Dave Chappelle joins the show to discuss his controversial appearance on Saturday Night Live, and how he handled being called a "porno" and a "hitman" by Bill Hader. Plus, we talk about his new coin, and why he doesn't have one of his own. And, of course, there's a lot more. Also, the guys talk about the new Star Wars movie Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, and what it really means to be a bad guy in a porno film. And, we have a special guest on the show this week, a man who has no idea what he's talking about, but is willing to talk about it. If you don't know who he is, you're in for a treat! This episode is brought to you by Anchor.fm and SeatGeek. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. We'd like to learn a little more about you, the listeners. Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. We'll get the results back to us at the end of the episode. Thanks so much for all the support we've gotten so far, and we appreciate all the love, support, and support of the show. We really appreciate it! Peace, Blessings, Cheers! - The Wanger Crew. -Jon Sorrentino and the Wangeros. Jon & Pete --Jon & Pete ( ) Jon and Pete (The Wangerz ( ) (Jon and Pete) (David Goggins ( )( ) ( ) & Dan Crenshaw ( ) ( ( ) ( . & the rest of the Wangers ( , and the rest ( & . )( ). (John) (Chris) ( ) . (Dan Goggans ( ) , ( ) and the guys ( . ) ( ). Chris ( ) [ ] (Tune in to this episode ( ) to discuss a new coin ( and ( ) on the podcast. & ( ) is a little bit more ( ) Thank you so much, Jon and we hope you enjoy it ( ) for coming on this week's episode , and we'll see you next week! ) and Thank you for all your support and support you guys ( ) Thanks for all of your support!
00:01:57.000It did not dawn upon me how big of a deal this was going to be.
00:02:01.000At the time, it felt more like an annoyance.
00:02:04.000It felt more like, okay, I've got to come up with a statement.
00:02:07.000I'm seeing people really upset about this, but I'm not going to lie to them and tell them that I'm emotionally upset, like I'm emotionally triggered by this.
00:02:15.000That would be a false reaction on my part.
00:02:19.000So we crafted, I think, the right statement, which was, listen, like, it's offensive doesn't mean I'm offended.
00:02:26.000And you don't have to choose to be offended here.
00:02:29.000And as just a general rule, we should try hard not to offend people and try hard not to be offended.
00:02:36.000I'm not going to demand some apology and kind of stand on my high horse and play this aggrieved victim role, which is the expected role to play these days.
00:03:30.000After having gone on the show and seeing how they do things and how carefully scripted it actually is, it's unclear to me, and it always will be, and nobody will ever come out with the actual truth on this, on how that mistake got made.
00:03:47.000Pete, Dave, if I'm just giving him total benefit of the doubt, and also after having met him and just having a general rule that we should try to give some people some space and assume that they're not the evil people that we might assume they are, he probably just kind of looked at the line and didn't feel like finishing it and just said,
00:04:33.000So the thrust of the entire skit was obviously not well-intentioned, but I'm not sure he meant to be as deeply insulting as it turned out to be.
00:04:42.000Yeah, he could have said the same thing, that you're an American hero, but you look like a hitman in a porno film.
00:04:56.000You know, people look so deeply into why comics do things, but the majority of the reason why they say offensive shit is because they think it's going to work.
00:06:05.000I mean, it was great for you, because it got people to know who you are.
00:06:08.000And then I started paying attention to you after that.
00:06:11.000I started watching some interviews and watching some speeches and different things.
00:06:15.000And I found you to be a very reasonable right-wing guy, which I think we need way more of in this world.
00:06:21.000You know, it's like, and this polarization of left versus right, it just seems, it's so toxic right now, that when you can find people that are reasonable and intelligent and think along logical lines that you could easily follow and go,
00:06:36.000oh, okay, maybe I agree or disagree with this guy, but I see where he's coming from.
00:06:40.000Yeah, and what you're getting at is a problem in politics is politicians and political leaders, I think, forgot to explain why we believe what we believe.
00:07:17.000That being said, being in politics, you wouldn't think that we're getting any closer to nuanced conversations.
00:07:25.000I think political conversations on podcasts are opening up a whole new door where you understand people like Tulsi Gabbard or Andrew Yang or Bernie Sanders, the people that I've had on this podcast.
00:07:37.000One of the things that I've talked to people about, they said, I didn't know that Bernie was like a normal person.
00:07:41.000You hear him talk, and it's always in these very quick sound bites on television.
00:07:46.000He's always yelling about wealth or race or something.
00:09:10.000We send guys like me over there so that they don't come here.
00:09:12.000We send guys like me over there so that we keep pressure on them and prevent them from having the operational space and timing to commit another 9-11.
00:09:20.000You have to understand that these people over there wake up every single day trying to plan another 9-11.
00:10:41.000And it's the prime example of why this is a long-term fight.
00:10:49.000And it's not likely to go away anytime soon.
00:10:52.000And the last thing I would say, the world is a very small place.
00:10:55.000When we pretend to ignore things going on in the Middle East, we can pretend that they won't come here.
00:11:01.000But the reality is that's a 12-hour flight.
00:11:04.000And the speed of information travels even faster.
00:11:07.000When we were seeing a lot of attacks in the US and in Europe, when ISIS was at its peak strength, that was because they were able to radicalize online.
00:11:17.000Notice that they've stopped having that power and it's because we actually took the fight to them.
00:11:23.000Well, there certainly are some conflicts between their ideology and Western ideology and Western values, but why is it that they're dedicating their entire life to try to take down America?
00:11:57.000It's less political reasons and a little bit more emotional reasoning.
00:12:00.000There has to be some part of it because of our policies and some part of it because of our actions and I'm not so sure that we should always assume that it's our fault.
00:12:09.000I think that's a common theme in politics these days where anything bad happening must be America's fault.
00:12:35.000Yeah, and if you were one of the people that is in one of those countries and you had to deal with that and you saw like the drone attacks in Yemen that have killed people and wedding parties and the kind of shit that we hope never happens again but has happened in the past,
00:12:51.000you can kind of understand why there would be a hatred against the number one superpower in the world.
00:12:56.000Well, opinions in these countries are not homogenous, right?
00:13:27.000So you feel like if we did pull out of all these countries, particularly pull out of the Middle East, Afghanistan, and all the bases that we have over there, that it would be very similar to what's going on in Iraq, what happened in Libya.
00:14:24.000Yeah, I'm just making sure the sound is off.
00:14:27.000Good for you before anything actually did happen.
00:14:30.000Now, do you think that this is a political ploy, that this is a popular thing to say because so many people that have a cursory understanding of foreign policy, they look at our military bases overseas and they say,
00:14:49.000But You're not the only one that's told me this, and particularly not the only one that's told me this that has a military background, saying it's virtually impossible to prevent any of this stuff without having bases over there.
00:15:26.000If we don't know what's happening, why do we have embassies everywhere?
00:15:29.000Part of that is just relationships and knowledge and understanding of what's going on because we can't look at it from afar and actually get it.
00:16:24.000You know, examination of this that's given to the American person, like, when they sign up to register to vote.
00:16:30.000It's like, you know, say, okay, before you vote, let's explain to you what's going on, and this is why there's bases here, and this is why we do this.
00:16:38.000I mean, not even as a real simple explanation of these things.
00:16:43.000It's just have to go searching for it or you have to rely on political pundits who usually have a bias one way or the other.
00:16:50.000It's MSNBC or it's Fox News and you don't know where the reality is.
00:17:19.000My message when high school kids are asking me how do they get involved in politics and what I tell them is it's okay not to know things, first of all, and it's okay not to choose a side just yet.
00:17:30.000Because there's nothing wrong with your ignorance on the why behind this issue.
00:18:05.000And so it's okay not to know and to ask questions and to just wonder and to think, maybe what I'm hearing isn't exactly the whole truth.
00:18:12.000Maybe I'll look into it before I start posting on social media about how awful that situation is or whatever it is.
00:18:18.000People love to know, you know, even if they don't.
00:18:21.000They love to be the person that has the information.
00:18:23.000And one of the things that social media has done is allowed this sort of text-based debate format where people can shut people down wrong and say this.
00:18:31.000The problem with that is this and this.
00:18:33.000And everybody wants to be correct about things because they're married to these ideas.
00:21:36.000Because you can do it, you're not going to get brain damage.
00:21:38.000You get strangled a bunch, you get your ass kicked all the time, and it teaches you humiliating.
00:21:43.000It teaches you humility and then you learn after that that you can get better and then eventually you become the hammer instead of being the nail.
00:21:50.000And that's something you can actually apply to your real life.
00:21:54.000You can understand that these lessons of failure and humility and humiliation and just getting pummeled, like all that stuff pays off ultimately if you just keep showing up.
00:22:07.000In life, if you can just keep showing up and keep working hard, you're going to have setbacks.
00:22:12.000But don't let them define you, and you can move forward.
00:22:14.000But if you don't, if you're just like, the world's toxic, we need to nerf everything, and everyone needs a safe space, well, we're just going to make a whole island full of pussies.
00:24:33.000It's one of the least realistic movies in every single aspect about the SEAL teams.
00:24:38.000But the point is that there's not just a hardening of the mind that occurs from Hell Week.
00:24:45.000It's an increase in confidence in a pretty excessive way.
00:24:49.000If I can push my limits this far, imagine what else I can do.
00:24:53.000And you continue to push those limits.
00:24:56.000I mean, even after Hell Week, you do it when you're kind of what I would describe as controlled drowning in second phase, where we learn to be super calm underwater under the worst conditions, meaning you can't breathe and you're about to pass out.
00:25:11.000And you're still going to go through procedures in a very specific way.
00:25:14.000You have to learn that calming and you've pushed another limit and you've pushed another limit.
00:25:24.000We have already suffered so badly in training that the combat doesn't feel all that bad, and we're ready to get your eye blown out of your head like I did.
00:25:36.000You understand it, and it's not surprising.
00:25:39.000You don't react in an emotional way when it does happen because you've allowed yourself to be hardened and you've told yourself the right story about that combat.
00:28:10.000Now, do they have any courses where they explain to you how your mind works and how to overcome questions and doubts that creep into your head?
00:28:24.000And we wouldn't want those courses, frankly.
00:28:27.000So when you see all those online people, what you've got to do is you've got to face your fears and understand who you are and say, it's going to be okay.
00:28:57.000And there's another chapter in my book, I call it No Plan B. You go through this with No Plan B. If you ever thought for a second that, oh, maybe I can make it through BUDS. Like, maybe I'll make it through Hell Week.
00:30:25.000If you want to really do something, let's pretend you have a certain amount of juice.
00:30:32.000Your juice is 100, and when it's fully on, you have 100. Well, if you take 30 of it, and you put it towards this, and another 20, and you put it towards that, well, guess what?
00:30:41.000You think you're all in, but you're really only 50% in.
00:30:44.000Because you've got all this 50% of your juice is...
00:31:28.000It's an interesting thing because of this world where there are so many people that are teaching lessons, that are teaching, you know, what you got.
00:31:35.000But then there's real ones like Jocko.
00:31:38.000You know, like, when a guy like Jocko says something, everybody listens, because he's done it.
00:33:44.000But people like that that, you know, have real lessons because of real success and real failure in life and a real understanding of what it takes to motivate people, what it takes to be a leader.
00:33:57.000I think those guys are extremely valuable, but they get...
00:34:00.000Watered down by so many people that are out there giving lessons and making a career out of being a motivational speaker when you just want to grab them and go, what the fuck have you done?
00:34:11.000What have you done other than motivate people?
00:34:13.000And with words, you're like collecting words out in the field and jumbling them together.
00:34:19.000You're like a word harvester and you're putting them together, but they're not really coming from a real place.
00:34:30.000If you're not backing it up with, I think, real experience and a real story to frame the argument that you're trying to make, and maybe the argument's the same as the other guy that you're talking about.
00:34:41.000It doesn't really have the experience.
00:34:42.000But if it's going to be powerful and meaningful to somebody, I think it does have to come from a place of experience.
00:34:47.000Well, it's one of the reasons why I really like politicians that have served.
00:34:53.000I think it's so critical when you're talking about sending people overseas to have an honest understanding of what that really means and to have been there.
00:35:00.000It's one of the reasons why I really like Tulsi, and it's one of the reasons why I really like you.
00:35:06.000I mean, I don't want it to be mandatory, but goddamn, when people start talking about going to war and they have no understanding personally about what that means, it bothers me.
00:35:15.000Yeah, and it's going to war or not going to war.
00:35:20.000Because, again, what me and Tulsi really disagree on fundamentally, I think on a deeper level, is whether our troops out there are victims or not.
00:35:27.000And I think there's a common misunderstanding that our troops don't want to be there, that our troops are being victimized by our bad political decisions.
00:35:38.000And that's, to me, as one of those people who voluntarily goes out there, which is, by the way, everybody, because everybody volunteers to do it.
00:35:46.000You know, that's a deeply problematic opinion, because it's just not true.
00:35:50.000You know, the truth is that we want to be there.
00:37:27.000There's still this argument to be made that there's no reward for being open and honest about things, for having that nuanced conversation.
00:38:15.000Because when I talked to my buddies that, you know, when I said, hey, I'm having that Dan Crenshaw, and they go, I fucking like that guy, man.
00:38:22.000I'm like, did you ever post on his Twitter?
00:38:47.000But the idea that just the people that are angry at you are the only ones that are paying attention, that it's all backlash.
00:38:56.000I think you're just not reaping the positive aspects of it immediately.
00:39:01.000Perspective is hugely important, and you're absolutely right.
00:39:07.000But, you know, trying to go back to the political culture, trying to move it into this a little bit more of an open and honest, nuanced discussion, I think is important.
00:39:18.000And we just, I want to be part of that solution.
00:39:20.000And it's why I come on a show like this.
00:39:22.000It's why other politicians come on shows like this.
00:39:28.000And I think people need to understand that there's, you know, what are the motivations behind these decisions?
00:39:34.000Like, what's the thought process behind these decisions?
00:39:36.000You just don't never get that on one of those panel shows where there's two people barking over each other and you've got five minutes to talk.
00:40:24.000I mean, we are the first generation that's experiencing politicians having their own channels to express themselves.
00:40:32.000You used to have to go to NBC or CBS or what have you in order to...
00:40:37.000And you had to be prominent enough to have a conversation with someone.
00:40:42.000They're only going to talk to a select number of people, and the only reason why they're going to talk to those people is because they think those people would be viable in terms of the amount of numbers of people that would tune in so they could get good advertising money for it.
00:41:05.000Well, just social media in general, I think, allows a lot of That vocal minority who's mostly angry, and it elevates that to a high extent.
00:41:17.000And it makes us a little angrier at each other, I think.
00:41:24.000What is your take on what we're seeing now with social media in terms of algorithms that sort of accentuate that hate, where they find the things that piss you off, whether you like to post about immigration or abortion and whatever it is,
00:41:39.000and that's what you're going to find in your feed.
00:43:27.000It's a lot what I wrote about after the Saturday Night Live thing.
00:43:30.000We have to get to this point, and it's a pretty low standard, where we're attacking ideas and not people, and not the intent and character of people.
00:43:38.000And it's a low standard, frankly, as far as political discourse, but it's a good place to start.
00:43:44.000It is a good place to start and there is a problem with the gatekeepers of social media and that these companies are all left with their policies and they might be right in terms of their business practices and David Pakman came on here and argued that and actually makes a lot of sense that in terms of like how they still shuffle money overseas and avoid taxes and they do there's a lot of right-wing business practices but My thought on that is it's
00:44:14.000probably just compartmentalization and you're dealing with business people that have taken over some multi-billion dollar corporation.
00:44:20.000And this is the business aspect of it, and then you've got your social engineering aspect of it.
00:44:24.000And the social engineering aspect of it is very problematic for me.
00:44:29.000There was an article that was written recently, and one of the guys, he was saying something about me in that, no, silencing white nationalism and keeping them off your platform is not censorship.
00:44:41.000Which is the dumbest way to sort of boil down my position on censorship and ignore the real problems of other people deciding what someone can or can't say and what is or is not offensive.
00:44:59.000One of the best examples is a woman named, I think it's Morgan Murphy, Megan Murphy.
00:46:28.000I mean, if we want to decide socially and culturally that we're going to accept this person as a woman, this is a completely different discussion.
00:47:01.000It has to do with a person that feels like their own particular protected group, being a feminist, being a woman, and trying to carve out rules where women are protected.
00:47:13.000And she's saying, I don't like the fact that these trans women are entering into this space and dominating it in certain aspects.
00:47:20.000And it's an example of this intersectional coalition that they've created coming to terms with itself.
00:47:27.000And, you know, a lot of the feminist groups aligned with us against the Equality Act because the Equality Act would have put into real practice this Into concrete terms, biological men getting into women's sports.
00:47:43.000A lot of feminist groups were finally coming out and saying, no, this is not correct.
00:47:48.000We're a feminist group, so let's protect women, which I fully agree with.
00:47:53.000And, but, you know, on a deeper level, it's interesting to watch that intersectional coalition just implode.
00:47:58.000And it stems from this desire on their part to divide everybody up into three categories of oppressed, the oppressors, and then the champions of the oppressed, right?
00:48:10.000And the woke culture is the champions, of course.
00:48:13.000They label their intersectional coalition as the oppressed, and And then they have this whole other kind of intersectional coalition of oppressors.
00:48:21.000And they connect it all with the worst of the worst, which is white supremacist Nazis.
00:48:27.000And they say you're all connected with that somehow.
00:48:30.000Even if you're just making a pretty bland statement about biological men and women.
00:48:38.000And this is how you see them reason their way through it.
00:48:40.000And what that does is it undercuts Real basic arguments because you're attacking the intent of that argument, because you're connecting it with the worst of the worst, right?
00:48:59.000And the idea that you're going to somehow or another convince people that everyone is a Nazi just because you say so, that's not going to work.
00:49:09.000What's going to work is people are going to just – they're going to go to the other side.
00:49:13.000You're making more Republicans with this crazy talk.
00:49:58.000That these things are boiling up and that we're destroying the few things that hold us together.
00:50:04.000As a country, what makes us Americans, it's not ethnicity, it's not religion, it's not even really a geographic area because our geographic area has changed over time.
00:50:15.000It is ideals, and those ideals are symbolized by certain things, and that's the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag, the national anthem.
00:51:30.000We're allowing the pop culture to get involved in this too, so we can't share pop culture anymore because musicians are getting involved in politics and comedians and We're losing these basic symbols that bring us together.
00:51:48.000And then we're also losing the pop culture that kind of brings us together.
00:51:51.000That should be something we can just share and then not talk politics, but that's been removed as well.
00:51:56.000The culture war, it's not going a good direction.
00:52:01.000I'm hoping that this is an adolescent stage in the development of this strange country that's an experiment in self-government.
00:52:09.000And I think this experiment in self-government, which is a completely new thing in human history, that's redefined the way the rest of the world governs itself.
00:52:17.000I mean, that's what America really is.
00:52:21.000There's not a goddamn human anywhere that's perfect.
00:52:23.000There's not a single culture anywhere that doesn't have something that's inherently wrong with it.
00:52:28.000It's the best system for imperfect human beings.
00:52:31.000It's a system based on the fact, the unavoidable fact that we are imperfect.
00:52:40.000You cannot constrain mankind's nature to the extent that progressives would like to.
00:52:45.000There's a belief From some sort of Marxist ideology and kind of French Revolution thought that you can perfect human nature, that you can get people to be perfect eventually.
00:52:56.000If you just give the state enough control and stop certain thoughts that are bad, keep those down, elevate these other ones, you can eventually get us to where we think we should be.
00:53:09.000I don't see how that's ever possible, and I think our U.S. constitutional system understands that.
00:53:15.000You know, it's not like the founders got together and just made a bunch of stuff up, right?
00:53:19.000They were very well versed in history.
00:53:21.000They studied it relentlessly, and they took ideas from Jerusalem and Athens and Rome and London.
00:53:27.000They took all these best ideas and these best practices, and they said, this is probably how we should govern.
00:53:32.000We're first going to say why government exists.
00:53:34.000Okay, we're going to say that in the Declaration of Independence.
00:53:36.000When Thomas Jefferson wrote that, the Declaration of Independence wasn't just declaring its independence, it was also declaring why government exists.
00:53:45.000And it exists to protect inalienable rights.
00:53:47.000Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
00:53:49.000And he gets these ideas from guys like John Locke who said, life, liberty, and property, those are inalienable rights.
00:53:55.000And you protect rights, you can't give them to people.
00:53:58.000But you can protect them because they're already inherent in you.
00:54:06.000Well, there should be checks and balances.
00:54:08.000You should have an emphasis on local state control because the problems are closest to the people and they should be closest to the representatives down at that level.
00:54:17.00051% of the population shouldn't be able to tell the other 49% what to do.
00:54:21.000We should have an electoral college so that the biggest population centers can't tell everybody else what to do.
00:54:27.000There's important structures embedded in the Constitution that have allowed us to actually last, I think, as long as we have.
00:54:33.000We have the oldest political – it's the oldest document in the world.
00:54:35.000It's the oldest Constitution in the world.
00:54:37.000So we're the youngest – one of the youngest countries, but we're the only ones that had such a longstanding Constitution.
00:54:41.000I think that's important to realize, too.
00:54:44.000It's very bizarre that they had the insight to realize that shit could go so sideways that they put all these checks and balances together that actually can reasonably well, in a reasonably well way, work today.
00:54:56.000I mean, there's a lot of people that disagree with a lot of the aspects of it.
00:55:01.000They don't think that representative democracy is important now because we have this ability to communicate that we didn't have.
00:55:07.000In the 1800s, you know, you had to send a fucking pony with a letter on it in order to get your word across.
00:55:12.000Now you can actually tweet and you could vote online if we so deem it and we made it legal.
00:55:19.000But the Electoral College, do you feel like that, especially with things like superdelegates, do you think that that's still the way to do things and is still an effective way?
00:55:54.000Because you really are, you're, and when people congregate in population centers, they also tend to start to think alike.
00:56:00.000And I just think, and on a more fundamental level, Look at the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
00:56:08.000People always wonder what that difference is, and there's a lot of differences, of course, but a really kind of simple heuristic to think about it is the word Democrat and Republican.
00:56:16.000One believes in a pure democracy, one believes in a republic.
00:56:19.000I'm not saying Democrats believe in total pure democracy, but when you're saying abolish the electoral college, you are saying pure democracy.
00:56:25.000You're saying 51% of the population can tell the other 49%.
00:56:29.000The Electoral College is a check and balance against that that gives those states in the middle some kind of voice that they wouldn't have otherwise had.
00:57:04.000You're not going to care if you're accountable to the rural areas like you should be and to the middle of the country like you should be because if you only care about 51% of the vote, you're just going to go to those main population centers and you're only going to talk to them and you're only going to care what they think.
00:57:19.000That's not good for democracy, especially when we have such a wide diversity of preferences and And just styles of living across the country.
00:57:27.000Is it still that important to be physically in a place to campaign?
00:57:31.000To physically go to Chicago to campaign, to physically go to Iowa?
00:58:43.000You know, there's two different philosophies here is are you just trying to get everybody to quickly spend five minutes of the day and then vote?
00:58:50.000Well, that's what they're doing for the most part anyway, don't you think?
00:58:53.000No, if you have to actually take the time to register and go to the polls, you're going to do at least a little bit more research on what's going on, I think.
01:00:52.000And then you should just show your idea when you vote.
01:00:54.000But what I'm saying is, wouldn't it be a better thing if more people voted?
01:00:58.000Or do you think that it's better if only the people motivated to vote and participate vote the way we're doing it now, where you have to register within a certain amount of time and you have to show up at an actual polling place?
01:01:38.000It's not hard, but it's not as easy as it could be if you could just register online.
01:01:42.000Yeah, I mean, I can make a million things easier, but again, they remove safeguards that create safe elections and elections that we can have faith in, and this is a very important thing.
01:01:54.000And I think you see this when you have this discussion with people.
01:01:56.000They're already on edge about whether their vote really counts because, you know, some people think illegals are voting.
01:02:02.000And again, there's not a huge amount of evidence for that either.
01:02:44.000And you just show your ID and you vote.
01:02:47.000We feel in Texas like it's safeguarded.
01:02:50.000We're not overly worried that our vote doesn't count because it's canceled out by some fake vote.
01:02:54.000And it's hard to argue that there's suppression either because, again, it's so easy to vote or you can go on election day.
01:03:03.000It's just a shame that we have so little faith in our ability to do things electronically that we're worried and that we wouldn't want people to vote online because we're worried about people hacking it.
01:03:14.000That is a shame because I just feel like maybe if you were going to vote online, you would have to watch a five-minute video explaining people's positions on things.
01:04:48.000But isn't it been fairly consistent, like the number of people that vote, the percentage of people that vote across the board?
01:04:54.000Yeah, but again, it's not self-evident that that's a problem.
01:05:00.000It's up to government now to force that into a fix.
01:05:04.000You know, I'm not sure I see that argument.
01:05:07.000It's not self-evident that things would all be better if we forced people to vote or made it so easy that they didn't have to think about it at all and just got on their app and voted.
01:05:14.000So, yeah, it's an interesting question.
01:06:26.000There's a giant divide between people that are Second Amendment advocates and people that want to round up all the assault weapons and take away all the guns and they think the guns are the problem.
01:06:37.000When you see this pretty disturbing increase in mass shootings in this country, what is your take on it and what do you think could be done?
01:07:22.000You know, you have some of the crime bills that went through, which are obviously the source of a lot of debate right now in the Democrat primary.
01:07:27.000And, yeah, it was just – there was an approach to fix that, okay?
01:07:32.000You know, tackling gang violence, tackling all of these things.
01:07:35.000And we live in a much, even though you wouldn't think so, because of these kind of theatrical, again, they're terrorist attacks.
01:07:58.000Probably been taking some kind of psychotropic drugs over time and they've gotten to this point and they'll attach themselves to whatever reason they need to do this and it's awful.
01:12:26.000And I think it's something to take note of.
01:12:29.000And it's not clear what you do about that.
01:12:33.000You have to look for signs of people before they do it.
01:12:38.000And so one bill that I'm on, which I've taken a lot of fire for because people are just, I think, misunderstand what it actually is, is the TAPS Act, which is the Threat Assessment Prevention and Safety Act.
01:12:50.000All this does is give local law enforcement the ability to apply for grants to get training and behavioral threat assessment training and data analytical tools to identify these threats beforehand.
01:13:03.000And people that are opposed to it, they look at it like red flag laws, right?
01:13:08.000They combine those two quite a bit, and that's just not true.
01:13:12.000I mean, the TAPS Act doesn't actually have anything to do with guns.
01:13:14.000And red flag laws, depending on how they're implemented, could take someone who looks like they're erratic or who has a penchant for violence, and they would say, you do not have access to guns.
01:14:12.000Now, on the other hand, there hasn't been any cases where there's been some obvious abuse of that law either.
01:14:18.000So, you know, I've encouraged the conversation.
01:14:21.000I think the conversation has to happen at the state level because every state has different criminal law.
01:14:26.000And that's where criminal law happens.
01:14:27.000It does not happen at the federal level.
01:14:30.000The only other controversial approach that I've heard is putting armed police or soldiers at schools.
01:14:41.000Which is like, that seems incredibly disturbing to me.
01:14:45.000That you have to have people, I'm not opposed to it, but it's disturbing to me that you would have to have someone standing by ready for violence.
01:16:13.000And one of the things that people like to gloss over is how many people have defended their life and defended the lives of their loved ones with guns in this country every year.
01:16:23.000I've got a whole list of stats and examples that I could read to you right now.
01:16:28.000Unfortunately, one of the things that gets brought up during gun violence statistics, they talk about how many people die from firearms every year in this country.
01:16:35.000They're also talking about people who are defending their lives and defending the lives of their loved ones.
01:16:41.000People get their houses broken into all the time by armed criminals and they shoot those people and they live to see another day and that person dies and that is the whole reason why people don't want to get rid of guns.
01:16:53.000And I want to bring something up along those lines.
01:16:55.000So it's far more likely in countries like Great Britain that you'll get your house broken into while you are there.
01:17:01.000Far more likely than in the United States.
01:17:04.000By a good order of magnitude, actually.
01:19:25.000It all started with that, and that's interesting.
01:19:27.000We should look at that and, like, what is driving people to like that?
01:19:30.000Well, I think there are a lot of people, I mean, if you look at mass shootings, a lot of these people, when you read their description, they're very disenfranchised, they're very angry, and when you're disenfranchised and very angry, there's like an archetype,
01:22:00.000And then, again, going back to the victim of a conversation, maybe they weren't dealt a bad hand, but they also tell themselves the wrong story about why that is and who's to blame.
01:22:08.000And that narrative just seeps within them and it creates this.
01:22:14.000When Bernie Sanders was on here, there was one thing I thought I agreed with him on, which is we have to look at the effects of these drugs and really what they are.
01:24:21.000Dishonorable discharge and NFA. What's an NFA firearm?
01:24:26.000NFA refers to the National Firearms Act, so that's what banned automatic weapons.
01:24:32.000Based on a general court-martial conviction, a person who was convicted of a crime that is punishable by imprisonment for more than one year, including dishonorable discharge, is prohibited.
01:25:35.000But we have to do it with some kind of constrained vision, as Thomas Sowell would put it, about what is possible, and then let's be reasonable about what is possible, and hit those two categories I said.
01:25:48.000Are we infringing on the rights of everyone for the sake of doing this?
01:25:52.000And second, is it going to actually solve the problem?
01:25:55.000Those are very important questions, and if we don't frame the debate within those, I think we're not doing justice to the problem itself.
01:26:04.000True, but again, no one seems to have any logical course, any logical, clear path.
01:26:12.000Like, this is how we're going to reduce gun violence.
01:26:15.000This is how we're going to stop mass shootings.
01:26:17.000I mean, other than arming all these public places.
01:26:20.000I was in Rome recently, and when you go there, it's fucking stunning.
01:26:24.000There's military vehicles, guys with...
01:26:27.000Guns just strapped, ready to rock, just standing by all over the place.
01:26:33.000And I was like, wow, this is a very...
01:26:37.000It's, you know, you're trying to enjoy yourself when you're on vacation, you're checking all these ancient buildings, and then you're like, oh, fucking guns, military, tank, look at that, you know?
01:26:48.000Yeah, and it's, I wish it wasn't that way.
01:29:30.000Just to be clear, it's just personal money.
01:29:32.000And they have limits on what they can donate to that own PAC. And then they use that to advocate for whatever is important to that business.
01:30:23.000There's also influence that comes with that on top of financial.
01:30:28.000There's also influence in terms of just cronyism and people reciprocating, getting along with each other and working, you know, establishing long-term relationships where they agree on things and they make deals.
01:30:42.000And they make deals that might not necessarily be in the best interest of people.
01:30:46.000Deals in terms of, like, what businesses get subsidies, what businesses don't get subsidies, what things get negotiated, what don't...
01:32:12.000I think it was Northwestern University did a study recently where they showed the public support for policies and public support for bills and how low the public support is in comparison to things that get passed.
01:32:31.000It was things that the public absolutely wanted, like across the board, had something in the range of a 30% chance of getting passed through.
01:32:41.000Whereas there's many things that the public absolutely did not want across the board also had a 30% chance of getting through.
01:32:48.000And they were talking about the various influences that lead to these policies getting passed.
01:32:54.000Now the argument is that you're electing representatives, those representatives don't do you justice and pass bills and Inact policies that would help your community and help you, then you elect them out of office.
01:33:09.000But the damage gets done while they're there.
01:33:12.000And the idea is that these people would then go on from there once they've established that influence and once they've helped these people get jobs in the corporate sector, get jobs that represent what they've done for those corporations while they were a representative supposedly of the people.
01:34:51.000And the other thing you have to point out is there's already a strong force against the pharmaceutical industry, which is the insurance companies.
01:34:58.000Because they have an interest in making sure that price is as low as possible.
01:35:02.000They're fighting all the time against the pharmaceutical companies.
01:35:05.000In the healthcare industry, all of these groups are often pitted against each other.
01:35:08.000And then as politicians, we kind of look at all of them and we say, all right, what are your arguments?
01:35:45.000It's because I meet with healthcare professionals and experts who know this issue really well and economists who And it's very far from self-evident that this would work, and it's far from self-evident that it would be beneficial at all and actually make a difference.
01:35:58.000When we look at the differences in healthcare spending between us and other countries, the drug prices actually have very little to do with that.
01:36:05.000They're able to negotiate those, but they also get last choice for medicine.
01:36:10.000When you look at Great Britain and Canada, they're not getting the premier new drugs like we have in the United States.
01:36:16.000We get screwed as Americans because the patent laws are not enforced in these other countries.
01:36:21.000So our pharmaceutical companies They immediately get ripped off in other countries.
01:36:30.000They get ripped off in that they've done the research to create these drugs and these other companies in other countries just copy these drugs because they have socialized medicine and their obligation is to provide medicine to the people.
01:36:42.000So their obligation is to – they don't care about these copyrights.
01:36:46.000They just care about getting medicine to the people.
01:36:48.000Now, some people would argue that that is in favor of the population, in favor of the people that need health care.
01:36:54.000I would argue it's not sustainable, though.
01:36:56.000It might make you feel good, but it's not going to do good in the long run.
01:38:31.000Everything somebody like Bernie Sanders says can be traced to this specific ideology where one person is to blame or one institution is to blame.
01:38:38.000And I think that's an extremely unhealthy way to look at things and also intellectually dishonest.
01:38:43.000I don't know the parameters of a Green New Deal, the New Green Deal, whatever the fuck it is, but you hear it all the time.
01:39:12.000So that's how you know it's not an actual environmental plan, or at least associated with carbon emissions and climate change, because why would you ban the one reliable piece of energy that we have that has zero emissions, which is nuclear?
01:40:15.000It's true, but we do have the technology to make them good, and I think we should look at ways to research more the miniaturized modular nuclear devices that are being looked at.
01:41:59.000And even the theoretical limit to how much a battery can hold, which we haven't discovered yet, but it's a theoretical capacity of a battery.
01:42:08.000It would still make it very difficult to actually do this.
01:43:05.000And then that solves 15% of the problem and has almost no effect on the actual climate.
01:43:11.000So when I say 100% of the problem, what I'm saying is technological innovation, whether that's nuclear or carbon capture.
01:43:16.000If the goal is less carbon, then let's actually focus on carbon capture.
01:43:21.000So I just dropped a bill, Senator Cornyn did on the Senate side, called the Leading Act.
01:43:26.000And it basically repurposes grant funds in the Department of Energy to focus on carbon capture for natural gas plants.
01:43:34.000So we have natural gas plants in Texas that are zero emissions.
01:43:36.000They take in natural gas, they operate the facility, they create electricity, and then they recapture that carbon and they power the facility with it.
01:44:38.000I mean, they realize where the conversation is going and we should encourage that.
01:44:41.000So there's Pretty impressive big projects going on by a lot of these folks.
01:44:47.000So your take is that what the Green New Deal is—I mean, if I can encapsulate it—the Green New Deal is basically more of an emotional plea to people that are worried about the future and that sea, wind, and solar as being free and clean alternatives.
01:45:36.000When we decided that we wanted ethanol in our gasoline, well, I think it was, I want to say it's Indonesia or Malaysia, but they cleared tons and tons of forest to make room so that they could produce the ethanol oil.
01:45:50.000Carbon emissions there increased rapidly because of that.
01:45:56.000And these incentives and these second and third order effects, they matter and we have to think about them when we're talking about policy.
01:46:02.000And if our goal, again, if our goal is less emissions, then let's be thoughtful about how we approach that.
01:46:07.000Let's not decide on a solution and then look for reasons to back up that solution.
01:46:12.000Is there any other things that are on the horizon that make sense in terms of trying to mitigate all the problems that we have with carbon emissions in this country?
01:46:23.000Is there anything else that people are working on?
01:47:02.000The Department of Energy has done a study on this.
01:47:04.000If you replaced coal-burning plants or the boilers, coal-burning boilers in China and India with natural gas, meaning we have all the natural gas in the world, by the way, in Texas.
01:47:55.000All of these factors have to combine for an earthquake to actually happen.
01:47:59.000And also the technology has progressed a huge amount.
01:48:02.000Haven't they radically increased the amount of earthquakes in places like Oklahoma just because of fracking?
01:48:06.000Yeah, and they decided that fracking did have something to do with that, but they've also figured out how to make sure that doesn't happen.
01:48:11.000How do they make sure they don't drill on the ground?
01:48:55.000And I know it was associated with some earthquakes, but there was a lot of other factors specific to that place.
01:49:02.000There's not earthquakes in Texas that I'm aware of.
01:49:05.000That's where we have in West Texas where we have most of this fracking going on.
01:49:09.000So it's sort of like nuclear power, like the old plants.
01:49:13.000They really didn't know what they were doing and they made some big mistakes.
01:49:16.000I think it's probably like any technology, but I just still want to point out It caused a huge decrease in emissions.
01:49:25.000And again, if we're looking to decrease emissions, why don't we focus on things that work?
01:49:31.000And you have to hook people on, by people I mean the world, especially developing countries, that don't care about our dogmatic approach to wind and solar.
01:50:17.000And if you don't take into account market forces and incentives, and I think basic human nature, then we're not doing justice to the problem itself.
01:50:26.000Now, one of the big issues that's in the news right now is the trade war with China.
01:50:32.000I mean this is a huge issue and it's made me dive into a lot of really weird stuff with Huawei and with Chinese governments involved in various corporations and it's a hard concept to grasp for the average American citizen that The corporations in China are next to be connected to the communist government.
01:51:01.000They do the bidding of the government.
01:51:02.000They work together even though they are profitable, radically profitable.
01:51:06.000They also do things specifically at the bidding of the government, including inserting shit that can allow people to spy on people, which is why they're banning Huawei devices.
01:51:18.000This is, and it all comes back to what you were talking about earlier, too, in intellectual copyright with, in terms of pharmaceutical drugs, the same thing can be said about electronics.
01:51:28.000I mean, there's entire Apple stores in China that have nothing to do with Apple.
01:51:32.000They don't even, they just make their own stuff and call it Apple stuff.
01:51:54.000And we've been in this position where our business community doesn't want to bash them too bad because they want that market to be opened up.
01:52:01.000And they'll be very conciliatory to whatever the Chinese want in order to get openings to that market.
01:52:07.000And Trump is the first president to really say no.
01:52:15.000I'm sorry to interrupt you, but do you think that's because he's the first person that actually has a background in business, like real big business?
01:52:57.000And so I would like the president to be more forthright about, listen, we are going to feel some pain too because when you implement tariffs, you're affecting people's supply chains.
01:53:04.000When you do that, you're hurting American businesses too.
01:55:06.000You've got to take a lot of things into account and have a good end goal in mind.
01:55:10.000And I think we could do a better job of having that.
01:55:12.000But in the end, holistically, I'm more sympathetic to being hard on the Chinese.
01:55:19.000I'm realizing as we're talking that I never really continued my thoughts on censorship in the media and I wanted to know what you think could be done in terms of how how you could stop particularly conservative voices from being silenced on social media and what could be done do you think that like government regulation should be enacted like what what should be done to stop because there's a bunch of stuff that's gone on behind the scenes shadow banning and you know What do you think about that?
01:55:50.000So Senator Hawley is looking at some legislation in the Senate on this, and I don't want to get into too much detail because I don't want to screw up the exact details of this, but it essentially gets at Section 230, which provides protections for internet platforms.
01:57:05.000They're trying to get the best of both worlds, where they're this open platform, but then they can also decide and act like a publisher and decide what kind of content is allowed on that platform.
01:57:15.000And the problem is the standards they're using are utterly vague and subjective.
01:57:21.000And then politically biased, obviously.
01:57:25.000And so I think this legislation might get at kind of removing that protection and basically allowing someone to say, hey, you're being libelous.
01:57:32.000And once that incentive is there, it's like, okay, there's a better incentive now to say we are a pure platform.
01:57:39.000We have to have much stronger standards in the sense of clearer standards.
01:57:44.000Maybe it's a word that you don't allow.
01:57:52.000They move the boundaries all the time.
01:57:54.000Like, now you can get banned for life for deadnaming someone, which means, like, if I wrote something about Bruce Jenner looks cute in these heels, if I wrote that, I could get deadname banned for life from Twitter.
01:58:06.000Like, literally, if I write Bruce Jenner looks cute in these heels in a photo of Bruce Jenner.
01:59:22.000But Andy Rooney, we were going to have him, O.J. Simpson, just give some sort of a down-home anecdote at the end of every episode to sort of tie everything up and let you know that this fucking show is bananas.
02:01:20.000And Google was in front of me in a hearing the other day.
02:01:23.000I said, and it was Google, all of them were there.
02:01:26.000I said, you don't have a legal obligation to do what I'm telling you, but I do think you have an American obligation to actually adhere to free speech standards and to adhere to the same standards that the government adheres to, which is your speech is not protected if it incites violence directly.
02:01:45.000And it only leads to a slippery slope.
02:01:48.000And frankly, a very dangerous situation where we're just at each other's throats even worse.
02:01:52.000Because not only are you yelling at each other, but you're telling certain people that their opinions are just utterly unacceptable and can't be heard at all.
02:02:00.000If you want to create civil war, that's a really quick way to do it.
02:02:03.000When you really disenfranchise people.
02:02:05.000And it's just so dangerous and we just shouldn't do it.
02:02:08.000I fully agree, and I really appreciate the way you were holding their heels to the fire on that, particularly in regards to the description of people being Nazis, right?
02:03:34.000But it's this convenient label that once you decide that someone is the other, you dehumanize them, their perspective becomes intolerable, and you can label them as being this target.
02:04:41.000And people on the left are the ones who are using it.
02:04:44.000It's not people on the right who are labeling left-wing people Nazis.
02:04:47.000But fascists and Nazi, that word just gets thrown out without any real comprehension or any real responsibility for the actual definition of it.
02:04:57.000Yeah, and I don't know where the origin is.
02:06:16.000And I just – I don't know why that – well, it's the rise of identity politics fundamentally.
02:06:23.000And so – and then I think there's – it's fair because the left would say, well, there was kind of a white identity politics rise and they were given some kind of voice by Donald Trump, right?
02:06:35.000And I think that there's probably some truth to that, and that's terrible, but I think that was a reaction.
02:06:42.000You know, we should always point out that when you do surveys of what race relations are like in America, they were much better before than they are now.
02:06:52.000And do we really think we've gotten more racist?
02:07:01.000It just came to the forefront in the last decade in a really terrible way.
02:07:05.000And again, I think identity politics is one of the worst things we could do to each other.
02:07:09.000When you divide people up into different groups and talk about intersectional hierarchies of victimhood, I just think it's...
02:07:18.000It's just dividing – because fundamentally what it is is you're dividing people up, and you're saying your group is oppressed by that group, and if you vote for me, I'll give you power over that group.
02:07:27.000And you can trace a lot of policies to that, and this all stems from Marxist ideology where it was more socioeconomic division of groups, but that has become an ideology of intersectionality, ironically put forth by a woman named Crenshaw – Really?
02:09:21.000So, I'm definitely more open to just the federal legalization of medical marijuana and all the benefits that come with that.
02:09:27.000I think the science backs that up pretty well.
02:09:30.000On the recreational side, I'm happy to leave that to the states.
02:09:33.000And then there's the argument of, well, the states are having trouble with some things, the banking laws, etc., because the federal government still makes it illegal.
02:09:42.000My issue with recreational marijuana still is – and again, this is not a strong opinion I have.
02:09:48.000This is not a hill I'm dying on by any means.
02:09:52.000But if we're going to change it, I want to understand what the point is and what the benefits are of it recreationally.
02:09:58.000I understand the benefits medically very well.
02:10:00.000But I want to understand the recreational benefits, and I want to see how this data plays out in places like California and Colorado.
02:10:07.000I want to see if there's an increased use among young people, because there's very good science that says if you use marijuana a lot under the age of 26, you're going to have cognitive issues for the rest of your life.
02:11:32.000And that's why we got a bunch of bottles of it over there.
02:11:34.000But don't you have to drink way more scotch to get even close to the basically cognitive incoherence that you'd be with just one bite of a brownie?
02:12:34.000But I think a lot of what that paranoia is, is you being acutely aware of your vulnerability and your actual real place in the cosmos and your real place in society and the real dangers of driving cars and the real dangers of being in crowds of people.
02:13:52.000This is the number one problem we have with the Mexican drug cartels.
02:13:56.000The number one problem is that there's a goddamn customer base in the United States, and they're making billions and billions of dollars selling illegal drugs.
02:14:19.000And when you lie to kids and tell them that pot's the real danger and you shouldn't do it, then they start going, well, maybe you're lying about heroin.
02:17:43.000I think we need a strong education program to let people know, first of all, if you have a problem with reality, if you have schizophrenia in your family, if reality is already slippery, marijuana is not for you.
02:17:55.000And I've personally seen people that have struggled that do have an adverse reaction to marijuana and they go off the fucking rails.
02:18:08.000But then there's other people that it doesn't do that too.
02:18:11.000And I think the way to study that is to have actual funding and make it legal where you could look at things across the board and figure out why.
02:18:19.000I think as far as the battles we should fight at the federal level, we've got to start with the medical side.
02:19:06.000And I think that's why generally when people ask me that, I'm like, the medical thing is the thing to be talking about right now.
02:19:12.000I appreciate that conservative perspective and the slow approach to things, and I understand what you're saying.
02:19:17.000What bothers me more than anything is that American citizens who are not doing any harm to anyone could be criminals for something that's been used by human beings for thousands of years and doesn't show any real problems.
02:19:29.000I don't think young people should drink, but I drank when I was young.
02:19:32.000I mean, I didn't drink a lot, but I did occasionally.
02:19:34.000I don't think young people should smoke pot.
02:20:07.000We sort of disagree on it, but only because I just think more due diligence needs to be done.
02:20:13.000This is not something I'm vehemently opposed to.
02:20:16.000Well, I think anything for young kids can be a real problem, especially for young kids where their brain is still developing and they're trying to find their way through life and you give them something that severely distorts reality, whatever it is.
02:20:27.000I wish we had that same due diligence to the way they prescribe psychotropic drugs to kids, because we don't.
02:23:04.000I have faith in my ability to just act responsibly.
02:23:09.000Like, I—yeah, you know, and so that requires a lot of things, but— And this a little bit gets to the war on drugs philosophy, like, do you just not do it because we're losing all the time?
02:23:22.000And I actually disagree with that pretty strongly, because, yeah, you might feel like you're losing all the time, but you are mitigating it.
02:23:29.000And supply does create demand, especially with something like opioids.
02:23:32.000If that one dealer gets into that one high school, And gets those kids addicted at one party.
02:23:38.000And those kids die 10, 12 years later.
02:24:08.000You know the whole deal with the pill mills?
02:24:10.000There's a great documentary called the OxyContin Express.
02:24:14.000It detailed how they had pain management centers in Florida set up right next to the doctor next door to the pharmacy that only sold opioids.
02:25:34.000You know, we could talk about immigration, too, but what happens a lot is, you know, all these massive waves of immigrants who are turning themselves into border patrol, they're allowed to cross because the drug cartels say they can cross.
02:25:45.000Okay, that's why they come across in organized groups.
02:25:47.000And then they turn themselves into border patrol and they claim asylum.
02:25:50.000They always bring a kid with them so that they know they can stay.
02:25:52.000What's also happening is just down the road, the drug cartels are moving the fentanyl or other drugs across, especially the bulky drugs, mostly like marijuana, things like that.
02:26:01.000Fentanyl is so small, they can just bring it through trucks, through ports of entry.
02:26:04.000So And so we need sensors to actually detect that, and we're getting those put in place more.
02:26:11.000And we need to secure the border, because this is where it's coming from.
02:26:13.000And we need to deal with where it's coming from south of the border, which is China.
02:26:16.000So the administration actually did that, and we got the Chinese to say, at least, that they'll do it.
02:26:21.000You never know how much they're enforcing that, so we'll see.
02:26:23.000It's so interesting when you play people clips of Obama talking about the importance of securing the border.
02:27:44.000Like, how often do you really vote with the other side?
02:27:47.000And you can measure that pretty carefully, actually.
02:27:48.000And you've probably seen a YouTube video, maybe, where you watch all over time, all the red dots and the blue dots, and they sort of mingle together in their voting records, and then they slowly, over time, move to the sides.
02:27:58.000So both sides are responsible for that, like a lack of actual compromise, a lack of deal-making, where we say, okay, I'll vote for your stuff, you vote for my stuff.
02:29:40.000I don't—I never—I actually never—when I talk about the immigration issue, I actually never talk about the drugs and the crimes.
02:29:47.000I don't want to label these good people as criminals— Drug dealers, you know, that's the wrong, and most of the best majority are, but that just because you're a good person and you want nice things doesn't mean you get to move to the front of the line on an immigration policy.
02:30:01.000It's also an important point to note for people that don't know, and it's kind of a shocking statistic, we let in more legal immigrants than any other country.
02:30:09.000Yeah, over a million a year, I think, become citizens, and much more than that, granted visas.
02:30:17.000And there's a perfectly reasonable debate to have about how many work visas should we have?
02:30:22.000Should we increase it or should we decrease it?
02:30:24.000And how does someone get over here and how do we know that they don't have a history of violent crime?
02:30:29.000And I advocate for a merit-based system.
02:30:31.000What the president proposed, I think, is absolutely right.
02:30:34.000We have the opportunity to choose the best people from the world to come here.
02:30:38.000And if you're a refugee, we have a system for that.
02:30:40.000And if you're an actual asylum seeker, we have a system for that.
02:30:43.000But what we should be totally opposed to is this idea that just because you made it to walk across the border, that all of a sudden you get to cut to the front of the line.
02:30:51.000And that's exactly what's happening right now because of the loopholes we have.
02:30:55.000If you bring a child with you, our laws are written so that we basically can't enforce it.
02:31:48.000So, and we're talking, you know, geez, in the earlier part of this year, we had over 100,000 a month.
02:31:54.000So it gets to a question of sustainability.
02:31:56.000Let's say all 100,000 people are perfectly good people.
02:32:00.000But it's a sustainability question and it's also a fairness question.
02:32:04.000Why do they get to cut in front of the legal immigrants?
02:32:06.000Why do they get so much more priority over all of the other people who want to be in our country around the world?
02:32:14.000I mean, they don't have that opportunity to just walk across the border.
02:32:16.000It's utterly unsustainable and if we value a sense of sovereignty and rule of law, which I think we should, We value the idea of having a managed system, then we have to put a stop to that.
02:32:26.000And then have a good conversation about, well, maybe we need more workers.
02:32:29.000Okay, well, then let's increase worker visas, if that's true.
02:32:31.000Well, I think we show sympathy on them because they're poor people that are trying to do better for their life, whereas we look at people that are coming over from Canada And if we had 100,000 people from Canada illegally immigrating into our country every year, we would go, hey, you fucks, get back over where you are.
02:32:47.000Like, you guys have a great country already.
02:32:49.000You don't have the problem of a lack of opportunity in Canada the way people do in Mexico.
02:32:53.000There's a giant disparity between North America in terms of, like, United States of America and Mexico.
02:34:53.000And I think it encourages a more creative look at development in Central America.
02:34:58.000The Bush Institute talks about this a lot, and I think it's a really good idea, which is basically economic empowerment through digital infrastructure.
02:35:06.000So here in America, I mean, we make a lot of money just based on the gig economy.
02:35:10.000Every individual can empower themselves and work towards that.
02:35:15.000They don't have that opportunity down there.
02:35:17.000And it's a lack of digital infrastructure, whether it's broadband or whatever.
02:35:21.000So working towards investing in the right things as opposed to just, hey, here's some aid that your corrupt politicians can line their pockets with.
02:35:28.000And we can feel good about ourselves and pat ourselves on the back and think like we're doing good for other countries, but we're really not.