Pierre Poilievre details his wrestling-to-politics journey, critiques Trudeau's economic damage, and proposes a "pay-go" law to curb bureaucracy while defending oil sands and restricting immigration. He debates assisted suicide limits citing Viktor Frankl, contrasts Canada's peaceful diversity with European violence, and demands tougher bail laws against repeat offenders. The conversation covers opioid crisis outrage, Ibogaine for addiction, and MMA history from Bruce Lee to Ilia Topuria, ultimately championing individual liberty over government control and humility in leadership. [Automatically generated summary]
Every time you do a kettlebell swing, you do a snatch, you do a clean, you're going to be seeing that maple leaf, and you're going to be reminding yourself that you need to come back to Canada.
Yeah, it was just, you'd go to a farmer's market, you want to buy some barley or some potatoes, but you don't know if you're actually getting the real weight.
So they'd have a scale, a balancing scale, and they'd put the kettlebell on one side and the produce on the other.
And then you knew you got the right amount.
And then, of course, they have these big farmers at farm fairs, and they're showing off their horses and their cattle and stuff, and they'd want to do strength displays.
So these farmers are throwing these things around.
And the Russian military picked it up.
And then the Soviets, of course, took over and they took it on.
And then Pavel, I think he was a Belarusian, though, if I'm not mistaken.
And uh, I think it's far superior to uh, to a dumbbell exercise, because there's no uh, a dumbbell.
You got a, you get a consistent lift.
But that's not real life.
If you're in a fight or you have to pick something up heavy, it doesn't lift consistently, it's it's explosive in that small range and what you know, when you're doing a snatch, by the time you get up to your shoulder, the thing's weightless because the catapult.
The catapult effect has taken over and now it's actually negative ways, lifting your hand up in the air if you're doing it right, but like if you're in a fight or if you're in a wrestling match or you're you're trying to push really hard against a heavy object.
It's all about explosive power and that's what kettlebells give, rather than just this sort of uh, freeze and contract thing that you do with with dumbbells.
Well, I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in south south end of Calgary, you know, and my folks were teachers.
I was adopted.
My mom was a 16 year old on she she was obviously a single mom.
She put me up for adoption, and two school teachers there was.
Electricians and oil workers and police officers lived on our street normal hardworking, good folks, and I always grew up with the impression they were getting screwed over and that um, the government didn't listen to people like them, didn't listen to people who grew up on streets like ours and living in western Canada.
There was a greater sense of that.
We called it western alienation at the time.
And there was this guy kind of a quirky guy but a really brilliant guy named Preston Manning, and I saw this billboard of him and he had his fist up and it said enough.
And I said, yeah, I like that guy.
So I got involved in politics.
I started reading about different things.
I read a biography on Fidel Castro, and then I read Justin's dad.
Well, it is a hell of a, I don't think it's a true one, though.
His dad is Pierre.
His dad was very controversial while I grew up because he did a lot of damage to the oil sector.
And we're from oil country.
And so that was one of the things that I felt kind of resentful about the national government.
And one of the reasons I got involved is because the West deserved a fairer deal.
But I read a lot of books like, you know, Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, and I came to develop a philosophy based on just maximizing personal, financial, religious freedom.
Let people make their own decisions.
And that animated me to get involved in politics and fight for that.
If you had suffered an injury that took you out of Taekwondo when you were young and you simply couldn't compete at anything, you'd probably be looking for some other adventure.
Well, I'm really excited to have you in here because I've seen you speak multiple times and you're a very reasonable, intelligent person that makes a lot of sense.
Like, I just say I don't go up there anymore, but it's because I think the government went horribly wrong over the last X amount of years.
But the people are amazing.
It's like, I've always said that Canada has like, it's like America with like 20% less assholes.
Like every time I would go up there, I'm like, people are so nice.
They're like the nicest people.
And I think that's part of what went wrong for Canada, is that people are rule followers and they're trusting and kind people.
And this wolf in sheep's clothing snuck in and was pretending he was a sweet guy and passing all these crazy laws.
And just when we saw what happened with COVID, with just what happened with the truckers and people's accounts getting shut down for donating to the truckers, like the whole thing was so concerning because it's our Canada was like a part of America almost.
I mean, you're a different country, but it's like you used to be able to go over there with just a driver's license.
It was such a cool place.
I started going to the Montreal Comedy Festival in like 1993.
Well, listen, my view is that people should have the choice, but the concern we have is the suggestion that it would be offered to kids or offered to people whose only condition is mental illness.
And that's why we have to do more to give people hope when they're suffering with mental illness.
You know, give people the sense that they can take back control of their lives.
I think we do have to promote fitness more because it gives people, it turns them into a subject that controls their surroundings rather than an object being controlled.
It teaches people that hardship is temporary and that the aftermath is positive.
And we have to give people, reinstill people with a sense of meaning when they're going through hardship rather than to say that it's all over.
And, you know, I think we have to, our system needs to be geared towards giving people all the best options to live on rather than just suggesting MAID as the easy, as the automatic path for the system to impose on people.
So one of the things our party is pushing for is to make clear that public servants who are getting phone calls from people who are in need of help for something, they shouldn't be offering that.
They shouldn't be offering MAID.
People can seek it out if they want.
But when you're calling up saying, I'm poor or I'm struggling or I'm having a mental illness or I've got an injury, we shouldn't have a government worker saying, well, consider MAID.
Well, first of all, there's the physiological side, which affects the brain, but it's also the sensation of discomfort that you push through, knowing that you have to focus on the thing you have to do.
And that, I think, it helps us in anything we're encountering, whether you're going through a divorce or a bankruptcy or an injury or an illness, if you know that pushing through to the other side, because you've got a meaning there, that can give people hope for a better life.
You know, my favorite psychologist is Victor Frankel.
And he developed this Lagos treatment, which was basically giving people a sense of meaning.
He survived the Holocaust in the concentration camp because he had a sense of meaning that he wanted to, his book was stolen from him in the concentration camp about this theory, and he wanted to live on so he could survive and write that book.
And then he found in his teaching that it wasn't so much people's circumstances that determined their happiness, it was whether they had a meaning in life.
And he tells this incredible story of a group therapy session where he had this very rich woman who was married to a very rich man.
And he had next to him another lady who was living in terrible poverty.
She'd lost a son and had a second severely disabled son.
And he said to both of them, what will your life look like when you're 80 years old and you're on your deathbed?
And the wealthier lady said, well, I will look back and think that I had some fun and enjoyed the luxuries of being very wealthy and having an easy life, that there wasn't a lot of meaning to it.
And whereas the mother who was struggling with a disabled child and had lost another one said, well, I gave my first child a great life, a short one, but a great one.
I struggled to give my disabled child a good, dignified existence.
And I leave this world satisfied and happy that my life had purpose and meaning.
And the lesson I take from that is that it is not about whether you have a gazillion dollars or whether your life is easy.
It's whether you have some meaning to invest your life into.
And I think we have to infuse people's lives with meaning so that they can live a good life.
And I think that's one of the most important parts of being a leader is having a great message and having a great philosophy and having a great perspective.
And I mean, that's what disturbed me the most about when Trudeau was running the country, that I didn't feel like that.
I felt like he was manipulating people with woke politics and ideology and that it was just this weird, slippery slope that people were falling down where they're losing rights and you're losing your ability to express yourself.
And it just really disturbed me because I always felt that Canada was like one of the freest places and one of the most open-minded places.
And it just, I didn't understand how it could fall so quickly.
You know, my leader, this funny moment when Joe Biden came to Parliament Hill and I said, Mr. President, I'm Pierre Polyeb.
I'm the leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition.
And he said, loyal opposition?
How can you be loyal and opposition at the same time?
It's like, what the hell are you talking about?
And because you guys have a system based on a republic, whereas ours is the British system.
And in our system, the opposition is an act of loyalty.
That's what our system, it means that if you are opposing the government, you're doing it out of loyalty to the good of the people.
In our House of Commons, you have a half circle in your Congress.
We have two sides in our parliament.
It's two and a half sword lengths apart because they used to literally kill each other in the old English days.
But the idea is the opposition is to prosecute the hell out of the government, make the mighty low, the most powerful people in the country are supposed to tremble every time they walk in that place because every mistake they made, every abuse of power, every corruption they might have done can be exposed and in front of all eyes.
So our system is really designed to constrain the power of government through what we call parliament.
Like I don't work for government.
I work for parliament and parliament works for the people.
We call it the House of Commons because it's the House of the Common People.
It's green in there because they used to meet in the fields of England.
And so I really view the world of our Parliament to limit the power of government, to maximize the power of the people, make people bigger, stronger, and more fulfilled by having the government narrowly focus on the things it's supposed to do.
Roads, military, basic social safety net, borders, police, et cetera, but then leave people alone to live their lives.
If I were to start a political party from scratch, it would be the mind-your-own damn business party.
You know, just get the government to do its job well, do four or five things really well, and then let people live their lives.
No, look, like I said, the way I grew up and everything I've seen ever since, when I talk to farmers or factory workers, electricians, I find they know just as much or more than the so-called experts I encounter on Parliament Hill.
Like back during COVID, when all these governments were printing money and all the politicians and bankers said, oh, this is great.
Look at all this money we get to spend.
I walk around communities and I'd have like mechanics say, you know, we're going to have inflation.
And I would say, yeah, it makes sense to me.
And I'd go back to Parliament Hill and the experts would all say, no, no, there's not going to be any inflation.
And sure enough, all that money filtered into the economy, bid up all the goods we buy, and everybody got smoked with higher prices.
But the point is that it was the common people who don't study this stuff for a living, who don't read endless reports and studies, who could just figure out that if there's money pouring into the economy that's not matched by goods and services, it's going to bid up the cost of everything.
So that's my experience and my ideology is the common guy knows how to make his own decisions.
So there's a narrative in America, and the narrative is that you were about to win and your party was about to win, but then Trump came along and said he was going to turn Canada into the 51st state.
You know, we love Americans as neighbors and friends, but we want to be uniquely and we want to be sovereign as Canadians.
It's our country.
It's where we grow up.
You're a patriot as an American.
I'm a patriot as a Canadian.
It's where my grandfather arrived.
It's where our collective ancestors put on military uniforms and sailed to fight wars.
It's where our grandkids are going to live.
We're very proudly Canadian.
So we're never going to be the 51st state.
And I just wish he'd knock that shit off so that we can get back to talking about the things that we can do as two separate, but two separate countries that are actually friends.
I think at first everyone thought it was a joke because we've always had these jokes like, you know, one day we're going to take over Vermont and Detroit should be part of Canada and all that stuff.
But then he kept saying it and saying it.
And, you know, it became a lot of people got upset about it.
We should get the tariffs out because there's so much we could be doing together as neighbors and partners if we got rid of those tariffs.
I think what are the biggest problems in America today?
Affordability, security.
And we can help with both.
We knock the tariffs down.
Let's look at affordability.
We have the fourth biggest supply of oil anywhere on earth.
You guys pay a huge price discount for our oil because we're effectively, all our infrastructure to ship it is north-south.
And it's a very unique heavy oil.
So we accept, unfortunately, and for now, a price discount on the oil we send you, which can translate into more jobs and paychecks, but also lower energy prices.
You've got $5 a gallon right now in lots of places in America.
You're buying, I want to produce more so we can sell 2 million more barrels of Canadian oil into the U.S. market.
And then there's housing.
You've got huge housing pressures on young people.
They can't afford a place to live.
We're the biggest supplier of lumber for home building of any country that imports to the United States, exports to the United States.
We've got very low cost but high-quality softwood lumber we could be shipping.
Or the best truck, the best-selling truck in America for 45 years now is the Ford Series.
It's aluminum.
It's a military-grade aluminum body.
You guys can't make enough aluminum here.
You don't have enough bauxite or electricity to convert it into alumina and aluminum.
You get your aluminum from us.
A tariff does not bring the production to America.
It raises the price of the aluminum and therefore the F-Series truck.
Get rid of that tariff.
You lower taxes.
You lower the cost of an F-Series truck for the miner in Appalachia or the electrician in Ohio.
And that's just on the affordability side.
There's a lot we can do with our minerals to make the continent a hell of a lot safer as well.
So I think it's in America's interest to come towards a tariff-free deal and trade freely as friends.
I believe in the rule of one prime minister at a time.
So I fought like hell to win.
I didn't win.
We came very close.
So I've said, listen, I'll leave it to the prime minister to do the negotiating.
And I've said I'll support him any way I can.
Even in my visit down here, I'm sending him text messages to tell him what's going on, to try and support his work, because we both want what's best for Canada.
Ours, we have technically fixed election dates, but the government can fall at any time.
It's very simple.
A rule is that if the opposition parties bind up and they can vote down the government, that is to say the majority of MPs in the House say we've lost confidence in the government.
The election is now.
Or if the prime minister decides he wants an election, he can call it and the election is now.
But it has to be sometime in the next roughly three years.
It wouldn't necessarily be tomorrow, but like, you know, in the next few weeks, if there were a non-confidence vote and the government lost it, then they go to an election.
So I said I'm the leader of the opposition, but I'm also prime minister in waiting.
So the notion is that the Canadian people should not only have a government, but they should have an alternative.
And that alternative has two functions, official opposition.
It's actually called that.
I think it's a proper noun, capital O, official, capital O opposition, and also government in waiting.
So you have to be prosecuting the government, but you have to present yourself to people in a way where they say, yeah, that guy or that team could actually be the government.
Those are the dual roles that I have to carry out.
And so the way your elections work now, so you're essentially just stating your case and going around and talking about what policies you would implement and how you would do things differently and just waiting to see how it all plays out.
I remember he came to Parliament Hill years ago, and I thought, geez, he's going to be because I thought he'd be cocky and swagger, but he was so down to earth.
And some people did get caught and get in trouble and nothing ever came of it because it's pretty unconstitutional to tell people that they can't work out together.
Like the government really didn't have the right to tell people that they couldn't do what they wanted to do.
That was a legal thing that you can do.
Like all of a sudden, there's this mandate, there's this law or rule being passed down, or at least it's being promoted, that you're not allowed to go to a gym and work out with other people.
But those are the healthiest people.
Those are the people that are the least likely to get sick.
Like this, this is crazy to say.
And you know, if you're sick, and if you just have a good gym with good people, say, hey, don't show up if you're sick.
Everybody should be okay.
These are the people you should worry about the least.
And too many governments in the Western world have gotten way too bossy.
They're just looking for every excuse to boss people around.
And that's what we have to push back again.
And it's, you know, EV mandates or, you know, excessive control of the internet or the massive increase in the cost of government, which is really like appropriating the private voluntary economy into the coercive government economy.
That's what we're seeing across Europe, in the UK, parts of the United States, as well as back home.
So we need to reverse that trend and get people back in charge of their lives.
So we have the most resources of any country in the world per capita, bar none.
We need to have, to make it happen, though, we need to have the fastest permits anywhere in the world and the lowest taxes on producing those resources.
We're the fourth in oil, the number one in uranium, number one in potash for fertilizer.
We have the fifth biggest supplier of natural gas.
We have the longest oceanic coastline.
Like we are, we have 12 of NATO's, sorry, we have 10 of 12 of NATO's defined defense minerals.
So, you know, you had that guy, Palmer Lucky, on.
I don't think he can make his stuff without Canadian minerals.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he'll correct me, but like night vision technology, you need to have germanium for that.
You need to have gallium to make semiconductors and radar.
You need to have aluminum for armored vehicles and airplanes.
You need cobalt for heat-resistant alloys and fighter jets.
You need tungsten for body, sorry, armor-piercing ammunition.
We have it all.
And what I want to do is unblock those resources, produce them in abundance for ourselves and our allies, make $200,000 paychecks for our trades workers, build up an enormous strategic stockpile of it so that we have tons of leverage in international relations.
And if God forbid there is ever a global conflict, we would have all the resources necessary to win it.
But we need to get rid of a lot of laws that are blocking and replace them with laws that have fast permitting so that we can produce this stuff on scale very quickly.
But I just think across the Western world, like Europe, UK, parts of the U.S., and Canada, there's a problem with bureaucracy just growing way too damn big.
Like, you know, the First Nations in our country are incredibly forward-looking.
The Squamish built 6,000 units of housing on 10 acres of land, you can believe it, in a town, in a city of Vancouver where it's very hard to get a permit to do anything because it was their land, so they did it.
They're trying to build, they're building now an LNG liquefaction plant where they replaced an old dirty mill.
They cleaned it up and put an LNG plant there.
But the federal government took a lot of time, 14 years, to give them a permit.
So we need to think like they're thinking, which is entrepreneurial, speed of business, get it done quickly.
That's how you develop.
Like we have this community in my district.
It's called Hardesty, 600 people.
They manage $100 billion of oil in a town of 600 people.
Why is it there?
Because their municipality offers a permit in one week with one page.
And I wanted to tell this story, so I called them and I said, can I have someone come and do a video with me?
And they said, we don't have anyone here.
We don't have like bureaucrats that can help you.
They're all out on their farms right now.
They come in, they stamp the permit, and they go back to their farm.
Well, that's why we have $100 billion of energy moving through the area, which is bigger than the GDP of many countries, because they have fast permits.
And that's what we need in Canada.
We need to be the fastest place to get things done.
We can figure out whether a project is damaging to the environment in weeks and months rather than decades.
There's nothing you're going to learn in year 14 of the review that you couldn't have learned in month 14.
So there's ways to protect the environment.
When the Germans, so when the Germans had to break their dependence on Russia after it invaded Ukraine, they approved an LNG import terminal in 60 days.
They completed the whole damn thing in less than 200 days.
And guess what?
No environmental problems.
They got their engineers to sit down and figure out how to do it quickly.
And that's the mentality that we need to get in Canada.
Well, you slim it down to one project, one environmental review instead of 20 or 30.
You have a fixed timeline that the bureaucrats have to give an answer of six months rather than just as long as they want to drag it on for.
And the other thing I would do is study areas where they're perfectly situated to have a project like a pipeline or a mine or an LNG export terminal or a port expansion.
And I would pre-permit it.
I would say to our officials, go in, study, make sure that the environmental aspects are all in good order.
I'll issue a pre-permit.
And then anybody who comes along and wants to build it, as long as they follow the terms and act responsibly, has a guaranteed permit before they even apply for it.
And I think we would have a roaring economy if we did that.
You open up a mine, you take out the bitumen, you separate the sand from the oil, you make it less viscous by putting diluent in it, and you ship it off.
And then after the oil is, after the mining is done, they resurface it, and you wouldn't even know there was a mine there.
I mean, there's an impact no matter what you do, but at the end of the day, the people who live there are very healthy and very happy, and they're the strongest supporters of the expansion of the oil sands.
You guys have shale here, but as the years go by, you get less and less out of a shale reservoir.
We have very little decline.
We can keep producing and producing.
We have what's called in situ, where there's an entire oil sands operation under your feet.
You could be out in a forest hunting, and you wouldn't even know that under your feet they're extracting it through a whole system of pipes where they inject just steam, steam vapor, that loosens up the oil.
It sinks down, it goes into another pipe, comes up to the top, and you can have beautiful, pristine nature.
The bears, the deer, the birds, they don't even know that there's extraction happening under their feet.
So we have the best industry, the most responsible industry anywhere in the world.
It's been a really disgusting PR campaign by extremist environmentalists and frankly some of our competitors to try and make our industry look bad.
Yeah, but I mean, that's just a superficial look at it.
I'll take you for a tour in the oil sands.
You'll be amazed.
We have the best engineers in the world.
And by the way, the First Nations people absolutely love it because it's lifting their people out of poverty.
They're getting enormous job opportunities out of it.
One of our MPs is a former chief where they took 18% unemployment, brought it down to three, balanced their budget.
Another one of my members of parliament in northern British Columbia negotiated a $40 billion LNG plant on the Heisla territory.
It's completely eliminating poverty for the First Nations there.
And by exporting clean Canadian natural gas, which we can liquefy 25% cheaper because it's cold as hell in Canada, they actually displace dirty coal overseas.
So instead of Asia burning coal, they're burning clean Canadian gas that's delivered by First Nations partnership.
So this is the best way to do it.
makes everybody richer, and makes our entire continent better off.
50 years ago, a barber and a barber and a waitress could buy a house with a big yard for a dog and raise four kids, meat and potatoes on the dinner table every night.
Well, there's a lot of spending and a lot of making money, a lot of just turning, you know, just making dollar bills with nothing behind it, nothing to back it.
So I don't begrudge them as people, but we can't spend money on enhanced social services, advanced programs that we as Canadians don't get for people who are not paying into.
If they're not real refugees, they shouldn't be brought in as refugees.
I think we have to distinguish between those people who are actually in danger in their home country, which is the definition of a refugee, and someone who just wants to come in in excess of their proper immigration.
Right now it's a challenge because we had a big number of international students and temporary foreign workers that came in in very large numbers in like two or three years.
We were bringing in about a million people a year, which in America's terms would be 10 million, like just if you're doing per capita.
And it really caused a housing shortage, like some places where you have 26 of these students living in one basement.
Well, in addition, so I like this idea that actually, believe it or not, that Bill Clinton and the Republicans did in the 90s in the U.S., it was called the pay-go law.
It was a very simple principle.
Every time the administration wanted to bring in a new dollar of spending, they had to match it with a dollar of savings.
So there was no extra net spending for like eight years.
And that's when your government balanced its budget and paid off $400 billion of debt.
That law lapsed in 2002.
And immediately after that, America went back into deficits.
And you haven't emerged.
You've been in deficit now for 25 years.
This is about internalizing the scarcity.
Every creature in the universe, every bird in the trees, every fish in the seas, has to live with scarcity, maximizing use of scarce resources.
The only creature who doesn't do that is the politician because he's always using someone else's money.
It's like, oh, well, I'll just print it or borrow it or tax it.
It's not my money.
And so they routinely show up to their cabinet meetings and say, well, I've got a new idea.
It's $100 million.
Where are you going to get it?
I don't know.
We'll print it.
We'll borrow it.
We'll tax it.
Not my money.
But if you had a law saying you can't actually bring a proposal to cabinet unless you have matching savings to pay for it, well, then you'd have these politicians walking up and down the hallways in their departments looking for waste and like rooting it out.
So instead of making the single mom, the senior or the small business owner live with scarcity, I want the politicians and bureaucrats to live with scarcity.
And that's what I would impose by law on my government.
Yeah, it was that Congress was very disciplined as well, and the American people just got fed up and said, we're not tolerating these deficits anymore.
And they imposed scarcity from the center.
And by the way, the economy boomed because the government was restrained and the free market economy could just roar.
And that's another part of the equation, by the way, is unlock the power of free enterprise.
Like this is the 250th anniversary, not just of the Declaration of Independence, but also of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, where he basically, for the first time in human history, described the free market system.
And that was starting to flourish in the States and in parts of Europe.
And that system basically started to come into place after the late 1770s.
The growth since the free market system has come into place in the world has been 200 times faster than it was before because there is the most powerful system for generating material benefit for the people.
And that's what we need to restore in Canada.
I want to make it the freest economy in the world.
Well, it sounds like I just can't see how someone would listen to what you're saying and say, I find fault in this.
Other than the potential environmental impact of extracting resources, I could see how a lot of the greenies would get really upset and get their panties in a bunch about that and be very incredulous to the idea that you're going to protect the environment while you're extracting all these resources.
But if you could lay it all out and also lay out this enormous economic impact and how it would uplift impoverished communities, how it would completely change the economic landscape of the country, it just only makes sense.
And then they said, first of all, they said that I had no policies.
Then they said they're scary policies.
And then they stole my policies right before the election.
But, hey, listen, if the government that's in power now steals all my ideas and does the things I want to do, then I've won because that's why I came here.
I didn't just do it so that I could have my name on the door.
So I keep saying to the Prime Minister, steal my ideas.
But, you know, the great thing about Canada is we've always sorted our shit out peacefully.
Like the Protestants and Catholics tore each other's eyeballs out in Europe for like hundreds of years.
And then we came to Canada and just got along.
And that's the great thing about Canada.
It's like you can come, you know, Muslims and Jews, Christians and Protestants and Catholics, Hindus and Sikhs, they come to Canada and they just get along.
I mean, we all believe in the basic principle that you're innocent until proven guilty.
But if someone's convicted of like 150 prior convictions and they're newly arrested on their latest crime, I don't think we should be releasing them onto the streets.
And so we got two lakhs on bail.
So there's now a consensus in Canada that you should have severe restrictions on repeat offenders.
Like in Vancouver, they had to arrest the same 40 guys 6,000 times in one year.
40 guys, 6,000 arrests.
So they're basically being released within hours of their latest arrest.
So we now built a bipartisan, a multi-partisan consensus to fix that.
And we're pushing to toughen the bail system and ensure that it's the repeat offenders, a tiny group.
We don't have a lot of criminals in Canada, but they do a tremendous amount of crime.
So if you take them off the street, you put them in prison, you can basically reduce the crime rate dramatically.
It's like it is bananas, and it doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't make anybody help.
I understand you want to be empathetic, and I understand these narratives that the prison system is racist, and the justice system is racist, and these people have never been given a great shake in life.
Well, if you want to fix that, start in these impoverished neighborhoods, establish community centers, establish better education, fund that, but don't let hardened criminals back on the streets when they're habitual.
If you've been arrested 40, 50 times, it doesn't seem like you're getting any better.
So whatever rehabilitation process they have going on there, that's not working.
So keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Unless you like crime, I don't understand why you would do that.
It's like there's so many of these problems with government that it's just like rational thinking is one of one of the great interviews that I loved about you, you were eating an apple and you were talking to this guy who was being completely ridiculous.
You were asking him to define the issues that he had.
And it was so funny.
It was like, this is what happens when a rational person meets a person with empty narratives.
Maple syrup and honey are both sugary, but maple syrup is slightly lower in calories, glycemic index, has more minerals like manganese and calcium, while honey is a bit higher in calories, has a slightly stronger impact on blood sugar.
Well, I mean, that was one of the primary factors for me supporting this administration was RFK Jr. in this Make America Healthy Again initiative.
Because I think, you know, I had my friend Brigham Bueller yesterday from Ways to Well On, and, you know, we hammer this many times over and over again, but people need to hear it.
We spend more money on health care and we're sicker than we've ever been before.
And we have more chronic illness and we have more money.
None of it makes any sense.
It's completely ridiculous.
And it's obvious that people are eating the wrong things.
And there was so much outrage of him implementing all these healthy choices and trying to get rid of dyes that are illegal in Canada.
Like the same cereals that the same factory sells in Canada, they sell with natural dyes.
And in America, we demand them to be more colorful so we put poison in them.
Processed foods is an enormous percentage of a lot of Americans' diets.
Things with massive amounts of preservatives in them.
And that's like if you want a general guideline, eat real food.
Eat real eggs, real vegetables, real meat, real fish.
You'll be healthier.
As soon as you start having things that can sit on a shelf forever, except things like rice and normal beans, like things that are dried, that makes sense.
They could sit there.
But if something can just sit on a shelf for a long period of time and you consume it, how is it just not rotting?
I'm sure you've seen where they've taken a McDonald's Big Mac and they've just let it sit, taken a cheeseburger in a box and the guy pulls it out like 10 years later, it looks exactly the same.
The easiest way to get fit is to get around a bunch of other people that are also involved in the same endeavor.
If you have a bunch of friends that are unhappy with the way their life is, like, just go walk together.
Say, hey, guys, let's all go for a walk after dinner together.
Let's all decide, like, as a neighborhood, to go walk.
Just walk for a half an hour after your meals.
It'll lower your glycemic index.
It'll change your body.
It'll make you healthier.
You'll feel better.
It just does so much for you, just movement and activity.
And if you're involved with a group of people that are also inclined in the same direction, they're also trying to get better, trying to get fit, then you kind of, you're, you know, you feed off of your atmosphere.
And you get support from the people that are around them.
You know, make it a little healthy competition.
You know, who can, you know, do the most exercise and who can do the most, you know, whatever it is, like whether it's a sport or whether it's a game or whether it's just something that you enjoy doing that's physically physically taxing slightly.
It doesn't have to be a crazy kettlebell workout or a jiu-jitsu class.
Just take a just take a walk.
If the world, if the United States or Canada or anybody that's got problems with their health just decided to start walking every day for 20 minutes, it'll change your life.
And when it doesn't, those needs are not met and your biological requirements aren't met, you develop anxiety, you get overweight, your muscles atrophy, your bone density decreases, you can't open up a jar anymore.
There's all these problems that can be solved with just simple movement and activity.
You don't have to become a fitness nut.
You don't have to become a gym rat.
You just do something and that alone.
And then change what you eat.
Drink more water.
Stop drinking soda.
Stop drinking so much alcohol.
You know, stop eating processed food.
If we just slowly but surely get this in people's heads, for the longest time, people didn't think there was anything wrong with eating processed food.
They didn't think there was anything wrong with they thought sugar just gave you extra calories.
That's it.
They didn't realize the catastrophic health consequences of consuming all this sugar, the increase in type 2 diabetes, all these problems that people are having, that people are having because of poor diets.
They always say the center of the grocery store is what you should avoid because the center is all the stuff that doesn't need to be refrigerated, right?
Everything on the outskirts, all the vegetables and the fruit and the meats and the milk, that's all the stuff that's healthy because it has to be refrigerated.
Because if it's not, it goes bad.
Things that can just sit on a shelf.
But things that sit on a shelf forever, those are the things that are the easiest to profit from because you don't have to worry about storage.
You don't have to worry about refrigeration when you're processing or when you're moving them and transporting them.
You know, just education is the most important thing because there's a lot of people that don't know how much their diet impacts them.
And then there's also the problems that happen in this country where the sugar industry literally bribed scientists to pass the blame on saturated fat and pretend that this was the cause of all these heart issues that people were having and all the obesity, that it was just fat.
So then people started eating all these seed oil-rich foods like mayonnaise or excuse me, like margarine and corn oil and canola oil, all this stuff.
And there's a lot of people that live very healthily off a carnivore diet and that astounds people.
They don't understand it because they've been pushed into this idea.
Well, one of the things they did in America that's great is they reversed the food pyramid.
Our food pyramid was all grains at the bottom, was all wheat and grains, which is like there's nothing wrong with eating that as long as you're being smart about it.
When I cut the carbs out and I went basically into ketosis, I felt great because instead of having all the ups and downs when my blood sugar was down, when you're in ketosis, you basically live off your fat stores.
And then you're like, oh, you get hit with a tranquilizer dart.
It's just not good.
It's not good for you.
If I eat a steak, I feel great.
If I eat a steak, I don't feel in any way tired after I'm done.
I don't feel exhausted, like completely full.
Also, they have a high satiety rate.
Like, if you eat just steak, you're only going to eat what you need.
Like, your body knows when to stop.
But if there's mashed potatoes next to this steak and spaghetti next to this steak and bread and all these other things, you're just going to keep eating.
Well, there's also this dumb narrative that cows are responsible for climate change, which is just absolutely insane.
And whoever started promoting that needs to go to jail because you've done a terrible disservice to people, especially regenerative farming, that actually sequesters carbon.
I think there's been a demand spike in the last couple of years.
Beef prices were low for long, so a lot of ranchers got out of it.
They just said, I can't stay in this business losing money every year.
And then all of a sudden, prices started to go up.
And moods have changed a lot on beef, even in the last three, four years.
So now they're trying to keep up with the demand.
But I'm happy to see the ranchers doing well, but I'd sure like to see middle-class families to be able to afford to have beef again.
But my theory on one of the reasons why the marketing has shifted towards all this processed crap, and this goes back to my obsession, which is inflation, because instead of just raising the prices, they downgrade the quality of the food.
They strip out the nutrients and they inject garbage into our food that the companies do.
That is ultimately less nutritious, but the price tag doesn't necessarily look like it's changing.
So it's one of the more insidious ways that the system is able to charge you to pass inflationary costs on without you seeing it in the price tag that's underneath the product.
The wine was 10 out of 10 tested, but 10 out of 10.
I was looking at the Japanese obesity thing.
They have an interesting law that they put in place in 2008 where I believe it says workplaces have to measure people's waste of adults over 40 to find out if they're potentially overweight.
And, you know, the fact that no one's going to jail for that is infuriating.
What they did and the deception that they use to pretend that that stuff is not addictive, that it's not the same as heroin, is just absolutely atrocious.
And the fact that they got away with it and that the Sackler family, just that one family, I don't know if you've ever seen the Netflix docudrama series Painkiller.
And we, you know, these companies, I mean, it started in the States with Purdue and a number of others where they basically started lying to the system and paying, they actually paid bonuses to distributors for every overdose they caused.
They actually tracked the overdoses and then paid bonuses to distributors because that was an indicator of how successfully they were pushing the drugs onto doctors and pharmacists and the system.
It all came out in the court because there was a huge lawsuit and the companies had to pay $50 billion because of an American government lawsuit against them.
But they actually paid bonuses for overdose rates.
And they basically, they were very, very strategic.
They said, we're going to go to working class neighborhoods where there's huge unemployment.
So, you know, in the Rust Belt of America, where people were out of work and they obviously had some minor industrial injuries and said, you know, this will solve every ache and pain.
Take OxyContin.
And it felt great when they first started taking it.
And then it spread into Canada as well.
And then it mutated from OxyContin into fentanyl, which is 100 times more powerful than heroin.
It can stop your lungs in 15 seconds.
Just absolutely deadly.
And these companies, these dirtbag companies should be paying hundreds of billions of dollars to cover the treatment and recovery of the people whose lives have been ruined by this.
They basically got into the entire system, the healthcare system, the medical acumen community, and they pushed these over-prescriptions.
And then they got this crazy idea that they pushed in places like Portland and Seattle and San Francisco that the government should start giving out opioids that are safer than the ones that are on the street as an alternative to keep people from having contaminated drugs, which made the problem even worse because the addicts would sell those to kids so that they could buy the harder stuff off the street.
And it expanded it even more.
And so one of the things we're focused on, my plan, is massive treatment and recovery programs to get people off drugs.
Abstinence-based treatment is incredible.
It's very successful.
And we're saving lives now in Canada.
You get them in, you get them counseling, group therapy treatment, sweat lodges for First Nations, people's physical exercise is a big part of it.
I went to one treatment center in Saskatchewan, and they actually bought these rusted-out weights.
And they had the guys like lifting weights.
And the bureaucrats are saying, well, why are you spending money on weights?
What does that have to do with it?
And he says, well, it's been the best thing we had.
These guys started to see their biceps grow.
And they're like, I want to look like this.
And if I take drugs, I'm not going to look like this.
So it was one of the best things they did.
And then you get them into jobs and treatment.
And there's one guy that I met in BC.
He was going to kill himself.
He drove his car into a brick wall because he was so ruined by his addiction.
But he didn't die.
He didn't pull it off.
So he actually went into treatment, turned his life around, started a business.
He's got six employees.
And now he's going out on the street and like helping, you know, pulling guys off the street and bringing them in and saving their lives.
So it's actually a really hopeful ending to the story if we can get to shift all our resources over to treatment and recovery services, which is one of my big objectives.
So former Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is involved in this Ibogaine initiative here in Texas.
And one of the things that they found, you know, he works very closely with veterans.
And, you know, obviously a lot of these guys, they come back from the war, they have PTSD, they have a lot of pain, they get addicted to pills, and then they have an incredibly difficult time getting off of it.
And there's a treatment called ibogaine.
And ibogaine comes from the aboga tree.
It's like a natural psychedelic that has no recreational use whatsoever.
It's not fun.
And it's apparently a brutal 24-hour experience, but it rewires the brain, stops the pathways of addiction.
And just one Ibogaine treatment, one session, the amount of people that never go back to using those drugs is in the 80%.
And Rick Perry, who was like a staunch anti-drug, hardline Republican guy, great guy, but realized from talking to these veterans, maybe you have to have an open mind and look at this.
We have this blanket term that we use for drugs.
And we say, oh, Ibogaine is a drug.
You don't want to take drugs.
But this psychedelic, this ibogaine, apparently it's like a 24-hour review of your life that in some way, some chemical way rewires your system and stops the pathways of addiction.
Also, if you're not educated in these subjects and you just trust the doctor, you go to a doctor and the doctor says you need pain medication, and then all of a sudden you're on it.
Well, the pathway to physical addiction is so well known and studied.
It's very, very addictive, which is why it's so horrific that they actually promoted the fact that these things are not addictive when they were promoting them.
Yeah, but you're right about fitness, though, because when I was young, I hung around with a lot of people who got into a lot of trouble.
And I could have ended up there.
The reason I didn't, frankly, is sports.
So I had something else to drive me.
So it's one of the reasons why we need to get our young people active in sporting activities when they're in that age group, because if you're not giving them an outlet, then they'll end up down that scary path.
And I've seen that happen with people where their forearm snaps and they have to have plates in it and then it's a chronic injury for the rest of their life.
And he just really worked on that one technique, specifically when he went up to heavyweight because the guys would be, first of all, less agile and mobile.
And also, it was the kind of technique where you could stop a guy with one shot.
Like a wheel kick to the head is really difficult to develop.
It's like a fast twitch thing that it's almost like your body has to evolve and grow doing that to really develop the kind of speed that you could pull it off on a skilled opponent and a fast.
Well, he became a Muay Thai world champion, and he developed Rufus Sport, which is a great gym in Milwaukee, a top gym, developed world champions like Anthony Pettis.
So if you were starting from scratch and you wanted to be an MMA, would you do like, you go to Thailand and do like two months there and then go to Dagestan to learn how to wrestle?
Volkanovsky, who's like one of the greatest featherweights of all time, knocked him out, knocked out Max Holloway, another one of the greatest featherweights of all time.
And then Charles Oliveira, one of the greatest lightweights of all time.
It's just amazing awareness and pattern recognition, technique.
He's a combination of all things, right?
Incredible confidence, incredible intelligence, insane discipline, work ethic, but just great training methods.
Like he does everything right, and then insane confidence.
Like his confidence is insane.
When he fought Charles Oliveira for the lightweight title, he celebrated his victory the night before.
He had a party to celebrate the night before the fight and then went out and knocked Charles out in the first round and said he was going to knock Charles out in the first round.
You know what impresses me most about him is how he got up after that kick to the head.
He took diet.
And you know who else did that was GSP?
Remember, GSP took that kick and he went down, but he recovered quickly.
And he was talking to me about how, because I said to him, like in politics, you get hit, right?
And not physically if you're lucky, but you have to be able to get up quickly and react to it.
I asked him, how did you do it?
How did you, like, how does your brain go from taking that kind of hit to getting back in the fight and turning it around?
And he said he gets two very deep breaths through the nose and then out through the mouth and get some oxygen back into your system and focus your mind.
Because John Jones said somewhere that he had, like, every time he gets hit hard in camp, he said, like, I just, that's part of my brain budget that's been taken away.
And so he wanted to make sure that there was not a chance that Chale could do anything to him that he would have been able to, wouldn't have been able to do if he was trained.
I don't know what he got on, but clearly it helped.
He got huge.
He got super jacked.
The problem with getting super jacked like that is then you get addicted to what got you super jacked.
Because if you're on steroids, you feel like Superman.
You feel like you could just run through walls, and then you get off of it, and now your endocrine system has to kind of catch up to the fact that you've been giving it exogenous testosterone for all these months.
And so that takes a long time for you to get back to a normal, healthy level.
And there was a lot of people that wasted their time doing stuff that didn't work.
And we didn't really know what that was until the UFC came along.
And then we're like, oh.
And now the evolution of martial arts from 1993 when the UFC started to 2026, in those years, martial arts have evolved more than they have in the last 30,000 years.
But it doesn't mean that Wing Chung's not effective, and you could use Wing Chung in Muay Thai or in an MMA fight.
But you have to know everything.
That's the reality of it.
It's like Taekwondo.
Taekwondo is not effective by itself in an MMA fight.
But if you know MMA and you know Taekwondo, then you could do like what Edson Barboza did to Terry Edam and knock him out with a wheel kick in spectacular fashion.
But on their own, like the best styles are the really strong styles like jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai wrestling.
Those are the best styles, Western boxing.
Those are the best styles on their own.
But what Krav Maga is, is a combination of all those styles.
And so if you have a great instructor in Krav Maga, yeah, you'll learn great Muay Thai, you'll learn great jiu-jitsu.
It's essentially mixed martial arts, but with a lot of emphasis on real-world applications, street fights, you know, dirty stuff like eye gouging, you know, poking people in the eye, kicking them in the nuts.
So they have to prepare for unusual situations where you're trying to survive in a situation where your arm has been, your weapon has been removed and you're just trying to fight for your life.
But still, we have a lot of people that are pure specialists that do really well in mixed martial arts because they're so good in one area.
Like Alex Pereira, who was the middleweight champion, light heavyweight champion, and now he's going up to heavyweight and he's going to be fighting at the White House card.
Alex Pereira is one of the greatest kickboxers of all time.
He's a two-division world champion and kickboxer.
But his style is all kickboxing, but he just developed takedown defense.
I'll try to avoid the guy fighting him on the street.
The funniest thing I ever saw was there's this video of John Jones on the street somewhere, and he bumped into, he was talking and he leaned on some guy's motorcycle.
I think he might have been in Asia or something.
The guy had no idea who he was and he started screaming at him.
Well, the bottom line is this: if you cannot trust a man to govern himself, how can you trust him to govern for others?
Like, if you think that human nature is so flawed that people cannot make decisions for themselves, then how could you possibly trust human nature to make decisions for other people, to impose decisions on their lives?
And who watches the watchman?
We're constantly told we need to be kind of guided by these people from ivory towers.
But who are these angels anyway?
They're just human beings like everyone else.
So when you give them more power and more, you give them the power to impose their will on people, then that ultimately gets abused.
So even, you're right, even when somebody is doing something that I don't agree with, and I would think it would be better for all of us if they didn't do it, the mal that is done by giving me the power to impose my decision-making on them is worse than the benefit of trying to direct them towards a better decision.
Well, I think leaders have to have humility because the problem is that if you are an egomaniac and you're in power anywhere in the world, then you're going to want to just continually impose new rules and laws to make yourself bigger.
Whereas if you believe in freedom, then you have to be able to say to yourself, I don't know better for this other person.
He knows better for him.
And it's hard, but politicians have to think that you have to trust the people.