a spaceship. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So here's my theory, which is you had this grand master plan to get Elon Musk to admit that he's an alien. | ||
| He's definitely an alien, but that's not correct. | ||
| This already existed. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| You bought it as is? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's a long story, and I can't get into too many details, but this was a conference room, and so we converted this. | ||
| The conference room was already circular. | ||
| We converted it. | ||
| But you put this weird alien stuff on it. | ||
| Yeah, this stuff we put on. | ||
| These are just sound deadening panels. | ||
| So that wasn't an attempt to get Elon to admit that he's an alien? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Okay, so here's how I thought you were doing this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You've conditioned him over time, right? | ||
| You bring him into the studio, you're drinking with him, you got him really high. | ||
| I didn't get him really high. | ||
| I don't even think he inhaled. | ||
| Did he inhale? | ||
| He took a little puff. | ||
| Well, the rest of America thinks differently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's just naturally high. | ||
| Pop probably doesn't work on aliens. | ||
| But you get him comfortable, and then you put him in a situation that looks like his home base, and then you ask him that question. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he answered it kind of funny. | ||
| He answered it exactly like an alien would answer it, I would think. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| Did it work? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| His denial of the possibility of alien visitation was interesting. | ||
| And it got a lot of people like, hmm. | ||
| Like you've never thought about it, really? | ||
| He believes in the simulation theory. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't believe in the simulation. | ||
| It doesn't explain anything because who's running them? | ||
| If they're running us, who's running them? | ||
| It doesn't explain existence. | ||
| You don't understand the simulation theory. | ||
| It's not that someone's running. | ||
| It becomes the universe itself. | ||
| The idea is that... | ||
| But somebody created it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But who created them? | ||
| Okay, us. | ||
| Listen, if we exist, right? | ||
| We do exist. | ||
| We agree to that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I had this conversation with Scott Adams. | ||
| He was on my podcast and I was kind of... | ||
| I had to think about it later. | ||
| And it still fails to explain existence for me. | ||
| Because if we're the ones who created it, then still somebody like us in a future state still created... | ||
| It created the reality that we're in. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I get that there's this kind of circular reasoning associated with it, but it still fails to explain some basic truths. | ||
| But it doesn't. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| Because here's the thing. | ||
| You have single-celled organisms. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| They didn't even understand cell phones, right? | ||
| It was like Kirk out. | ||
| Like he had a fucking walkie-talkie, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's pretty close. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| But meanwhile, you couldn't Google shit on it. | ||
| 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 get the theory, I just don't know how to believe it. | ||
| I don't know how somebody can believe it. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Do you believe in video? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Video is time capture. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If I videotape you right now, this is being videotaped and someone is going to watch it later. | ||
| This is time capture. | ||
| You're capturing a moment in time. | ||
| But I can touch it. | ||
| I can manipulate it. | ||
| You can't manipulate this theory in any sort of way. | ||
| It's a fine theory, I suppose. | ||
| I'm just not sure what the point of it is. | ||
| Are you a reductionist? | ||
| Are you one of those guys that reduces everything down to the simplest of terms? | ||
| Not everything. | ||
| Some things deserve a complex conversation. | ||
| But in this case, my first question is, what's the point of the theory? | ||
| Is it meant to explain us in some existential way? | ||
| It's not meant to explain anything. | ||
| The theory is... | ||
| It's kind of for fun. | ||
| It is inevitable, if we don't kill ourselves, if we don't blow ourselves up, if we don't go back to Mad Max days... | ||
| We don't nuke ourselves back in the Stone Age. | ||
| It's inevitable that someone creates something like the simulation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the Matrix. | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| I would like to think that the human psyche and the human consciousness is a little bit more libertarian than that. | ||
| A little bit more individualized. | ||
| A little bit more rugged and... | ||
| And it's unable to be captured in that sense. | ||
| Now, the year 2020 might have convinced me otherwise. | ||
| And it scares the hell out of me, frankly. | ||
| But you're in Texas now, and that's what we're all about, is that independent-minded thinking. | ||
| And I would like to think that it would break the system, that it's just not possible. | ||
| Well, the simulation might be something that you can exist in and use the same principles that you can exist in as a rugged individualist in reality. | ||
| Like, it's just because it's a simulation. | ||
| Yeah, but there's an answer for everything in this theory. | ||
| Well, it would just fix it because it's so advanced. | ||
| I'm not saying it would fix it. | ||
| I'm saying it might be an alternative reality. | ||
| Human beings that might have created, or intelligent life, might have created an alternative dimension that exists in what you would call cyberspace. | ||
| If it fully forms out, what if someone in a lab, what if some scientist figured out a way to literally create another universe? | ||
| There's a theory about black holes. | ||
| You know anything about supermassive black holes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Inside of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole in the center of every galaxy that's one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy. | ||
| The bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There's a theory that I don't totally understand, but I'm going to repeat it like as if I do. | ||
| That inside that galaxy, if you go through that black hole, there's another universe inside. | ||
| Another universe filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with black holes in the center of them. | ||
| You go through each one of those black holes, there's a new universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies. | ||
| So the universe being infinite, it's too big for dumb people like you and I. I should say I and you, just call me dumb first. | ||
| That's the only time it's more polite. | ||
| I'm minored in physics, Joe, so I know what I'm talking about. | ||
| It's like five classes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just this week and I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson posted a video on his Instagram. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm trying to pull it up right now. | |
| It might have been on Twitter. | ||
| I thought you'd be more entertained by my theory about you trying to trick Elon into admitting he was an alien. | ||
| I'm trying to be cool about that theory because I don't want Elon to know I'm tricking him. | ||
| Is it the gig up? | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| It's probable but not true? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, what you're saying. | |
| Neil Tyson was on your side of this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| After all the thought. | ||
| I got Neil Tyson on my side. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| I'll take Neil. | ||
| If the simulation theory was true, you could point at any moment in the timeline, and that would be us. | ||
| We're about to create the simulation, but we haven't done it yet, and we don't know how to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| That's sort of why I wanted to get him... | ||
| W-U-T. Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't have a fucking case on his phone. | ||
| And I told him that was stupid. | ||
| And last time I saw him, his phone was cracked. | ||
| And that is proof he doesn't know what he's talking about. | ||
| He's got some knucklehead ideas. | ||
| He's like, ah, it's an elegant device. | ||
| All theoretical physicists have knucklehead ideas. | ||
| I mean, that's the entire point of a theoretical physicist. | ||
| They got too good at math. | ||
| They got board-proving theorems over and over again. | ||
| Well, he's an astrophysicist. | ||
| Yeah, well, which requires some theoretical physics in it as well. | ||
| It's fascinating stuff. | ||
| It's beyond my scope, to say the least. | ||
| So the most advanced physics class I ever took was quantum mechanics, and it just becomes math, right? | ||
| And I was not an engineering major. | ||
| I was an international relations major doing a minor in physics, which is an odd thing to do. | ||
| But I liked it. | ||
| Because I love science. | ||
| I love math. | ||
| I was good at it. | ||
| So I wanted to keep pushing that side of my brain. | ||
| Because you're working two different muscles in your brain when you're doing liberal arts on one side and science on the other. | ||
| So I love doing it. | ||
| But when you get to trying to... | ||
| Explain to somebody why you don't know where a particle is at any given moment. | ||
| It's only you know the probability of it. | ||
| This becomes confusing, and the math behind it is even more confusing. | ||
| I'm glad I didn't advance much further than that. | ||
| Yeah, when you get into particles and superpositions, you're like, wait, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| It's both moving and not moving. | ||
| It's here and not here. | ||
| It's in two places simultaneously. | ||
| And if you view it, if you're observing it, it changes the way the particle behaves. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What? | ||
| And we're not sure how. | ||
| Nobody really understands it. | ||
| That's why it's fascinating. | ||
| It's spooky. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So I'm like, well, okay. | ||
| It implies that there's some... | ||
| Unseen connection between us and the object and between objects themselves. | ||
| I mean, quantum entanglement is when you can entangle these two particles and they will copy each other even from lengthy distances. | ||
| This is how you do quantum computing or quantum... | ||
| What's the word I'm looking for? | ||
| Not a... | ||
| Well, a part of computing, but basically security with quantum computers. | ||
| This is sort of that theory being applied to that. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| Meaning it's like a peer-to-peer encryption, quantum encryption. | ||
| It allows people to get away with a lot of fuckery, too, right? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| It's why we should advance it more than the Chinese do. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't even mean that kind of fuckery. | ||
| I mean, like, psychic fuckery. | ||
| Like, that's that movie, What the Bleep Do We Know? | ||
| Like, you want to get a physicist mad? | ||
| Talk about what the bleep do we know. | ||
| Talk about the fuckery in that movie. | ||
| I haven't seen the movie. | ||
| You ever seen that movie? | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh-uh. | |
| It's all about... | ||
| You know about the secret? | ||
| You know about the idea of the secret, the idea of the law of attraction? | ||
| I saw that a long time ago, too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's the end up in a cult. | ||
| And someone's banging your wife and you have to pay 10%. | ||
| That's how you're drinking weird Kool-Aid. | ||
| Yes, that's how it works, man. | ||
| People are strange. | ||
| We want to find meaning to things that don't necessarily have meaning to them. | ||
| And we want to apply rules to things that maybe don't necessarily have rules, like life itself. | ||
| Life itself is very bizarre. | ||
| Well, the search for meaning, I think, is what's behind this conversation. | ||
| What I believe is an extravagant theory of a simulation. | ||
| Maybe, yeah. | ||
| No, maybe. | ||
| I'm not married to the simulation theory. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Great movie, right? | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty good. | ||
| Fun movie. | ||
| I think that's going to happen. | ||
| I don't think that's far away. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's more interesting than... | ||
| That seems likely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That seems likely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And, you know, is this a good thing? | ||
| It doesn't seem to me that it is. | ||
| My position is that it's a thing. | ||
| I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. | ||
| I don't know if agriculture is a good thing. | ||
| Everything's a trade-off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's so many fragile people in our culture. | ||
| I was blown away by the politics of it. | ||
| I'm a politician, so this is what I analyze. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a problem, right? | ||
| And then that's definitely part of it. | ||
| However, after Trump lost the election, that didn't stop. | ||
| That movement, pro-lockdown movement never stopped. | ||
| So it was not clear to me then that that was the only reason. | ||
| But it is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But they'll never even do an after-action report on it to the point to where it's ridiculous. | ||
| I thought you were showing us something. | ||
| And so I put another few factors in there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There might be some explanation there. | ||
| For sure, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think people tend to try to find a group that they can attach themselves to. | ||
| And Chris Rock has a great bit about this. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| You can find... | ||
| Mick Maynard, who is one of the matchmakers for the UFC, posted this on his Instagram. | ||
| Go to Mick... | ||
| You got it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So Mick Maynard posted this from the great and powerful Chris Rock. | ||
| And this is... | ||
| We can watch this because it's on his Instagram. | ||
| And Chris will holler at me if it's an issue. | ||
| But I fucking love Chris Rock. | ||
| And this is one of the best points. | ||
| It might not be one of his best bits... | ||
| But it's one of his best points ever. | ||
| It's so accurate. | ||
| Because he's talking about... | ||
|
unidentified
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We all got a gang mentality. | |
| Republicans are fucking idiots. | ||
| And Democrats are fucking idiots. | ||
| And conservatives are idiots. | ||
| And liberals are idiots. | ||
| And anyone that makes up their mind before they hear the issue is a fucking fool. | ||
| okay Everybody's so busy wanting to be down with a gang. | ||
| I'm a conservative. | ||
| I'm a liberal. | ||
| I'm a conservative. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| Be a fucking person. | ||
| Listen. | ||
| Let it swirl around your head. | ||
| Then form your opinion. | ||
| No normal, decent person is one thing. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I got some shit I'm conservative about. | ||
| I got some shit I'm liberal about. | ||
| Crime, I'm conservative. | ||
| Prostitution, I'm liberal. | ||
| It goes on, but that's where the clip ends. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they do it all day long. | ||
| I find that to be the most... | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| The most probable, if somebody's saying something extremely crude and awful to me online, it's probably a younger man. | ||
| It doesn't necessarily. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're interested in supporting your gang. | ||
| Yeah, and that's your gang or team. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Wait, who's paranoid and who's power-hungry? | ||
| Which one? | ||
| The right is more paranoid. | ||
| Can you switch it back and forth, though? | ||
| Left is paranoid sometimes, too. | ||
| Look, everybody's on a spectrum, right? | ||
| And I should say that in the beginning, right? | ||
| I'm analyzing in the aggregate the coronavirus. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Republicans in name only. | ||
| I've never used that word against anybody. | ||
| Even if I think that this... | ||
| Explain that. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| It's a commonly used term in conservative politics. | ||
| The rhinos. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Mitt Romney's a rhino. | ||
| Susan Collins is a rhino. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Mitt Romney's a rhino? | ||
| He's not conservative? | ||
| Because he turned on Trump. | ||
|
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Oh, that's hilarious. | |
| And I can disagree with him for doing that, but the name-calling frustrates me because it's a way to bypass debate. | ||
| Name-calling is always a way to bypass debate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's always the use of it. | ||
| It never has good intentions behind it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| My wife said I wasn't allowed to. | ||
| Your wife loves you. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| You're having a sip. | ||
| This is the most American whiskey available. | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| Buffalo Trace. | ||
| It drives out those more moderate members that you need to actually persuade people, especially in certain districts. | ||
| And so, look, I don't think I take any left-wing positions. | ||
| I'm very conservative. | ||
| What do you mean by you don't take any left-wing positions? | ||
| What are left-wing positions that you oppose? | ||
| Well, what issue do you want to talk about? | ||
| I mean, anything. | ||
| Healthcare, on their energy mix, on taxation, on border, on just about anything. | ||
| We disagree. | ||
| This is the nature of politics. | ||
| This is healthy disagreement here. | ||
| Well, let's go to healthcare. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wouldn't it be nice if everybody had healthcare? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The left is right about that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this gets to another point I think you were kind of making earlier, which is there's good ideas on both sides. | ||
| I do think we have to listen to what the left wants sometimes, not all the time. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| But on healthcare, are they wrong to say everybody should have access to good healthcare? | ||
| Is that a wrong statement to make? | ||
| No. | ||
| Of course it's not. | ||
| I think of us as a community. | ||
| I think of the United States as a community. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Incentives matter. | ||
| It matters a lot. | ||
| I think that's what you're getting at. | ||
| Human nature matters. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, first, we have to agree on the change. | ||
| Now, in this case, we do. | ||
| Everybody should have access to good health care. | ||
| Yeah, we all agree on that, right? | ||
| Sometimes we don't agree on the change. | ||
| Like, on the border, we don't agree. | ||
| The left wants to go a totally different direction. | ||
| Well, let's just talk about healthcare first. | ||
| Let's go to the border, too. | ||
| I would love to do that, too. | ||
| I'm sticking to healthcare. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| So they want people to have access to healthcare, and they want to do it through Medicare for All. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We say, no, you can't do it that way, because if you do, there's trade-offs associated that I don't think that we should bear. | ||
| What are those trade-offs? | ||
| Well, the trade-offs would be one that's really expensive. | ||
| So you have to double or triple people's taxes to pay for the amount of care that they want to give. | ||
| Double or triple? | ||
| Double or triple, at least. | ||
| That's what every study would show. | ||
| This is not disputed, by the way. | ||
| I'm not saying things that a Democrat would disagree with. | ||
| This is well known. | ||
| This has a large cost to it. | ||
| But how do you triple? | ||
| Like, if someone's in a 48% tax bracket, how do you triple their taxes? | ||
| That's a really good question. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| You're talking in the aggregate. | ||
| And look, Nordic countries that do do this, for instance, we have the most progressive tax system in the world, by the way. | ||
| Nobody believes that, but it's actually true. | ||
| Nordic countries tax their middle class exceptionally more than we do. | ||
| Our top 1% pays 40% of taxes. | ||
| That share increased after the tax cuts under Trump. | ||
| Do they have a benefit to that tax increase? | ||
| Sure, they have a large welfare state. | ||
| So they have a very large welfare state. | ||
| Do they have a lower crime rate? | ||
|
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That's the trade-off. | |
| Do they have a lower crime rate as well? | ||
| I'm sure it depends on the location. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We do. | ||
| Because we make most of them here. | ||
| Because there's a profit incentive. | ||
| That's why we make most of them in China. | ||
| On some of the more generic stuff. | ||
| That was a problem during the pandemic that was being talked about. | ||
| When it comes to your next generation drug, that's made mostly by American Pharmaceuticals because there's a profit incentive. | ||
| Is it invented by most American pharmaceuticals, but then produced by China? | ||
| Is that what the issue is? | ||
| They might produce a certain compound or something in China. | ||
| It was not our most exceptional drugs being produced in China. | ||
| There is supply chain issues that we're addressing that we should address. | ||
| Is there a hierarchy of drugs? | ||
| Like essential drugs? | ||
| There's a hierarchy of businesses, essential businesses? | ||
| Well, there's the most advanced kind of cancer drug, for instance. | ||
| You're only going to get that here in the United States. | ||
| You're only going to get it in terms of the way it's invented or the way it's processed and produced. | ||
| I mean, get it, period. | ||
| Get it. | ||
| Because we make it? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is the issue that they're buying what they want? | ||
| This is where it gets weird, right? | ||
| It's like, if you give someone food stamps, should you say, well, you can only buy real food? | ||
| You can't use food stamps to buy cigarettes. | ||
| It's a different conversation. | ||
| Can you buy cigarettes or food stamps? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| Can you buy booze? | ||
| No. | ||
| And it would be the same with healthcare. | ||
| Can you buy... | ||
| Can you buy Cocoa Puffs? | ||
| I'm not going to let you distract me here. | ||
| So we would... | ||
| It would be the same with healthcare. | ||
| A lot of people have health savings accounts. | ||
| So this is a tax-deductible, basically a tax-free zone you can put money into, but you have to spend it on healthcare. | ||
| So yeah, there's qualified things that you can spend that money on. | ||
| Imagine a system where you put your money into that health savings account. | ||
| And if you can't afford healthcare, the government puts some money in there, and then you have a choice of insurance plans to buy. | ||
| Or one thing I'm working on is direct primary care. | ||
| And this is separate from insurance. | ||
| But we need to get back to this place in America where you feel like you know who your doctor is. | ||
| You have a quarterback for your healthcare. | ||
| And that quarterback is your primary care physician. | ||
| And a lot of people don't have that. | ||
| You might have that. | ||
| I have a specific doctor I always go to for just basic stuff. | ||
| Just really basic stuff. | ||
| Usually telemedicine involved. | ||
| Usually just a phone call. | ||
| You don't go to them when you break your arm. | ||
| But they're your primary care doctor. | ||
| Now, direct primary care is a system that's already growing in America. | ||
| It's about $75 a month on average, and you have total access to a doctor. | ||
| So it's more like a gym membership than it is insurance. | ||
| And there's no co-pays. | ||
| There's no third-party insurance. | ||
| That's what I want to normalize in America to get people to this point. | ||
| And again, you could put that money on a debit card for the poor. | ||
| Explain what you're saying. | ||
| Like, when you're talking about that money, where's this money coming from? | ||
| How does it get allocated? | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Every study shows this. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Doesn't have improved outcomes? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is that malarkey? | ||
| Is that fucking around with statistics? | ||
| A lot of studies have shown this from qualified universities. | ||
| But hold on a second. | ||
| You're talking about someone getting medical care or not getting medical care? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| Because you always get medical care in America. | ||
| How so? | ||
| You just show up. | ||
| Hospitals never turn anybody away. | ||
| It would be a myth to say that... | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's not. | ||
| For whatever reason... | ||
|
unidentified
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It's not? | |
| It's not. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The same motivation, the same action... | ||
| You get your healthcare either way. | ||
| Again, our pricing system sucks. | ||
| Our payment system sucks. | ||
| That's what everybody's pissed off about. | ||
| When you're enrolled in Medicaid... | ||
| I'm not saying Medicaid's fault that you have worse outcomes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is that unreasonable? | ||
| It doesn't end up turning out that way necessarily because their deductibles are so high. | ||
| So you know that when you go seek out, hey, I just want to check up on something. | ||
| You got a $6,000 deductible. | ||
| Is that what a deductible is for Medicare for All? | ||
| Well, in Bernie Sanders' idea of Medicare for All, you would never pay for anything. | ||
| And again, that sounds really nice. | ||
| It does sound nice. | ||
| It does sound nice, but I explained all the trade-offs you're getting with that. | ||
| You've driven profits out of the system completely. | ||
| How do you do that, what Bernie Sanders wants? | ||
| How do you merge the two? | ||
| I'm trying to. | ||
| Is it possible? | ||
| Well, the way I'm explaining it, I would say it is, right? | ||
| How do you have your cake and eat it, too? | ||
| Because I'm not willing to sacrifice the quality of our system For what Bernie Sanders wants. | ||
| I'm not willing to make us look like Canada. | ||
| We're the last country in the world truly innovating. | ||
| Now, if we were done innovating, if we said we don't need any... | ||
| You mean with medical stuff? | ||
| Medical devices, pharmaceuticals, all of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So is the idea that the reason why Medicare is only willing to pay 60-70% of the procedure is because they believe the procedure is overpriced? | ||
| It's a negotiation. | ||
| It's a formula. | ||
| How do they justify that? | ||
| Well, they're saving money. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what they're saying. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Hold on, stop. | ||
| When you say put money in a health insurance account, what does that mean? | ||
| Where's that money coming from? | ||
| So do you get to allocate how much money goes to this or to that? | ||
| It would be means tested just like anything else. | ||
| Means tested, how so? | ||
| It means if you're poor you get more, if you're you, you don't get any money. | ||
| But when you say the money goes into some sort of account, the individual who wants health care, what happens if that money runs out? | ||
| What if you have so many health problems? | ||
| What if you're just unfortunate biologically? | ||
| Well, you'd be buying insurance with that health savings account. | ||
| You would be buying insurance. | ||
| It would be up to the individual to choose which insurance they buy or don't buy. | ||
| So they would have to be educated on this. | ||
| Yeah, that's why you have a primary care doctor as well. | ||
| So the primary care doctor would also have to educate you on what kind of insurance you need? | ||
| You already have to be educated on it. | ||
| I mean, that problem already exists. | ||
| How so? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, you have to make a choice. | ||
| You don't have to be educated. | ||
| You can just make a choice, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But choice is important. | ||
| There's this idea out there that nobody knows how to make choices for their things. | ||
| That's a common refrain I hear from the left. | ||
| People are just too stupid to do it. | ||
| It's not that they're stupid. | ||
| It's just they don't understand what's going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's complicated. | |
| It's complicated. | ||
| 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 | ||
| That's a lot of fucking money for spinal surgery. | ||
| What if your insurance doesn't cover that? | ||
| How does one deal with the deductible? | ||
| 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. | ||
| In Medicare for All, you have no power. | ||
| So are you defending the current options that are available? | ||
| Or are you... | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| I'm advocating for change on this. | ||
| But what's the specific change? | ||
| What do you think the specific change should be? | ||
| Liberalize HSA accounts to an extraordinary... | ||
| You've got to do this in steps, right? | ||
| I would lay this out. | ||
| HSA? What is that? | ||
| Health Savings Account, the thing we talked about. | ||
| Government puts money... | ||
| Instead of government spending hundreds of billions of dollars, wasteful dollars that don't have the outcomes we wish they had... | ||
| Where's that money going to? | ||
| What's the waste? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the waste? | |
| Well, a lot of it's through fraud, for instance, because people who are not qualified for Medicaid still get on Medicaid. | ||
| What makes someone qualified for Medicaid? | ||
| It's a means-tested program. | ||
| So it's a matter of how much money you make? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So there's a lot of people that make money that don't want to spend that money. | ||
| They lie? | ||
| This happens with any welfare program. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Have you argued with anybody on the left about this? | ||
| Have you ever had a debate? | ||
| Every day, because I'm on the healthcare subcommittee now. | ||
| But have you had anything, like, publicly, where people can sort of like watch... | ||
| The Joe Rogan show. | ||
| Yeah, but it's only me on the other side. | ||
| I don't really understand what I'm talking about. | ||
| You know, I have ideas about what I would like. | ||
| I would like everybody to have healthcare. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, by the way, that's basically their only point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what most people would like. | ||
| They would like everyone to have healthcare. | ||
| I don't think they understand... | ||
| They don't understand the trade-offs. | ||
| And everything has trade-offs. | ||
| There are no solutions in policymaking. | ||
| There are only trade-offs. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, Medicare for All. | ||
| People need health care? | ||
| Okay, just give everybody health care. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's like, people should have higher wages? | ||
| Okay, just raise the minimum wage. | ||
| No problems, right? | ||
| No trade-offs. | ||
| They pretend like there's no trade-offs with any of their solutions, and I reject that. | ||
| And I'm always trying to expose what those trade-offs are to people. | ||
| And explain to people why there's a real reason why we should have a debate about this. | ||
| And there might be better solutions. | ||
| Better solutions that maybe take a scalpel to a problem instead of a hammer. | ||
| And those solutions have to be tailored around, I think, classically conservative principles. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What do you do for a living? | ||
| Well, you know, I'm a social worker. | ||
| Oh, well... | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You voted for Biden-Harris. | ||
| We have dispositions that are different. | ||
| You should do things that are hard. | ||
| They help you build capacity. | ||
| You should do things that are hard. | ||
| Chapter 8 of my book, Fortitude, American Resilience in the Area of Outrage. | ||
| I'm not plugging it or anything. | ||
| You just did. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| People plug things. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| You should do things that are hard. | ||
| That should be a quote. | ||
| It should be a picture of your face and it says, you should do things that are hard. | ||
| And you do it all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's all I do. | ||
| I don't like to do things that are easy. | ||
| I don't like things that are easy. | ||
| I don't do a fucking single... | ||
| Other than love my family, there's not a thing that I do that's easy. | ||
| Everything else I do is hard. | ||
| And the only reason why the things that I do which are easy are easy is because I put in the work to make them easy. | ||
| Whether it's stand-up comedy or martial arts or anything. | ||
| That's a good way to put it. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| The reason why they're fairly easy, like if I roll with a white belt, it's fairly easy. | ||
| Why is it fairly easy? | ||
| Because I've been doing jujitsu for 30 fucking years. | ||
| That's why it's easy. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| Not really 30 years, but 25 or whatever it is. | ||
| Fact check. | ||
| I'm just being honest. | ||
| It's time. | ||
| It's all just time. | ||
| It's time. | ||
| It's time and effort. | ||
| But you have to put in time and effort. | ||
| And the problem with this world today is there's so many people that are given participation trophies and they tell you you're special, period. | ||
| You're a fucking curve model. | ||
| You don't have to lose weight. | ||
| You're a this, you're a that. | ||
| Everyone's amazing. | ||
| Everyone is amazing in their potential. | ||
| Everyone is amazing. | ||
| It's the worst thing you can tell somebody, though. | ||
| The worst thing you tell someone is they're great without doing any work. | ||
| The self-esteem movement is detrimental. | ||
| You should have high self-esteem no matter what. | ||
| You're perfect the way you are. | ||
| Your truth is what matters. | ||
| Just tell us your truth and we will mirror it for you. | ||
| I think we need two things. | ||
| We need both. | ||
| We need, you're okay. | ||
| Everyone has been in a down state. | ||
| Everyone has been low. | ||
| Everyone has failed. | ||
| Everyone has been weak. | ||
| Everyone has been unworthy or felt terrible or... | ||
| Just fell short of their goals. | ||
| 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 they couldn't possibly comprehend. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lack of perspective out there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That doesn't mean it's a good policy. | ||
| That's a good example of populism. | ||
| People voted. | ||
| If they voted and said, do you want $100,000 for a year? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Everybody would vote yes. | ||
| Yeah, why wouldn't you? | ||
| But is it a sustainable policy? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 100 million? | ||
| Easily. | ||
| Through COVID? It's way more than that. | ||
| I'm cutting it off at 100 million. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hold on. | |
| Explain that to me. | ||
| When we send out checks, the direct cash payments, I've always been against direct cash payments. | ||
| So the COVID stimulus checks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they go out to anybody who makes... | ||
| People got those checks that didn't lose their jobs? | ||
| Of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, the cutoff was like 75k a year. | ||
| Wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| That means every federal, well not every, but a lot of federal workers getting them too. | ||
| So people that didn't lose any money because of the pandemic still got checks? | ||
| Yeah, these were never based on your situation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| I thought you had to lose your job. | ||
| I thought there was a problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| So people who never lost a penny. | ||
| So if you look at their tax receipts, you look at their... | ||
| What they made in 2019 versus 2020. Correct. | ||
| They didn't lose any money. | ||
| It's based on just your income. | ||
| So I think 75k a year was the cutoff. | ||
| But also if you're a married couple, 150k. | ||
| And if you have kids, then it's even more. | ||
| I've got a lot of active duty military friends. | ||
| We're getting thousands of dollars because, you know, they have kids, and they're like, why? | ||
| This is such a waste of taxpayer money. | ||
| I mean, do your duty and go spend it on a local business that's been suffering. | ||
| I thought the money was allocated to people that lost money because of the pandemic. | ||
| 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 the direct cash payments? | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| What are the direct cash payments? | ||
| That's the free money. | ||
| That's the free money. | ||
| So this is the people that, even though they still make the same amount they made in 2019, in 2020 they got a big check for no reason. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| That seems crazy. | ||
| And if you do the math, that's well over 100 million people. | ||
| And they just got it. | ||
| They didn't ask for it. | ||
| They just received it. | ||
| So it's not something they're guilty of. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| They just received it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But don't you think that he was doing that politically? | ||
| And I didn't vote for him. | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| But don't you think that was... | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| That's political. | ||
| That's exactly the point. | ||
| There's an incentive now to pay people off with their own money, and it's not good. | ||
| Yeah, but don't you think that he was in a desperation situation where he just wanted to get re-elected? | ||
| I mean, he's coming through this whole... | ||
| This was in December. | ||
| He had already lost. | ||
| Oh, so in December, after he lost, he still... | ||
| But he didn't think he lost. | ||
| He thought he was still going to... | ||
| That's a good conversation. | ||
| He thought he was going to somehow or another get reinstated. | ||
| I don't know if he ever truly believed that, but... | ||
| He was pushing for it. | ||
| But yeah, on the victimhood side, this is the demise of the republic. | ||
| When people are comfortable with being bought off with their own tax dollars. | ||
| And more than that, comfortable with being told that they're victimized and that some other group Right. | ||
| So it's not just that they're in a bad situation. | ||
| They're in a bad situation because someone did it to you. | ||
| And maybe it's the 1%. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's where it gets tricky, right? | ||
| Where they manipulate the narrative and they realize where people's heads are at so they try to jump on board. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you want to go into that, into Georgia and everything? | ||
| Georgia's a weird situation, right? | ||
| Because I don't understand why people are so upset and why somehow or another it seems to be that the narrative is that this is a racist decision. | ||
| They're trying to get people to explain what's happening. | ||
| They're trying to get people to... | ||
| You have to have ID... To vote with a mail-in ballot? | ||
| Is that what the... | ||
| Yeah, so you have to provide now your driver's license number on your mail-in ballot. | ||
| Is there anything valid about the idea that in somehow or another this is racist towards black people? | ||
| No, it's absurd. | ||
| But is there an argument where they're saying it, maybe they don't understand how it's written out and they're being manipulated? | ||
| Like, what is the reason why so many people... | ||
| Like, it was part of SNL, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| Like in the monologue or one of their sketches this weekend? | ||
| What is it about it? | ||
| Like MLB, the Major League Baseball, they're pulling their All-Star game from Georgia because of this. | ||
| Why are they doing that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I would say this. | ||
| You find me a group of people that doesn't have IDs. | ||
| Find me them. | ||
| Find me them. | ||
| And the first thing we should do is get them IDs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But first, find me them. | ||
| And you go into any black neighborhood, and you interview people, and you ask them this extremely insulting question. | ||
| Why can't you get an ID? And they're going to be like... | ||
| I have an ID. What are you talking about? | ||
| I have an ID. You have a driver's license. | ||
| You have a social security card. | ||
| Why do you think I'm so stupid that I can't figure out an ID? What is the ID that you have to have? | ||
| You have to have a photo ID? Just a government-issued ID. A regular ID. Just a typical ID. So can it be a social security card? | ||
| Can it be a driver's license? | ||
| Can it be anything? | ||
| In this particular case, we're talking about a driver's license. | ||
| And if you lose your driver's license, you can still get a photo ID, right? | ||
| Yeah, you would still get it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't know the details of the Georgia law. | ||
| But this gets back to the basic notion. | ||
| Democrats think all voter ID laws are racist. | ||
| But let me ask you this. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Why do they think that's racist to have an ID? They have it in their heads. | ||
| But what's their argument? | ||
| I wish I could tell you. | ||
| I've never heard a good argument except to say that on the average, minorities have less access to IDs. | ||
| But what about poor people that are white? | ||
| People that live in West Virginia, coal mining towns? | ||
| They don't care about them, first of all. | ||
| And second of all, they also have ideas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who's that? | |
| The Democrats. | ||
| The Democrats. | ||
| The Democrat people who are saying these things. | ||
| 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? | ||
| If you're asking me, yes. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| And I'm not trying to build a straw man argument. | ||
| What's the argument against it? | ||
| What's the argument for the idea that this is racist to ask people that they have to have an ID? It's about mail-in ballots. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Do you mean what's my argument? | ||
| No, their argument. | ||
| Is it about mail-in ballots? | ||
| Is that what it is where you need an ID? You need a valid ID to mail in a ballot? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| The new Georgia law is that. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Because previously, it's signature verification. | ||
| I'm not a fan of signature verification. | ||
| Because you could forge someone's signature. | ||
| When I was a kid, I used to forge Ace Frehley's signature. | ||
| You could try. | ||
| And how are you assessing this? | ||
| I mean, this is difficult. | ||
| So you're assessing a signature that somebody put on the pad at the DMV 10 years ago. | ||
| And you would have to have a signature expert in order to do it correctly? | ||
| And this goes both ways, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, how are you doing this? | ||
| I don't like the way this is done in any state. | ||
| Were you dealing with millions of ballots? | ||
| Who's looking at those signatures? | ||
| Let me give you a stat real quick. | ||
| In the 2020 Democrat primaries, so the presidential elections in 2020 for the Democrats, about over 500,000 ballots were thrown out. | ||
| Thrown out. | ||
| Mail-in ballots, thrown out. | ||
| So why are they thrown out? | ||
| There's only two reasons. | ||
| Well, because of signature mismatches and maybe other clerical errors. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| When a signature is mismatched, there's only one of two possible reasons. | ||
| Attempted fraud, And the election official did the right thing. | ||
| Or the second possible reason, the election official did the wrong thing and threw out a valid ballot. | ||
| Shouldn't it be like fingerprints or something like that? | ||
| It seems like signatures... | ||
| If you look at my signature from like a year ago and today, I'm getting lazier. | ||
| So you're either having... | ||
| It's either easy to attempt fraud or you're throwing out valid ballots. | ||
| Either way, I don't know why you... | ||
| 500,000? | ||
| It's over that, but yeah, and just the 2020 election. | ||
| Is it subjective? | ||
| Do people challenge this? | ||
| It depends on the state. | ||
| Do people say, like, hey, man, that's my fucking signature? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, so you can cure ballots. | ||
| But how do you know? | ||
| Like, what if you vote and they say your signature's no good? | ||
| Yeah, well, then you can cure it. | ||
| Then you can go through a process to cure it. | ||
| But how do you find out? | ||
| It depends on the state. | ||
| This is exactly why you shouldn't have an overuse of mail-in ballots, because it's so complicated. | ||
| So mail-in ballots were not established, but they were reinforced because of COVID, right? | ||
| And the left wanted this, the right didn't. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because of what I just explained. | ||
| But what is the disparity between the left and the right when it comes to mail-in ballots? | ||
| I'm having trouble giving you their argument, because I don't understand it. | ||
| This is, like, often times I get where they're trying to go, and I can present their argument fairly well. | ||
| They were more risk-averse. | ||
| The idea is that people on the left are more risk-averse, so they don't want to do it in person. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, there's that, but I think that was more of an excuse, right? | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, because, I mean, they're going to grocery stores every day. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, but it's a different thing. | ||
| You're not stuck in a line. | ||
| No, you are stuck in a line. | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| You're interacting with more people at a grocery store. | ||
| Yeah, but no, you're not. | ||
| But grocery stores give you this big six-foot gap. | ||
| They do in voting lines, too. | ||
| Yeah, but do they? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| No, I've passed by a voting line. | ||
| I saw these motherfuckers sandwiched in next to each other. | ||
| No. | ||
| There was people waiting to get outside of the post office to drop mail-in voters that were sandwiched next to each other. | ||
| I never experienced that. | ||
| Where'd you vote? | ||
| It's possible though, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mailed it in. | ||
| I voted for California, but through Texas. | ||
| Okay, but you didn't vote in Texas. | ||
| Sort of a halfway protest vote. | ||
| But I did. | ||
| I was in Texas. | ||
| But you weren't at a voting... | ||
| Mail-in! | ||
| But you weren't at a polling station. | ||
| I went post office. | ||
| But you didn't go to a voting station. | ||
| But the day of the vote... | ||
| You went to a post office. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There was a fucking line of people trying to do that. | ||
| That's a totally different discussion. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You never actually interact with anybody. | ||
| And everybody has to stand up. | ||
| Yeah, they were actually really strict about it. | ||
| So it's no different than the supermarket. | ||
| Yeah, I would say there's less human interaction at the voting station. | ||
| At the supermarket, I have to give that person all of my stuff. | ||
| They touch it all, they scan it, and then they put it in a bag, and then I leave. | ||
| I'm also walking around the supermarket with a million other people. | ||
| So, I mean, if people are going to a supermarket but they won't go vote in person, I question their motives here. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| And I think they were trying to get more mail-in ballots. | ||
| I understand what you're saying, but for individuals, they were worried about risk assessment. | ||
| And they were saying, well, is there a way that I could have less risk? | ||
| Well, there's a clear way. | ||
| That way is mail-in your ballot. | ||
| That one day, you don't have to be in a group of people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you understand that, though? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's hard to understand because it's not rational. | |
| It is rational. | ||
| Here's why. | ||
| Because it's one more day. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You can do the same thing with voting. | ||
| But you can't. | ||
| It's one day. | ||
| But the sanctity of secure voting is an important thing. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| We have a real problem in this country. | ||
| I'm playing devil's advocate. | ||
| You understand what I'm doing here. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, fine. | ||
| I'll assume that their intentions are pure and they're genuinely scared of the voting booth. | ||
| Just the individuals, not the party. | ||
| Not the party. | ||
| Just the individuals. | ||
| There's a collectivism there that I think is very frustrating to me. | ||
| And I think the messaging should have been honest and science-based. | ||
| What's the collectivism? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's just not the case. | ||
| But let's assume the intentions are pure. | ||
| I don't want to quibble on that. | ||
| Who said it was less dangerous, though? | ||
| You, just a second ago. | ||
| I mean, basically. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But what I'm saying is not that it's less dangerous, but that there's a day that you can avoid danger. | ||
| If there's a day you can avoid danger by mailing in a ballot... | ||
| Oh, granted. | ||
| Their intentions are pure. | ||
| Their intentions are totally pure. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| There's no way that they want... | ||
| There's no fuckery at all. | ||
| There's no way that they want a system that just makes it easier to generally have some organic voter fraud. | ||
| If Trump wins, they're happy because it's what people want, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| But it gets back to the problem the right has with mail-in ballots generally is this problem with how do you verify it? | ||
| How do you deal with chain of custody issues? | ||
| The sanctity of an election must be self-evident, in my opinion. | ||
| When I go vote in Texas, and you'll do this eventually, you'll vote in Texas, and it'll be different from how you voted in California. | ||
| I voted in California, so I know when I go to California, I just tell them my name. | ||
| I'll show them an ID. Now, I could tell them any name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright? | |
| That makes me feel uncomfortable. | ||
| Wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| In California, do you show them an ID when you go vote? | ||
| Or do you just always vote by mail because you're Joe Rogan and you don't want to actually show up there? | ||
| No, I'm being honest. | ||
| Okay, well you don't have to. | ||
| You have to be on the voter rolls in the proper area. | ||
| But you can say any name. | ||
| This makes people uncomfortable. | ||
| You can say any name if you're on the voter roll. | ||
| You don't have to show an ID. Like if I just show up and say I'm Dan Crenshaw and they go, oh, Dan Crenshaw hasn't voted. | ||
| They might catch it. | ||
| They might not. | ||
| You don't have to show your ID. Really? | ||
| In Texas you do. | ||
| Really? | ||
| In Texas you do. | ||
| This is why we care about voter ID. I don't know why it doesn't make sense to people. | ||
| Well, I think it should be biometrics. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Look at my face. | ||
| I put it next to the thing. | ||
| How come you can't vote? | ||
| I'd say a couple things about that. | ||
| 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? | ||
| They budget it in. | ||
| So they know it happens. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Hundreds and hundreds of millions. | ||
| There's fraud in banking. | ||
| With all the banks. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's ways to get around systems electronically for really smart people. | ||
| It does happen. | ||
| And so the thing is, how much are we willing to accept for voting? | ||
| Now, I would argue that we should not accept anything. | ||
| I mean, Marionette Miller-Meeks in Iowa won by six votes. | ||
| I won by 155 votes in my first primary. | ||
| 155. Or six. | ||
| Six votes. | ||
| Forget about the conspiracy theories of hundreds of thousands of votes being changed overnight. | ||
| Forget about that. | ||
| Let's talk about six votes. | ||
| And you know how easy it would be to do six votes? | ||
| Because how many states did you hear about where your mail-in ballot is coming to your home and it has somebody else's name on it? | ||
| Maybe because they used to live there. | ||
| Maybe it's your dead relative. | ||
| How easy would it be to just send it back in? | ||
| Boom, six votes. | ||
| Six votes in one household. | ||
| Especially if you're dealing with millions of votes. | ||
| How many of those are getting verified? | ||
| This is the point that we're making. | ||
| And this is also why I say, look, just show up and vote. | ||
| Let's show up and vote, have an ID. Why is this so hard? | ||
| And if you're disabled, if you're truly disabled, you can't make it to a voting station, let's have a system for you to vote by mail. | ||
| This is basically what we have in Texas. | ||
| I think we need to stiffen it up a little bit, which we're doing. | ||
| But this is basically what we have. | ||
| When I go vote in Texas, I can't figure out how I would cheat. | ||
| I can figure out how I would cheat in California. | ||
| I can imagine it right away. | ||
| But I can't imagine how I would do it in Texas. | ||
| Because I have to show them my ID. They look at it. | ||
| They give me a little piece of... | ||
| It's on an electronic voting machine. | ||
| Okay, there's no paper either. | ||
| Maybe you should have paper backup. | ||
| Okay, that's a reasonable thing to say. | ||
| But there's no way that somebody else can go and fudge my ballot after I've given it in either. | ||
| This makes me feel happy. | ||
| This makes me feel like the integrity of the election is actually self-evident. | ||
| This is all we're trying to get at. | ||
| What do you think is going on in Georgia? | ||
| Like, why do you think that they are saying that this is the new Jim Crow and that... | ||
| Because it's a swing state. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Because Georgia voting laws, their new voting laws are still far less strict than, say, like New York and Delaware. | ||
| Everybody's been having a field day with this, just comparing liberal states to Georgia now. | ||
| I have seen that. | ||
| It is fascinating that New Jersey is far more complicated than Georgia. | ||
| And why aren't they Jim Crow laws? | ||
| They're not. | ||
| Because they're not swing states. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's really what it is? | ||
| Because the Democrats are complete opportunists, and these woke corporations have completely fallen in bed with them. | ||
| So we're talking about Major League Baseball, that they pulled their all-star game out of Georgia. | ||
| Do you think that this is just entirely because of optics? | ||
| God, why? | ||
| Why are they doing that? | ||
| I think, well, of course they didn't read the legislation, right? | ||
| There's always this belief that whatever Republicans do with election law, that it must be Jim Crow. | ||
| Isn't it also influence? | ||
| Like someone tells you, like, hey, this is racist. | ||
| You don't want to be a part of something that's racist. | ||
| You're like, I don't. | ||
| Well, the president said it, right? | ||
| Because there was some rumors that players were going to ask for it. | ||
| And then the president gets on ESPN and says they should definitely do it. | ||
| And then what do they do? | ||
| They definitely do it. | ||
| But the problem is there's so much fucking information out there, and there's so much chatter. | ||
| Like, the president said that, like, soccer players, the female soccer players should be paid what the male soccer players are paid. | ||
| And how would that work? | ||
| Like, well, that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| The reason why... | ||
| Whether it's basketball or... | ||
| The only one who's got a good argument is Claressa Shields, who's like the best women's boxer in the world. | ||
| She's got a good argument, and she brought it on the podcast. | ||
| She brought up her own ratings on television shows when she was on versus when males were on, that males were getting paid more than she was. | ||
| But her ratings were just as good. | ||
| Yeah, her ratings were just as good. | ||
| That's a good argument. | ||
| That's a good argument, yeah. | ||
| But like... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| This is like a weird little game you're playing. | ||
| The outcome has to matter. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're pretending that it's sexist when it's really just... | ||
| It's a meritocracy. | ||
| It's what it is. | ||
| People go to see the fucking NBA. It's a giant sport. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| If they had a female NFL and the female NFL players demanded the same amount as the male NFL players, how many people are going? | ||
| Where's the revenue coming from? | ||
| How are you earning this money? | ||
| There has to be a value associated with whatever activity you're engaging in. | ||
| But in the case of the Georgia thing, I mean, the egregious part about it was it was just lying. | ||
| It was just lying, straight up lying. | ||
| I mean, the Washington Post gave Biden four Pinocchios on this. | ||
| The Washington Post did? | ||
| Yeah, they fact-checked the hell out of him for it. | ||
| Because he's saying, oh, you can't get water if you're in line in Georgia. | ||
| They're closing down voting over here. | ||
| It's just lies. | ||
| Right, but here's what's true. | ||
| You can't give people water. | ||
| If you're an electioneer, I can't wear a Joe Biden shirt and give you water. | ||
| But that's the case in Texas, by the way. | ||
| You're not allowed to electioneer. | ||
| But it's not just that. | ||
| Within a certain distance of the poll, you're not allowed to give people gifts. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So you can't give them anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You can't give them cookies. | ||
| You can't give them coffee. | ||
| You can't give them water. | ||
| This is the case in most states. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| How the fuck do those people that are trying to get into America get Biden shirts? | ||
| Do you know what I'm talking about? | ||
| What's going on with that? | ||
| Because these are organized events and they're well funded. | ||
| By who? | ||
| It's hard to say. | ||
| The drug cartels certainly have an incentive to fund this. | ||
| Mexican drug cartels, because they make millions and millions of dollars a month. | ||
| You're going to get charged about $300 per head to cross the southern border. | ||
| Get charged? | ||
| By the drug cartels. | ||
| They control that border. | ||
| When you say charged, who's getting charged? | ||
| The person that wants to come across? | ||
| The person. | ||
| So if you want to come across, you give the cartel $300 and they get you across? | ||
| More or less, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I like how you said that like a Mexican. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Coyotes. | |
| See what I did there? | ||
| Yeah, I like how you did that. | ||
| I speak Spanish. | ||
| I went to high school in Colombia. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You went to high school in Colombia? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much coke did you do? | ||
| None. | ||
| You know... | ||
| It's like... | ||
| If you're in Colombia, I think you're supposed to do coke, right? | ||
| I guess you're supposed to. | ||
| Drugs are a much bigger problem in American high schools than they were in Colombian high schools. | ||
| I can imagine. | ||
| It's probably a detriment to do coke in Colombia. | ||
| Yeah, my dad was in oil and gas. | ||
| They're angry about that Escobar shit. | ||
| I used to have a photo of Pablo Escobar by my old studio. | ||
| People got mad at me for having this like... | ||
| I just had a weird moment in history. | ||
| It is a weird moment in history. | ||
| I was there in 98 to 2002, so the Escobar days were long over, but it was dangerous. | ||
| You still couldn't drive between cities. | ||
| We had to have an armored car. | ||
| We didn't have an armored car initially. | ||
| It got shot up. | ||
| It was dangerous. | ||
| It was more of a guerrilla warfare problem in that time frame. | ||
| And now it's an amazing country. | ||
| It's an exceptional example of what a country can do and how U.S. partnerships can work. | ||
| It is weird how they kind of cleared up a lot of the problems that they had during the Escobar days. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I love Colombia. | ||
| I still go back for high school reunions. | ||
| Do you really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going back for my 20-year next year. | ||
| Why were you in Columbia for high school? | ||
| What did your parents do? | ||
| They selling coke? | ||
| Oil and gas, Joe. | ||
| Import-export business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't ask any more questions. | |
| Did you ever see that TV show, Trafficked? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't. | |
| I watch Narcos, religiously. | ||
| That's actually filmed in Columbia. | ||
| It was pretty well done. | ||
| Mariana Vanzella, right? | ||
| That's her name? | ||
| She was a guest on the podcast and she does this show called Trafficked. | ||
| And there's a lot of different aspects of the show, whether it's guns to Mexico. | ||
| One of the things she did was, it was Colombia where they were talking about cocaine, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And she actually went to the places where they grow the coca leaves and dry them out in the field. | ||
| And she sort of dispelled a lot of the myths. | ||
| Like, a lot of people think that the cartels are growing all this coca leaves. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| No, that's a supply chain just like anything else. | ||
| You've got poor farmers. | ||
| Poor farmers, yes. | ||
| So that's always a political policy problem in Colombia. | ||
| You can go destroy these fields, but then you have all these farmers who now don't have fields and then they join the guerrillas. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So then they join this Marxist guerrilla movement. | ||
| So yeah, all of these... | ||
| It's a long, complicated story. | ||
| Long, complicated supply and demand story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what it is. | ||
| And this show really shows when you see the people that are actually the chemists that add the chemicals to the leaves and create the cocaine. | ||
| And then you have these same people that put the cocaine, the processed cocaine, in backpacks and then walk for 24 hours through the forest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And get this stuff to whoever it is that brings it to America. | ||
| It's very strange and eye-opening. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why do you think they advocate for open borders? | ||
| What's the motivation for that? | ||
| Yeah, because we're on opposite ends of this. | ||
| I mean, not you and I. I mean, me and the left. | ||
| I want to note something. | ||
| The outcome that I'd like for healthcare is the same that the left wants. | ||
| I want everybody to have access to good healthcare. | ||
| I don't think we want the same thing when it comes to the immigration border issue. | ||
| I think they want more illegal immigration and I want less. | ||
| Why do you think they want people to have the opportunity to live a better life? | ||
| That's the best rose-colored glasses. | ||
| Yeah, but I agree with that statement. | ||
| But then, okay, so how do we do that? | ||
| We have to have a process for people to apply to our country, and we have to process them in an orderly fashion. | ||
| Because we'd agree on that, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so we have that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It is hard to imagine. | ||
| But will you explain to people that don't understand what we're talking about, what's going on with the Uyghurs in China? | ||
| Because it's scary. | ||
| Very quickly. | ||
| There's a minority population in China that is subjugated by the Chinese government. | ||
| They're put in basically labor camps, forced labor, forced sterilization. | ||
| It's a serious humanitarian crisis. | ||
| It's been going on for a long time. | ||
| But it's widely ignored. | ||
| It's discussed, but there's no policy that's been enacted to sanction. | ||
| Yeah, and so this is a bill that would do it. | ||
| It's called to Protect the Chinese Uyghurs Act, and it basically just makes it more difficult to import products from that area. | ||
| Now, some companies have done that. | ||
| I'll give maybe Patagonia a little credit here. | ||
| Now, they're always woke virtue signaling. | ||
| It's kind of annoying. | ||
| Every product they have must come from petroleum, so spare me is what I say to them. | ||
| But, for instance, they, I believe, did change their supply chain to have less of it come from these regions in China. | ||
| So it can be done. | ||
| And this bill would do that. | ||
| Coca-Cola, Apple have both lobbied congressional members against this. | ||
| Against? | ||
| Against that bill. | ||
| Because it hurts their bottom line. | ||
| But they're happy to woke virtue signal about Georgia. | ||
| They're so full of crap. | ||
| Is there anything about the Georgia law that makes sense to you that they're arguing against? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I mean, even the Washington Post fact-checked Biden's claims. | ||
| Wait, wait. | ||
| Well, it makes sense in what way? | ||
| Like, from the left side? | ||
| Anything that you say, I can see why this would more likely impact lower-income minority neighborhoods? | ||
| They've said this all the time. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| And it gets back to this notion of, can black people get voter ID? Can black people get IDs? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I know this is an argument and this is something that's being currently debated, but is there anybody on the left that supports this? | ||
| That is against this voter ID legislation that's gone through in Georgia that is like a logical, intelligent person that argues against it. | ||
| Like, so somebody I generally respect, but still is mad about it. | ||
| I can't think of it. | ||
| You know, people, I don't know, to answer your question. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We're talking about some... | ||
| You should have it. | ||
| Some shit that's going down in 2024, right? | ||
| That's what we're talking about. | ||
| We're talking about like, you have now three years to get an ID in order to be able to vote for the next president. | ||
| That seems like it should be a lot. | ||
| I'm sure there's votes in between now and then, but that's the big one. | ||
| Look, they're against voter ID laws, period. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I don't understand why. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Has there any debates been done on this? | ||
| It seems like I would like to see someone from the left who supports this idea that voter IDs are bad. | ||
| So every member of Democrat Congress, I believe, voted for H.R. 1. H.R. 1 is their premier election reform bill from the left. | ||
| They passed it out of the House last session, passed it out this session, questionable whether it would get through the Senate. | ||
| This is a lot to this bill, but one of them undermines voter ID laws in states. | ||
| So they don't like voter ID. But why? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Their stated reason is that, right? | ||
| It hurts minority voters. | ||
| And you and I look at that and you're like, that's ridiculous. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And go talk to minorities then if you believe that. | ||
| They have IDs. | ||
| It's ridiculous to assume they don't have IDs. | ||
| It seems like it's way easier to get people IDs than it is to get them health care. | ||
| It is way easier. | ||
| And also, here's another fact. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Is there a way? | ||
| Is there a clear path where we can sort of... | ||
| I think liberals and conservatives can be brought together. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How? | |
| I think progressives are out on their own. | ||
| Progressives are out on their own, but what about QAnon people? | ||
| They're out on their own, too. | ||
| Yeah, they're out on their own, too. | ||
| So the critical race theory people, all the super hardcore lefties, and then the QAnon. | ||
| There was an article in the Federals today that critical race theory is QAnon for the left. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| Yeah, that's actually a great point. | ||
| It's a really interesting article. | ||
| I'd like to read that. | ||
| And it's also state-funded. | ||
| It's taxpayer-funded. | ||
| It's an interesting theory. | ||
| Well, it gets to my point about QAnon is about... | ||
| What is it fundamentally about? | ||
| It's about paranoia, right? | ||
| Paranoia about a conspiracy. | ||
| Remember I said this before, the right deals with paranoia, the left deals with power. | ||
| Well, the left deals with some paranoia as well. | ||
| But critical race theory is fundamentally about power hierarchies. | ||
| It's fundamentally what it's about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And manipulation. | |
| And about gaining that power. | ||
| And manipulation. | ||
| And playing on people's guilt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It gets real slippery. | ||
| I tell that to my own side all the time. | ||
| I'm like, you have to be careful of the grifters who make money off of your outrage. | ||
| And what's the first thing they do? | ||
| They tell you that I'm the traitor. | ||
| That I'm the rhino. | ||
| I'm like, I have to earn your vote, man. | ||
| I actually have to campaign to people. | ||
| You know what's really fascinating? | ||
| The grifters, the people that in their adult life have completely shifted their perspective on things. | ||
| And they realize, you know what, there's a lot more money on being left. | ||
| Or there's a lot more money on being right. | ||
| And then they just... | ||
| Completely side with one group. | ||
| You don't recognize any of the concepts that you thought were most important just four years ago. | ||
| Now you're 100% on this other side. | ||
| Who are you talking about? | ||
| I'm not talking about anybody in particular. | ||
| I'm talking about this ideology. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And people do it. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like the Lincoln Project type. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a good example. | ||
| Explain that to people. | ||
| Explain the Lincoln Project. | ||
| I hate them. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What were the principles they initially proposed? | ||
| I don't follow them that closely, but they usually use platitudes like the integrity, the integrity of the office, just the sense of dignity, right? | ||
| They're careful not to adhere to certain policy positions because then you can call them on it, right? | ||
| It's always about dignity and integrity. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They wanted to keep going. | ||
| They wanted to make lists. | ||
| It never stops. | ||
| Yeah, but it was also like, punish those people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this was something that came out, like, whenever someone says, I want to make a list of people, like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. | ||
| It's a little like fascism. | ||
| Yeah, this is, you're getting dangerous here. | ||
| This is a weird thing you're doing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This forced conformity. | ||
| And fascism, there's lots of kind of definitions. | ||
| Everybody says, well, it means Hitler. | ||
| What's the classic definition of fascism? | ||
| Let's put it on Wikipedia and I'll kind of extract from that because I was looking at it earlier today and we would talk about this. | ||
| But a lot of it has to do with forced compliance. | ||
| It's mostly compulsory. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Conformity. | ||
| Fascism is a form of far right. | ||
| I don't know why they call it that. | ||
| Because that's the big lie of the century. | ||
| Ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy. | ||
| And of the economy which came to prominence during the early 20th century Europe. | ||
| So we'll stick with this definition for a second. | ||
| Isn't there another definition? | ||
| Here's a better definition. | ||
| Well, there's whole books written about it. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's the forcible suppression of opposition. | ||
| That makes more sense. | ||
| And I think that's the correct way. | ||
| Because these definitions get very specific about... | ||
| Look at the second one. | ||
| They make it about race. | ||
| Yeah, but that was only that other one. | ||
| That other one, which is like, that seemed more cultural and seemed more current. | ||
| Yeah, the second one looks more like just a basic definition of authoritarianism to me. | ||
| A tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control. | ||
| I tend to like the first definition here. | ||
| It says, because it says often race, but not necessarily. | ||
| And that's important because it's not necessarily race. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| Mussolini's fashionism was not centered around race. | ||
| Hitler's was. | ||
| But severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition is exactly what we're talking about. | ||
| That sounds to me exactly like the extreme left right now. | ||
| But what gets tricky is when they're calling it right wing. | ||
| They do. | ||
| But that other definition is rude. | ||
| It's wrong. | ||
| I mean, if you're a person that is not very sophisticated— It's right-wing Europe. | ||
| It's right-wing Europe. | ||
| And that's the part they leave out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I trend on Twitter once a week. | ||
| Well, who cares? | ||
| You know, it's not a big deal. | ||
| But for them, that's everything. | ||
| Now, that's me being kind to them. | ||
| I think in their boardrooms, they might. | ||
| When are they going to get past that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I don't. | ||
| I mean, it's ridiculous. | ||
| You have 300 million people in this country. | ||
| If 200 people get angry at you, they're willing to change policy. | ||
| They do. | ||
| And, like, my goal is we're fighting back now. | ||
| I don't know how much you follow me on social media, but I was hitting this one really hard all week. | ||
| I'm like, we will not stand by and watch this anymore. | ||
| You're going to feel pain when you jump into the political arena from now on. | ||
| So that's my message to them. | ||
| How are you going to do that? | ||
| Well, just whether it's public pressure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now you're in it, and we're noticed. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Two can play at this game. | ||
| Right, but that's the problem. | ||
| It's only one that's been playing at this game. | ||
| Only one has been, and that is not the case anymore. | ||
| That's where it gets dangerous, right? | ||
| And that's where you have really big problems. | ||
| One side has been manipulating this narrative and making people abhorrent and racist and... | ||
| And fascist and whatever it is if you don't agree with them. | ||
| And hoping and praying that people don't look into the actual bill or the actual legislation and look at the facts of whatever you're discussing. | ||
| Instead, just go by the narrative. | ||
| The narrative is this is racist or this is fascist or this is nationalistic, it's dangerous because of this or that. | ||
| And without people actually examining all the different parts of the bill or parts of the legislation, And discussing it. | ||
| And I hate that. | ||
| And both sides do that. | ||
| Now I think the left does it in a much more disingenuous and malevolent way. | ||
| Because, I mean, to call me a racist is a really big deal. | ||
| You think I'm racist because I'm for voter ID? That's a really big deal. | ||
| You think I'm for Jim Crow laws because I'm for voter ID? Well, explain what actual Jim Crow laws were. | ||
| That's where it gets really weird. | ||
| State-sanctioned segregation. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| State-sanctioned. | ||
| Like clear. | ||
| I mean, like keeping people, like literally, forcibly keeping people away from voting. | ||
| I mean, there's a really bad history there. | ||
| You can't ignore that. | ||
| But it doesn't exist now. | ||
| But you can't equate the two. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Because it's rude. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is there anyone on the left that's pushing back against this concept that the Georgia law, that this idea that's being passed is negative? | ||
| Is there anybody that's saying, hey, let's look at what this is? | ||
| I haven't seen it. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't exist. | ||
| I'm just saying I haven't seen it. | ||
| Because there's a compliance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What would be their incentive? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, look, the Democrats I like are all out of Congress now. | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| I still have friends there. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard? | ||
| Tulsi. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then when you add— Style. | ||
| They didn't like the style. | ||
| Not just that. | ||
| The Capitol Hill insurgents. | ||
| Well, I mean, but that was before the vote. | ||
| I mean, after the vote. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was really pissed off about that. | ||
| I mean, anybody who follows me knows how strongly I was pissed off about it. | ||
| Yeah, well, you should be. | ||
| Everybody should be. | ||
| The style argument is, yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. | ||
| I'm not going to run from that statement. | ||
| Look, 40,000 people in my district voted for me and not for President Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 40,000. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| Well, you're a reasonable guy. | ||
| 13, 14 percent. | ||
| 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... | ||
| My sense is that people generally, if I'm going to categorize them, people don't like to be categorized or labeled, and you're one of them. | ||
| And most people are like that. | ||
| But just for the sense of political science that I kind of daily, I engage in daily, I tend to, right? | ||
| And it kind of gets me in trouble sometimes. | ||
| People are like, well, I don't believe exactly that. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm not saying you do. | ||
| You don't have to. | ||
| I'm speaking in the aggregate. | ||
| I realize there's a spectrum. | ||
| But my sense from these past elections is that America is a center-right country. | ||
| Because Republicans won pretty handedly in the House. | ||
| And I think we're on track to do pretty well in 2022, especially with the Democrats proposing the things they're proposing. | ||
| Well, what do you think is the problem? | ||
| The reason why they don't win across the board is that the candidates themselves? | ||
| Candidates mean a lot. | ||
| We had a lot of good candidates this time around. | ||
| And look, people generally agreed with Trump on the issues. | ||
| And you can look at the polling on this before the election. | ||
| He would win on the issues all the time. | ||
| And then he would lose on characteristics. | ||
| Do you think if the pandemic didn't take place, he would have won? | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| Because the economy would probably be booming. | ||
| Yeah, it'd be really hard to beat them without the pandemic. | ||
| The pandemic was not a good thing for them. | ||
| Who the fuck is going to survive that? | ||
| Because when you're a politician, as the country goes, so goes your polling or the way people feel about you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it got in his head. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's about all you can do. | ||
| There were so many people that were like, Donald Trump's responsible for 500,000 people being dead. | ||
| That's such an insane statement. | ||
| It's so insane but so prevalent. | ||
| And look at every single COVID graph of a trend of infections or even death rates, however you want to splice it. | ||
| And then compare it to lockdown states versus non-lockdown states. | ||
| Compare it to lockdown countries versus non-lockdown countries. | ||
| Everybody ends up in the same place. | ||
| This is a thing that we have to deal with. | ||
| Or better. | ||
| That's what's really uncomfortable for people when you look at Florida. | ||
| Now, is there an issue going on right now in Florida where cases are on the rise because of the Brazilian variant? | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| I'm not following it exactly. | ||
| I don't want to get fact-checked on it. | ||
| You know who I saw that from today? | ||
| I do know Texas continues to decline rapidly. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| But we haven't got those Florida fucks coming over here, giving us their cooties. | ||
| Well, they're having too much fun. | ||
| I mean, it's spring, it's Miami. | ||
| Why would you leave? | ||
| Listen, man, the difference between California and Texas from someone who's lived in both is so palpable and just the feeling of being here. | ||
| I'm going to defend Southern California a little bit. | ||
| They're living off of fear porn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You lived in LA. I lived in San Diego. | ||
| It's a little different because it's a military place. | ||
| It's a big difference. | ||
| Big difference. | ||
| Huge difference. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| It's a better place. | ||
| It's a better place psychologically. | ||
| I want to see Orange County and below just become its own state. | ||
| It might be. | ||
| It might be in the future. | ||
| I've got to defend. | ||
| I mean, I've spent 10 years there. | ||
| I've got, you know, I love it, right? | ||
| Now, I think it's getting a little worse. | ||
| You know, I do follow it closely, but... | ||
| Wasn't there a new crazy mayor of San Diego that's arresting people for going outside without a mask on or something? | ||
| Yeah, they're being a little crazy. | ||
| I might have made that up. | ||
| But for the most part, though, look at the housing situation in San Diego versus San Francisco. | ||
| And I know because I bought a condo in San Diego in 2008, and I've never been able to raise rent on it. | ||
| But in San Francisco, that would, of course, not be the case. | ||
| You'd be doubling rent by this point. | ||
| So why is that? | ||
| Well, it's a basic supply-demand issue. | ||
| They allow buildings to be built in downtown San Diego, whereas they don't in San Francisco. | ||
| Is that really what it is? | ||
| But isn't it supply and demand because of the tech community and they have so much fucking money? | ||
| Yeah, well, they also have the not-in-my-backyard community, which, again, is fair, I guess. | ||
| I mean, if you don't want things built there and you advocate against it, fine. | ||
| But how can they say not-in-my-backyard when they allow people to defecate on the streets? | ||
| Good question. | ||
| I'm not defending San Francisco. | ||
| That is literally the lead place on the planet if you want to shit on the street. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the place to go. | ||
| I'm a big fan of shitting. | ||
| In public on the street. | ||
| Well, San Francisco is your spot. | ||
| There's an app for it. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, people imitate their atmosphere. | ||
| 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 if the government allows it, then why wouldn't you? | ||
| Well, if the city allows you to camp out, and the idea is like, listen, this is extenuating circumstances. | ||
| This is a very unusual time. | ||
| A lot of people are out of work. | ||
| A lot of businesses have shut down. | ||
| A lot of people can't find any sort of reasonable way to make a living. | ||
| We're going to allow you to camp out for a little while, and then we're going to sort this through. | ||
| But this has been going on for 10 years. | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| I've only been here for seven months. | ||
| No, no, I'm not Austin. | ||
| I mean in San Francisco. | ||
| Right, but in Austin. | ||
| My time in San Francisco is a long time. | ||
| In my seven months here, I've seen it grow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's uncomfortable because I see San Francisco, and I've been to San Francisco, and I see LA. I see Venice, which is fucking chaos. | ||
| If you go down to the beach in Venice, you just can't believe it. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| People that don't know what Los Angeles is really like today... | ||
| Because I've been to Venice, but I don't remember it like we were describing. | ||
| You've got to go there now. | ||
| You've got to go to downtown LA now. | ||
| It's madness. | ||
| And you look at it, you're like, the only thing that comes into mind is, I've got to get out of here. | ||
| And that's what a lot of businesses are doing, and that's what a lot of individuals are doing, and a lot of wealthy people. | ||
| They're going, like, you're not going to fix this any time in my life. | ||
| Like, there's too many people. | ||
| There's tens of thousands of people in tents on the street. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| That's a real number. | ||
| The exodus is real, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That existed in San Diego to an extent. | ||
| Much, much less. | ||
| It's much less. | ||
| It's embodied in the eastern part of downtown. | ||
| I have friends that would say, I don't want to live in San Diego because it's too conservative. | ||
| I'm like, that's why it's so clean. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
| And it's like not conservative. | ||
| But it is. | ||
| It is conservative relatively compared to Los Angeles. | ||
| And they were like, oh, they're rough with pot. | ||
| I'm like, come on, man. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Just hide it. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| Smoke in your fucking apartment. | ||
| Just don't smoke on the street. | ||
| But L.A. That's the kind of people I'm rolling with. | ||
| But when they would go down to San Diego, they would worry about being busted with pot. | ||
| Like that San Diego was more Republican. | ||
| It was more conservative. | ||
| But you go there... | ||
| There's more to life than being busted with pot, too, isn't there? | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| Depends on if you're a pot junkie. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| I'm... | ||
| I straddle both worlds in this way. | ||
| I'm a disciplined person, but I also like pot. | ||
| I like a lot of things that these lefties like, but I like a lot of things that these righties like. | ||
| I like guns. | ||
| I like hunting. | ||
| There's a lot of things. | ||
| I eat meat. | ||
| Personal responsibility. | ||
| Personal responsibility. | ||
| Discipline. | ||
| It's a core tenet of my existence is discipline. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Isn't that better? | ||
| I have a lot of trouble understanding the left's intentions when it comes to the election stuff. | ||
| I know we've kind of beaten that dead horse. | ||
| Yeah, but it's spooky. | ||
| It's spooky to me because I'm like, why is this the one thing you don't want regulated? | ||
| Because every other aspect of life you want ultra-regulated, why is this the one thing where you want no rules on it? | ||
| It seems strange to me and it makes me feel like you want to cheat. | ||
| That's how it makes conservatives feel and that's how you end up with the chaos that we've had. | ||
| Well, I think the narrative is, like, on the left, it's already been established. | ||
| And that narrative is, you've got to make voting more accessible to people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And whether that is not requiring identification, whether it's mail-in ballots, whatever it is, make voting more accessible to people. | ||
| That's what they say, but in practice, it's like, who doesn't have access? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Who? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| What percentage of people don't have driver's licenses? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| And if you don't, then that's a real problem. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, there's a suspicion. | ||
| People have suspicion about the government. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Why do you think that is? | |
| Because they love collectivism and they love centralized control of the economy and society. | ||
| I recall a definition we were looking at earlier. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, sounds like fascism. | |
| And again, I always distinguish between liberals and progressives on this one. | ||
| I think there should be an alliance between real liberals and conservatives in the future, and that's how we're going to solve problems. | ||
| I talk to Brett Weinstein all the time. | ||
| Weinstein. | ||
| If you talk to him all the time, you know his fucking last name. | ||
| Harvey Weinstein. | ||
| Brett Weinstein. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Anyway, I think... | ||
| Anyway, he's like, I'm a hardcore liberal. | ||
| He's like, I'm a radical liberal. | ||
| And we just agree on so many things. | ||
| Because he's a classical liberal. | ||
| And if you're going to describe yourself as a liberal, you mean in a classical sense in most cases. | ||
| And you want nice things. | ||
| You have the sense of compassion, and you want nice things from people. | ||
| Maybe it's health care. | ||
| Maybe it's to take care of people when they've fallen on hard times. | ||
| These are good things. | ||
| These are not bad things. | ||
| These are not things that conservatives even disagree with. | ||
| Now we generally have a different philosophy on how to find solutions for those problems. | ||
| That's the center, I guess. | ||
| If we're always grasping for the center, which a lot of people are, and I always kind of question, what do you mean by that? | ||
| But maybe that's the right way to look at it. | ||
| Liberals are good at having enough empathy and compassion to see what might need to be changed. | ||
| Conservatives are good at finding the solutions for that change that maintains the good things that got us here in the first place. | ||
| You can't burn down all the foundations of a society just because you're not at utopia yet. | ||
| Remember, utopia is defined in Greek as being nowhere. | ||
| And you'll always burn things down to grasp for that. | ||
| You can't get to that point. | ||
| So I think that's the right alliance. | ||
| I kind of forgot what the initial question was, though. | ||
| You're talking about the difference between a classical liberal. | ||
| When you say classical liberal, I always think you're trying to pretend you're liberal when you're really a conservative. | ||
| Because there's a lot of people that use that term, classical liberal, and it's like, what do you believe? | ||
| Like, it's like, things get sneaky. | ||
| I think there's a real problem with definitions. | ||
| There's a real problem with, like... | ||
| You gotta focus on the definitions. | ||
| 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? | ||
| You're dealing with two very different things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That would be an injustice. | ||
| Now, I know you said that the left is fascinated by COVID or obsessed with COVID, but we didn't really cover it. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| That was the original question. | ||
| I got really philosophical. | ||
| No, it's okay. | ||
| That was the original question. | ||
| Well, it's obviously a bad idea. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| It's obviously a bad idea. | ||
| 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 it's not that. | ||
| It's like limiting your ability to travel. | ||
| Which is an excessive infringement on your rights. | ||
| And also, is it really even scientific, given the trends that we're seeing? | ||
| I mean, no matter how you approach this question, it seems like a really bad idea. | ||
| When you say, is it even scientific, what do you mean by that? | ||
| Meaning we've been traveling for a year without vaccines. | ||
| Well, in a limited aspect. | ||
| Some people have that. | ||
| I travel a lot. | ||
| Limited capacity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's somewhat limited. | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| If you look at the airline trends, it's severely limited. | ||
| Fairly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I spent a lot of time at airports over the last year. | ||
| Well, you do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it's still not even 50% of what it was a year ago, or a year and a half ago, I should say. | ||
| I don't know the exact numbers. | ||
| I don't know what it is either. | ||
| I just know that we've been living with it, just like you have to live with a pandemic, because you don't have a choice. | ||
| Here's a big difference. | ||
| Maybe everything boils down to this difference. | ||
| The right believes, look, you don't have a choice. | ||
| You've got to make the best of it. | ||
| You've got to keep living. | ||
| You've got to mitigate risk where you can, but you can't mitigate risk at the expense of everything else. | ||
| And the left says, no, no, no. | ||
| You have to mitigate risk at the expense of everything else. | ||
| No cost is too high because it just saves one life. | ||
| This is the fundamental difference. | ||
| The problem they don't take into account is it costs a lot of lives. | ||
| It costs a lot of lives through suicide, depression, drug addiction. | ||
| The school's closing has been excessively bad, and there's no science to indicate that this is what our kids need. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You have a higher chance of dying from the flu if you're under 20 years old. | ||
| Why doesn't Dr. Fauci ever say that? | ||
| Why does he go, hey, you could die if you're 14. You could. | ||
| Yes, you could. | ||
| But you have to contextualize the information you're giving. | ||
| This is why America has lost trust in their public health officials. | ||
| Because they never contextualize anything. | ||
| They never give you the probability of risk. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| Fauci, in the beginning of the pandemic, when he said you don't need to wear a mask, and then changed it. | ||
| But he said the reason why he said that is because he wanted the first responders and all these different healthcare professionals. | ||
| He should have said that at the beginning. | ||
| Well... | ||
| 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? | ||
| Isn't this theater? | ||
| And he's right! | ||
| He is right. | ||
| And you could see the panic in it. | ||
| And also, saying to people... | ||
| Give them an incentive to get vaccinated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And don't make it COVID passports be the incentive. | |
| Right. | ||
| Say you don't have to wear fucking two masks if you've been vaccinated. | ||
| Like, you have immunity. | ||
| Why are you wearing two masks? | ||
| It's in this theater. | ||
| Like, Rand Paul's done some really interesting things. | ||
| And he's a doctor, by the way. | ||
| He is a doctor. | ||
| Well, he's an ophthalmologist, but he's not a specialist in infectious diseases. | ||
| But he knows enough about it. | ||
| And the way he's saying it is not illogical. | ||
| He's not making any errors. | ||
| It's not illogical at all. | ||
| No. | ||
| And he's also a guy who's got COVID, as are you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It might even be higher now. | ||
| 2.6 comorbidities, which is a lot. | ||
| And also the average age is, I believe it's over 78. I want to say that's about correct. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Vitamin D is a major part of this, and it was just never explained by our highest health officials. | ||
| Nor was obesity. | ||
| 78% of the people that are hospitalized. | ||
| Well, you can't fix obesity in a month's time. | ||
| You can in a year's time. | ||
| We're a year in. | ||
| My friend Laura, Laura Bites, she went through this Beats. | ||
| She gets mad and I say Bites. | ||
| I fuck it up all the time. | ||
| See, I'm not the only one who screws up the last name. | ||
| Well, it's spelled wrong. | ||
| It's B-E-I. You have no moral high ground. | ||
| It's beats, but it should be... | ||
| Anyway, she's fucking hilarious. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, this whiskey's good for you. | ||
| That's probably true. | ||
| But when you talk about healthcare, how do you solve the healthcare problem? | ||
| People just need to be healthier. | ||
| We have one of the most obese countries in the world. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| And it causes a lot of our healthcare problems. | ||
| It's one of the reasons that our healthcare is so expensive. | ||
| And our insurance is so expensive. | ||
| Because when you're paying that premium, you do have to accommodate for a lot of people who use healthcare way, way more than you do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's why people have looked at the morbidity cases in terms of percentages with America versus other parts of the world. | ||
| And the other parts of the world where people are generally more active and thinner, you have better results. | ||
| Even places where people are poor, like Egypt and Nigeria, they have a much lower... | ||
| African countries have done really well with COVID. Asian countries. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Now, there's a few reasons, theories at least, is why that might be the case. | ||
| In Asia, they're dealing with SARS and coronaviruses all the time. | ||
| Their immunities are probably well built up against it. | ||
| I've seen studies in Japan, because Japan wasn't hit hard, but I've seen studies in Japan where well over half of the people tested antibodies. | ||
| So they've clearly had it, but they never even noticed. | ||
| And also, they're not fat. | ||
| That's a big part of it, man. | ||
| It's a big part of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but it's mean and compassionate if you tell people to work out. | ||
| Even in schools, I mean, you look at videos from the 1950s of gym classes, and it's pretty hardcore. | ||
| You know, I remember gym class, and I don't know that it was hardcore, but at least we were active, and there wasn't a lot of excuses. | ||
| There's a lot of meanness to it, too. | ||
| Like, dodgeball was fucking mean. | ||
| Oh, did you have a bad story about dodgeball? | ||
| No, it was fine. | ||
| Sounds like you do. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Sounds like you were picked on. | ||
| I was one of the mean people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You were one of the mean people. | |
| For me, give me a fucking ball and allow me to throw it full blast at people. | ||
| I enjoyed the shit out of that. | ||
| But I was also on the wrestling team. | ||
| You're a bully. | ||
| I wasn't a bully. | ||
| Sounds like you were a bully. | ||
| If you gave me an opportunity to be mean, I would be mean, though. | ||
| But the problem is you tell people that it's not their fault. | ||
| And that doesn't empower them. | ||
| What empowers people is tell them, here's a way where you can do better. | ||
| Here's a way where you can improve your health. | ||
| Here's a way we can improve your fitness. | ||
| Here's a way we can improve the outcome. | ||
| You know, I know so many people that they eat shit. | ||
| They eat garbage food, and they're fucking sloppy, and they don't exercise, but they can't wait for the vaccine. | ||
| They're like, my God, man. | ||
| My God, you have an opportunity. | ||
| You have an opportunity to do something. | ||
| You've had a fucking full year where you're hiding, and you've still been eating Cheetos and getting fatter. | ||
| You know, the average American... | ||
| There was a study done on people... | ||
| I think it's 40% of the people have gained an average of 30 pounds. | ||
| Yeah, I don't get that. | ||
| I've heard the COVID weight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like the freshman 15. That's not okay. | ||
| There's no excuse for it. | ||
| Well, the freshman 15 makes more sense. | ||
| You're drinking. | ||
| Yeah, fair enough. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| You're away. | ||
| Your parents aren't around. | ||
| You're eating pizza. | ||
| I don't know, but you're like 18. How do you gain... | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| Because you're fucking studying all day. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| That makes... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I barely went to college. | ||
| It makes more sense to me than the COVID thing, because there's a real physical consequence. | ||
| That's BS. And if you pay attention to the news, everyone knew. | ||
| They closed my gym, and my gym, you know, this is early days, back when we were, like, all in it together. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Back when it was a little bit novel. | ||
| The first week? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| First two weeks to slow the spread. | ||
| Yeah, fuck you. | ||
| Yeah, what happened then, man? | ||
| And my gym rented us equipment. | ||
| So you use it. | ||
| And so you use it. | ||
| You figure it out. | ||
| What do you mean your gym rented you equipment? | ||
| I could go take equipment from the gym because they were closed for a few weeks. | ||
| So they were like, hey, if you want to check out equipment. | ||
| What kind of equipment? | ||
| Well, I got whatever you wanted. | ||
| I mean, I got some kettlebells and... | ||
| No, I got two 65-pound dumbbells and I got a barbell with 45-pound bumper weights so that I could use them. | ||
| I would just run... | ||
| I live in an apartment in Houston, so I would just go up the parking garage with stairs. | ||
| I would just do shit. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I would just be creative and work out with it. | ||
| I was in pretty good shape, frankly, but maybe better shape, because that was when you were really locked down. | ||
| I mean, that was like, everything's on Zoom. | ||
| It really wasn't doing anything. | ||
| That didn't last all that long. | ||
| In Texas, it didn't last all that long. | ||
| It didn't last all that long in Texas. | ||
| In LA, it's basically exactly the same as it was a year ago. | ||
| It can't be that bad. | ||
| It's not much different. | ||
| It's 25% restaurant capacity. | ||
| As of a few weeks ago, they opened up restaurants. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| 25% only? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Isn't it? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| What is the restaurant capacity... | ||
| Of Los Angeles. | ||
| For inside dining, I think. | ||
| I think inside dining is like 25%. | ||
| It's so unacceptable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so ridiculous. | |
| And I remember this heartbreaking video, and it was in Los Angeles, and it was this woman. | ||
| That woman, yeah. | ||
| She had finally gotten... | ||
| She had spent all this money. | ||
| She had created this outdoor dining area, and then they closed down outdoor dining, either. | ||
| Also. | ||
| This is not science-based. | ||
| This is what is really infuriated. | ||
| More and more to that. | ||
| Across the parking lot. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm... | |
| I know. | ||
| That was why she was so mad. | ||
| Because some Hollywood studio was able to set up their picnic tables and film whatever the hell they were filming right there. | ||
| And that was her baking point. | ||
| Because the unions had supported the politicians. | ||
| And that's exactly what it is. | ||
| And so right across the parking lot from her, she was watching her business deteriorate. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Right across the parking lot, there was massive amounts of people who were dining outside. | ||
| And it's horrific. | ||
| And that lady was crying. | ||
| It's so awful. | ||
| I mean, Gavin Newsom should be recalled. | ||
| I hope that movement works out for whoever's, you know, whoever's pushing it. | ||
| Well, he certainly made all the mistakes that you can make to get recalled. | ||
| The dining outside is a big one. | ||
| The fact, I mean, there's a lot. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| Look, you compare COVID numbers from California. | ||
| Dining inside, excuse me. | ||
| Literally anything. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Are they comparative in terms of population density, though? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you mean by density? | ||
| Like we have major cities, sure. | ||
| But Los Angeles has like fucking 40 million people in it. | ||
| No, it doesn't have 40 million people. | ||
| Well, they don't count the Mexicans. | ||
| They don't count all the illegal people. | ||
| They have no idea how many are there. | ||
| But I mean, there's at least 20 million people in Los Angeles. | ||
| Can we agree to that? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| Isn't LA 20 million people? | ||
| No. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| There's no way that's possible. | ||
| Okay, what's the population of LA? That's pretty much Los Angeles County. | ||
| I mean, it's really high. | ||
| What do you mean a county? | ||
| It's all connected. | ||
| There's no fucking getting away. | ||
| Oh, it's a big sprawl. | ||
| Anyway, but Texas and California are not that different. | ||
| There's a big difference in terms of population density. | ||
| If you try to draw... | ||
| You're saying density. | ||
| Manhattan has the highest density, for instance. | ||
| Yeah, but nobody drives. | ||
| If you try to drive from LA, if you try to leave LA, if you're in Santa Monica and you want to drive to Disneyland, it'll take you a year. | ||
| It takes forever. | ||
| It doesn't take a year. | ||
| Of course it doesn't take a year. | ||
| I'm joking. | ||
| But it takes hours and hours. | ||
| How much do you love Disneyland? | ||
| That's a lie. | ||
| That's 2019. That's two years ago. | ||
| So now it's 20 million? | ||
| It's more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Can you look up Harris County? | ||
| Houston? | ||
| How many is in Los Angeles County? | ||
| That's the county I hit. | ||
| 10 million? | ||
| That's a joke. | ||
| 40 million in the state, right? | ||
| It's about 40 million. | ||
| I think Texas is smaller. | ||
| The point I'm trying to make is they're comparable. | ||
| And so it's good to compare policies and just what's going on. | ||
| And for COVID in particular, trends were basically the same. | ||
| Los Angeles is not weird. | ||
| It's a sprawl, just like Houston's a sprawl. | ||
| I think Los Angeles and Houston are very comparable places. | ||
| We both have downtowns. | ||
| They're both major, major sprawls. | ||
| How many people live in Houston? | ||
| Can we look it up? | ||
| I would say like five. | ||
| Just under five. | ||
| In Houston, though, but what about Harris County? | ||
| Oh, see, you're doing what you don't like me doing. | ||
| It's 4.7 in Harris County. | ||
| I'm attaching all these other people, and you're like, no, no, no, don't do that, but you're trying to do that to Houston. | ||
| I'm just saying they're comparable. | ||
| These are comparable urban sprawls. | ||
| Houston's only 2.3. | ||
| It's a big difference, bro. | ||
| 8 million fucking people. | ||
| Houston's the fourth largest thing. | ||
| It goes to New York, LA, Chicago. | ||
| Think about how many people died in the Holocaust. | ||
| It's less than the difference between Houston and LA. It's a lot of people. | ||
| That's an interesting way to look at it. | ||
| I'm just talking about numbers, bro. | ||
| Just talking about numbers. | ||
| Does LA win or something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| We win for sucking more. | ||
| LA wins for having more fucking humans. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You're punished. | ||
| By the way, Houston is very liberal. | ||
| It affects your bottom line. | ||
| Houston is very, very blue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| All major cities are very, very blue. | ||
| Houston's very diverse. | ||
| The difference is there's a balance in Houston between the state government being very red and the liberal city government. | ||
| Dallas is like less blue, but not much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's pretty blue. | |
| Nah, pretty blue. | ||
| Is it the same as Houston? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pretty much? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, Dallas. | ||
| Austin is completely blue. | ||
| Austin's weird blue. | ||
| Austin's like California. | ||
| Just like a different type. | ||
| Again, I differentiate between practical liberals and progressives. | ||
| So what the fuck keeps Texas red? | ||
| Farmers? | ||
| Ranchers and shit? | ||
| Well, first of all, it's not like everybody's blue inside Harris County, of course. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| You know, I win, and I'm only in Harris County. | ||
| My district is an urban, suburban district, and I win by 13, 14 points. | ||
| Well, that's what I think we need, is more people like you. | ||
| Yeah, I agree, Joe. | ||
| More people who are rational Republicans. | ||
| You're not mean-spirited ideologists. | ||
| You're just a fucking rational person. | ||
| It makes a lot of sense. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| They should be punished. | ||
| Grifters should be punished. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No! | ||
| 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? | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| However, here's the problem. | ||
| So it should be difficult, yes. | ||
| And only about 10% end up getting adjudicated for asylum. | ||
| Only about 10%. | ||
| Because for you to claim to asylum, you have to prove that you've been persecuted politically or for your gender, for your religion, or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Okay, there's an actual legal standard. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, but what if you're a person that lives in Mexico? | ||
| Or Syria. | ||
| 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 what they end up doing is they go and they say, well, I'm claiming asylum. | ||
| I'm running away from violence and political persecution. | ||
| They know what to say. | ||
| They have notes, even. | ||
| Right, but outside of asylum, what are their other options? | ||
| The normal immigration process. | ||
| What is that process? | ||
| Like if you're a person who's like a poor person lives in Mexico. | ||
| It's hard because there's tens and tens of millions of hundreds of millions of people who would want to apply for it. | ||
| So you have to have a system. | ||
| You have to have a line. | ||
| All around the world. | ||
| 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. | ||
| A portion? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Part of your family? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| Why would you have a percentage of them stay in Mexico City? | ||
| Because it's a disincentive, because now you're creating a disincentive. | ||
| You're creating a disincentive because there's a good chance that we're going to... | ||
| There's at least a chance that when you cross that border, you're going to be sent back immediately. | ||
| And you can claim your asylum there. | ||
| Once people got word of this, they were like, well, I don't really want to make the risk. | ||
| I don't want to pay the drug cartels that PISO that I had to pay. | ||
| I don't want to make the journey. | ||
| How do you say PISO, but you say the other word so well? | ||
| PISO is just pronounced PISO. Isn't it PISO? No, no, no, no. | ||
| I'm not saying peso. | ||
| I'm saying piso. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| That's a different word. | ||
| What's the word? | ||
| What does piso mean? | ||
| It's just like a headcount thing. | ||
| It's just a thing. | ||
| Do you know what that means? | ||
| It's just what they call it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Piso mojado means wet floor. | |
| Well, piso means floor, yes, but that's not... | ||
| That's just what Border Patrol told me they call it. | ||
| It's like a slang term. | ||
| I thought you were saying peso wrong. | ||
| Peso is a monetary currency. | ||
| Peso is a floor, but piso in this case is a slang term. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Slang term. | ||
| Yeah, as I understand it. | ||
| Unless they told it to me wrong, but that's what they've called it. | ||
| So they disincentivized people by making it more difficult. | ||
| So you think in doing that, they eliminated a lot of the fuckery? | ||
| Yes, they did. | ||
| And COVID restrictions also helped us basically push people back. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that what you believe? | ||
| That would be a kind way. | ||
| A kind way. | ||
| It depends on the person. | ||
| What's the unkind way? | ||
| You want more legal immigration because you want them to eventually become citizens and vote for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think at the higher ends of the democratic patriarchy... | ||
| That's what they want. | ||
| Because every policy you propose to me increases illegal immigration. | ||
| What's the worst case scenario if that happens? | ||
| Let's say that more and more people embrace this idea of open borders and illegal immigration and allowing those people to vote. | ||
| And then once they get in there, they're going to vote for the same people that allowed them to get into the country. | ||
| What's the worst case scenario? | ||
| I'm not sure what the worst case scenario is. | ||
| I mean, pick every hyper-progressive policy you don't like, and I suppose that would be the worst case scenario. | ||
| But in some countries, that's not the case, right? | ||
| Like Cuba. | ||
| The people that emigrate from Cuba tend to be very conservative. | ||
| That's one of the weird things about Miami. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Miami is... | ||
| Venezuelans as well, because they're dealing with the social unrest there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's not what we do. | ||
| We say, hey, take 30 days, please leave. | ||
| What do they do if they contain someone, they find out they're COVID positive? | ||
| Well, not what they do with an American. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So what happens if you cross the border? | ||
| Do they test people? | ||
| No, the Border Patrol is not testing people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're generally the ones testing them. | ||
| So a charity organization. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Some organization like that. | ||
| It's not necessarily a government organization. | ||
| What do they do when they test someone positive? | ||
| 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. | ||
| What do they do with them? | ||
| They don't turn them back. | ||
| So they allow them to infect everyone else in the containment facility? | ||
| Well, again, Border Patrol and our processing facilities, they don't have the capacity to test everybody there, as I understand it. | ||
| Currently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's highly likely that what you're saying is absolutely happening. | ||
| And then if we do end up testing a huge group of people later on, that's generally what happens. | ||
| And you see that a lot of them are test positive. | ||
| Did you see the video that Ted Cruz posted where he was at the border and this woman was telling him not to film things? | ||
| And you look, these people were just sandwiched in there like sardines. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| What did you think about that? | ||
| 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? | ||
| But Biden's doing the same thing. | ||
| He's doing the exact same thing. | ||
| But the issue is that it's hard, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's the issue. | ||
| And that's what conservatives are Instead of making it a partisan issue. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I don't like repeating the same slogans that the left was repeating two years ago. | ||
| Kids in cages! | ||
| No. | ||
| Hey guys, here's the lesson to be learned here. | ||
| We have a rule of law. | ||
| We have a process. | ||
| You have to adhere to the process. | ||
| If you don't, Then you're doing a disservice to the American people and their sense of sovereignty. | ||
| Not only that, but you're doing a disservice to legal immigrants who are trying to do it the right way. | ||
| This is unfair on all levels. | ||
| You remember when Obama was talking about this? | ||
| Obama was talking about this when he was running for president. | ||
| They used to be very pro-border security. | ||
| It's a crazy video when you watch them discuss it. | ||
| You can make them debate each other on their clips. | ||
| Yeah, it's like Obama sounds like a Republican when he was talking about the rule of law. | ||
| I can find Chuck Schumer doing the same thing. | ||
| Yeah, it's sad that these things become tools in order to get their side elected. | ||
| And I think it is. | ||
| Again, there's certain issues. | ||
| People are like, well, why can't you find the middle? | ||
| And I'm like, sometimes you can if the objective is the same. | ||
| If the objective is the same, we can work together. | ||
| If the objective is not the same, we can't work together. | ||
| Now, here's where the hippie, idealistic aspect of my own personality comes into play. | ||
| Because I go, well, what would disincentivize people to try to illegally immigrate? | ||
| Well, the best strategy, I think, would be to make their country a place where you wouldn't want to leave. | ||
| Well, there's an agreement on that. | ||
| That would be the best. | ||
| Like, is there a way where we could make these places where these people flee from? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How would you do that? | ||
| Well, I think our foreign policy needs to focus on our own backyard. | ||
| I think we need to look at the Western Hemisphere as a place to invest in and to focus on policy. | ||
| For sure, for sure. | ||
| But we have an issue with illegal immigration. | ||
| 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? | ||
| To give people opportunity in those places. | ||
| So what people... | ||
| Is that outside? | ||
| Am I just thinking like an idiot? | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Shout out to Henry. | ||
| Henry's a friend. | ||
| But he's, you know, again, true liberal. | ||
| He's representing his constituents. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Like, if you don't want to label people, he's representing what his constituents want. | ||
| And his constituents, who mostly have Hispanic last names, by the way, they still don't want illegal immigration. | ||
| There's this myth out there that you can just group Hispanics into this category, and it's just not true. | ||
| As somebody who grew up in South America, I think I understand the culture fairly well. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| And it's not obvious to me that they just want illegal immigration on top of illegal immigration. | ||
| They want the opposite. | ||
| They're voting constituents. | ||
| They want fairness. | ||
| So, let's bring this fucking podcast home. | ||
| How do we fix this issue? | ||
| How do we fix this ridiculous bipartisanship? | ||
| Or ridiculous partisanship, rather, that we have. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, how do we bring everybody together? | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| You're a politician. | ||
| I'm not going to give You're a congressman. | ||
| I might not give you the answer you told me. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| I'm going to say this. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
97%. | |
| A lot more. | ||
| A lot more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Go get involved in your local level and get informed and be humble about it. | ||
| A sense of humility, frankly, is maybe what you're looking at. | ||
| Like, I know what I believe, and I know why I believe it. | ||
| You're not going to change my mind in a really big way, and that's fine. | ||
| But if you're going to take a really hard position on something, please know why you believe it. | ||
| There's no shame in ignorance. | ||
| It's not your fault you don't know a lot about why Medicare works the way it does. | ||
| Or any given subject. | ||
| Any given subject. | ||
| It's not your fault. | ||
| You're trying to get your kids to school, man. | ||
| But at least be open-minded about it. | ||
| And let's have rational conversations online. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They haven't been explained that yet. | ||
| The problem with people online is that it's too easy to just be negative. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| It's too easy. | ||
| And that's a problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| And that's what you're sensing. | ||
| That's why you're sensing this division. | ||
| And there is division. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When are you running for president? | ||
| Last question. | ||
| Nah, you've already asked me this. | ||
| I asked you that a year ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not soon. | |
| Not soon. | ||
| Dan, you're a good man. | ||
| I appreciate you very much. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| You're a good man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I support you. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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