April 21, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:16:06
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
[music] | |
| The question I get asked more than anything else lately is, "How can you possibly say that Revenge of the Sith was a | ||
| good movie?" | ||
| But after that, and I do have my reasons, the next most asked question is who do you trust in the media? | ||
| I'm finding this question harder and harder to answer these days, which is yet another indication of how screwed up our political and social system is right now. | ||
| At the same time, it's hard to know just how screwy our world is, or whether it's just the loudest and craziest voices that consistently get amplified on social media. | ||
| Maybe the American Revolution actually was a bit nuttier than the history books would tell us, but we'll never know because George Washington didn't have the chance to live tweet it. | ||
| Without trust, we really don't have the basic underpinnings for a free and pluralistic society. | ||
| We have to trust our elected officials will do the jobs they're sworn in to do and carry out the promises they said they would deliver upon. | ||
| We have to trust that our media will keep the political elite in check and not just suck up to the powers that be. | ||
| And we have to trust that our institutions are strong enough to withstand corrupt politicians and totalitarian ideologies that would strip us from the very freedoms our system was built upon. | ||
| Of course trust, without doing the necessary work to make sure it's based in logic and reason, is really just faith. | ||
| Having faith that our politicians will do the right thing, or that our media will hold the politicians to account, or that our system will just function as it should, is basically a recipe for disaster. | ||
| Slowly but surely our freedoms will be chipped away at because faith isn't what guarantees our freedoms in the first place, it's the Constitution that does so. | ||
| Trust is built over time by repeated evidence that you can actually believe that when someone says something, it's what they mean. | ||
| You don't believe it simply because they say it, you believe it because of a track record of a person consistently following through on their word. | ||
| This is the opposite of faith, which is built on the idea of believing in something without evidence. | ||
| We usually talk about these existential issues in the context of God and religion, but I think it would serve us all well to ask some important questions about these issues right here and right now. | ||
| So now let me kick the question back to you. | ||
| Who do you trust in the media? | ||
| I'm guessing it's a pretty short list, though if you've got some good names I'd love to hear them in the comments section below. | ||
| Let's go a step further with that. | ||
| Who do you trust in politics? | ||
| If you're the biggest Trump supporter out there, do you truly trust everything he says? | ||
| Or do you accept his untruths because you believe in his wider agenda? | ||
| Accepting a certain amount of untruth may be the only legitimate way to view politics and politicians, but when you add a distrust of the media to a distrust of politicians and then toss in a heavy dose of social media craziness, we end up with this confused conversation in which we can't even agree on basic facts. | ||
| This spot, where nothing is really true, and what we feel overrides what's provable, is fertile ground for those on the extremes to take root. | ||
| So who do I trust? | ||
| Well, there's a wide range of people, from Sam Harris to Ben Shapiro to Larry Elder to Eric Weinstein. | ||
| Trusting these people doesn't mean that they're infallible or that I agree with everything they say, but it does mean that I see they have a commitment to the truth and they have consistently done their best to put it out there. | ||
| They don't have all the answers, and I certainly don't either, but I think we're doing our best to find some truth in the sea of craziness. | ||
| For those of us who genuinely want to figure out how to combat the forces who want to burn down the system, or give in to authoritarian tyranny, our work is cut out for us. | ||
| As for me, I trust that it'll work out because I see more and more of you speaking out every day. | ||
| You might just say that a little faith in yourself goes a long way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
[music] | |
| Joining me this week is a former candidate for President of the United States from the | ||
| Libertarian Party and a man who, according to his Twitter bio, is pro-liberty, pro-life | ||
| and pro-Constitution. | ||
| Austin Peterson, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, thanks for having me. | ||
| We've been trying to do this for quite some time. | ||
| Yeah, our Twitter. | ||
| It's going to go bonkers. | ||
| My people love your people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know if your people are going to like me yet, but I guess that kind of remains to be seen. | |
| I think they're there. | ||
| I don't know if you've noticed, but there seems to be a classical liberal libertarian little bonding thing happening in America right now. | ||
| My people said that if I get you to say you're a small-o libertarian, then they're going to donate five bucks to my Super PAC. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| So are you a libertarian? | ||
| You can turn some of this on me at some point, but not right at the beginning. | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| Not just yet. | ||
| So it's funny, I'm shooting three shows today, and I just walked outside with my dog just to get some fresh air. | ||
| I just found you wandering in the streets. | ||
| You didn't even take a car here. | ||
| You're truly a man of the people. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, I'm from Missouri. | ||
| I grew up on a farm. | ||
| Pretty common, you know. | ||
| And I think that, you know, California's beautiful, and, you know, we're trying to, like, be environmentalists, right? | ||
| I don't have a bicycle, so I just went for a walk and found your studio. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| So here we are. | ||
| There's a lot I want to get to with you, but let's just start with the basics. | ||
| People know I like definitions. | ||
| You ran as a Libertarian. | ||
| What is a Libertarian to you? | ||
| Well, essentially a Libertarian, it allows you to choose your own values, as long as you don't try and use the government to force those values on somebody else. | ||
| And that's why we get a lot of infighting in the Libertarian Party, because we have so many people from so many different backgrounds with different values. | ||
| But the one value we all share is that we believe the government should be limited so that individuals can choose what they want to do and choose their values and explore the wide range of options. | ||
| Sometimes those options are dangerous. | ||
| Some people choose to smoke, but they should have the right to do that as long as they don't try and impose a cost on others. | ||
| And so as soon as you start talking about what sort of a cost people are imposing on others, that's when government starts to come into the equation. | ||
| At the most hardcore end of libertarianism, which some say is the true libertarianism, it's anarchy, anarcho-capitalism, I think I fall right before that. | ||
| I get off the train right there and I call myself a minarchist. | ||
| Essentially the government should be relegated to very basic They should protect life, liberty, | ||
| and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| You know, that may include things like fire, courts, police, military. | ||
| Otherwise, everything else should be solved by the market. | ||
| Yeah, so I had Brian Kaplan from George Mason University, who's an anarcho-capitalist. | ||
| Yeah, brilliant guy. - Anarcho-capitalist. | ||
| Yeah, brilliant guy. - I always say anarcho for some reason. | ||
| Yeah, brilliant guy. | ||
| And I thoroughly, we did about an hour and a half. | ||
| I enjoyed every minute of it. | ||
| There were moments where I thought, all right, this is a bit much, you know, some private court stuff and some of the pacifism stuff and open borders. | ||
| But is that the inherent problem with the Libertarian Party? | ||
| Not the philosophy, but the party? | ||
| That this thing's really wide. | ||
| And when you say I'm a libertarian, people see some of these guys or some of the, you know, at the convention, the guy running around without a shirt and some of the more crazy pieces of it. | ||
| That was not the worst thing that happened to that convention. | ||
| We'll get to that in a second. | ||
| But that it's based, because it's based on the individual, it's hard to get a whole bunch of individually focused people to agree on something. | ||
| Right, because essentially you're talking about taking collective action, right? | ||
| This is kind of anathema to the libertarian cause. | ||
| But the Libertarian Party is made up of sincere individuals. | ||
| These people really want limited government. | ||
| A lot of these people are victims of the state. | ||
| People that have been harmed, whether they've been persecuted in their communities for doing things like homeschooling or Maybe they want to drink raw milk, right? | ||
| Maybe they want to have the ability to sell that, right? | ||
| Amish farmers and things like that. | ||
| So it's kind of easy to poke fun at the people like the naked guy, but the thing is that the news often doesn't go in and cover the tales of the single mothers who are being harmed because their tax rates are so high that it's hard for them to feed their kids. | ||
| That doesn't make as compelling a news story as the guy who dances around. | ||
| So the problem is that we're missing the forest for the trees, in some sense. | ||
| And there are a lot of sincere, dedicated activists in the Libertarian Party who really just want to... They're not just fighting for their own freedom, and many of them are sincere patriots who are fighting for the freedom of their fellow countrymen, and they just see the two parties as being one and the same, in some sense. | ||
| That their solutions are just more government. | ||
| So that's kind of the untold story of the heroes of the Libertarian Party, which we don't see very often. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| So I want to spend most of our time talking about looking forward, but we do have to look back a little bit here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, to me, 2016 was a massive disaster for you guys, because I've said this a zillion times. | ||
| First off, I voted for Gary, okay? | ||
| I've had Gary Johnson on the show. | ||
| The candidacy ultimately was just terrible, and I think if there was ever a year where the Libertarians, or any third, maybe the Greens, whoever, although obviously I agree more with you guys, but if there was ever a year where there was gonna be a mark made, not the presidency, but a mark to be made, this was it. | ||
| There was so much disgust with Trump and Clinton. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| I'll tell you, this topic, I mean, this turns me into Salt Bae. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, I got salt, I could drop it right here. | |
| Don't you usually walk around with a musket? | ||
| Yeah, the flintlock, right. | ||
| Oh boy, you're gonna get my hackles up. | ||
| Alright, so... | ||
| It's very difficult to be in this situation where, in the position of having tried to stop that, having kind of seen it, there's nothing more frustrating, and I think a lot of libertarians see this in so many other ways on society as a whole, where we see things kind of rushing toward a cliff and you're screaming stop and people... | ||
| If you're going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh or else they'll kill you. | ||
| And that's happening in society. | ||
| But with the Libertarian Party, there were so many times when the incompetence was being displayed pre-primary and people either weren't paying attention or they were applauding it. | ||
| I mean, there's videos of some of the gaffes and stumbles that went on before the convention, and I don't think there's an excuse. | ||
| I mean, the people who take responsibility for what it was need to take responsibility because they had every opportunity to try and stop it, and they sort of cheered it on. | ||
| But, you know, the Libertarian Party has a lot of the same problems that the major two-party has, with cults of personality and things like that, with none of the upsides of actually winning elections. | ||
| So that's the problems of fighting in a third party. | ||
| Is there a bigger issue here which is that, forgetting the specific stumbles that Gary made once he got the nomination, and again I like him as a person, I think he's a decent guy, and I hope he'll come back here and I'd be happy to discuss all this stuff with him, But is that the bigger issue, the only time anyone ever talked about the Libertarians was when he either made a gaffe or when the naked guy ran around. | ||
| Beyond that, there was virtually no coverage. | ||
| So it was almost as if you had to do outlandish things. | ||
| So I watched the Libertarian debates and I thought, They needed to say more crazy things if anyone was gonna pay attention, even though I don't believe that generally related to politics. | ||
| Well, it's not about what you say, it's about how you say it very frequently. | ||
| And so sometimes it was just Gary's delivery that came off as awkward. | ||
| It wasn't necessarily what he was saying, but the way that he was saying it, which I think puts people off. | ||
| And the thing about Donald Trump that I think was so attractive was that he was giving, | ||
| last year was a crazy bastard year, right? | ||
| And libertarians as crazy bastards, that could have been our year. | ||
| And with the rise of the alt-right, which is really what propelled in many ways, helped | ||
| propel Donald to the presidency, a lot of those people were sincere conservatives who | ||
| were looking for a third option. | ||
| They wanted somebody who could take down Hillary. | ||
| And I think that the real strategy problem was simply that it looked as if Gary and Bill were sort of cozying up to Hillary, which is what nobody in the United States wanted because they rejected her. | ||
| So it wasn't so much what Gary was saying. | ||
| It relied a little bit more on tactics. | ||
| I mean, yeah, the delivery was not that good, and the gaffes were horrible. | ||
| But it really just comes down to not being able to read the political winds of the time, and that's really where we suffered. | ||
| Yeah, without getting too thick in the weeds on just the machinations behind the scene of the party, because I don't think people really understand what happens behind a party. | ||
| So we know the Democrats have this massive machine, we know it's deeply corrupt, and a lot of that has been exposed. | ||
| The Republicans also have a pretty powerful machine. | ||
| I don't think it's quite as corrupt, but who knows? | ||
| What is the underpinnings of the Libertarian machine? | ||
| What's going on behind the scenes? | ||
| Who's in charge? | ||
| What's it about? | ||
| Anarchy, right? | ||
| I mean, they have the Libertarian National Committee. | ||
| Their job is to run candidates for office. | ||
| I think the good thing about the Libertarian Party is that... | ||
| Anybody can participate. | ||
| It's not like the Democrats where they have super delegates and things like that. | ||
| Anybody can become a delegate if you join the Libertarian Party and go to your state convention. | ||
| So the way that the Libertarian Party works is it's powered by the people. | ||
| There isn't some shadowy Koch money. | ||
| The Koch brothers left years ago. | ||
| So it's really just powered by the activists and the people who want to try and see these ideas be put into public policy. | ||
| Now there are some people who actually, they caucus with the party but they don't want the party to actually win elections. | ||
| For multitudes of reasons. | ||
| One being perhaps that they think that there will be a system wide collapse and libertarians will get blamed for it if there is a libertarian president. | ||
| Another one is that they think that the party should be educational. | ||
| So you've got all these different factions in the party, and some of them are sincere, | ||
| committed activists who really want to bring about change. | ||
| But when it comes to the mass nations, what you see for the most part is what you get. | ||
| I mean, there are some backroom dealings and things that go on, and there's a lot of pressure | ||
| and hassling that goes on at the convention. | ||
| People are like, "Endorse Bill Weld. | ||
| We'll give you the world." | ||
| It's like that story in the Bible where they take Jesus and Satan is like, "If you will | ||
| bow before me." | ||
| And it's like, "No, Bill Weld." | ||
| But, you know, that kind of stuff happens. | ||
| But for the most part, what you see is what you get. | ||
| Yeah, was there a moment after Gary got the nomination that you would have considered being his VP, or did they announce, once he got the nomination, did they say they were a team immediately? | ||
| Well, of course he was running to be the VP, and the thing was this, my mistakes that I made at the convention was that I actually took the principled moves over the pragmatic moves, and I'll just explain this very briefly. | ||
| So, there was a brief period of time when some people said, okay Austin, if you want, just go run for the VP slot. | ||
| But, because I was trying to think for the good of the party and for the good of the ticket, I thought to myself, okay, well, Gary hates me, and I wouldn't want to be hamstrung by a VP that I can't stand. | ||
| He obviously wanted Bill, the delegates thought that he was better, so I was trying to, I gave in to the will of the majority, and I thought, no, I'm not going to do this because I think it's going to cripple the ticket. | ||
| Well then later, Stupidly, I didn't realize that Gary had threatened that if he didn't get billwhelled, he would quit. | ||
| So if I had been the VP, then I would have been the candidate if Gary had quit. | ||
| So maybe I should have just stuck it together. | ||
| Well, I suspect he wouldn't have chose you though, right? | ||
| No, but the delegates choose. | ||
| That's how the Libertarian Party is different from the major two parties. | ||
| The delegates choose the vice presidential candidate. | ||
| So if I really wanted to be a butt chunk, I could have taken my gun out of the trash and mounted a campaign to try and be the VP pick with the hopes that Gary would quit. | ||
| But that's just being, again, a jerk. | ||
| I already have been labeled a jerk, so I'm trying to get away from that. | ||
| So my last question to you at the end of this is going to be about 2020, but as a lead-in to that, so you learned that lesson there, so do you think you would do things differently next time, before you even tell me if 2020 is an option? | ||
| Yes, I would definitely do things differently, and there are certain things that you learn from the process. | ||
| Hindsight is 20-20. | ||
| But I think that tactically, I made some mistakes. | ||
| But from a principled perspective, I did everything right. | ||
| Raised money the grassroots way, online, you know, just doing live streams and going around the country. | ||
| I think we raised $120,000. | ||
| So in a lot of ways, my campaign pioneered many of the campaigns in the future for people who have no power, right? | ||
| People who are grassroots, who can come out of nowhere. | ||
| I think I showed that people who are sincere, committed activists can do that. | ||
| So there are some things that I would do differently, but most of it's just sort of parliamentary kind of procedure things. | ||
| Yeah, how much for you as an outsider running on an outsider ticket was about raising money? | ||
| Because that to me is the root of all the problems right now. | ||
| Well, you know what the funny thing was was that I found about raising money is that when things are good and you're happy and like you're doing well, you know, people will send you money, but there's nothing that raises money like controversy. | ||
| And one thing that happened to me, and it's so ironic because I was just their keynote speaker this year now, the Colorado Libertarian Party disinvited me from their debate. | ||
| And I was in Illinois at the time, and I'm there with my staff, and they said, okay, well, you're not invited because I disagree with some of the radical anarchists on one of their base philosophical principles. | ||
| So they're like, oh, you're not a libertarian, you're not invited. | ||
| What principle is that? | ||
| It's called the NAP, the N-A-P, the Non-Aggression Principle, which many libertarians believe that is the centerpiece of libertarian philosophy, which I know in certain terms completely reject, simply because in my mind I believe it leads one to a form, a strict form of pacifism. | ||
| Which doesn't account for self-defense, which they dispute. | ||
| But aggression being a sort of a term that can be broadly used in many ways, like what do you define as aggression? | ||
| It leads one to consider maybe we'll need a court system to suss it out, which would imply a government which would end the argument for anarchy, right? | ||
| They disagree and they're gonna be very mad at me for saying that. | ||
| So you're taking, in that specific instance, what you would argue is just a more realistic approach? | ||
| Or a more functional approach? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| It's not a matter of realism, essentially. | ||
| It's a matter of real, true principle. | ||
| Simply because many people have argued, and boy, this is going to make people mad. | ||
| But in the end, the concept of aggression... | ||
| Maybe your liberal friends are going to like it. | ||
| I'm kind of a heretic in libertarian circles for this. | ||
| But simply, many libertarians have argued, and many have told me directly to my face, that the evil of government is so horrible that it's better that we have a society where it may be immoral to allow a child to starve to death, but it's not illegal simply because it's all about the initiation of force. | ||
| I like to play the puzzle game. | ||
| If you walk past a homeless person on the street, they're starving to death, and you don't feed them, have you committed a crime? | ||
| No. | ||
| Have you initiated force? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| If you have a child, and it's your child, and by neglect you allow that child to starve to death, have you committed a crime? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Have you initiated force? | ||
| No. | ||
| So that's really where it comes down to. | ||
| The rights of children is sort of where we start talking about whether or not some third party may have a right to come in. | ||
| But that controversy was enough to make the Libertarian part of Colorado say no, and it made my activists so angry that they started pouring money in my coffers saying, Austin, drive to Colorado right now. | ||
| And we drove all night, thirteen hours straight to the convention, took second place, beat up on Gary a little bit, and raised money. | ||
| That's fascinating, because the infighting of all the parties I find incredible. | ||
| Just the inability for anyone to build a bridge these days, which is so much of what, I'm not a political insider, but what I'm trying to do around here is build some bridges and show people you can disagree on abortion, and we'll talk about that in a little bit, and a bunch of different things, and still find some basic principles to believe in. | ||
| But let's just talk about the general role of government, because that's really what this all comes down to. | ||
| So you touched on it just a little bit up top. | ||
| Give me the basic things that you believe government should exist for. | ||
| The specifics, not just the ideas of liberty and that sort of thing. | ||
| Libertarianism isn't really about government. | ||
| It's about self-government. | ||
| It's the concept that if you have a moral, just society, then people should be self-governed. | ||
| It's different from the FDR definition of freedom. | ||
| FDR and the Social Democrats believe that freedom means freedom from want. | ||
| So you're not free if you're hungry. | ||
| That's their definition. | ||
| So the question really comes down to is that we as libertarians have a different concept of freedom from most people. | ||
| Because our concept of freedom is the most politically incorrect. | ||
| Because it requires personal responsibility. | ||
| And when you start talking to people about personal responsibility, that's when they get angry. | ||
| And even libertarians aren't perfect when it comes down to this. | ||
| But when it comes to the actual role of government, it should be the absolute minimum that is required in order to sustain life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| Now that's the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| That's not the law. | ||
| But the Constitution being the law, it has very specific enumerated powers. | ||
| And sometimes conservatives, I think, make a mistake where they'll say, well, we believe in states' rights. | ||
| And the libertarian says, no, actually, that's a misnomer. | ||
| Only people have rights. | ||
| States have powers. | ||
| And the idea is that those powers should be strictly limited and enumerated. | ||
| So we delegate some of our power to government, but we don't delegate any of our rights to government. | ||
| Our rights are intrinsic, our rights are natural. | ||
| They are self-evident as to our humanity. | ||
| And so Libertarians simply believe that the individual should be self-governed to the greatest extent possible. | ||
| Until that self-governance is a problem, right? | ||
| If you do not police yourself, you will be policed. | ||
| So as long as, you know, whatever action that you're taking isn't creating some negative externality on the community, in that question, you know, when it comes to the environment, right? | ||
| Whether you may be polluting or something like that, these are problems that Libertarians face. | ||
| Yeah, we believe in a strict definition of property rights. | ||
| So essentially what government should do is it should adjudicate disputes between property rights holders and it should prosecute criminal cases. | ||
| Force and fraud, really, is what it should do. | ||
| And that's really the limited role of government. | ||
| So you would take sanitation away from the government, you would take the U.S. | ||
| Postal Service, all of those kinds of things. | ||
| We're keepin' courts, we're keepin' cops, and... And probably need nuclear weapons, in my opinion. | ||
| But that's... Cops, courts, nukes. | ||
| Yeah, cops, courts, and nukes is about all. | ||
| Well, I think we just came up with your slogan for 2020. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Save me, please. | ||
| How is any of this different? | ||
| Do you consider yourself an objectivist, actually? | ||
| I mean, I flirt with objectivism. | ||
| Now I'm going to really get you in trouble, because I know you just mentioned Ayn Rand. | ||
| People go nuts. | ||
| I like a lot of it, and I've had many people. | ||
| Your own Brooke, whose book is right over there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that she rejects altruism. | ||
| I get a joy out of doing something. | ||
| I know the argument is that, well, if you get a joy out of doing it for other good people, well, then it's selfish. | ||
| It's not entirely selfish. | ||
| I mean, I think that, you know, that there is a desire for us to sacrifice ourselves in order to do it for the greater good. | ||
| Some people think that the government should require that sacrifice on us, like mandatory service. | ||
| But as a libertarian, I believe in voluntary service, a voluntary military. | ||
| And if I had served in the military, I would be doing it out of a sense of patriotism, which would be In some sense, a sense of selflessness. | ||
| Many people have been drafted, right? | ||
| But a lot of people who fought in World War II against the Nazis were doing it because they were fighting for their family. | ||
| They were fighting out of a greater sense of oneself. | ||
| I mean, sometimes libertarians, I think objectivists are sort of immune to that. | ||
| But not all libertarians are. | ||
| Some libertarians do what they do out of a sense of what's good for the community. | ||
| Maybe this is what Ayn Rand would say was selfish, but I actually do want to see humanity flourish and thrive. | ||
| I just simply don't believe the government is the best way for us to do that. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't see actually a major distinction there from what you would believe as opposed to an objectivist because doing for yourself what is selfishly good, I always view that as that's not necessarily going to hurt your neighbor because if you're smart and you're doing what's good for you, you're not going to be dumping in your neighbor's lawn because you want your neighbor to be happy too. | ||
| Sometimes, don't you just do good things for people, even if it doesn't benefit you? | ||
| I mean, yeah, it may make you feel good, but every once in a while, I catch myself just doing things for people, like opening a door, handing a quarter to a homeless person, giving somebody my phone to use, or something like that. | ||
| Sometimes I don't derive any pleasure from it, I just do it automatically. | ||
| Right, so then we're on the philosophical piece of, is that somehow actually for you? | ||
| To me, it's almost irrelevant in a sort of real world. | ||
| Practicality? | ||
| Probably my biggest issue with objectivists is just simply, again, that it's distasteful to me because I really dislike cults of personality. | ||
| And I'm a contrarian and a skeptic and I just really like to pick things apart, find the flaws in it. | ||
| This is what gets you in trouble and gets you branded a heretic. | ||
| But when you find flaws and you want to pull the thread, eventually the sweater comes apart just because I like to see what things are made of. | ||
| And I don't like to accept things just because This Murray Rothbard said it, or Ayn Rand said it, or Ron Paul said it. | ||
| Now I just angered everybody else in the attack movement. | ||
| I normally don't have a list of people to anger, but I feel like I should have had a little Glenn Beck whiteboard here and I could just write down... Yeah, we could just knock it all. | ||
| We haven't hit feminists or SJWs yet. | ||
| Oh, patience, patience. | ||
| We'll get there. | ||
| Okay, so we've taken back a lot of the stuff with government. | ||
| We've taken back all of those things. | ||
| Do you think that's actually possible? | ||
| Is the government too big at this point? | ||
| And are people too dumbed down to understand why big government isn't important? | ||
| So, for example, when I hear a lot of progressives saying, you know, that it's just the government should redistribute and all of these government programs and they get upset when we cut money to the arts. | ||
| I don't think that's going to stop art. | ||
| I think it actually might help art. | ||
| But we've just become so numb to how things work that if you were to try to reverse some of this stuff, you might do some really irreparable damage in ways that maybe we can't even see. | ||
| Well, at the risk of sounding like a founding father, I'm going to quote T.J. | ||
| and say... I should have brought the wigs. | ||
| The natural tendency is for government to grow and liberty to shrink. | ||
| So, do I think we can go back? | ||
| I think we can. | ||
| The only problem is that we have to adopt, not the principles, but the tactics of some of our opponents. | ||
| The Fabian socialists who want to try and grow government bit by bit. | ||
| We're going to have to try and fight a war a game of inches. | ||
| We're going to have to take ground bit by bit. | ||
| So I do think that we can go back, but the problem is that with my movement, the Liberty Movement, is that we're not content with small gains, right? | ||
| We want to see big gains. | ||
| We want to start seeing major victories because we see our opponents getting major victories all the time. | ||
| And I think we've got to be a little bit more patient. | ||
| We've got to fight, you know, on the short game before we can worry about the long game in some ways. | ||
| Why doesn't the party do anything down ticket? | ||
| Why is it that you only hear about Libertarians There's not a lot of incentives because when you run as a senator or for president as a libertarian, you're going to get the same amount of hell that you're going to get if you run for lower office, but at least there's the benefit of getting a little bit of notoriety, right? | ||
| A little bit of fame perhaps, a little bit of opportunity to advance your ideas. | ||
| I mean, when you're running for the dog catcher as a libertarian, you're going to get the same amount of hell, but it's your neighbor next door that's going to give it to you. | ||
| So I think that the incentives are probably messed up there. | ||
| And also, I think a lot of people don't know what it means to be a libertarian. | ||
| Bill Maher says he's a libertarian. | ||
| John Bolton, Ambassador John Bolton, came on my show once and was like, I'm a libertarian. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Invade Russia. | ||
| Because I think of him more as a neocon. | ||
| Well, to some neocons, and this is going to make more people angry, but to some neocons, they actually consider themselves anarchists in a sense. | ||
| No borders, right? | ||
| And that if we see somebody like a genocide going on overseas and things like that, well, if we believe in a borderless world and these are all humans, members of the human race, why should we not intervene overseas? | ||
| I mean, a lot of Democrats agree with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| That we should be stepping into Darfur and Sudan and Yemen and we should be, you know, having humanitarian interventions around the world. | ||
| And so the neoconservatives in some ways think of themselves as libertarian humanitarians in some way because by bringing democracy to the Middle East They are spreading freedom around the world, and that's their thought. | ||
| The only problem is that in using government for this, their ends may be positive, but the means that they use end up with the destruction of regimes and with humanitarian crises. | ||
| Right, so what would your position be on that then? | ||
| I know that obviously you wouldn't be for nation building, but in the case of a true genocide or a case of what's happening in Syria now, I think the general libertarian idea is thought of as isolationist. | ||
| Where do you fall on that? | ||
| In some sense, some libertarians are isolationists. | ||
| Actually, that's more of a paleo-conservative thing. | ||
| The people who want to build a wall on the southern border, right? | ||
| And they want to stop trade overseas. | ||
| Those people are much more isolationists. | ||
| But there are ways to solve these problems. | ||
| And if you're going to use government to solve foreign policy problems, You should use the Constitution. | ||
| That's really what it is. | ||
| And the problem is that we ignore the Constitution. | ||
| The Constitution actually gives, and libertarians don't talk this up enough, the Constitution does give the Congress some authorization to act in a manner that would make liberals very angry. | ||
| Which is that it would allow the Congress to lay a letter of mark and reprisal. | ||
| The last time they did that was the War of 1812. | ||
| So, international laws and norms have changed. | ||
| So, if it's a terrorist activity, essentially it would be something similar to how we dealt with Osama Bin Laden. | ||
| Because we have such a deep and profound sense of patriotism in the United States, we think only the government can kill terrorists. | ||
| We're not willing to go all 1776 on that. | ||
| And hire a merc, which is really what we're talking about here. | ||
| So in a case like that, like a Bin Laden type case, you would actually be for that. | ||
| You hire, you're basically subcontracting our army out, and it's probably, you would argue, I assume, it would be a cheaper and more effective way of doing it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ron Paul, after 9-11, actually introduced legislation to go and to kill Bin Laden using letters of mark and reprisal, because at least we're following constitutional due processes. | ||
| A lot of libertarians that don't agree with the authorization for the use of military force have to admit that that was quote-unquote a congressional authorization and the real problem that we're dealing with in terms of law and the laws of war Or that if we declare war on ISIS, in some sense, if we lose, we're legitimizing them as a state actor. | ||
| In some ways, we don't want to do that. | ||
| So in order for us to behave in a manner that is in conduct with constitutional principles, reviving Article 1, Section 8 in the letters of Mark is a way for us to follow constitutional processes But the problem is that liberals aren't going to like this because we're talking about privatizing the military, and the conservatives aren't going to like it because it's not the whole badass Team America. | ||
| Hell yeah! | ||
| Team Six, kill them! | ||
| But we've got thousands of former veterans who are out of work, who would love to do the United States a favor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And if you gave them a contract, one of the beautiful things about it is, and only libertarians are going to like this, is that any bounty that they capture over there can be brought back and sold to the United States. | ||
| So all those guns that fell into the hands of ISIS can come back and be sold, not in California, but in Missouri, where I'm from, you could have a beautiful new, you know, military-grade weapon. | ||
| So when I hear you talk about this stuff, I can go there intellectually with you for sure, and I like the ideas of this, and especially if you root things in the Constitution, I love that. | ||
| When I hear you say this, though, there's a piece of me going, this sounds like Rambo. | ||
| You know, it just sounds like some '80s movie, like Schwarzenegger or Stallone, | ||
| where they got a bunch of mercenaries. | ||
| I'm pretty sure this was a movie. | ||
| Was this partly The Rock, I think? | ||
| They get a bunch of disgruntled former military men. | ||
| They come together, they find the guy. | ||
| I think Predator was sort of about this, too. | ||
| There's an alien that you're gonna hunt, right? | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| But the idea of that, that just sounds crazy to people. | ||
| I'm not saying to you it's crazy, but just, so how do you even get there, then? | ||
| Well, new ideas, they always sound crazy, right? | ||
| Like, legalizing marijuana 30, 40 years ago, you're crazy, you're stupid, you're a stoner, blah, blah, blah, and now we see that things start to change, right? | ||
| And, you know, crazy people, like, the problem with this is that there's this really great quote that somebody used the other day on Twitter, they said that smart people sound like crazy people to stupid people. | ||
| So the problem may not be that just because an opinion is in the minority doesn't mean it's wrong, right? | ||
| Most of the time whenever people are like, oh, your idea is crazy, nobody agrees with you. | ||
| Well, you know, maybe most people are kind of stupid. | ||
| So maybe you're the crazy one. | ||
| Yeah, and the media is not helping that situation at all. | ||
| At some point you've got to be willing to put your foot in the ground and take a stand and say, I don't care if nobody agrees with me. | ||
| I'm going to take a stand on principle. | ||
| And listen, the founding fathers did not put this into the Constitution for no reason. | ||
| You know why they did this? | ||
| It's because the War of 1776 was primarily won on the seas by private mariners. | ||
| There was no continental navy. | ||
| There was something like maybe six or seven ships. | ||
| There were over a thousand people who turned their merchant mariner ships into dogs of | ||
| I mean, this is the days of fighting sail, but I mean, without those merchant mariners turned privateers, we would not have won our war of independence. | ||
| They captured hundreds of British ships. | ||
| So, I mean, when the going gets tough, sometimes you have to turn to the private market to solve these things. | ||
| But again, the reason why it's distasteful to the establishment is for two different reasons. | ||
| Conservatives love it. | ||
| They're like, oh, this is a great idea, but we'll never get the liberals on board and we'd much rather trust it to our Navy SEAL team guys. | ||
| And the liberals are like, oh my god, you're privatizing war. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's horrible. | ||
| It's the free market and it's war. | ||
| So it's very hard to win that battle. | ||
| But I mean, whatever I do, I try and couch it in actual precedent, the law, the constitution. | ||
| That way I think you remain consistent. | ||
| And again, new ideas always sound crazy until they finally become accepted. | ||
| Yeah, so speaking of precedent and the Constitution, what do you think of the general state of the Constitution right now? | ||
| I think it's a pretty beautiful, almost perfect document to be governed by, but it doesn't seem to be what we're really governed by anymore. | ||
| It's being trampled in every direction right now. | ||
| You can make cases that Trump's trampling it in certain ways with executive actions, and by the way, Obama did plenty of them, and George W. Bush did plenty of them, so that's a non-partisan attack. | ||
| We also don't, you know, we do military actions where we don't get congressional authorization. | ||
| What was Libya? | ||
| What'd they call it? | ||
| A kinetic military action or something? | ||
| They just make up terms, and you go, oh, that's not a war. | ||
| I'm pretty sure if Libya had been blowing us apart, we'd call it a war. | ||
| So the general state of how we are or are not governed by the Constitution. | ||
| In many ways, I think we're living in a post-constitutional republic. | ||
| It has some of the trappings of a constitutional republic. | ||
| The good thing is that the Bill of Rights still exists. | ||
| It's still in force. | ||
| I mean, Congress uses the Fifth Amendment all the time. | ||
| They've got people in there in the hearings that are always having to plead the Fifth. | ||
| Yeah, that's a big one for these guys. | ||
| Right, and then of course the Supreme Court relies on the Second Amendment when it upholds decisions in like Heller or McDonnell versus Chicago. | ||
| So you've got the Second Amendment, I don't think anybody would, well maybe some people would like to get rid of it. | ||
| Oh yeah, there's plenty of people that would, sure. | ||
| But most people I think, you know, cooler heads will prevail on that issue. | ||
| You've got the First Amendment which is in retreat in a lot of ways. | ||
| College campuses probably primarily the spots where they're in retreat. | ||
| And, you know, it's also a retreat in some ways in the mainstream media. | ||
| This is why, you know, the Rubin Report is probably so popular and successful, not just because you're so tremendously talented, but because people are seeking out alternate means of information. | ||
| You know, we don't live in North Korea, so I can't say that the Constitution has been a total failure, but I do think that in some ways the Constitution was far from perfect. | ||
| The founders tried to get rid of slavery at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| It didn't happen. | ||
| It took another hundred years and a bloody civil war. | ||
| So there were some institutional problems with the Constitution, and we had to pass a 13th and a 14th Amendment. | ||
| And again, it took a war for that. | ||
| But I think that, you know, if you look at post-war amendments, of course you've got things like, you've got the 16th and 17th amendments, which have been, you know, the most anti-libertarian parts of the Constitution. | ||
| Now we have a law by bureaucracy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So in many times, things like the FDA or the EPA, they'll write law and enforce it. | ||
| And that was definitely alien to the concept of constitutional laws written by the founders. | ||
| So if you're going to have a bureaucracy, then I think the bureaucracy should be limited | ||
| to operating within constitutional law, but if they're going to create laws, | ||
| then those laws should have to be passed by Congress. | ||
| And those laws are regulations in many ways. | ||
| So that's really where the problem comes, is with all the executive branch agencies | ||
| that have been created that I think are probably the biggest problem that we have. | ||
| Yeah, for the record, I didn't mean that in and of itself it's perfect, | ||
| but in terms of the way that we can be governed as we humans are the ones that write this stuff. | ||
| It's the best we've got. | ||
| Yeah, because we've got us in it, and we are flawed things that create these things, so as perfect as maybe we can create, but of course just as an independent thing. | ||
| Probably the biggest thing, though, is that for some reason the founders didn't build a wall along the southern border. | ||
| So that can be improved upon. | ||
| Well, because at the time, there would have been no need for a casino down there. | ||
| That's a joke, by the way. | ||
| But wait, all right, so you mentioned the EPA. | ||
| So the two ones that I hear all the time, or the Food and Drug Administration, these are the two that you hear when people say libertarians are nuts. | ||
| Even Bill Maher, who I know, he half now identifies as a libertarian, but he's for a lot of big government stuff at the same time. | ||
| You know, I saw a couple weeks ago, he said something about that Trump, you know, got rid of this thing with the EPA, and now they're gonna start dumping in rivers again, is immediately what he said. | ||
| And to me, it's like we now live in 2017, where everyone has a phone, and if the company a block away from you is dumping in the river, or the smoke's coming out of their chimney, That everyone would report on everyone, that's another problem that society has altogether, but that we would police ourselves in a way, and as John Stossel, who I love, would always say, you know, the more regulations we keep putting in, companies just figure out other ways to do it, we just keep putting money in lawyers' pockets, and we're not actually accomplishing anything, we're just shifting around bullshit, basically, all over the place. | ||
| Can I jump in on that? | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| So two things. | ||
| There's the EPA and then there's the FDA. | ||
| So very briefly with the EPA. | ||
| The EPA was created by Nixon. | ||
| It was created to essentially offer scientific information in court cases where property rights were in dispute. | ||
| So the original idea behind the EPA is a good one because Congress is not made up entirely of scientists, right? | ||
| It's mostly lawyers. | ||
| And lawyers aren't environmental scientists, and so you're gonna need the testimony of environmental scientists. | ||
| You're gonna need someone to actually go out and do the research, you know, find the samples, and prove perhaps that some company is putting too much mercury or some sort of toxin into the environment. | ||
| You're gonna need science for that. | ||
| To specifically not be political, though. | ||
| Right, not being political. | ||
| And not to be the enforcement arm, because right now there are a bunch of unelected bureaucrats with assault rifles. | ||
| I think the U.S. | ||
| Department of Agriculture has submachine guns right there. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| What are they doing with them? | ||
| They're checking the cows! | ||
| But there's a, when it comes to the FDA, I actually think the FDA is an easier case to make for the case of abolishment. | ||
| Because even though people, they think, oh my gosh, well it's the things that we eat all the time. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, actually. | ||
| And if you haven't noticed, people are much more conscious about what they eat. | ||
| And you know, whenever, look at Yelp reviews. | ||
| Perfect example. | ||
| Every time you go and eat somewhere, I go and eat somewhere, if I've never been there before, I check the Yelp review. | ||
| And if they're like, it's dirty, it's got cockroaches, you know, terrible service, I don't go there. | ||
| And that's a market mechanism, that's a regulation, right? | ||
| It's a free market regulation. | ||
| That people use in order to determine whether or not they should eat somewhere. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't take very long to figure out that, you know, some food source is bad. | ||
| But the problem is that when anybody makes a mistake, which the government can't even stop Salmonella from getting out, it happens. | ||
| Whenever somebody's child dies, you know, then they say, well, one death is too many. | ||
| Let's create an enormous government institution just for the children, and we'll save all the kiddies. | ||
| And if you don't do this, then you hate children, and you want all the children to die. | ||
| And that's why we have these institutions, because as a politician, it's so much easier to say, well, I'm for the children. | ||
| I'm for checking children's food. | ||
| And we don't want them putting poison in baby's milk, right? | ||
| Because Yeah, because people really have an incentive to poison babies' milk, right? | ||
| Because, actually, if you are a good producer of food and you create clean, healthy food, you make more money. | ||
| You make more money? | ||
| Yeah, whole foods. | ||
| They're making much more than the lower-end retail chains. | ||
| I just walk in there and hand them all my cash, because I'm like, I know I'm not walking out of here with any money. | ||
| Well, in some sense it's elitism, because what they'll do is, like, the people who argue for it will say, oh, well I'm not worried about me, right? | ||
| It's not me. | ||
| I'm wealthy enough to check my food, like, I have no problem with it. | ||
| Like, if I had a private agency that was, you know, checking the food and had a stamp on it, like, I would be fine. | ||
| But it's all the underclass, right? | ||
| it's the plebes, that we need someone to take care of them, right? | ||
| And it becomes a very elitist thing that we need to have the government | ||
| because we need to have the really, really smart people, like about 100 or 200 to 300 of them sitting in a room, | ||
| making these decisions for the plebes, you know? | ||
| And that's what it comes down to, it's very paternalist. | ||
| You know, I never thought of it in the Whole Foods concept, | ||
| but there is something really there because if you go to Whole Foods, | ||
| at least the one over here, they've got five levels of how they treat the animal | ||
| and one, the lowest is like free range, which is still pretty damn good. | ||
| The highest, it's like they took them out to dinner before and they drugged them and, you know, whatever. | ||
| That sounded weird, but the point is that that's all done by Whole Foods. | ||
| It's by their policies. | ||
| But if they don't do it at Walmart, you see, and then the paternalist kicks in and is like, but they don't do that at Walmart. | ||
| Well, you don't shop at Walmart. | ||
| Well, but other people do and I care about them. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| You don't care about them. | ||
| You're not charitable because you go and you take a gun and you put it to somebody's head and you say, you will make sure this food is clean, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, but is there any evidence of a place where that was scaled? | ||
| Like, before the FDA existed, Were there a lot of stores that were, you know, I don't think people are intentionally poisoning tomatoes, you know, for a little grocer. | ||
| But is there any evidence that it actually accomplished anything? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the thing is, is that it's all about the incentives, right? | ||
| So the question is, is do you think that people are incentivized to actually do good by their community? | ||
| Because the way that capitalism works is the better you serve your community, the more money you make. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| But yeah, and there's always examples of, just like there have been financial panics | ||
| before the Federal Reserve. | ||
| But somehow instead of having great, instead of having great depressions like we did post-Fed, | ||
| we have these little short-term blips, little panics that happen in a year, | ||
| it cleans itself out and it's gone. | ||
| But now what we do is government steps in and it prolongs crises, right? | ||
| It exacerbates crises, 'cause then you have to have taxpayer money spent on the cleanup, right? | ||
| Whereas before, if there was a food poisoning case, a local judge would have a judgment | ||
| and they would exact tribute and they would bring it back to whatever the victims were | ||
| and there would be just compensation for that. | ||
| But again, it comes down to the question of whether or not you think that some bureaucracy | ||
| in Washington, D.C. can centrally plan all the food. | ||
| And all of the drugs everybody takes in the United States. | ||
| I think it's hubris to assume that people are smart, right? | ||
| And yeah, you can get the best people in the world and put them in a little room and hopefully you're going to get some good ideas, but more often than not, again, it's hubris because they think that they can possibly play on all of our lives. | ||
| They can't. | ||
| The definition of socialism is central planning. | ||
| Central control over our lives. | ||
| 90% income tax rate, you have no choice, the state plans everything. | ||
| And that's really the road to serfdom. | ||
| Freedom is dangerous. | ||
| Freedom is dangerous as hell! | ||
| We're gonna start poisoning our tomatoes. | ||
| And by the way, you know, with all this inspector stuff, of course, first off, you can pay off an inspector very easily. | ||
| There's so many little ways around it. | ||
| It reminds me a little bit like when I was a kid, and I went to sleepaway camp, and the camp would be like a disaster for three weeks, and we were like swimming in sewage. | ||
| The day before visiting day, when the parents are coming, they clean up the whole freaking place, and it looks good. | ||
| Parents come, they're happy, and then they leave. | ||
| Next thing you know, next day, we have lice. | ||
| Right, but the difference between a private inspector and a state inspector is that both have a tendency to be corrupt, but you can't fire the state inspector, right? | ||
| It's going to take an election, or it's going to take some connections in D.C. | ||
| But if you've got a private inspector, then they are much more tied to their communities. | ||
| And again, you can fire them, you can prosecute them, and the government will guarantee he's going to step in. | ||
| And clamp down on them. | ||
| But if it's the government and you're trying to sue the state, it's very difficult. | ||
| You briefly mentioned taxes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh boy. | |
| Let's do it. | ||
| Taxes. | ||
| Is taxation theft? | ||
| It's more like extortion, right? | ||
| But it doesn't make for as fun a slogan. | ||
| It doesn't fit on the hat. | ||
| I have a great hat that I sell. | ||
| It says, Make Taxation Theft Again. | ||
| Instead of Make America Great Again. | ||
| And that goes really well. | ||
| But I didn't want to wear it in California because I thought they would think it was a Trump hat and I might get beat up. | ||
| Even if you just wear a red hat. | ||
| I know! | ||
| Did you see this? | ||
| I had a guy that tweeted at me a couple weeks ago that he wore, he was wearing a Nintendo Switch hat, the new Nintendo, and it's a red hat, and he said people were telling him to go fuck himself. | ||
| I mean, come on! | ||
| Yeah, well, and yeah, somebody got beat up in D.C. | ||
| because it said, make Bitcoin great again, or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, the left has gone a little bit nuts, I think, as you've started to detail in some of your videos, but when it comes to taxes, taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society. | ||
| Just kidding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just kidding. | |
| I like that you went to the camera. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just triggered all the libertarians that are watching. | |
| Taxes should be as low as possible. | ||
| The idea is that you should keep the fruit of your labor. | ||
| That's the philosophical argument. | ||
| But the technical argument is that government wastes so much money. | ||
| They waste money because they don't have an incentive. | ||
| I have an incentive to save money. | ||
| But if we go out to dinner tonight, Dave, and you're like, Austin, I'm taking the finest restaurant in Los Angeles. | ||
| I'll be, all right, great, I'm getting steak, I'm getting lobster, I'm getting shrimp, I'm gonna get all the fixings. | ||
| And so there's no incentive for government officials to save. | ||
| So there's no incentive for them to be careful stewards of the public's money and our trust. | ||
| And they build these budgets that they have to exceed, otherwise their budgets get slashed because people, they didn't use the money. | ||
| I'll take it in and out, but that's really all it is. | ||
| In and out is fine. | ||
| I'm going to order a secret menu though. | ||
| But yeah, when it comes to taxes, I'm not a fan of the income tax just because it assumes that the money isn't yours. | ||
| It basically assumes that, no, this is our money and we're going to let you have some of it as soon as we've taken out our share, right, withholding. | ||
| And again, from a philosophical perspective, I think it's just anathema to the concept of freedom. | ||
| We didn't have it before 1913. | ||
| Somehow, the roads got built. | ||
| The roads did get built, guys. | ||
| We had systems of tariffs, but at least with a tariff system, and I'm not a fan of tariffs either, but with a tariff system, I mean, in a sense, you're paying for what you use, right? | ||
| It's kind of like Gary Johnson's National Sales Tax proposal. | ||
| You're just paying for what you use, what you consume, which I think, in some ways, from a moral perspective, I think it's better than an income tax, which just says, well, what you have is ours and we'll let you keep a little part of it. | ||
| I prefer a flat tax system. | ||
| I know that's controversial because poor people pay a larger percentage of their goods and services, of their money, into essential goods and services. | ||
| So there is a problem with that, because people say that's regressive, and that is true, and I acknowledge that. | ||
| But again, if you really believe in true equality, which we hear a lot from progressives, if we want people to be equal in some sense, then shouldn't they be taxed at an equal rate? | ||
| Well, then they disagree, and they say, no, if you make more, you should have to pay more. | ||
| And I think that that creates Big word here, disequilibrium, in a sense, because the people who are the most productive are being harnessed the most, right? | ||
| And the people who are the least productive, in some sense, are paying less. | ||
| And that's not to say that it should, could, should, would, what's moral here, but in some sense, you're taking the people who are creating all the wealth of society, and this is the Randian concept here, is that you're taking all those people and you're disincentivizing the cream of society. | ||
| And so I think that that's not the right way to go about it. | ||
| Everybody should be taxed at the same rate if you're to be taxed at all. | ||
| And most of the taxes that we have, I think, are just excessive. | ||
| But again, it's not just the income tax. | ||
| You've got sales taxes, property taxes. | ||
| You've got fines and fees everywhere you go. | ||
| Trust me, I'm a business owner now, and I just did my taxes this week. | ||
| I know about a whole new slew of taxes I didn't know about. | ||
| Self-employment tax. | ||
| For the privilege of sitting in your home doing this interview, you owe the government 15%. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| So you mentioned a flat tax and when people ask me about taxes and I think you know I've said for a while as a liberal I haven't moved. | ||
| I've watched the left go off the deep end so it makes it seem like I'm more right even though I don't I don't think I've moved but I think I've shifted a little bit on taxes. | ||
| Which is, I would basically be for some sort of flat tax, I'm just gonna pick a number for a second and we can go back more than that, let's say 15% flat tax, and if you've made less than 50 grand, you don't pay any taxes because you need the help the most, and if you make over 10 million or something, like I would pick at something pretty high, you pay another 2%, and then maybe over 100 million, you pay another percent, but something like that. | ||
| Does something like that make some sense to you? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm for any reforms of this tax system that we have. | ||
| I can be reasonable. | ||
| I may not like taxes at all. | ||
| I just chafe at it from just a simple reaction. | ||
| I just despise taxes. | ||
| But I think that it's time for us to have some sort of reasonable tax reform. | ||
| So yeah, I think that this is the kind of solution that I was looking for. | ||
| The real problem isn't with taxes. | ||
| It's with spending. | ||
| Because spending is just future taxes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we've gotten ourselves to, what, $20 trillion now in debt? | ||
| When I was a kid, the conservatives and the Democrats were attacking the conservatives of the Republican Party because Ronald Reagan drove up our national debt to $144 billion. | ||
| Yeah, what is it now? | ||
| It's $20 trillion. | ||
| $144 billion versus $20 trillion. | ||
| So we've gone into the twilight zone, in some sense, in terms of our spending. | ||
| We take in $2 trillion a year, we spend $4 trillion a year. | ||
| That, to me, is a recipe for disaster. | ||
| Right, so it seems fairly obvious to me, and I'm not an economist, but we are never going to pay this money back. | ||
| That seems obvious to me, and that then, unfortunately, creates a situation where it's why we need a military. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| That one day China, you know what I mean? | ||
| That just seems real world to me. | ||
| One day it's possible China's gonna go, whoa, you guys have racked up quite a bill over here. | ||
| What are we gonna do about that? | ||
| And then unfortunately, we know we're not gonna pay it back, because we don't have the money, and that's how you end up in another war. | ||
| So in a bizarre way, Debt brings war, I think. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| I mean, the United States has defaulted before, and it didn't go to war. | ||
| I mean, we had the Bretton Woods crisis, of course, that we had where we, you know, finally closed the gold window where, you know, no longer could you, you know, trade dollars for gold internationally, and then we did it nationally. | ||
| And in many ways this is a default, because in some sense you're destroying the savings of people who had money backed by gold, and so these are defaults in a sense. | ||
| And it didn't cause war, but I mean our creditors overseas who wanted to be able to exchange their dollars for gold, you know, they didn't attack us. | ||
| So I don't know that it would necessarily lead to war, but if we had a default in some sense. | ||
| You know, here's the thing. | ||
| It's only $20 trillion. | ||
| It's not $100 trillion. | ||
| In the United States economy, we put out $2 trillion a year. | ||
| It wouldn't take that long for us to pay it off if we would cut spending. | ||
| So it's not that it's not feasible to cut taxes, because I think everybody wants to cut taxes. | ||
| Everybody, if you ask them, would say, can I pay a lower tax for this sandwich? | ||
| Well, everyone says they'd like to cut them for themselves, but there's plenty of people that would say, I'd like them to be higher for other people. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| But if we could get some sort of broad-based tax reform, let's say we do. | ||
| It's not going to solve the problem, because again, any spending is just a future tax increase. | ||
| But if we could cut spending, and there are some proposals that have been put out, | ||
| and I put one out in my presidential campaign, we called it the Penny Plan, | ||
| where rather than try and kill Elmo, you know, or some special interest, right? | ||
| You just make everybody take a haircut from the top, right? | ||
| It was called the Penny Plan because you'd cut one penny out of every federal dollar across the board, right? | ||
| And then you would put in a cap, a spending cap, so like 15% of GDP, right? | ||
| So that you wouldn't spend yourself into oblivion in the future. | ||
| But I think that if you just give everybody a little haircut across the top, | ||
| and then you continue to do that every year, those savings start to add up. | ||
| And I think that that's a reasonable way to do it, rather than, you know, inflame some of the passions | ||
| of the people who love PBS, or the National Park Service, and things like that. | ||
| If everybody has to take the same haircut, just like if we're all taxed the same rate, I mean, that's really equality in a sense. | ||
| But it's, again, it's not necessarily politically feasible. | ||
| But new ideas, got to get them out there. | ||
| Yeah, so that's interesting and that's actually consistent with what you said earlier about sort of incremental things or how you would change things without burning down the system. | ||
| So in this case, you're not taking Big Bird out to the shed and shooting him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I would get a lot more Facebook fans if I said that. | |
| I would be a lot more popular because right now, we could get in the media, but I'll just tell you, it's so polarized right now that if you're not with us, you're against us. | ||
| If you're not a feminist, you're a bigot. | ||
| If you're not a conservative, then you're a stupid libtard. | ||
| And it's difficult to be... I mean, I'm not a moderate, right? | ||
| I'm not radical compared to my nation. | ||
| Yeah, but in the political world of today, I mean, you know, I think I bore people because I come up with such simple solutions and say, okay, this is a path towards what we really want. | ||
| And progressives can get on board some of these things, right? | ||
| Gay marriage, liberals, Democrats can get on board this. | ||
| People who even like Hillary or Bernie can get on this and people who like Gary or whatever. | ||
| There are all sorts of solutions that I think has a broad base of support amongst the American people. | ||
| The people who control our politics right now, on left and right, are so toxic that they poison the well. | ||
| And that's why Obamacare wasn't overturned. | ||
| Not because the House Freedom Radicals were in there, but because the people who were in the establishment were slapping it together. | ||
| And in some sense, they were the radicals because they were doubling down on Obamacare in many ways. | ||
| And then they start to demonize the opposition within their own party. | ||
| And the Democrats are just loving it. | ||
| But the Democrats have their own problems too. | ||
| Right, alright, so let's throw away some easy ones, so medical marijuana and legalizing marijuana altogether, no problem? | ||
| Sure, but the problem with legalizing it is that you gotta pay taxes, so I mean, I guess, you know, decriminalizing is what the anarchists want, but yeah, I'll take legalization over nothing. | ||
| Alright, we'll throw that one away, gay marriage, not a problem, right? | ||
| Two people want to do what they want, no problem. | ||
| Can I talk about that for just a second? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Let me just say that... I was just trying to give you some easy ones to just... No, I love it! | ||
| I'm so happy whenever anybody finds love, you know? | ||
| And it's just not said enough by people. | ||
| It's like, what the hell business is it if somebody else is happy that the government should get involved in a contract between two consenting adults? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I just, like, I never understood. | ||
| I've seen on some level where some people, you know, they find disgust with it. | ||
| I just never felt that way, right? | ||
| And I have just way too many gay friends and family members that I've grown up around that I love Like crazy, and I want them to be happy. | ||
| And so, yeah, when it comes to gay marriage, it's not a gay marriage question. | ||
| It's does the state have a prevailing interest in telling people that they can't sign a contract, and that's how I feel about it. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why I've used that one as such a consistent example of where liberals and libertarians can get together. | ||
| So you may be a liberal who just feels that this is the right thing to do, and the liberal thing to do, and you may be a libertarian, even though you said nice things about gay people and whatever, but you may just be a libertarian who says, But conservatives are not like this now. | ||
| Conservatives in Alabama are pushing a bill to get the state out of marriage. | ||
| Now they're doing it because they're absolutely tired of the government stepping in and saying, well, we're forcing you to recognize gay marriages, right? | ||
| And so we may actually get a consensus on this because the conservatives are so tired of losing these culture wars. | ||
| And, well, the Democrats love winning, but I think that if we could get a consensus for it, Unfortunately now because of the Oberfell case, which I still support, but because of the Oberfell case, it's now a federal issue, right? | ||
| It's like abortion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We just can't go back to a state-based solution on this. | ||
| But if we can get people to accept an idea first, then we can start talking about putting it in action. | ||
| Yeah, and I suspect, as with abortion, it's going to just stay the way it is, and I don't think they'll flip it, but that remains to be seen. | ||
| All right, so I gave you two basically easy ones. | ||
| Now we'll do two tougher ones that we've sort of touched on here. | ||
| So Second Amendment, so obviously I know you are a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. | ||
| Are there any regulations that we should have on guns? | ||
| Well, maybe nukes, right? | ||
| So maybe you shouldn't be able to have a nuclear weapon, right? | ||
| No nukes. | ||
| We don't want a Kim Jong-un, right? | ||
| That might be the tipping point. | ||
| Everything but nukes, for the most part. | ||
| The problem is that most people think that if you make it legal to own tanks, then everybody's going to own tanks. | ||
| Well, it's not true, because it's so expensive to own a tank. | ||
| You can't even drive it down 10 feet without the insane gasoline bill that it would take. | ||
| And it's probably illegal to drive that on the road, too. | ||
| So you don't have to worry that people are going to suddenly come out with tanks. | ||
| And this is going to make some people uncomfortable, but you really need to understand that the revolution was fought by, in many ways, by militiamen. | ||
| They fought with military-grade weapons of their time. | ||
| And so I worry about disarming the citizenry one day. | ||
| I mean, liberals are now arming up. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| This is the ultimate irony. | ||
| Yeah, now the liberals all are talking about limits on executive power because Trump is in power and, you know, all of their screams of misogynists and racists and so now they're like, well maybe we need to do something about it one day. | ||
| They're talking about states' rights because it's sanctuary cities. | ||
| I mean, everything's upside down now. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And so there is some irony there in that, but hey, if they agree with me, great. | ||
| I saw that some liberals were out like doing a gun march the other day, but then when we looked closer they were carrying airsoft. | ||
| You guys might want to get some actual guns. | ||
| But yeah, strong, firm support of the Second Amendment. | ||
| It says arms for a reason, right? | ||
| So it's a bit obtuse. | ||
| The idea is that arms, the definition of that would change. | ||
| So I do think that citizens should be able to have that. | ||
| Fully automatic rifles. | ||
| I want to live in a world where gay married couples can defend their marijuana fields. | ||
| Fully automatic machine guns. | ||
| That's a beautiful world. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| You're giving me a lot there. | ||
| Yeah, well, like, happily married lesbians who grow marijuana and one day somebody comes in and wants to steal their stash? | ||
| I mean, they should be able to grab their AK-47s and, you know, kick some ass. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds like that should be on Netflix. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That should be a movie. | |
| That show, you know. | ||
| Alright, but somebody's gonna hear that and go, alright, I've been with this guy, he's making some sense, but I don't want my neighbor walking around with a bazooka. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The tank is obviously okay. | ||
| You can't afford a tank. | ||
| But maybe you save 20 grand. | ||
| I don't know how much a bazooka costs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But you know what I mean? | ||
| So how do you stop the crazy person from just saving all their money and buying a weapon that they could blow up a school or... Well, you could tell. | ||
| You could get on the internet and you could build a bazooka for a lot less than it costs to buy one because... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's probably not the answer they wanted to hear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Probably not. | |
| But that's the problem, is that people who want to do evil things are going to do it, right? | ||
| It's very easy to make a gun. | ||
| You know, you can take a pipe, put a shotgun shell in it, hit it with a hammer, that's a gun. | ||
| And so, you know, I don't want to say that, oh, well, we don't ban it, you know, ban something | ||
| simply because, oh, it's, you know, it's possible to do it, right? | ||
| We ban murder for good reasons. | ||
| But a gun is a tool, right? | ||
| It's just a tool, and it's just, it's only as evil as the person who wields it, you know? | ||
| An object in itself doesn't carry any morality, right? | ||
| Like, sometimes libertarians get upset with me because I talk about drones, for example, and I say, well, a drone is, again, just a tool. | ||
| It's just like any other tool. | ||
| And what matters is that constitutional due process is applied when the government uses a tool like this. | ||
| We like drones much better than we like carpet bombs, because it's more pinpointed. | ||
| But the ultimate question is, who wields the gun? | ||
| Who has power to do it? | ||
| The funny thing is about liberals that kind of kills me, the ones who are the anti-gun liberals, is that they say things like, you know, oh my god, these cops are so evil and racist and they hate blacks, and only they should own guns. | ||
| That goes to the heart of the argument, which is always how corrupt and evil the system is. | ||
| What's the answer? | ||
| Make the system bigger! | ||
| Make the system bigger! | ||
| Hire more cops! | ||
| I don't usually get off on seeing people get harmed, but there was some irony in Occupy Wall Street. | ||
| Some of these definitions of people calling for more government and then they get government right in the face with a pepper spray, right? | ||
| You wanted more government and there it is, right? | ||
| That is the ultimate result of the call for more state intervention. | ||
| So there is some irony there. | ||
| When you see leftists get bashed over the head by the police truncheon, that's essentially what they're calling for when they say we need more regulations, we need higher taxes. | ||
| That's the state because as Mao Zedong said, all political power flows from the barrel of a gun. | ||
| And so you have to be careful about the use of power because it's fire, it's force, it's not reason. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Abortion. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| So I had a flip on this, way before I ever thought about running for office. | ||
| And because, you know, I'm a secularist, right? | ||
| I believe in empirical study and data and science and things like that. | ||
| So I didn't have some sort of divine intervention that said, Austin, you need to believe this. | ||
| But when I started to listen to some of the secular pro-lifers' arguments on this, I was convinced. | ||
| People like Christopher Hitchens, even Bill Maher has said at some points, expressed some sympathy towards the unborn child. | ||
| And so, the question in my mind is, is it a life? | ||
| Is it a human life? | ||
| I think the answer to that question is yes. | ||
| And then it gets down to the question of, well, when does life begin? | ||
| Well, can I be intellectually honest and say I don't know because I'm not a scientist? | ||
| And that I don't know everything? | ||
| But if I'm to make a mistake, I would probably think it would be the moral Question is should you err on the side of life? | ||
| So I think that yes, we should err on the side of life and this is this is not a scientific or empirical question, but my little sister is adopted and she was Slated to be aborted by her mother and we convinced her not not to abort and then we adopted her and so I think to myself Wow, you know like I'm so glad that she's alive. | ||
| And then I think about all the people who want children for adoptions. | ||
| Because while we were going through the adoption process, I was only 11 years old, but I was learning about the adoption process and studying it, and I realized how many parents just really want children. | ||
| So I think that Abortion for convenience is a problem. | ||
| Morally, I think it's a problem because I think that if you really want to live in a moral society, we should encourage people to adopt. | ||
| It's not to say, you conservatives or pro-life libertarians only care about a baby once it's born, right? | ||
| But that's not true because my family adopted. | ||
| I know many parents who are dying to adopt children. | ||
| You know, I'd like to have kids one day, and if I can't have kids, I'm gonna adopt. | ||
| So I think that, you know, again, knowing that this isn't a perfect world, and that, you know, we're never gonna be able to just completely ban it, like Venezuela tries to do, that I think that we can probably agree that abortion isn't a good thing. | ||
| Some people think it's a good thing. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It's fetishized in a bizarre way by some people. | ||
| In some way it is, right. | ||
| But I think most people don't think it's a good thing. | ||
| Otherwise, why is the stigma or the shame attached to it? | ||
| But I think that if that's true, I think science is going to come up with new ways for us to save the kids, the life of children, you know, earlier and earlier. | ||
| Perhaps there are going to be some options there. | ||
| I know a lot of Catholic charities that would spend millions of dollars to see technology like that come to the light of day. | ||
| So I think that looking to the future, that abortion is probably going to become less of a problem, especially because birth control is becoming so much more available. | ||
| And when it comes to the law, the first things that I always like to do when it comes to policy, try and find the most non-coercive way to reduce the amount of abortions. | ||
| The number one simplest way that makes some people very upset still is to just legalize birth control over the counter. | ||
| And that comes part and parcel with ending the war on drugs. | ||
| And so there's some institutional challenges there. | ||
| But I think that abortion is wrong. | ||
| I think that it is a human life. | ||
| I think that as a society that we should protect. | ||
| If government is to exist, then its role should be to protect those who cannot protect themselves. | ||
| And I think that that should include the unborn. | ||
| But of course we have federal challenges to that. | ||
| And we have court challenges with that. | ||
| We have state challenges with that. | ||
| But I try and make the moral argument because unless we can win the moral argument, | ||
| we'll never win the legislative argument. | ||
| Yeah, well, I like the way you frame the argument there because it's also nice to occasionally hear someone say, | ||
| "I don't know everything and I'm not a scientist." | ||
| And that there's an actual moral quandary here. | ||
| What did you make of a couple of weeks ago when Tommy Lahren came out and said | ||
| that she, using her conservative principles, is actually pro-China? | ||
| I don't know that she said she herself is pro-choice, but she said that she didn't want the government basically legislating what a woman could do with her body. | ||
| I do see that as an intellectually consistent It may not be the conservative position, it may not be the position that Glenn Beck, who I like and who's been in that chair, believes, and he did what he did. | ||
| His show is no longer on the blaze. | ||
| That's a whole separate issue. | ||
| But do you think that there's legitimacy to the argument that she made? | ||
| No. | ||
| The first thing that popped into my head was, oh, she's had an abortion. | ||
| Because three weeks before that, she said... I know, there's a video from a little bit before that. | ||
| Yeah, she's being a complete hypocrite here, so something happened. | ||
| That was my first thought. | ||
| Then I was like, well, can't prove that. | ||
| Then I thought to myself, okay, so what is this really all about? | ||
| Well, if the argument is that the government has no prevailing interest in getting involved in a woman's body, well then, can the government save the child if something's wrong with the mother, if she's in a coma? | ||
| Can the government take the child out? | ||
| Let's say that the situation happens where the mother's life is actually in danger, And the mother, but the mother can't give consent. | ||
| I mean, can the nurse then save the life of the child? | ||
| But what if the mother at the time doesn't want the child to be born? | ||
| What if she woke up and decided, oh no, I actually wanted to have an abortion, right? | ||
| Would the nurse probably not try and save the life of the child by default because she thinks of it as a baby? | ||
| When Beyonce posted pictures of her being pregnant, the liberals were saying that, oh, those are babies, those are children, those are humans. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But they're not babies, they're not humans. | ||
| But when it comes to the Tomi Lahren thing, I think she probably just says whatever she can say to get traffic and clicks, and God knows I've been so tempted to follow in her example, because you could make a lot more money that way. | ||
| But I think that when it comes to the question of whether it's consistent or not for government to intervene, I mean, even Gary Johnson, who parades himself around as a pro-choicer, signed a partial birth abortion ban. | ||
| So most abortions do occur within the first trimester. | ||
| But the real thing, again, when I said, and we're full circle here, the most politically incorrect thing that you can say is that you should be personally responsible. | ||
| Is that we have things called condoms and birth control and you are supposed to take care. | ||
| Because the problem with the liberal argument of freedom is that I am free to not only destroy other people's lives and create harm and have the government solve it. | ||
| I'm also free to self-destruct and to make you pay for it. | ||
| A prime example of that is, for example, when the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare. | ||
| I was there the day that happened. | ||
| The liberals were unironically smoking cigarettes after it was over. | ||
| Not because they were necessarily addicted to nicotine. | ||
| It was a sign to the rest of us that I can do whatever I want and now you have to pay | ||
| for it. | ||
| And, you know, there are people who think that taxpayer-funded abortion should exist | ||
| and that we should pay for those decisions. | ||
| But when it comes down to it, if it is killing a child, if it is killing a human child, well, | ||
| shouldn't you be personally responsible? | ||
| Shouldn't you have been careful beforehand? | ||
| And then, you know, you've got the questions of rape and all these other things that come into it, which is always like, you know, we like to take tiny, tiny exceptions to rules and then blow them out and conflate them to the rules. | ||
| But, again, I don't know everything. | ||
| And government cannot possibly legislate from Washington, D.C., all of these problems, which is why I think it should be a state issue. | ||
| Because I think from an administrative question, the states should be allowed to have laboratories of democracy in some way. | ||
| When it comes to the war on drugs, when it comes to abortion. | ||
| If you're in Texas, if the war on drugs was ended federally, Texas might execute you for looking at a joint. | ||
| But here in California, it may be like, they may have... | ||
| They could execute you for not smoking. | ||
| They could execute you for not smoking, right? | ||
| So that's the thing, is that there are some problems with federalism, | ||
| but I think when it comes to issues, especially of life and death, | ||
| that those things are better handled to the smaller, the tighter knit, the community, | ||
| so that the negative externalities aren't projected on the rest of us. | ||
| Because I certainly don't think I should be funding abortions, right? | ||
| I think that if I think it's a crime, then I certainly should not be taxed to do that. | ||
| Yeah, it's just such a place where there's so much richness for conversation, where we can find people that are perfectly moral and just view things a little bit differently. | ||
| Because I do get the Tommy argument there of keeping the government out of it, and I personally am pro-choice, but I find no great pleasure in it at all, and I have all sorts of issues with, you know, later term abortions and stuff like that. | ||
| But this is one of those ones that it's just... I think, yeah, but we make a mistake if we looked at Tommy for intellectual... | ||
| Be that as it may, and I hope she'll be here so that I can ask her about that. | ||
| Alright, last question, and I already told you what it was. | ||
| 2020, are we doing this? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't like running for office. | ||
| I really despise it, and as a libertarian I really like my personal life. | ||
| I have looked at, people have said, Austin, go run for lower office. | ||
| And so I have looked at potentially running in Missouri for Senate seat. | ||
| I've still got about two or three months before I have to decide something like that. | ||
| But maybe, you know, I ran for president because of the timing and because I thought that there just weren't that many good people who represented my beliefs. | ||
| And so I didn't run last year just because I wanted to be the king of the United States. | ||
| ran because I thought that Donald and Hillary were so distasteful and Gary was not the strongest | ||
| candidate that maybe I would look good by default and could get our ideas out there. | ||
| And so I think in some ways I didn't win the presidency but in many ways I won the argument | ||
| in a lot of ways looking retrospectively because a lot more people are now interested in libertarian | ||
| ideas which is one of my goals. | ||
| But when it comes to running for president in 2020, I'm gonna respectfully decline at this time | ||
| and say that maybe it would be better for me to try and do something at this point | ||
| that would not be an altruist perhaps, but try and give something back to the citizens of my state | ||
| who have got a horrible Senator, Claire McCaskill, a Democrat who's now for complete partisan politics. | ||
| She's kind of shooting herself in the foot saying she's gonna filibuster Neil Gorsuch. | ||
| And she's doing this because she's terrified of the progressives in her own party, | ||
| the Bernie bros and all that, or they're threatening the primary. | ||
| So now she's being pushed so hard to the left. | ||
| She's doing what Hillary did, the mistakes that Hillary made, | ||
| going as hard left as she can, hoping that those socialists and social Democrats | ||
| are gonna push her into it. | ||
| But if I think that there is an opening there to maybe run for senator in Missouri, then I might pursue that. | ||
| But God, I don't know. | ||
| I see what's happening to Trump on a daily basis, and I don't really have that much of a lust for power. | ||
| So at this point, I'm gonna say, yeah. | ||
| Which is the inherent problem with all of this, that good, principled people simply don't wanna be part of this game anymore. | ||
| So you're left with... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It, well, you know, it destroys you, right? | ||
| So it's, you know, every little personal thing that you've ever said, right? | ||
| Every joke, every off-color joke that you've ever made is suddenly used to demonize you. | ||
| I mean, I thought I was a good person until last year. | ||
| I didn't realize that I was a sexist, misogynist, you know, and all of these things. | ||
| And, but then, you know, when you look at it, it's like, the truth is who is fit to rule, right? | ||
| Nobody's really fit to rule over all of us. | ||
| And the power, it has so much power. | ||
| I mean, I just, at this point, I'm going to say I don't really have an interest in running. | ||
| Alright, well you put it on the record, so now if you do end up running for whatever reason, you're going to be considered a flip-flopper. | ||
| Sure, but they always do that, too. | ||
| Everybody, like Donald Trump said, no, I'm not going to run for president, and he runs for president. | ||
| It always does. | ||
| You know, on the minuscule chance that, you know, that I feel like I can, I'm called to public service, which is what it should be, then maybe there's an opportunity. | ||
| But at this point, you know, I've got a lot of other things that I really need to focus on. | ||
| My own personal life, you know, like maybe have kids someday, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, well, as I told you before we started, people email me every day asking if I'm going to do it. | ||
| I don't want to run for president, but if I do, would you at least help me before the debates? | ||
| Because you know your shit. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Yeah, what is Aleppo? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what Aleppo is? | |
| I know what Aleppo is. | ||
| That's like half of it right there. | ||
| Would you make them bake the cake? | ||
| No, I would not make them bake the cake. | ||
| See, we haven't gotten to this. | ||
| Okay, let's start quick. | ||
| Alright, real quick. | ||
| You know, we're going to do this for our bonus segment after. | ||
| We'll do the cake thing because people know my feelings about the cake. |
Export Selection