May 11, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
39:48
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Every nation should be able to set its own laws and its own customs and its own traditions and all of those things, and that's going to be different than every other country. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that one is necessarily worse or one is necessarily better, but most likely every nation is going to do something different, and that strong nations first at the bottom are then what can build a sort of worldwide system that we can all play by. | ||
| And what we've done backwards, and this is when people talk about globalism, | ||
| is we think that, oh, if we could all just be governed by one thing first, then we can sort of set that down | ||
| to all of the individual states. | ||
| And that, I just don't buy into that idea. | ||
|
unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
| Hi everybody, Michael Shermer here, You're talking to Dave Rubin about his new book, Don't Burn | ||
| This Book. | ||
| I tried to burn it last night because I ran out of firewood and it just wouldn't take, so I don't know what the deal is here. | ||
| They got special paper or something. | ||
| We sent you the fire retardant copy because you're a skeptic and I knew you'd be up to no good. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Sort of like polyester suits, they don't burn. | ||
| So, um, well, I read your whole book. | ||
| Uh, I did it on audio and then read it before we talked before on, on my podcast, uh, from the print edition. | ||
| So, um, congratulations on the book. | ||
| I thought we'd just hit some of the key points in chapter three, because to me, I think this is where the rubber meets the road. | ||
| It's one thing to say, well, I'm in favor of freedom. | ||
| Everybody's in favor of freedom if you ask them. | ||
| But what about this point, or what about that point, you know, is kind of where it matters. | ||
| Now, you and I are largely on the same page, so I think I'll channel my inner progressive far-left... Go for it! | ||
| I like it! | ||
| ...person I see on cable news, and just kind of try to steel man the other side. | ||
| So we'll hit the major issues here in Chapter 3, drugs, immigration, foreign policy, economics, and on starting with drugs. | ||
| Well, so you fess up to having done a few yourself. | ||
|
unidentified
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I've done most of the good ones. | |
| I guess somebody could accuse you of being in favor of the decriminalization of drugs for personal reasons, but of course you're not arguing that here. | ||
| You're arguing in terms of personal liberty. | ||
| I guess it would apply something like the harm principle. | ||
| As long as you're not harming anybody, what's the problem? | ||
| Well, the problem, I would guess, Conservatives might argue would be, it does harm people indirectly. | ||
| So let's say, you know, it drives insurance costs up because you personally have to be treated medically or whatever, and the rest of us have to pay for that through our premiums. | ||
| Or, worse, would be something like the broken windows theory of crime, where little things that bring the neighborhood down a little bit, drug dealers on the corner or whatever, You know, why don't we just let them deal drugs like the liquor store sells liquor, the gas station sells cigarettes, and the counter argument to that, I think, would be, well, but it brings down the neighborhood, like graffiti on walls, sends a signal to everybody, this neighborhood is not being monitored by the police, we don't give a crap about standards here, do what you want, and that leads to petty crimes, and then that escalates to major crimes, and before you know it, you have | ||
| a runaway homicide effect like in the 70s in New York City. | ||
| So what's your response to that? | ||
| So that's why I love you, Shermer, because you went out of your way to steel man some of the oppositional stuff. | ||
| So my basic feelings about this are first off, and I make this point, if you're for legalized alcohol, which pretty much everyone is, then you really can't make an argument at least against legalizing marijuana. | ||
| I mean, the amount of medical problems and most of the domestic violence and all of the negative things, drunk driving, that come with alcohol, there's actually no evidence that any of those things come with marijuana. | ||
| So that's one. | ||
| And then I would expand, but by the way, I'm completely okay leaving it to the states, which is how we're doing it right now. | ||
| It was first medically available in certain states and now recreationally available, and I'm completely fine with that. | ||
| And if you don't want it in your state, You can move to another state. | ||
| And what the states have found actually is that when they've recreationally allowed it, not only are they not really seeing a major increase in marijuana usage, well then they're also generating tax revenue. | ||
| Colorado is probably the best example of this. | ||
| I'm also okay generally with legalizing some other drugs, so like psilocybin, magic mushrooms, things like that. | ||
| And then where I get into the broken windows part, which I think is completely legit, When I talk about the light touch of government and things from a classical liberal or libertarian perspective, and I have a lot of libertarians that have been reading this already that are kind of pissed at me, and my friend Michael Malice, I went on his show and we duked it out all in good spirits. | ||
| He wants to legalize everything. | ||
| My feeling is this is where government has to come in and do some stuff. | ||
| So first off, I don't want to put people in jail for doing drugs. | ||
| I simply don't want to do that. | ||
| And I think there's better ways either through rehabilitation and hopefully most of that can even be done privately. | ||
| But I would be willing to put some public funds to getting people off drugs. | ||
| But I don't want to just jail people. | ||
| Because they've made some, let's say, rough choices or negative personal choices. | ||
| That being said, I also admit to doing a lot of stuff back in the day. | ||
| And should I have been put in jail? | ||
| Had I been caught? | ||
| And we also know that there's socioeconomic reasons that certain types of people will be caught more frequently than other types of people and a whole bunch of other stuff. | ||
| But what I would say in short is that you have to have some rules. | ||
| So the simple Answer on this is, look, if my neighbor, if we legalized everything and then I found out that my neighbor was making meth in his kitchen or it turned into a crack den or something like that, not only do we know that there would be all sorts of nefarious people coming around, that there would be more crime, it would be less safe for kids to be around and a whole slew of things. | ||
| Now, specifically making everything illegal or legal doesn't necessarily take care of all of those problems, but this is just one of those places where I feel you just need some guidelines on society, and where I guess the rich conversation that we could have, and we sort of did this when you had me on your podcast, we could whittle this down to, okay, well then what drugs exactly are we talking about on all of these things? | ||
| So is it marijuana and say medicinal mushrooms and ayahuasca, sort of the, The psychedelic stuff that generally people do, and there isn't like a hardcore addiction, and is the hardcore addiction heroin, meth, things like that, is that the line? | ||
| It's a great place to have that back and forth, but what I was trying to do here, which is what I try to do with the whole book, is just give some basic guidelines, and then let's sort of whittle down the differences. | ||
| Yeah, you talk about the taxation of cigarettes in New York City. | ||
| I'd forgotten how expensive it is to smoke, because I've never smoked. | ||
| It's crazy in New York City. | ||
| New York State tax on a pack of 20 cigarettes is $4.35. | ||
| 20 cigarettes? | ||
| There's people that do that every day. | ||
| While New York City tax is $1.50, comprising $5.85 of the $14 total. | ||
| New York is now the black market capital in the United States for illegal cigarette sales. | ||
| So that, I presume, is just to avoid the taxes. | ||
| So there's a problem. | ||
| It's also that if you're taxing people on vices, in a weird way, as the state, you end up needing people to have vices to generate revenue. | ||
| I don't like that idea, that we're going to, in a weird way, need the very people we're trying to stop from doing these things. | ||
| Again, this is where I just want to get the government out of the way as much as possible, but I don't want to crack down next door. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Woody Allen had a funny bit about, to get divorced in New York State, this is back in the 60s, there had to be a cause. | ||
| So as he said, what was it? | ||
| Adultery is required in New York City. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So you have to have it, yeah. | ||
| You have to have it, yeah. | ||
| So anyway, that's kind of funny. | ||
| Yeah, so that's the problem with, well, so the counter argument to legalizing pot, say, and then taxing it, Is that if you drive the taxes too high or the, the regulatory, um, bureaucracy to set up a pot farm and so on is so, um, it's so large that people then just do it on the sly anyway, just to avoid all that. | ||
| And I think that there has been some cases in Oregon where there's a lot of illegal pot growers still because they can't get the license or they don't have the money for the license and then all the taxes. | ||
| Right, and all of that I would leave up to then hopefully some other people come in and they find cheaper ways to make marijuana or to grow marijuana or everything else. | ||
| That's where competition, I would hope, would depress some of those costs. | ||
| But again, it's not perfect, and that's what I try to say throughout the book, that if you're dealing with these issues honestly, as opposed to sort of this utopian idea that we can create a perfect law for everybody that's gonna stop everyone from doing all the bad things and they're only gonna do the good things, That's just not real. | ||
| So what I try to do is get out of people's way as much as possible, but then also say, okay, we've got to have some guardrail so that we're not completely going off the deep end. | ||
| Okay, gay marriage. | ||
| This one's kind of hard for me to steel man the other side because, you know, I'm so in favor of it, but we don't have to go back very far. | ||
| 2011, both Hillary and Obama were against it before that, and pretty much, you know, that was the trend. | ||
| So what were their arguments? | ||
| Okay, let's see. | ||
| You know, the state sanctions marriage for a reason because the state wants citizens to have more babies. | ||
| So marriage is sort of the foundation of family with children. | ||
| And, of course, that is an ancient tradition, you know, grounded in religion. | ||
| But the state, you know, gives you a tax break for being married because they want people to be married so that they have kids and so on. | ||
| And that somehow, you know, allowing gay marriage Then what, people can marry their pets or having polygamous families? | ||
| Because if you want lots of children, then let guys marry 20 women and have tons of children. | ||
| So I guess they were making something of a slippery slope argument, that if you allow this, then you put a crack in the foundation of why the state endorses marriage in the first place. | ||
| Well, and then on top of that, there's just sort of the more typically conservative argument, which is also bound up in religion and the Bible and, you know, a man and a woman and a man should not lie with another man. | ||
| And that sort of stuff, which I certainly know your feelings on that. | ||
| I mean, we don't have to spend too much time on this, because in many ways, the ship has sailed, and the loudest voice is against gay marriage. | ||
| I mean, the Christian right, when you think of the Mike Huckabees and the Rick Santorums, they actually have completely let it go. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean they don't have their own personal religious beliefs, but as an issue, I find that most of the people we know, like Ben Shapiro, who has his own personal religious belief, He's taking the libertarian approach, which is either that the state shouldn't be involved at all, or it shouldn't be something, you know, I can have my beliefs and you can have yours. | ||
| So I'm actually okay with that, and I'm thrilled that this really is no longer an issue, and I can just accept, and I know this is where a lot of lefties get angry at me, but I can just accept that some people may not be happy with all my life choices. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I'm happy with them. | ||
| And that's enough for me. | ||
| So I don't even think it's really one that, I sort of wrote it very quickly because it was kind of like, the ship has sailed, and when you get wins, I think this is one of the things that people don't do well in politics. | ||
| When you get a win, be gracious about it. | ||
| I don't need to now rail against and say, oh, but all of you used to be against it, and just keep clubbing over the head. | ||
| Guys, we got a win, let's move on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, let's move on to a much harder problem, I think, is immigration. | ||
| Obviously, we don't want to open the borders up to everybody, and we don't want to close the borders, so nobody comes in. | ||
| What's the right balance? | ||
| How do you find that? | ||
| That was a very dangerous word you used there, my friend, obviously, because, you know, a lot of people don't find that obvious. | ||
| I mean, there's sort of the lefty version of open borders and sort of no-nation states, and then there's a very strong libertarian argument for that, too. | ||
| I am completely against both of those arguments. | ||
| That is an odd one for the horseshoe theory, right? | ||
| Because you've got the far lefties and the libertarians. | ||
| Both saying just open it up and we'll have one passport and you can wander through and commerce and all that. | ||
| Look, I believe in strong nation-states. | ||
| I believe in an American ethos that is special, that is different than a Canadian ethos and is different than a Mexican ethos. | ||
| We are separate countries. | ||
| The book that I reference in the chapter, The Virtue of Nationalism by Jerome Harzoni, his whole argument is that every nation should be able to set its own laws and its own customs and its own traditions and all of | ||
| those things. | ||
| And that's going to be different than every other country. | ||
| Now, that doesn't mean that one is necessarily worse or one is necessarily better, but most | ||
| likely every nation is going to do something different. | ||
| And that strong nations first at the bottom are then what can build a sort of worldwide | ||
| system that we can all play by. | ||
| And what we've done backwards, and this is when people talk about globalism, is we think that, oh, if we could all just be governed by one thing first, then we can sort of set that down to all of the individual states. | ||
| And I just don't buy into that idea. | ||
| I don't buy into it from an American perspective when I talk about the federal government. | ||
| I like things to go this way. | ||
| And so that really is the argument. | ||
| I want strong nation states. | ||
| I think every country from the United States to Paraguay has the right to set whatever their immigration policy is. | ||
| That doesn't mean they're always going to do it exactly justly or exactly fairly. | ||
| But one other thing that I do reference in this portion is that many of the things that Trump now says about immigration, although he says them perhaps without the great cadence of Barack Obama, are the exact same things that Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, and Dianne Feinstein, and Chuck Schumer, and all of them have said in the past. | ||
| So I think when you whittle it down to the truth, most people actually do believe in borders. | ||
| Most people, look, we know we have something like 12 million illegal immigrants here. | ||
| I'm for a pathway to citizenship. | ||
| I don't wanna kick all these people out. | ||
| But we have to start figuring out a way to talk about this honestly. | ||
| It can't just be open borders for everybody, or everybody else is racist. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I have a wall around my house and I have a front door. | |
| That's a kind of a wall. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, isn't that something? | |
| Yeah, no, so the libertarian argument that let the economy decide. | ||
| So we're in Southern California. | ||
| A lot of Mexicans come here to work. | ||
| They do great work. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| They wouldn't come here if there was an economic opportunity. | ||
| So why not just let the let the market Now, someone like, I think, a Heather MacDonald or a more traditional conservative would say, but they're not bringing American values with them. | ||
| So even if they're hard-working, we want them to believe in, say, the Constitution or civil rights and, you know, the things that define Americanism versus other traditions. | ||
| That seems to be harder to kind of articulate or quantify in an immigration policy. | ||
| It's absolutely harder to quantify. | ||
| I'm with them on the spirit of that. | ||
| I don't want to insult any of these individual people, of course, but we don't know exactly. | ||
| If everyone's just coming here for work, that doesn't mean that they share in the American ethos. | ||
| Now, I also don't want to force anyone to share in the American ethos, so I think you're right that quantifying it actually is is the hard part. | ||
| And that's why I say, you can leave this. | ||
| Every administration can set their policy. | ||
| This is one of the things that the federal government is supposed to do. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| If you don't like Trump's policy on it, then don't vote for Trump. | ||
| And then if you get a Democrat in who maybe has a more liberal policy, a more open policy, and you don't like that, then vote against that guy. | ||
| That actually is the beauty of our system because it's not that we're setting a policy and this is the policy now for the next 20 years. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, so it's always adjustable on that. | ||
| Even if you can't quantify it, there is a way to kind of articulate it and have some kind of reasonable policy. | ||
| You know, at the end of the moral arc, I sort of speculated about a future of a world without borders. | ||
| In a way, we were getting there without economic borders because of the internet. | ||
| You know, at least the borders were very porous and it was easy to trade with other people. | ||
| I could imagine that continuing where You know, the political unit is the city-state, not the nation-state. | ||
| Unfortunately, since I wrote that in 2015, you know, we've kind of gone the other direction of, you know, nation-states gaining more power. | ||
| But I like the idea of local solutions. | ||
| You know, the pothole out here on my street, you know, the federal government, I can't count on them. | ||
| I just want the local Santa Barbara people to come up and fix my pothole. | ||
| They're the ones responsible. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, I make that same argument literally about our messed up exit off the 405 near my house. | ||
| I mean, that's absolutely true. | ||
| By the way, one other thing on this quickly. | ||
| Obviously, I wrote this before coronavirus, but one of the interesting things that's popping up right now is that suddenly you've got all of these lefties that are saying, oh, we should have closed the border to China a lot sooner, even though Trump was actually fairly ahead on that and they were calling him racist for doing it. | ||
| But, you know, the truth of the matter is these are the same people who just two weeks before that would have been calling for open borders and allowing, you know, totally free back and forth all the time. | ||
| So it's one of those things that I think, you know, you sort of said it before, when the rubber hits the road, I think people's policies start making a little more sense because they're important and they impact them rather than just at the idea level when you can sort of say something and it doesn't necessarily matter. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So, abortion issue, again, another contentious one. | ||
| The Republicans have glommed on to this as, like, one of their key issues in the last quarter century or so. | ||
| And, you know, you're pro-choice, largely, and so am I. So, let's just say it is a living human being. | ||
| It may not be a legal person yet. | ||
| Depends on where you draw the line. | ||
| You know, if a woman's in her third trimester and she's murdered, it's a double homicide. | ||
| So, the state does recognize personhood at some point. | ||
| But isn't it reasonable to argue that there is a, not just a quantitative difference, but a qualitative difference, the moment of conception. | ||
| You know, so everybody agrees, a sperm and an egg, that's not a living human being. | ||
| You've got to have a boat. | ||
| But the moment the conception happens, even if it's just, you know, a sick cell, a prosthesis, and the moment a woman gets pregnant, when she wants to be pregnant, She talks about her baby is three weeks old and my baby is six weeks old. | ||
| I can't wait to have my baby. | ||
| They don't talk about it like it's a piece of medical tissue that has to be removed like a tumor. | ||
| They talk about it like it's a human. | ||
| So why is it not murder? | ||
| So I love that you're steelmanning this one of all of them, and as you know, my last line in this chapter is, now that you all hate me, let's move on. | ||
| So I make the concession. | ||
| What you just did there, I make that concession. | ||
| Look, we can leave it to ethicists and religious leaders and scientists to exactly tell us what the moment when life really begins, but I will concede that when the sperm meets the egg, I'm willing to take that as the beginning of life. | ||
| Now again, you can talk about three days later in the blastocyst and when it attaches to the uterine wall, and I happen to be fairly well versed in this right now, because as you know, David and I have started the process of having kids, which for two guys ends up being a lot more clinical than maybe you'd want it to be, or than it is for a heterosexual couple. | ||
| But what my basic position on this is, is that up to 12 weeks, whether you like it or not, if you live in a pluralistic society that is not a religious theocracy, You have to give that choice to the woman. | ||
| Now hopefully the man that was involved too, but at least to the woman. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| I don't like the idea of it. | ||
| I like the phrase, it should be rare and safe is the idea. | ||
| But then there's a lot of cascading issues for the purely right-to-life crowd. | ||
| I mean, first off, I've chatted with a lot of right-to-lifers who will tell me privately that although they take that hardcore, no-compromise position, that privately they know if their daughter got raped or if they found out that their daughter had a child with severe brain abnormalities that could never live a fully actualized life, that they would do something. | ||
| And now that's not a reason to make abortion legal, but I think it shows that we all live with certain inequities and inconsistencies in our ideology. | ||
| So I think the best you can do, again, if you're just trying to create guardrails on a society that's going to allow people from all walks of life and religious beliefs and philosophical beliefs and everything else, if you're just trying to guard as many of those people to be free, then you pick a fairly early time in the pregnancy, which is first trimester. | ||
| And then you put a couple caveats around that related to the mother's health, and then severe abnormalities that could show up beyond that. | ||
| But I just, it's unfortunate, and abortion has unfortunately been fetishized in a weird way by some on the left, and all of those things. | ||
| This is the hardest one to talk about, and I don't think that there is an absolutely great answer. | ||
| And I will just say one other thing, because I know we see largely similarly on this, that I think in many ways this is the one that keeps let's say people like you from saying you're a conservative and keeps conservatives from saying people like Shermer is a conservative. | ||
| That abortion, I've noticed this with a lot of my sort of liberally libertarian friends, or let's say ex-lefties, that this is the one that they go, I could never be one of them. | ||
| And this is the one where the conservatives are like, yeah, you can kind of never be one of us, which in many ways is why I don't call myself a conservative. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that's fair? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, but again, it's really just in the last couple of decades that it's become such a conservative hot button issue. | ||
| It used to be, you know, more moderate Republicans were in favor of Roe v. Wade, you know, Goldwater Republicans or Goldwater Conservatives, who was really, we would probably call a libertarian or classical liberal today, that, you know, Reagan never made a big deal about abortion, like current Republicans seem to have to. | ||
| Um, but speaking of fetishes is, you know, guns have become fetishized on the right. | ||
| I think just almost beyond belief. | ||
| You know, we're talking to the day after that, uh, group of protesters were at the Capitol in, I think, Michigan with a picture of them online with their, you know, military style assault rifles. | ||
| It's, and it's like, holy crap. | ||
| They're just showing up with their guns. | ||
| It seems to be one of these things that the gun represents something else, like freedom, liberty, or whatever, that other freedom-loving countries don't seem to have. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| So interestingly, this is one where I think I'm a little more sympathetic to those people than you are, probably. | ||
| But that being said, I know that we're both proponents of the Second Amendment for sure and believe that you should be able to defend your family and your property and the rest of it. | ||
| You know, in this portion, I lay out some of the things, you know, that there are more guns at this point. | ||
| We think there are more guns than people in the United States. | ||
| I mean, there's probably something around 350 million guns in the United States. | ||
| And all of these ideas, buy-back programs, well, if the government buys back something, that implies that it was the governments to begin with. | ||
| So, you know, you only buy back something that you once owned. | ||
| So we use a lot of strange terminology around this. | ||
| We have odd things, like when I go into my local supermarket here where it says no firearms allowed, and it's like, well, yeah, all the good guys, the non-murderous people, are going to follow that edict, but the guys that want to create chaos aren't. | ||
| In many ways, this is sort of similar to the abortion one, where the way we talk about this, it's almost like we're just talking about things from a different perspective. | ||
| I also make a point that the gun issue is not one of my hardcore pet issues. | ||
| But I do believe, in a case of what's happening with Michigan right now, that those people, as long as they don't break whatever the current gun laws are in Michigan, they're allowed to protest. | ||
| If they have open carry there, then they are allowed to protest openly. | ||
| And fortunately, at least as of our taping of this right now, there hasn't been any incidences, there hasn't been any violence. | ||
| And you know, when people always attack the NRA for this sort of stuff, it's like, it's never NRA members that are doing any of these mass shootings. | ||
| Often it's NRA members that are security guards that kill the shooter. | ||
| So I think we have to just start thinking about it in a more mature way. | ||
| But your question really about why do we have this in America, this feeling about guns that other countries that are Western countries don't. | ||
| There is a spirit in America, and it's because of how our nation was founded. | ||
| We were pushing back against the king, and live free or die, and don't tread on me. | ||
| And I'm leery of doing anything that would quash that. | ||
| So it's not, again, this is one of those ones, and this is what I try to lay out consistently. | ||
| These are not perfect answers. | ||
| I think they're guideline answers for you to inform your own opinion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Social psychologist Richard Nesbitt studies the culture of honor, particularly in the South. | ||
| His argument is that democracy came late to Western and Southern states. | ||
| And by that, the long arm of the federal law, with court systems and police and law and order, was just not there. | ||
| So people had to take it on themselves. | ||
| Because everybody wants fairness and justice and the right thing to be done. | ||
| And if the police aren't going to be there, there's no court. | ||
| I have to do it. | ||
| And that's where the gun comes in. | ||
| That's why violence is higher in western states and southern states. | ||
| The homicide rates are higher than southern states and particularly New England states, where the citizens were largely disarmed, you know, before this pile up of guns and so on. | ||
| But anyway, let's just finish up this chapter on economic policy here. | ||
| I guess the steel man argument would be Isn't it obscene that, say, CEOs make 1,000 times, 10,000 times the amount that the line worker makes? | ||
| Michael Eisner at Disney, he's not working 10,000 times harder. | ||
| He's not 10,000 times smarter. | ||
| Why is he getting that kind of reward? | ||
| I've even heard libertarians like Charles Murray go, yeah, that is really obscene, how much money. | ||
| I mean, the disparity is just staggering. | ||
| Shouldn't we curtail that a bit? | ||
| If corporations won't do it, because they won't, then maybe the government needs to do some of that. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't really think that's the job of the government. | ||
| So the way I would frame this is we're both friends with Peter Thiel, who's worth, I think, probably about six billion dollars or something insane. | ||
| He's got a sick house. | ||
| He's got several sick houses that I've been to. | ||
| But I don't deserve any of those things. | ||
| This guy helped create PayPal. | ||
| He created Palantir. | ||
| He's invested and taken tremendous risk in all sorts of companies. | ||
| And by the way, you know, tons of people that inherit millions and millions of dollars lose it almost immediately. | ||
| You know, you hear all of these stories about young people that inherit, you know, the parents have all sorts of money. | ||
| It doesn't just mean you're gonna have it forever. | ||
| I don't know that it's the government's job to tell companies Oh, your CEOs can't earn this much because then also what happens is you end up getting lesser quality CEOs and people want to figure out other things to do. | ||
| I mean, there's a reason we don't have a lot of great minds in government right now, but it has something to do with caps on salary and the rest of it. | ||
| So look, do we have some sort of inequity in finances in America? | ||
| Of course we do. | ||
| I don't know that there's really a way around it. | ||
| In the economic portion of this, I talk about taxes, and I'm just a firm believer that in general, we don't have a tax problem in America. | ||
| We have a spend problem. | ||
| So the government operates by every department, has to spend their budget every year unless, | ||
| or they get their budget cut. | ||
| So they always spend it or go over and then demand more money. | ||
| And then everyone says, oh, we have to raise taxes. | ||
| And even right now in the midst of corona while we're doing this stimulus, | ||
| I would much rather, instead of the government just giving people money, which I'm not opposed to | ||
| for the people that are hurting right now, although I don't love the concept, | ||
| I would much rather have, Right. | ||
| allowed people to keep much more of their money in the first place. | ||
| So what I call for basically is an 18, well I call for an 18% flat tax with some exceptions. | ||
| I actually do a little bit of a progressive game which is where I say classical liberals | ||
| are just guilty libertarians. | ||
| If you make something over five million bucks, yeah, you could pay a little bit more. | ||
| I'm not even sure it's economically sound and I'm pretty sure Thomas Sowell would smack me | ||
| over the head with a newspaper for saying it. | ||
| But again, I'm talking about guidelines here so that's where I'd be throwing a little something | ||
| to the lefties to say yeah, you could pay a little bit more up top. | ||
| And then by the way, at the bottom, I am okay with the poorest amongst us | ||
| getting a free ride on taxes. | ||
| But I think a flat tax, it would get rid of all the loopholes. | ||
| It would treat us all equally. | ||
| It wouldn't punish success. | ||
| And I think that's sort of That's sort of how you have to do it. | ||
| We know that this system's not working. | ||
| We know that there's a million ways around it. | ||
| We know, Michael, we live in California. | ||
| I mean, come on, our taxes, you know how much better we'd be doing if we live in Texas? | ||
| And right now we can't even go to the beaches. | ||
| So what the hell are we doing here? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Well, the beaches are still open. | ||
| Santa Barbara, if you want to come up this weekend. | ||
| Oh, I may visit you this weekend. | ||
| Well, I think a sense of, on the left anyway, that even when people like Bill Gates generously give away a lot of money, earlier on the coronavirus pandemic that NBA star gave a bunch of money to the workers at the stadium where they play, the arena where they play, that was in New Orleans. | ||
| But some of the pushback against that was, yeah, but let's not praise him too much because he shouldn't have had that much money in the first place to give away. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then it's suddenly like, you know, this is what AOC does. | ||
| This is what AOC does. | ||
| It's like, we're going to tax the hell out of the billionaires to get what we want. | ||
| And also billionaires are evil. | ||
| And that's very much like the cigarette thing before. | ||
| Cigarettes are evil. | ||
| They're killing us. | ||
| We're also going to tax them to do the things we want. | ||
| This is a very dangerous play. | ||
| It's also a dangerous play by Gates because it's like, no matter how much you give, you're still going to be the bad guy in their eyes. | ||
| So I don't think that that sort of guilt-ridden policy is a great idea. | ||
| That's where I would just rather we flatten the taxes as much as possible with some relief at the bottom, a little extra up top, which again, I'm not even sure is morally or financially right, but that would be just throwing something to the lefties. | ||
| And then pretty much you get the government out of the way and you cut back some regulation and you let the economy move. | ||
| One of my arguments against that idea is that There's what we see, and there's what we don't see. | ||
| What we see are the billionaires that made it. | ||
| What we don't see are thousands or tens of thousands of entrepreneurs who never made it, or they're just kind of barely successful, or they failed, or they lost all of their money. | ||
| I have a VC friend who tells me that, I forget what the exact numbers are, but out of 100 pitches, they fund one. | ||
| And out of the hundred that they fund, one makes it to IPO, where the head guy makes a gazillion dollars. | ||
| So many are called, few are chosen, and we only see the one at the top, and they go, hey, hey, hey, how come that guy gets so much money? | ||
| Well, if you're going to take his money, then what about all the failures? | ||
| Are we going to fund them? | ||
| In a way, we are funding them by saying, you should take all these risks, because if you make it, look what you get. | ||
| And if you lose, sorry, buddy. | ||
| That is the exact point. | ||
| Listen, as a guy that just started a tech company in the last year, I've been in a lot of pitch meetings. | ||
| We've pitched to a lot of people. | ||
| Some people bit, some people didn't. | ||
| And if it's a bust, some people are going to lose some money. | ||
| And if it's a win and we go to IPO one day, some people are going to make serious bank. | ||
| And that's what free market capitalism is all about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Last kind of general, I don't think you talked about prostitution and polygamous marriage in the book, but I wanted to touch on that in the sense that the libertarian or classical liberal argument of, you know, the harm principle, it's the consenting adults, you know, prostitutes and say polygamous women that want to marry the guy and have sister wives or whatever. | ||
| What's wrong with that now? | ||
| I used to that position I've always held but then you know and when you kind of pour into it and you see well a lot of these women in prostitution were you know teenagers they weren't really consenting and they and the pimps get them drug-addicted and they beat them and You know so I thought hmm Maybe the state the light touch of the state has to kind of regulate some of that and also these polygamous women you know they raised since the you know the the time they were children and This is what you're going to do. | ||
| You're going to marry this old guy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What do they know? | ||
| So then when you put them on camera and they go, yeah, yeah, I love being a sister wife to so-and-so, but they don't really know what the kind of autonomy and free choice would be like if they weren't raised that way. | ||
| To me, this is a hard one because it's implying that the state's going to get in there and muddle around about what it means to have free will or consent or autonomy. | ||
| I don't talk about it specifically in the book, but I did write a little bit and we had to cut some things as you have to do. | ||
| On the prostitution side, I'm actually okay with prostitution being legal. | ||
| I get all of the more traditional conservative arguments about what it does to the women and the family and all that. | ||
| But we know it's happening anyway, and there are plenty of studies out of Amsterdam where they're in a union and they get benefits and all sorts of stuff, and you can clean it up and get some of the drugs out. | ||
| So that would be one. | ||
| As for the multiple wives, I'm sort of with you. | ||
| It's a messy one. | ||
| And again, this is where I get the more traditional conservative argument about the traditional family as sort of the building block for everything else. | ||
| So I would lean against it just by saying if the government is involved in marriage, which it is right now, then it should just be one person can marry one person and we just leave it at that. | ||
| But I think we should probably put that one aside. | ||
| That's a whole other thing. | ||
| I know we've got one more here. | ||
| Okay, final point. | ||
| So one of my favorite books, and it gets pushed against me on the big pro-free speech idea, intolerance, is Karl Popper's Open Society, and so this is always thrown at me. | ||
| What about, you know, Popper's paradox? | ||
| It is if you tolerate intolerant people, the intolerant people will get power, and they won't tolerate you, and therefore they'll get a toehold and then take over. | ||
| What's your counter to that? | ||
| This is almost the hardest one there is, right? | ||
| That's why it's the paradox. | ||
| And I think we see a lot of this these days, that there are a group of highly intolerant people who are telling everyone else they're the intolerant people, when we know that the ones who are saying it would gladly use the state to silence other people. | ||
| So this is a massive problem. | ||
| I would say, look, right now it's like Trump happens to be in power, and they can say that the conservatives and the religious people are all intolerant. | ||
| But nobody's coming to knock on their door. | ||
| You can tweet at Trump all day long that he's Hitler and all the worst things in the world, and the Gestapo doesn't show up at your door, and you don't get pulled to the gulag. | ||
| What I do fear, though, is the counter to that, which is, imagine if we had a really progressive or leftist president, and suddenly the same thoughts were being presented. If he tweeted it, let's say | ||
| it was President Elizabeth Warren, and she tweeted out something and suddenly all the | ||
| conservative commentators were telling her she's Hitler and just saying all the awful things that | ||
| people say about Trump all the time, I'm fairly certain that the progressives would gladly use the | ||
| power of the state to silence dissent. | ||
| So I do think this is almost one of the biggest problems that | ||
| Lefties are generally saying, we want the state to do things. | ||
| They believe the state can do a lot of good. | ||
| It's not just an asymmetry of power, it's an asymmetry of what type of people want to | ||
| use power. | ||
| Lefties are generally saying, "We want the state to do things. | ||
| They believe the state can do a lot of good." | ||
| The more libertarian-minded of us, it's not that we don't think the state can do good, | ||
| but we're leery that the state could do a lot of bad, so we don't want to give it that | ||
| kind of power. | ||
| kind of power. | ||
| So this is why the paradox is the paradox. | ||
| Yeah, I also think it's very unlikely to happen here. | ||
| It doesn't happen in most places historically. | ||
| You know, people always throw up, of course, Hitler and Stalin and Mao and I guess Kim Jong-un now. | ||
| But there aren't many of those examples historically since the rise of democracies. | ||
| Most democracies can tolerate some intolerance without intolerant people taking over the press and so on. | ||
| I mean, as much as Trump has been hammered for himself hammering the New York Times, for example, saying the failing New York Times and so on, well, apparently the New York Times subscription rates are highest they've ever been. | ||
| And, you know, they seem to be thriving pretty well. | ||
| So whatever he's doing, he's not stopping the press. | ||
| Well, that's what I always say. | ||
| You may want Trump to behave more presidential or more professionally, whatever that means, but he attacks the press, the press attacks him, nobody gets thrown in jail, nobody's being dragged off, and the rest of it. | ||
| Which reminds me of the Colin Kaepernick thing which I write about, which is that Kaepernick decided to kneel. | ||
| That means, so he expressed himself. | ||
| Trump is allowed to say what he wants about it. | ||
| He can't use the government to stop the guy from doing anything, but he's allowed to voice | ||
| an opinion too. | ||
| The owners of the team are allowed to say, "Well, this is becoming too much of a headache | ||
| or not, and I don't want him there." | ||
| The fans are allowed to say, "Well, I'm going to protest and not buy tickets, or I'm not | ||
| going to buy jerseys." | ||
| So ironically, the whole Kaepernick thing was framed to the world as if free speech was under attack. | ||
| But literally everybody from the fans to the president of the United States and everyone in between, the owners, the whole, everyone expressed themselves and nobody was dragged off. | ||
| So this is where I think it would probably be a good ending. | ||
| It's sort of like, this is where America's done Tolerance pretty well. | ||
| And we should just be leery of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. | ||
| Well, those were all the right answers, so I'm not going to burn your book after all. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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