On today's episode, we have our first guest on the show, former Marine and current Congressman Joe Crowley (D-NJ) joins us to talk about the coronavirus outbreak that has the entire country on lockdown. We talk about how to deal with it, how to manage it, and how to get through it. We also talk about what we should do if we ever find ourselves in a similar situation, and what to do about it. We also discuss how we can deal with something like this in the future, and why we should be prepared for it to happen in the here and now. Finally, we talk about our thoughts on how we should respond to it and what we can do to prevent it from happening again. Thanks to everyone for all your support, stay safe out there and stay safe Fire Family! -Jon and Dan Don't Tell Mom: e-mail us what you think of this episode and we'll get back to you with a new episode next week. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What do you think about this episode? 4:30 - How do you feel about it? 6:00- What would you do in a situation like this? 7:00 8:15 - What are your thoughts on the current situation? 9:20 - How should we deal with this situation in a better way? 11:30- What do we do next? 14:30 15: How do we respond? 16:15 17:40 - How can we handle it better? 18: What do I deal with a crisis like that? 19: What should we do in the next step? 21: What is the best thing to do in response to this situation 22:10 - What kind of response? 26:30 What would we do? 27:30 Do you think we need to do more? 29:10 32:40 33:30 How do I respond to something like that in a crisis? 35:30 Is there a silver lining? 36:00 What are you going to do to a crisis in a lockdown? 37:40 Do you have a plan? 39:00 Do you need to be more prepared? 40:00 Can we get out of this situation better than this situation any faster? 45:00 Is it possible?
00:03:12.000We have to slow the spread and allow our backup, our public health system to catch up.
00:03:18.000At a certain point, we have to come out of that tactical pause.
00:03:21.000We have to come out of that retreat and start engaging in the enemy a little bit.
00:03:27.000Now, we do that slowly and we do it carefully.
00:03:30.000I like to look at it that way as the conversation about how to reopen society.
00:03:34.000At a certain point, we have to move away from risk containment and move into a risk mitigation strategy, and we're ramping up our production of things like ventilators, of PPE, of testing capability in order to do that.
00:03:48.000Now, there's some talk of when this is going to end, and I don't know how you even make that distinction.
00:03:59.000And it seems like one of those things where once it starts, once you lock a country down and tell people, stay away, stay home, don't go to work, don't do anything unless it's very essential, like grocery stores, hospitals, media, there's certain things that are allowed to be done right now.
00:04:15.000When does that end and how does one decide when that ends?
00:04:22.000Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to think about that.
00:04:24.000From the public health perspective, I hear them say certain things like, After 14 days of a downward trend in cases, then we can start reopening.
00:04:36.000When the R is less than one, then you can start reopening.
00:04:40.000So R being less than one means for every contagious person, they infect less than one other person.
00:04:45.000Right now, that number's around just over two.
00:04:47.000Okay, so there's an obvious spread that occurs.
00:04:55.000I definitely question using those as our standards.
00:04:59.000I would like to see us use other standards as well, such as, are we at a point where we're testing it up and we have enough ventilators and hospital bed space and PPE to actually fight the virus alongside reopening our society?
00:05:14.000Because I think we have to come to terms with a very certain truth, which is we cannot indefinitely lock down.
00:05:22.000And they're not just costs to our 401ks and our jobs.
00:05:26.000I mean, there's a public health cost there, too.
00:05:28.000You know, I speak with doctors here in Houston.
00:05:30.000We don't have a huge case number in Houston.
00:05:33.000Our hospitals are like 50% empty right now.
00:05:36.000And they can't do much needed surgeries, procedures, because, you know, what's called an elective surgery is going to be kind of a gray area.
00:05:44.000So a lot of stuff isn't getting done from a public health side.
00:05:47.000Also, there's, I think, the obvious public health crisis when people don't have jobs, there's divorce rates, there's suicides.
00:05:54.000We have to really take all of this into account as we talk about when to reopen society.
00:06:00.000Yeah, you and I privately had this conversation through text messages about the way reporters are using this moment to criticize Trump in ridiculous ways.
00:06:13.000And one of them was This questioning of whether or not he should describe these drugs that have some promise, which many doctors are describing.
00:06:25.000Hydroxychloroquine with Z-Pak and zinc apparently is a combination that keeps getting brought up and there's a doctor that has been using this to some reported success in New York City.
00:06:40.000What drives me crazy is that these are rare opportunities that someone has to talk to the president, and they're using it to chastise him for bringing up drugs that do show promise and hope.
00:06:51.000He's not telling people to go take it.
00:07:45.000Okay, I wish they would treat all politicians the same.
00:07:49.000To an extent, that is their job, to be adversarial, to question what is coming out of government.
00:07:55.000But I would argue that their main purpose is to simply educate the public.
00:08:00.000Educate the public with full context, full understanding of what's going on.
00:08:07.000I think on that point they're utterly failing, to a huge extent.
00:08:11.000I think they've been failing for a long time, but in a time of crisis where it's so important that they actually do that more important thing of informing the public, they're really failing.
00:08:22.000I mean, how many reporters actually get access to the president?
00:08:24.000I bet there's hundreds of thousands of reporters out there, good ones, who would love to be able to be in that press briefing room and actually ask, Legitimate questions that would inform the American public, but they don't.
00:08:57.000They're a complete waste of time, and I think they're failing us miserably.
00:09:02.000And then there's the opportunism that occurs.
00:09:04.000Listen, if you're writing an op-ed, if you're a journalist writing an op-ed, let's say an opinion journalist especially, I fully understand why you might say, you might write in your report, okay, the president said this today, but three weeks ago they said this,
00:09:29.000But to only do that indirect questioning with the president, just to try and play this gotcha game, it's not helpful.
00:09:38.000It's not helpful at all and it's not informing anybody in the least.
00:09:42.000You know, you mentioned the president talking favorably about the chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine.
00:09:50.000And you remember the couple that ingested that out in Arizona, because something similar to, I think it's a chloroquine phosphate or something like that.
00:10:13.000And then the media, instead of saying, wow, this is a shame that they did this, They blame the president.
00:10:20.000And they blame the president for talking about what is a, at least anecdotally, a proven way to combat this disease.
00:10:28.000We don't know through clinical trials whether in mass it'll actually work, but to express optimism over it.
00:10:36.000It doesn't seem to be a punishable offense, but the outrage mob was fully invested in this kind of outrage reasoning to tear down the president over this, and it just feels so unnecessary.
00:11:05.000I mean, this is what it is with these new tools that people have through social media and through making these viral video clips, which is what each reporter is hoping they're going to accomplish by being combative with the president and trying to catch him on something.
00:11:18.000They're hoping that they're going to create this viral video that's going to accelerate their career.
00:12:09.000Or, like, real characters, like Rosa Parks or Jesus.
00:12:13.000Like, there's people that we actually look up to and we identify with, and there's certain attributes that we use, and we say, I want to be like that, and so when I act in public, I'm going to access that attribute, and I'm going to be better according to that archetype.
00:12:29.000We've sort of turned that on its head in our current outrage mob culture.
00:12:33.000Like, we see somebody who plays the victim, and we cheer them on.
00:12:37.000When in reality, what we used to do was see somebody who overcame adversity, who was a true hero, and then we cheered them on.
00:16:27.000Because, at least politically speaking, my goal is to win the argument.
00:16:31.000And to win the argument, I have to actually persuade people.
00:16:33.000That should be the goal, those lengthier conversations.
00:16:37.000Again, it's why these kind of podcasts are so prevalent, why I do my own podcast, because I want to dive deep into some of these issues on a substantive level.
00:16:48.000Well, I do appreciate your reasonable and balanced perspective, because you are one of the rare guys that's on the right, that does criticize the right, and you do it fairly and objectively, which I think is very important in this day and age.
00:17:02.000I'm on the left, but I find myself more and more getting confused, like a man without a country, or a man without a side, rather, without a team.
00:17:12.000There's so many people on the left now that want to silence people.
00:17:16.000Freedom of speech was always a core tenet of what this country is based on, the ability to express yourself.
00:17:23.000But there's so many people that want people deplatformed for having views that they disagree with or ideas that they disagree with.
00:17:31.000And this is an enormous problem, obviously, in social media.
00:17:36.000Well, bringing it back to coronavirus, there was certain messages that were being taken down by Twitter And I think the type of messages or articles that were being promoted along the lines of,
00:17:52.000hey, there's too much economic cost, we need to reopen the economy and get people back to work.
00:17:57.000If it was things like that, Twitter was taking them down.
00:17:59.000I don't know if they're still doing that, but I heard reports of it.
00:18:04.000And on a broader scale, yeah, the attack against freedom of speech is by far one of the most concerning elements.
00:18:12.000That concerns, I think, classical liberals, and if that's how you would describe yourself, I don't know.
00:18:18.000To all of us in the political world, Joe Rogan's political leanings are like the great mystery.
00:18:23.000And frankly, we kind of like it that way.
00:18:36.000I'd also vote for Whoopi Goldberg over Joe Biden.
00:18:39.000I'd vote for Mike Tyson over Joe Biden.
00:18:42.000I just don't think it's a good idea to take someone who's struggling with dementia and put him in one of the most stressful positions the world has ever known.
00:18:53.000It is me saying, you shouldn't have a man who's clearly, clearly in the throes of dementia.
00:19:00.000I mean, I'm not a doctor, but when you can't form sentences in public, and you forget what you're talking about, and you wander off into these conversations, if you're not smoking pot, you're not high, if you're not on pills, like, what's going on?
00:19:35.000I mean, there is a recent thing that Kyle Kalinske posted, a video on his Twitter, talking about this is what happens when you don't discuss the elephant in the room.
00:20:45.000This is an extremely stressful process to run for president.
00:20:48.000And the idea that he's going to be able to get through this and be okay on the other side to run the country for four, potentially eight years is crazy.
00:20:59.000From a policy perspective, if we're looking at the coronavirus in particular and the handling of it, you know, this is obviously the subject of hot debate.
00:21:09.000Bad faith journalists out there who continue, and politicians, including Pelosi, who continue to repeat that Trump has the deaths of thousands on his hands.
00:21:19.000I think that's a horrible, horrible overstatement.
00:21:21.000I mean, to say the least, it's just fundamentally not true.
00:21:24.000But we need to remember, Joe Biden just recently acknowledged that he now agrees with Trump's decision to close down travel from China in January.
00:21:43.000Where I go through a timeline of what actually happened, right?
00:21:47.000Let's actually look into this debate in an objective way of who knew what and when.
00:21:53.000Because you can criticize people for sure, because hindsight's 20-20.
00:21:56.000But it's important to put yourself in the moment and what we all knew at certain times when certain decisions were made.
00:22:03.000And I have to point out that back when we did this travel restriction from China in late January, at that same time, the World Health Organization was repeating Chinese claims in mid-January that this virus couldn't even be transmitted in human-to-human contact.
00:22:23.000Biden continued to rip him apart for that up until a couple weeks ago.
00:22:26.000So these decisions saved countless lives.
00:22:31.000And it's pretty obvious that Biden, I mean, he said it, so of course it's obvious, that he would have made a different decision.
00:22:37.000And we would be in a much different place right now.
00:22:39.000To put aside all of the issues that you pointed out, those are certainly issues, and I don't need to repeat them, I don't need to go into it.
00:22:47.000Well, I feel like we do need to repeat them.
00:22:49.000It is obvious, but that's crazy that this is the guy that's running for president.
00:22:53.000And then when people got upset at me saying that I'd probably vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden, I'm literally saying I'd vote for anybody that can talk.
00:23:05.000I mean, anyone who's not in severe cognitive decline.
00:23:38.000Yeah, well, there was a couple days where it all happened, where, you know, behind the scenes, all of these different candidates basically said, okay, we're all going to quit because they're so afraid of Bernie winning.
00:23:51.000They don't think Bernie can win the general election.
00:23:56.000I tend to agree with that, and I'm very much against Bernie winning the general election, but that's not the point.
00:24:04.000The point is that the DNC didn't want that, and they made moves to make that happen.
00:24:12.000The Democratic Party, as a whole, is trying to find out who they are.
00:24:18.000I look back in time, and the Democratic Party, to me, seems more like a Labour Party.
00:24:25.000And that changed over time into a highly progressive activist party, where the labor side of that is really just an afterthought.
00:24:35.000And it has really become this sort of, well, a democratic socialist party.
00:24:46.000Because I wouldn't even describe President Obama as, I mean, he definitely paved the way for it.
00:24:53.000He's definitely way more progressive than Clinton, but it appears to me that it happened very recently.
00:25:00.000I have another theory as to how this happened.
00:25:03.000I think the kind of language that is often used by a lot of well-meaning Democrats over time in this sort of Labor Party era, let's call it the Bill Clinton era before that, the language they used was still rather We're radical and revolutionary and kind of,
00:25:21.000you know, coming up from the children of the 60s and that kind of revolutionary feel.
00:25:26.000This idea that a progressive utopia can solve more and more of your problems if you just expand government control that we put enough experts at the top, we can figure all this out and we can make your problems go away.
00:25:38.000I think for a long time, though, they had the Republican Party to always just be against that and say, hold on, wait a second, there's other consequences to doing that.
00:25:48.000And it was almost like there was this sort of unspoken balance.
00:25:54.000And I'm not even sure that they believed it themselves.
00:25:57.000But over time, their young people did believe it.
00:26:00.000And so now you have AOC, who I think truly believes these things, truly believes in the virtues of socialism.
00:26:05.000I think Bernie believes in the virtues of socialism.
00:26:32.000To an extraordinary degree, where somebody like me now views Pelosi as sort of in the middle between moderates and extremists.
00:26:40.000And, you know, 10 years ago, we would have described Nancy Pelosi as an extremist.
00:26:45.000But now I view her as sort of center-left.
00:26:47.000And the extremists are even to her left, and she's deeply afraid of that progressive squad because of their power on social media and media in general.
00:27:10.000They don't think of it as socialism, the way Bernie describes it.
00:27:13.000When you talk to him in person, it sounds very reasonable.
00:27:15.000It sounds like he's looking out for the rights of the workers, and the way he described finding this money, just taking a small tax on speculation, gambles that Wall Street does.
00:27:28.000Do you think it's because nothing has worked, ideally, and that this hasn't been tried before, so they look at this as this could be the solution that solves all this for us and sort of balances out the economic playing field?
00:29:41.000That's why people starved in Maoist China and the Soviet Union, because they put price controls on food, and they did production quotas, and they believed, they truly believed that the government could figure out How much to produce?
00:30:07.000And so it's even more unlikely that it would work for more complicated parts of the economy, like wages and drug prices.
00:30:13.000Because the reality is, and the Congressional Budget Office confirmed this, many other studies confirm this, we would have up to 30 less new drugs over the next couple decades if you implement that kind of legislation.
00:30:24.000And so they forget to tell you that you're actually making a choice between these price controls and actually having the cure in the first place.
00:30:30.000And what I tell people is, Affordability is definitely important, and we should continue to tackle that problem, and there are ways to do that.
00:30:39.000But the thing has to exist before you can afford it.
00:31:42.000And instead of wide price controls on everything that a pharmaceutical company actually creates, we should be looking at some of these life-saving drugs that we want people to have, but we also don't want to destroy the foundation of innovation and research and development that it took to make that drug in the first place.
00:32:01.000There's ways to reinsure it at a certain cap.
00:32:04.000So when insurance companies don't want to pay The exorbitant amounts that it would cost, there's other options for reinsurance, but you have to tackle it one at a time.
00:32:18.000There's more complicated ways to do it with the way that Pharmacy companies do rebates with the insurance companies.
00:32:27.000That gets into a really complicated discussion.
00:32:29.000But there's ways to do that, for instance, for insulin.
00:32:32.000That was a Republican bill that we tried to pass in ENC that got shot down.
00:32:36.000But it would have driven down prices for something like insulin.
00:32:40.000Was there anything else attached to that?
00:33:07.000But there are second and third order effects.
00:33:09.000And when we ignore those second and third order effects, we ignore them at our peril.
00:33:12.000And in the case of the $15 minimum wage, well, you can't ignore the fact that companies are just going to hire less people.
00:33:18.000Their budget doesn't change just because you change the minimum wage.
00:33:22.000With respect to drug innovation, they just won't invest in something.
00:33:27.000And it takes billions and billions of dollars to invest in these drugs for the massive amounts of costs that it takes to do the clinical trials that take years.
00:33:37.000I can't remember the average on top of my head, but it's enormous, in an enormous amount of time.
00:33:42.000And so you're not going to get somebody to take that risk if there's not any payoff at the end.
00:34:11.000It would put all of the smaller startup biotech companies totally out of business because they're the ones who actually, they start that innovation just like happens in Silicon Valley.
00:34:21.000These startups start it and then they get bought out by the bigger companies.
00:34:24.000That's sort of how the system works and it's a very dynamic system.
00:34:28.000It's why we are by far the number one innovator in the world.
00:34:31.000No other country innovates like we do.
00:34:33.000They don't do the research like we do.
00:34:35.000If we implemented the price controls that are inherent in Medicare for All or HR3, there wouldn't be anybody else in the world doing what we do.
00:34:46.000I can relate that back to the coronavirus discussion too, because there's a big discussion about, you know, should we have Medicare for All?
00:34:55.000Doesn't coronavirus prove that everybody should have free healthcare?
00:35:00.000And again, what I have to remind everybody is, If we had Medicare for All, what we're basically talking about are price controls.
00:35:08.000Because Medicare already pays below average payment for anything.
00:35:13.000For whatever service, for whatever doctor visit.
00:35:34.000Yeah, I don't want to confuse it with Social Security.
00:35:36.000So the idea is that for older folks, we should give them health care and make sure that their basic needs are covered in terms of sickness, illness, injury, and such.
00:35:53.000We could even debate the merits of Medicare on its face.
00:35:58.000But Medicare for All would be available for everybody.
00:36:01.000Now, if Medicare for All was available for everybody, what you're saying is essentially you would fix prices on everything in terms of medical treatments, and that would be a problem because of what?
00:36:50.000There would have to be a reason why they would say that I could only get $100 per ad.
00:36:54.000The reason why you would say that things shouldn't cost too much for someone who's injured or sick is because we want to take care of each other as a community.
00:37:02.000And the idea is that healthcare should be something that we provide so many services to people that we are united, right?
00:37:11.000We're supposed to be a gigantic community.
00:37:14.000And one of the great things that we could do for each other is to make sure that if someone's sick or injured and something's wrong, that we can take care of that.
00:37:22.000We would like everybody to do their share, and we would like everybody to chip in so that this is possible.
00:37:28.000But there's a big difference between that and fixing the price on an ad.
00:37:34.000Well, no, but economically there's no difference.
00:37:36.000Morally there is, and I agree with you morally.
00:37:38.000We have the same goal of getting everybody adequate care.
00:37:42.000But from an economic standpoint, my point still stands, and you can apply that to any industry.
00:37:48.000I see what you're saying, but I think we're looking at medical care as a basic human right instead of just an economic issue.
00:37:56.000The reason I don't describe it as a...
00:38:11.000It's why, as we compare ourselves to other countries right now, all these places with socialized medicine, it's important to look at some stats.
00:39:16.000We should be looking for the ways to do that.
00:39:18.000But I want to be able to do that in a way that doesn't undercut the foundations of the good parts of our healthcare system, which is quality and innovation.
00:39:26.000If we undercut those things, and we're the last country doing this, we're the last country in the world truly doing innovation, The world is left out to dry.
00:39:41.000Is there a way to provide healthcare to everyone but also encourage this innovation, encourage profit, so you encourage these companies to do all these great things that you're describing and maintain this incredibly high level of healthcare that we have right now?
00:39:59.000And this is why I think there's got to be room for compromise on the healthcare debate because You can't compromise with the other party if the goals aren't the same.
00:40:07.000I've come to believe that our goals on immigration are actually not the same.
00:41:05.000Well, we can't subsidize lower income people in order to do that.
00:41:10.000Now, how we do that is very complicated.
00:41:11.000That's what I'm working out within our complicated system.
00:41:15.000But that's an idea to make that free market model actually take off.
00:41:21.000So that people who don't need help with their healthcare costs, like you and me, we can still afford that, just like we afford any other monthly cost.
00:41:28.000And you have access to preventive medicine, you have access to telemedicine, you actually have a doctor-patient relationship.
00:41:35.000That makes it a lot easier to start solving the rest of the problem, making our insurance market more competitive, putting more choice in it.
00:41:43.000Directly subsidizing those who need it, but in a way that looks a lot more like Medicare Advantage.
00:41:48.000So Medicare Advantage is a part of Medicare that basically forces competition and choice between insurance companies.
00:41:54.000It came out to be a lot cheaper than we originally thought it would in the early 2000s when this thing was created.
00:41:59.000This was a Republican plan because there's certain foundations that I think we have to adhere to anytime we want to problem solve.
00:42:06.000Choice and competition are among them.
00:42:10.000And I think when we talk about Medicare for all, It tries to move past these essential foundations of a free society that we have to adhere to.
00:42:22.000And because the other thing I push back on a little bit is the health care is a right statement.
00:42:32.000And I push back against that because when you're calling something a right, what you're effectively saying is that somebody else has an obligation to serve you.
00:42:42.000And it's hard to call something a right when that right requires the service of somebody else.
00:43:09.000You can add a few hundred thousand more people to the nation's population and it doesn't change the mission of the military.
00:43:18.000It doesn't take anything away from them.
00:43:21.000But because of this sort of non-rival, this is like an economics term, But the sort of non-rival attribute of these things, it is different, right?
00:43:33.000Because there's only a select number of doctors.
00:43:35.000And we've already said that once you put price controls in, there's going to be less doctors because doctors will be paid less, they'll get burned out more.
00:43:46.000The reason price controls reduce supply and the reason we see supply reductions in other countries is because hospitals don't get the same amount of money.
00:43:54.000They're not going to invest in that extra ICU bed.
00:43:56.000They're not going to buy those extra ventilators.
00:43:58.000They're not going to hire those other doctors.
00:44:00.000A doctor doesn't want to be a doctor because they don't make the amount of money that they thought they would make.
00:44:04.000They're doing extra work because there's more people who now have access to them, but there's less of them.
00:44:10.000So wait lines are huge and they're seeing multiple more patients a day.
00:44:44.000It is, but understand, so let's call it a public service then, and let's call doctor healthcare a public service as well, if we were to do Medicare for All.
00:44:52.000But wouldn't the result be the same if it's provided for everyone?
00:44:56.000Not from a practical standpoint, just because it's much easier.
00:44:59.000Again, you could add 100,000 people more to your city, and the fire department would have marginally more work to do, compared to a doctor, for instance.
00:46:05.000Yeah, but just unlikely most of the time.
00:46:07.000I'm trying to distinguish why those aren't very comparable things, like why one is more of a public service that we see to work while the other wouldn't necessarily be.
00:46:20.000And you kind of just said it yourself.
00:46:23.000It would be a signal for there to be more doctors, which is why the free market price points are so important.
00:46:32.000Because the only way to signal that is to actually, that demand raises prices.
00:46:39.000When the government tries to do that, now there's this theory as a socialist that they would say, the government can just figure that out.
00:46:45.000I would say that they've tried that in the past.
00:46:51.000The government can't possibly be so omniscient as to know every single price signal and anticipate every single piece of demand and production that is therefore required.
00:47:02.000And so it's not just healthcare that this is a problem, it's It's every aspect of society.
00:47:07.000So if I can go back to what you were saying earlier.
00:47:09.000So what you're essentially saying about socialism, that socialism looks at this problem and says, hey, let's make the government take care of everything.
00:47:18.000Let's take money from the wealthy people and pour it into the government, and that the government will then have resources to take care of these issues.
00:47:24.000And you're just looking at the first step of the problem.
00:47:28.000You're not looking at the secondary or tertiary issues.
00:47:33.000Instances are things that are going to go sideways once you do implement that first step.
00:47:42.000Socialism leaves out some very important things like human nature, for instance, and this notion that we need incentives.
00:47:54.000Socialism doesn't believe in incentives, doesn't believe that we need incentive to do things.
00:47:59.000There's this utopian belief among the hardcore socialists that humans will act in this kind of philanthropic manner, no matter what.
00:48:11.000Like, we're going to do the most amount of work, even if that reward is overwhelmingly taken away from us and redistributed.
00:48:17.000But of course, that's not how it would actually function in reality.
00:48:20.000You would start to It just wouldn't, right?
00:48:24.000Now, maybe for a few people, a few altruistic people would be the ones doing all the work while everybody else is pretending to work, which is what happened in the Soviet Union.
00:48:32.000You pretend to pay us, we'll pretend to work, right?
00:48:34.000That was the saying from the Soviet Union.
00:48:38.000I think we intuitively understand that.
00:48:40.000And when that happens, again, the same thing with Medicare for All.
00:48:44.000If you have price controls, your incentives change.
00:48:47.000And if we're not really serious about understanding that aspect of these policies, then we're not thinking through them correctly.
00:48:56.000And I understand a lot of Democrats would say, well, it's Medicare for all, it's not socialism.
00:49:01.000And I'm like, yeah, but it has very socialistic tendencies and it has these qualities that I've described of not taking into account the second, third order effects, of removing human incentive, of Of forcing somebody's services, because you're calling it a right,
00:49:18.000which means that you now have a right to somebody else's services.
00:49:20.000These are things that have been proven not to work.
00:49:25.000And I think we have to understand that as we try to move towards the mutual goal of getting everybody access to healthcare.
00:49:33.000Well, it doesn't work with everything, but doesn't that work with the fire department?
00:49:37.000Isn't the fire department, in a lot of ways, a socialist institution?
00:49:57.000If there's a fire, they come in and help you.
00:50:02.000There's not a financial incentive for them to do so.
00:50:07.000Right, but on a practical level, though, imagine the scaling that has to occur if you're doing that with medical care.
00:50:17.000And I think that's the difference, both from an economic point and a practical standpoint.
00:50:23.000You're talking about socialism overall, not just involving medicine.
00:50:29.000You're talking about socialism in general, and I'm saying, isn't the fire department an example of socialism that works?
00:50:36.000Well, it's definitely not an example of socialism.
00:50:38.000I think it's an example of a public good, the way the military is an example of a public good, the way the highways are examples of public goods, the way parks are examples of public goods.
00:50:47.000Right, but they're funded by the people.
00:51:13.000But it's not relying on the tenets of socialism to function.
00:51:18.000And so now we're kind of having a discussion of definitions.
00:51:23.000And this is an important discussion to have because...
00:51:29.000Well, even Bernie Sanders doesn't call it socialism.
00:51:32.000He's talking about democratic socialism, and he makes some very clear distinctions between the two of them, which I think you could apply to things like the fire department or the police department.
00:51:45.000So I think Bernie, yes, he does say democratic socialism.
00:51:48.000I think he does mean something much, much closer to socialism, and that's just me gleaning from his policies, because he does talk about putting government control on corporate boards.
00:51:59.000Elizabeth Warren talked about the same things.
00:52:01.000Now, we really are talking about nationalizing things.
00:52:03.000When you're talking about mass price controls across all industries and wage controls, you really are talking about more of an actual socialism.
00:52:12.000Again, going back to whether a fire department or a park or a public highway or the military is a socialist institution, again, I would really push back against that.
00:52:24.000We've never, in our culture, in our economics, we've never defined these things as socialist institutions.
00:52:30.000A socialist institution effectively means you're seizing the means of production and you're forcing everybody into a centralized planning state.
00:52:41.000You're telling people what they will earn and what you will pay them, how much they can sell.
00:52:46.000You start to take more control over the economy.
00:52:49.000A lot of the policies set out by Bernie Sanders are movements in that direction.
00:53:07.000It doesn't meet any of those other attributes or elements that I describe when I describe what a socialist is.
00:53:13.000And so this gets into another question, like, well, maybe Bernie just means the Nordic countries, right?
00:53:18.000And, you know, I remember the foreign minister from Denmark came to Harvard, I think he gave a speech, this was a few years ago, and he said, stop calling us socialists, we're not socialists.
00:53:28.000We're probably, and I would agree with him, all these Nordic countries have, frankly, It's more of a free market than we do in many ways.
00:53:37.000When we look at their regulatory standards, they're quite liberal.
00:53:41.000When we look at their corporate tax rates, it's very low.
00:53:44.000They don't have a minimum wage in many cases.
00:53:48.000And so, you know, they're not socialist countries.
00:53:50.000What they do have is a very generous welfare state.
00:53:56.000And even that is different than socialism.
00:54:00.000Now, I'm still against that in many ways.
00:54:02.000I think there's consequences to that giant welfare state that they now have to suffer with.
00:54:09.000As a result, and if you've noticed, too, that they actually used to be very socialist countries, but their economies crashed as a result, and over time, they became much more free market.
00:54:23.000It used to be much more deeply socialist countries.
00:54:26.000A lot of them have just maintained their big welfare states, which they are having trouble paying for, just like we're having trouble paying for our big welfare state, which is mostly based in Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.
00:56:18.000I bet once they got their taxes, they would totally change their mind.
00:56:21.000But let's say they're totally into it.
00:56:23.000Let's say they actually want to do that.
00:56:26.000Then you have the second and third order consequences, which is, okay, what are you getting for this?
00:56:30.000What is this new utopia that we really live in where healthcare is free?
00:56:35.000And then I go back to, okay, in order to meet that price point of the $3.5 trillion a year, that's, by the way, assuming that we continue using Medicare prices, which is what all the plans do assume, by the way.
00:56:50.000So if we're doing that, we're drastically cutting prices that we pay doctors and hospitals.
00:56:56.000If we do that, we drastically cut our supply of doctors and hospitals, and we cut off and choke off the innovative capacity that we do have.
00:57:38.000But for the most part, it's too expensive, which is why I go back to my direct primary care idea because once you solve the primary care issue, you make solving insurance much easier.
00:57:48.000Then you can still protect people with pre-existing conditions.
00:57:51.000We like things like either high-risk pools at the state level or reinsurance programs.
00:57:57.000You can continue to make improvements to the system that make it affordable for people.
00:58:38.000How does all this stuff get evened out?
00:58:42.000Are you referring to cases where the cost of somebody's care is so astronomically expensive that even the insurance company can't afford it?
00:58:51.000Well, look, here's the problem, right?
00:58:53.000People can't afford health care, so we get them insurance.
00:58:57.000How do the insurance companies make any money then?
00:59:02.000Well, I mean, they make a profit just like anybody else.
00:59:04.000But they're also, what we've found is, especially with our experiments with Medicare Advantage, is when you pit insurance companies against each other in a free market, they lower costs.
00:59:16.000You know, they are a natural, there's different elements of the healthcare system.
00:59:24.000On one side is driving up costs, you know, because the doctor wants to keep doing more tests or whatever it is, or a patient wants to do more things.
00:59:31.000The insurance company's job is to say, hold on a second, why are you doing this?
01:00:40.000But no, that's not the way it happens over there.
01:00:44.000Because over there, like in Great Britain, if you actually nationalize the healthcare system the way they do, when they say you're not going to be on the ventilator anymore, There's no choice.
01:00:55.000That is the decision, and that's what they have to deal with.
01:01:25.000I don't want to get bogged down too much in socialism, but one of the things that you said, you said socialism has been implemented before, but it's never really been implemented here, right?
01:01:36.000But this is what I was saying before, that I think that when people look at it as an attractive notion, one of the things that attracts them to it is that our system doesn't work that great, and that maybe this would be a system that does serve people.
01:01:52.000And there's a bunch of buzzwords that people use, you know, wealth disparity, economically disadvantaged, you know, the working class, all these different – these are words that they use that this is maybe – Maybe socialism would benefit those people when there's more of them than there are the elite.
01:02:12.000I would say that there has been times in this country where we had astronomical tax rates and higher government control on some things, and we ended up with skyrocketing inflation and downward growth.
01:03:19.000The problem, Joe, is people are identifying issues.
01:03:24.000They're not putting them into context and perspective.
01:03:27.000But even if they're right about the issues, like, hey, our purchasing power is lower with respect to housing and healthcare, two very important things, people are misunderstanding why that is.
01:03:37.000People forgot to ask the question, why is it that I can't afford this?
01:03:41.000People are instead jumping to a solution that is, frankly, very shallow and simple, which is make housing cheaper.
01:04:13.000I talk to developers who develop here and develop sometimes in California.
01:04:16.000It's like four times more expensive to develop because of all the regulations in California, which means the housing itself is going to be more expensive.
01:05:25.000But it's also people that just have ridiculous amounts of money.
01:05:28.000And so the wealth in San Francisco is so off the charts that people are willing to buy a stupid house for, you know, $3 million that really should be $300,000 in taxes.
01:05:59.000And as a city, people in San Francisco might just decide, we don't want anybody else living here, and we don't want to build anything else.
01:06:05.000But what's weird is they have no problem with homeless people.
01:06:11.000When was the last time you've been to San Francisco?
01:06:16.000It's been a while, but I have been there quite a number of times.
01:06:19.000And I was going to say, I spent 10 years in San Diego.
01:06:21.000San Diego doesn't have these problems.
01:06:23.000Well, it's a far more conservative place.
01:06:45.000But, you know, the irony is, like, the populist kind of left and right, like, are really mad at the owners and developers, the owners of capital, right?
01:06:53.000Like, kind of Marxist screaming and yelling is all about.
01:06:56.000But the irony is that the policies they want to implement help those people.
01:07:01.000And if we let more deregulation occur, you're helping the renters whose rent hasn't changed in years.
01:07:59.000There's no solution that's on the table.
01:08:01.000There's nothing that anybody's said that, okay, this is what we're going to do, and this is our 10-year plan, and we're going to clean this up, and we're going to do X, Y, and Z, and we're going to take care of this.
01:08:10.000Because there didn't used to be 70,000 homeless people in the city, and there is now.
01:08:14.000So obviously something went wrong, and over a period of 10 years, 70 million people, 70,000 people, and how many...
01:08:22.000Throwing out a bunch of numbers here that don't make sense.
01:08:24.000How many million people live in LA? It's like 20 million people, and there's 70,000 homeless people, right?
01:08:53.000One thing we do is a housing first type of policy.
01:08:56.000So you offer services, but after you've gotten them somewhere, and maybe that place is a warehouse, but you also have to have a forcing function.
01:09:06.000So there's also a degree of allowing this, what is basically a crime, to take place in California, whereas in Texas, we don't allow it.
01:09:36.000Because Austin is a very liberal city.
01:09:38.000And so their instinct was to do the same thing that they're doing in San Francisco and LA. The governor stepped in and said, okay, you know what?
01:09:53.000So we took them out, but made sure that there was some kind of access to hygiene, to porta-potties, and then access to social services that get people back on their feet.
01:12:09.000I've seen the fact they had to shut down beaches because people were just getting silly and they're using it like a day off and going to the beaches and being on top of each other.
01:12:17.000So they had to shut down parking at the beaches and they've slowly tried to close the loopholes, the loopholes for knuckleheads, basically.
01:12:56.000You know, healthcare, and this is a healthcare issue, obviously, is so complicated and there's so many levels to it.
01:13:04.000But I mean, I think one of them that we really have to address is diet and obesity.
01:13:09.000There's a giant problem with diet and obesity in this country, healthy food, eating the proper food.
01:13:17.000And, you know, I had a friend who said...
01:13:20.000They were talking about people who do drugs and people who drink, and maybe they shouldn't get access to those same healthcare, and maybe that's a good incentive to stop people from drinking and doing drugs.
01:13:34.000And I said, yeah, what about people who do...
01:13:44.000So can you tell, hey fatso, you can't get the same healthcare that a healthy person does.
01:13:49.000Well, if you've got a healthy person who likes to drink, and they run, and they jog, but they do like to drink, and they occasionally smoke a cigarette, are they healthier than someone who's morbidly obese?
01:14:14.000Is it because of a lack of awareness of the consequences of a non-healthy diet or eating poor foods or consuming large amounts of alcohol or tobacco products?
01:14:25.000I don't know what it is, but That is a massive part of our healthcare system, is people who are not doing the proper things to their own body in terms of eating nutritious foods, hopefully that they can afford, in terms of exercise, which is free for everybody.
01:14:42.000There's a lot of things you can do that are free to take care of your body.
01:15:27.000And, you know, part of the deal, when our founders wrote out the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and built the framework for this free society that we live in, where government's role is to protect your rights.
01:15:43.000That's fundamentally the government's role.
01:15:45.000You have God-given rights, and These are life, liberty, property.
01:15:51.000Effectively speaking, life, liberty, and property.
01:15:54.000In the Declaration, Jefferson wrote, the pursuit of happiness.
01:15:59.000And they choose these words really carefully.
01:16:02.000Now, part of the exchange there is a necessity for citizens to live with a sense of duty.
01:16:09.000And to live as a citizen, this idea of citizenship and to do what is right, to do what is good.
01:16:16.000It's hard for me to imagine that people are just so uneducated that they don't know that they're unhealthy.
01:16:21.000You know, I think they know it, right?
01:17:48.000If more people had discipline and more people just went out and took care of themselves and then had discipline to not overeat and had discipline to try to choose the right foods and to make a meal plan, write things down, it can be done.
01:18:03.000We're not talking about breathing underwater.
01:18:05.000We're talking about things that can be done by the average person.
01:18:10.000I don't think the notion of personal responsibility is talked about enough as...
01:18:16.000Conservatives talk about it all the time.
01:18:18.000It's one of the things I appreciate about conservatives.
01:18:22.000But it's kind of used against us a lot, right?
01:18:25.000It's almost like we're accused of being immoral and unfeeling and uncaring when we say, you know, in this whole like, oh, just tell everybody to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
01:18:36.000And like, not that we even use that term, but the point is that it's actually important, and I don't think conservatives have done a good enough job over time explaining why it's so important.
01:18:47.000And personal responsibility, as a foundation of our culture, it's important because it leads to empowerment.
01:18:55.000It gives us the agency to control our own destiny.
01:19:52.000In America, when the same question was asked, it was like 30 or 40% of people said yes, versus in Germany, it was like 50 or 60%.
01:20:02.000So there's a pretty marked difference, and that's a uniquely American thing, that we believe we are in control of our own destiny.
01:20:08.000We tend to overwhelmingly say, more than European countries, that if we work hard and play by the rules and do what's right, that we will get ahead, that we will find that opportunity.
01:20:18.000And I think the world recognizes that, too.
01:20:22.000When you go around the world and you ask people, where would you rather be if you could immigrate right now?
01:20:42.000And so for all of the left-wing, like, anger and always saying how bad it is and how nothing works here and everybody's just in crisis all the time.
01:20:53.000Obviously, we're in a crisis technically right now, of course.
01:20:55.000But this rhetoric was prevalent before all this.
01:20:59.000For all of that commentary, it just isn't true.
01:21:05.000And the reason they use crisis language, the reason they tell you you're going to die in 10 years, climate change, the reason they're always telling you that corporations are taking advantage of you and the 1% has just got you under their boot and all of this, it's very victimizing language.
01:21:22.000And there's a reason behind it, because they want very, very extreme policies put into place, and you can't justify revolutionizing the whole system unless you convince people that the system is so bad and so corrupt that it needs to be revolutionized.
01:21:39.000And what that's created is a real undermining of this notion of personal responsibility, because you have to tell people they're victims if you're going to convince them that they need you to save them.
01:21:50.000And when you undermine personal responsibility, you disempower people.
01:21:53.000And fundamentally, to me, that's what socialism does, because you're telling people each to their need, each to their ability.
01:22:01.000What you're telling people is that they don't have to work that hard, that they deserve, they have rights to all of these other services from other people.
01:22:09.000It's their right, and we should distribute that accordingly.
01:22:13.000What that does is it removes agency from people, and it's truly a disempowering thing, and we've seen this throughout Throughout history, you know, just talk to Venezuelans and Cubans, and they're so happy when they get here.
01:22:26.000They're so happy because they just want to work hard and move up.
01:22:30.000And they're just so excited about this meritocracy that we've built into our culture.
01:22:37.000Well, Cubans are such a great example.
01:22:39.000My friend Andrew Schultz, who's a hilarious comedian, has a great bit about how communist Cubans come to America and the moment they step foot on soil, they become Republicans.
01:23:02.000The consequences of it being such a great time are it's far easier to get by.
01:23:09.000Because it's far easier to get by, people look for things to be more difficult than they actually are.
01:23:16.000They look for things to be more stacked against them than they actually are.
01:23:20.000They look for more of a woe-is-me standpoint.
01:23:23.000When you find people that actually have a real difficult life, they don't look for things to be hard.
01:23:29.000They find hard things everywhere they look.
01:23:32.000And oftentimes you find that those people that have a real struggle.
01:23:37.000There's a great documentary called Happy People by Werner Herzog.
01:23:41.000It's about people who live in Siberia.
01:23:43.000And it is a brutal, difficult existence in extreme cold.
01:23:47.000But these people are overwhelmingly happy.
01:23:51.000I mean, it is a really crazy documentary because their physical and their struggle just for existence, just to survive, is so difficult that they've found this sort of Perfect vibration of existence where they're in the wilderness,
01:24:09.000they're out there trapping and hunting and fishing and farming and gathering up enough food to survive in the extreme winters.
01:24:17.000And it really shows you that human beings need difficult tasks.
01:24:26.000And we need to actually go out there and do them to have a feeling of satisfaction and have a feeling of Personal responsibility and the fact that you've actually done the things that you needed to do in order to survive.
01:24:58.000I'm not saying you need to get blown up in the face and lose an eye to have this sort of spiritual awakening and how good it feels to go through something hard.
01:25:06.000But you should habitually move into a self-imposed You were about to say something.
01:25:33.000Just that alone creates character, creates a different kind of person, and the type of people that gravitate towards those endeavors, they're special people.
01:25:44.000They are, but I didn't write this book for them, and I wrote it for everybody.
01:25:49.000And what I point out is, listen, SEALs have our hard thing, and it's BUDS, which is an acronym.
01:25:56.000It stands for Basic Underwater Demolition slash SEAL Training.
01:25:59.000It's six months of hell, and It pushes you beyond limits you ever thought you had, Hell Week especially.
01:26:08.000And when you're done with that, when you come away from Hell Week, there really is this sort of spiritual awakening.
01:26:15.000It's that you have higher confidence, you feel prepared for anything.
01:26:18.000Even in some of the worst situations, you can think to yourself, well, it's not quite Hell Week, is it?
01:26:25.000And so you're able to have much more perspective.
01:26:29.000We're lacking in perspective quite a bit also.
01:26:31.000Chapter 2 is called Perspective from Darkness, and I point this fact out that too many of us have gotten so comfortable.
01:26:37.000We've removed suffering from our life to such an extraordinary degree, and that's not a bad thing, okay?
01:26:46.000That's an element of the modern times that we live in, and I'm happy we live there.
01:26:50.000But the reality is that my ancestors were struggling through Texas trying to find water on a daily basis.
01:26:56.000And in my life, I'm complaining because when I'm at 30,000 feet flying through the air, the Wi-Fi isn't as fast as I'd like it to be.
01:27:04.000So we have very different complaints, and it's good to every once in a while just think, you know what, I have it pretty damn good.
01:27:10.000And to remind yourself of that, again, the Do Something Hard chapter is...
01:27:16.000One, it's a deep dive into the psychological literature, which I just enjoy doing.
01:27:21.000There's a lot to back this up, whether it's modern psychology, the history of Stoicism, or the Bible.
01:27:28.000All of these texts, these ancient pieces of wisdom that have been around for a very long time They all talk about this.
01:27:37.000They all talk about the value of suffering, the value of enduring and hardship and how this builds character and how this actually quite literally makes you stronger in both a metaphysical sense and a psychological sense and a physical sense.
01:27:51.000I actually go into the science of it as well and how the changes in your brain, what exercise does, what hardship actually does both physically and metaphysically.
01:28:02.000There's real benefits to this, but you have to do it.
01:28:06.000And it doesn't have to be Joe Rogan's life.
01:28:10.000I wonder if a lot of people look at your life and they're like, that guy is too productive for me.
01:29:35.000We all know who those guys are, and it's because they stopped They stopped listening to the lessons from Buds and to this value of self-imposed suffering.
01:29:47.000Yeah, I feel that resilience is almost like a muscle.
01:29:50.000It's something that you can build, and it's also something that can get soft.
01:29:54.000And I think that, look, I love comfort, don't get me wrong, but I don't appreciate it unless I've done something difficult.
01:30:02.000If you look at all the different things I do and say, oh, you're real productive and that's nice.
01:30:07.000Dude, I also like to watch TV. I like to put my feet up.
01:31:49.000And when you don't feel that shame, you can't feel a sense of duty to be that citizen that we talked about earlier.
01:31:55.000And I find this to be a big problem, even with the small stuff.
01:31:58.000And I use examples in the book like, You should feel shame when you're that person who doesn't put the shopping cart in the little shopping cart section in the parking lot and instead leaves it in the parking space.
01:35:03.000And the reason I wrote about this was because, you know, throughout this book, I'm identifying a problem and then trying to come up with a solution.
01:35:12.000So the solution is effectively saying what you're saying.
01:35:17.000I write about the psychology behind it.
01:35:19.000But the problem is, is like, we've I feel like we've removed shame in our culture to a huge extent to where it's almost celebrated to do these wrong things.
01:35:34.000We've started to change the definition of what's right and wrong in this post-modern society.
01:35:43.000Let me think of some examples of what I mean by that.
01:35:47.000In one part, I do bring up the example of Of how we view, you know, assistance, like government assistance.
01:35:55.000And there's the movie Cinderella Man where Russell Crowe plays the, whatever the name is, the boxer.
01:36:15.000Like, we believe in helping people who need it, but we also believe that you shouldn't take it if you don't need it.
01:36:20.000It seems like a pretty good piece of civic duty to live by.
01:36:26.000And then I went to my own experience leaving the Navy, where we were actually encouraged to get on Social Security Disability Insurance as I was leaving the Navy.
01:36:37.000So I was in a classroom full of fellow Navy service members, none of which were SEALs, none of which had been in combat.
01:36:45.000None of which appeared injured in any way.
01:36:47.000I was the only one with like a visible injury where it's obvious as to why I'm being medically retired.
01:36:52.000And so we're all getting medically retired.
01:36:55.000And by nature of getting medically retired from the military, it's guaranteed that we have some kind of benefit on the back end of that.
01:37:02.000And what I would call a very generous benefit.
01:37:05.000You know, people would disagree with me on that, but I think we get a generous benefit.
01:37:11.000To say on top of that, that we should also take money out of the Social Security Trust Fund for disability insurance, even though every single person in there walked right out of that classroom and is perfectly capable of working, was so frightening to me.
01:37:25.000That it is so ingrained in our new culture that it was actually in the curriculum at a government classroom.
01:38:02.000And I think the reason is because we started to elevate victimhood.
01:38:05.000We started to elevate this sort of shameful And this is what I mean by we sort of change the definitions of what it even means to feel ashamed and what it means to feel like you're doing the wrong thing because we've changed the definitions of right and wrong and I see a need to get us back to some traditional definitions before we all just lose our freaking minds.
01:38:28.000Yeah, I think that's a very good point.
01:38:30.000I think what you're saying is absolutely correct.
01:38:41.000But if you're not a victim and you're playing up victimhood, it's disgusting.
01:38:46.000It's one of the grossest things that you see in our culture, especially when we're talking about how easy society is.
01:38:51.000Now, when you have a person who is affluent and successful and famous, like Jussie Smollett, who does that, and you're like, Jesus Christ, man.
01:39:06.000When we see someone who's just trying to, for their own personal gain, they're trying to game the system and Make it out like they're a victim.
01:39:18.000It's one of the grossest things that you could see in a successful culture.
01:39:22.000I mean, there's people out there that really are injured, like yourself, from combat.
01:39:26.000There's people out there that really are sick.
01:39:28.000There's people out there that are really victimized by violent crime.
01:39:32.000And to fake it, it's such a disgusting insult to people that actually are injured.
01:39:40.000Yeah, and that's like the most extreme, I think...
01:39:44.000That's the extreme consequence of this victimhood culture.
01:39:47.000Because there's definitely a difference between real victims and victimhood culture.
01:39:49.000We have to distinguish between those two things.
01:39:51.000And we have to respect somebody who's actually a victim.
01:39:54.000In my case, in the disability insurance thing, I didn't take it.
01:39:58.000But what concerns me is that if I had taken it, and if I had gone on and sort of proudly exclaimed that I got this and I needed it, shouldn't somebody call me out for that?
01:40:12.000And the reality is I don't think people would.
01:40:14.000I don't think I would be called out for that, even though I'm perfectly capable of working.
01:40:18.000Yes, I'm kind of blind and I can't see even out of my good eye, but I can work.
01:41:25.000It's made debate with my colleagues in the Democratic Party very difficult.
01:41:29.000Because every disparity is assumed to be originating from some kind of injustice.
01:41:35.000You know, every time somebody is wealthier than somebody else, the assumption nowadays is that, well, it's ill-begotten money.
01:41:41.000And that there was some kind of injustice that occurred.
01:41:43.000You know, when we were voting on this giant stimulus package, not really a stimulus package, more of a rescue package, remember how this happened?
01:41:52.000There was, you know, we were negotiating through this thing, it was actually looking pretty good.
01:41:56.000Nancy Pelosi comes in and says, hell no, we're blowing up the whole thing, and we're going to protect workers and damn, you know, not these damn corporations.
01:42:10.000I'm happy to go into the details of that politically if you'd like me to.
01:42:13.000But the point is this, there was this outrage from the populist right and the populist left against anything that had the name corporation attached to it.
01:42:23.000And we've forgotten how to ask ourselves, like, why is that?
01:42:41.000Because there's this sort of cultural movement towards feeling that anytime something is successful, like, our reaction should be to punish it.
01:42:49.000And that cultural movement Worries me a great deal.
01:42:55.000I think that's what leads to these sort of topics of socialism.
01:42:58.000Well, I think that that is one of the bad aspects of the ideals of socialism, is this inclination to think that when there is an inequality, that then inequality is because of either corruption or greed.
01:43:51.000And those people should be rewarded for their effort.
01:43:55.000One of the problems that I have with people that espouse socialist ideals is that they don't want this competition aspect of our culture and our society to exist, where you put in more work, you get more reward.
01:44:55.000And that needs to be addressed as well.
01:44:57.000And you can't have this blanket thing that all the people that run corporations are greedy, and all the money that they have acquired is because of ill-gotten gains.
01:45:25.000The second one is mental toughness, which I wrote a whole book about.
01:45:31.000You said it exactly how I describe it when I give speeches on this, which is we need mental toughness because otherwise how do we survive in a free society where we have to compete?
01:45:41.000Because the only alternative to a bunch of mentally weak people is that we do live in a society where competition is not necessary because the government will just give you everything.
01:45:49.000But I don't want to live in that society and frankly that society can't function very well because nobody would actually do anything.
01:45:55.000And you have to be mentally tough to deal with that.
01:45:57.000And I think the American spirit and our history as a culture is a really, really tough bunch of people.
01:46:05.000And I just want to remind people of that.
01:46:07.000And I want to remind people that it's something to aspire to.
01:46:15.000But we have so many, like, postmodernists who actually, again, it's going back to this victimhood culture, they want you to be that victim.
01:46:21.000And then they'll celebrate you for it.
01:46:23.000When people tell their victimhood stories, they're cheered.
01:46:25.000But it's like, wait a second, where's the part where you overcame it?
01:46:29.000I thought that was the story we're supposed to cheer.
01:46:31.000Well, they also connect competition with cruelty, and I think that's foolish as well.
01:46:38.000Yeah, it feels bad to lose, but that's just because it feels great to win.
01:46:42.000It's a peak in a valley thing, and you have to understand that.
01:46:46.000Look, every competition that I've ever had, anything where I've ever competed and lost, has fueled me beyond measure.
01:47:14.000The bonds that are formed in jujitsu gyms and kickboxing gyms and martial arts gyms with the people that you train, the men and women that you train with, there's an intensity to those bonds that's almost indescribable to anybody that hasn't experienced it.
01:47:29.000I mean, I'm sure it's not as tight as people that have gone through combat together.
01:47:34.000But there's something in those people, they fuel you.
01:48:34.000Nobody gets inspired by Jesse Smollett putting a fucking fake noose around his neck and walking into a hotel still holding a Subway sandwich.
01:48:43.000Maybe you're inspired to never be that guy, but it's a weak inspiration.
01:48:48.000You're inspired by great You're inspired by great people's stories, great people's autobiographies and documentaries and stories of them putting in that work.
01:48:57.000That's why there's so many people that their Instagram existence is essentially just, all they're doing is just providing inspiration to people, like David Goggins!
01:49:42.000There's been some instances where I'm like, okay, this seems like a car, but this seems impossible to film without some better equipment than just a selfie video, you know?
01:50:01.000And the audio version is even better, because the audio version, he actually gets somebody else to read it, but then he comes in between and discusses each and every chapter.
01:50:10.000So it's like the audio book and a podcast together.
01:50:13.000You know, he lives an incredible life, and he's...
01:50:17.000That guy is an amazing source of fuel for people, but is an amazing source of fuel because of his own competition with himself.
01:50:26.000And he's a guy that's talked really openly about being weak at certain points in his life, and being fat and lazy, and that he got through that.
01:50:35.000He wasn't born this fucking warrior that came out of the womb running 100 miles.
01:52:19.000People that are healthy, they want them to go out and live their lives.
01:52:23.000They don't want the restaurants to shut down, the pubs to shut down.
01:52:27.000This is a disease that, you know, it's ravaged people of all nationalities and all age and demographic groups, but their idea is take care of your health, be careful, but let's get society back on its feet again.
01:52:43.000And they're widely criticized by that.
01:53:16.000Of course, that's different depending on what part of the country you're in.
01:53:19.000The second, well, let me jump to the third one.
01:53:21.000The third one would just be surrender, okay?
01:53:23.000Let it happen, we'll deal with it as we go, but we're not keeping anybody at home.
01:53:28.000That's effectively what Sweden is doing.
01:53:31.000The second option would be sort of a mix of the two, which I think will end up being the American option, or it better well should be, where we have a defined period where we remain in place, but then we confront the enemy.
01:53:45.000And like I said, we're in a tactical retreat right now, but at a certain point we actually have to come back out swinging.
01:54:21.000I think their social cohesion and their ability to follow rules, kind of like the Koreans, is different than our culture, where we are just way more individualistic and we're going to do whatever the hell we want.
01:54:32.000If we want a flamethrower, In our office, we're going to have a flamethrower in our office.
01:54:35.000I'm like, don't tell me I can't have it, right?
01:55:13.000And so, okay, so those are the three options.
01:55:15.000I think the jury's still out on if it works for Sweden or not.
01:55:18.000I think it can work, and I would like to see us move to that rather quickly.
01:55:21.000Now, we need to be careful about how we do it, but I'm very concerned about these indefinite extension of the timelines of stay in place.
01:55:31.000I think we have to start having reasonable conversations about the costs of that, and the costs are a lot more than just dollar signs.
01:55:39.000The costs are a hell of a lot more than just People's 401k is tanking.
01:55:43.000The costs are actually people's lives also, whether it's mental health or suicides or divorces or putting off all of these procedures that we're just putting a freeze on.
01:55:55.000And I have a lot of problem with this.
01:55:57.000In places like Houston, our hospitals are not overwhelmed.
01:56:00.000They're at 50% capacity still because we're not getting that many more cases.
01:56:57.000There's explanations behind these things.
01:56:59.000And I do worry sometimes that our modeling is using these numbers in the wrong ways and not taking enough into account into the fact that we have very different lifestyles in different parts of the country.
01:57:10.000And also take into account that we can target certain solutions.
01:57:14.000And so regarding that Harvard white paper that says the second solution is mobilize and transition, Once you've slowed the spread by doing what we're doing, and again, I'm not against doing what we're doing, I just think we need to stick to the timelines and maybe make those timelines sooner than later,
01:57:50.000I went through the numbers before when we're talking about socialized medicine.
01:57:53.000One of the benefits of our system is we are actually way better prepared than people realize.
01:57:58.000Now, we have a big lack of PPE. There's a lot of reasons for that, and I can go into it.
01:58:03.000One reason is that China was stopping Export from 3M from China to the rest of the world back in January and February.
01:58:11.000This just came out in an article that was written and was confirmed by You know, 3M and a lot of people in government.
01:58:17.000They were preventing the export because 3M produces a lot of it in China.
01:58:21.000They were preventing those exports because they wanted to hoard the supplies.
01:58:25.000Then they act like the good guy and go around the world giving it out.
01:58:28.000I mean, China has to, we're going to have to really look at our supply chains and our relationship with China after this.
01:58:34.000But that's one of the reasons we didn't have the proper amount of PPE. It also depends on the hospital.
01:58:39.000Again, like there is some accountability that has to take place with What I've noticed as of late is this strange belief that the president is everybody's micromanaging boss.
01:58:53.000And that's just not how our system works, nor should it.
01:58:56.000And there has to be some level of accountability at the local and state level, too.
01:59:00.000Again, I just got the phone with some of the doctors here at the Texas Medical Center.
01:59:04.000And I'm like, how are you guys on PPE? And they're like, we have so much PPE. Because we're used to disasters here and we prepare.
01:59:12.000And so they're just not worried about it.
01:59:14.000We've set up the supply chains in advance.
01:59:20.000What I've noticed in all the finger pointing, and a lot of it's just political opportunism, I don't know if you put these people up to a lie detector test, I wonder if they really think it would be the president's fault that this happened.
01:59:33.000I don't think they could pass a lie detector test.
01:59:35.000I think it's a lot of political theatrics.
01:59:39.000But in any case, it gets us away from the right way to look at our system, which is local and state government are our managers.
01:59:51.000If California wants to try a single-payer healthcare system, let's see it work in California now.
01:59:58.000Or a smaller state, and then let's scale it.
02:00:01.000Hell, let's see if it works in a city, and then let's scale it.
02:00:06.000There's a reason federalism is the way it is, and it's hard to compare us to different countries in so many ways, because these countries are like the size of our city.
02:00:15.000LA is bigger than so many countries around the world.
02:00:25.000And it's like socialism works if you've got maybe like 50 or 60 people, because you can hold each other accountable, there's a little bit easier maintenance.
02:00:32.000As you scale it out, you just can't, right?
02:00:35.000That's why co-ops exist in this country, like Bernie Sanders lived on one.
02:00:39.000You can make it work if you can literally see everybody all the time.
02:00:47.000Teach their own, teach their needs, teach their ability.
02:00:51.000When you scale things out, it dramatically changes things.
02:00:53.000And we have to remember that as it pertains to dealing with the pandemic and dealing with public policy as well.
02:01:00.000The point I was making about the media a second ago, one of the problems, it's not just that they're not informing people correctly, which we discussed earlier.
02:01:09.000The other problem is that they're preventing us from having the right discussions.
02:01:13.000Because we do have to have this discussion that we're talking about right now, which is how do we responsibly move into a system where we're simultaneously combating the pandemic, but also reopening our economy.
02:01:53.000You know, we live in a world where we take risks.
02:01:56.000And we have to take those risks and then mitigate those risks accordingly.
02:02:00.000And we can better mitigate risk and we better understand what we're dealing with and when we're better prepared.
02:02:05.000And those are the two things we have to do over the next month is get better prepared.
02:02:08.000And the answer there is test more people, especially test people with antibodies so that we can see who's actually immune and we can give them like a certificate or something and they can go do whatever they want.
02:02:19.000Getting more ICU beds where they might be needed, getting more ventilators, getting more PPE. So that's the preparedness side.
02:02:24.000And on the other side, we risk mitigate.
02:02:26.000It's just like, you know, like you explained in Sweden, let's keep sick and vulnerable people away.
02:02:32.000Let's target our efforts a little bit better.
02:02:35.000Let's take a more vertical approach as opposed to a horizontal approach.
02:02:40.000We can do this if we give each other the grace and the space to do it instead of like this bad faith finger pointing of like, oh, you're just going to kill people and you don't even care.
02:02:49.000Well, it's like, That's a terrible way to think about it.
02:02:52.000I mean, I could moralize this situation and say, well, I'll save 30,000 lives this year because I'm not going to let anybody drive.
02:02:59.000And I'm a better person than you because you have the blood of 30,000 people on your hands because you want people driving.
02:03:14.000No, you're absolutely right, and I'm worried about that when we do go back.
02:03:18.000I'm worried about that finger-pointing.
02:03:20.000I really am, because I think it's just going to muddy the waters, and I'm also worried about it being used as political opportunism, and it's going to scare people.
02:04:04.000But there's a lot of quotes out there from media and from pundits, from Twitter users.
02:04:14.000Well, I only quote people who are well-known, either they're well-known journalists or they're politicians.
02:04:19.000But it usually goes along the lines of exactly what you just said you were worried about, which is Trump is more concerned about the stock market than people's lives.
02:04:28.000That's kind of the typical one you hear.
02:04:30.000And it's certainly been said quite a bit.
02:04:35.000And my fear is that it continues to be said.
02:04:38.000And it prevents us from having a reasonable debate.
02:04:42.000Because we truly need to have that reasonable debate.
02:04:46.000The other thing that frustrates me about these kind of Bad faith arguments is that the people saying them made the same claims themselves.
02:05:36.000Who says it's not safe to travel to China?
02:05:39.000So this is following President Trump's extremely, at the time, a very bold move to restrict travel from China.
02:05:47.000And, of course, all of these papers and prominent people are now saying something different.
02:05:53.000I go through a timeline, too, where I look at, because, again, my Democrat colleagues are very quick to continue to accuse this administration of just dropping the ball, doing all these bad things.
02:06:44.000And also declared it a public health emergency.
02:06:47.000On that same day, Nancy Pelosi talked about a bill, promoted a bill called the No Ban Act, which would limit the president's ability to impose travel restrictions.
02:06:56.000So, you just can't say You just can't say that this guy wasn't acting in the public's best interest and then have facts like this.
02:07:09.000I do remember this too, and I pointed this out at the time, because a lot of people were not talking about coronavirus in February.
02:07:17.000And on February 28th, which is a few days before February 28th, The 24th, the Trump administration asked for $2.5 billion from Congress to combat the spread.
02:07:34.000So that was money that had already been spent by HHS, by CDC, that needed to be reimbursed.
02:07:40.000So the Trump administration has already been dealing with this, and they're like, hey, Congress, we need more money, we need more supplemental funding.
02:08:03.000They had days to give more money because this was earlier in the week.
02:08:07.000What we actually voted on that week was 2339, which is reversing the Youth Tobacco Epidemic Act.
02:08:15.000That was a bill to ban flavored tobacco.
02:08:18.000According to House Democrats, things like hookah, grizzly, wintergreen, which is maybe what I... It's now illegal.
02:08:25.000Now, it never got into law, of course, because it never went through the Senate.
02:08:29.000But I want people to understand, like, I'm not blaming Democrats either, because there was a lot that we all just didn't know.
02:08:36.000And I just want to point these things out, because it's important to give each other the grace, to be like, hey, not everybody knew what was happening.
02:08:45.000It wasn't until early March that it was exploding as a virus in Iran and Italy and South Korea.
02:08:52.000These things happened and it wasn't clear that there should be massive, massive lockdowns of society.
02:09:01.000Those are very bold moves and it's so easy to have this 20-20 hindsight and act holier than thou and point fingers, but it's highly disingenuous.
02:09:13.000And I built this whole timeline out to show it.
02:09:17.000And I also point out that the timeline can end.
02:09:20.000From here on out, we could just give each other some grace and solve these problems together, because it will be very easy to blame each other for the deaths of Americans, no matter what the decision is.
02:09:30.000It will be easy, because the counterfactual is impossible to prove.
02:09:34.000And the fact that it's so easy, that political opportunism is so easy, is what worries me the most.
02:09:40.000And we have to have those conversations, though, about reopening society and when to do it.
02:09:45.000And we have to have the conversations about this political opportunism and shaming it and calling it for what it is and really being honest with those quotes from the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today, and letting people know, no, we didn't know what this was.
02:11:10.000There was a study that showed that if they had actually been honest and given the world three weeks extra notice, 95% of the spread could have been contained.
02:11:26.000Five million people were traveling all over China, all over the world.
02:11:30.000The reason this became so bad in Italy and Iran is because of the Belt and Road Initiative.
02:11:34.000These are major hotspots for China's economic development and the Belt and Road Initiative.
02:11:40.000Then let's get into the World Health Organization.
02:11:43.000There's got to be a come-to-Jesus moment on the World Health Organization.
02:11:47.000Again, mid-January, World Health Organization says that They repeat the claims made by China that it can't even be transmitted human-to-human contact.
02:11:59.000On January 30th, World Health Organization said something along the lines of, there's no reason to be shutting down travel or limiting travel.
02:12:08.000So they are directly controlled by the Chinese government, the World Health Organization.
02:12:12.000It should also be worth noting, I forget the guy's name who runs it, the director of the WHO, but he's from Ethiopia.
02:12:19.000And Ethiopia is one of these countries that has huge investments from the Belt and Road Initiative.
02:12:27.000And so, I mean, we need to be calling for a complete change out in leadership of the WHO. Well, we've seen that video where they refuse to acknowledge, he refuses to acknowledge the existence of Taiwan.
02:13:10.000You know, I don't think the WHO will ever have the standing that it did before, not without an immediate and serious leadership change, because they've lost all credibility.
02:13:19.000And then move on, you know, fast forward, the Chinese were perpetuating, it's unclear whether they started this talking point or whether it was the progressive left and the Chinese just repeated it and latched on to it.
02:13:30.000But this whole notion that it's racist to call the virus the Chinese virus was, it was such an utterly absurd thing that we were focused on as a country when it just doesn't matter.
02:13:39.000No matter what your opinion on whether it's actually racist or not, I personally don't think it is.
02:13:45.000There's a history of calling a virus some kind of geographic name based on where it's from.
02:14:17.000There already is quite a few things that we're looking at as what we can do to, one, rebalance our supply chains.
02:14:23.000As a country, we need a better industrial policy on bringing a lot of important manufacturing back home and being more competitive in that sense.
02:15:05.000Do you think that this, because of the consequences of this virus and all this, that this awakens people to the need to manufacture things in America, particularly medical supplies, so many things that we rely on China for?
02:15:37.000We have, and the Republicans need to come to terms with this, is we have really adhered very closely to a more libertarian mindset of free trade, where the more free trade, the better, where if somebody else can make it cheaper, then we should just have them make it all,
02:17:43.000Well, I think also when you look at what are the consequences of allowing us to have things manufactured over there, what kind of karma do we take on for, when you look at Foxconn, those buildings where they manufacture iPhones, they have nets around them to keep people from jumping off.
02:17:59.000How many people have to jump before you put nets up?
02:18:03.000What has to happen there where your life sucks so hard to make an iPhone?
02:18:10.000How much would it cost to make those here?
02:18:15.000Is there some real value in the label that we used to love to look for, Made in America?
02:18:23.000That's not really discussed that much anymore, but I think it would be wise for all of us to invest in that idea again.
02:18:32.000Yeah, and the problem is we hold ourselves to those standards of good labor conditions and good environmental standards, but we punish ourselves almost out of business completely.
02:18:43.000And so we punish ourselves out of business, usually through these specific regulations, whether it's labor or environmental, but then we also engage in free trade.
02:18:51.000So it almost guarantees that we lose out our own manufacturing base or sometimes the energy sector, whatever it is, because we simultaneously make ourselves less competitive While also forcing our people to compete against people who work their employees so hard that they have to build nets around their office as they throw themselves off of it.
02:19:14.000That's such a good question, by the way.
02:19:16.000How many people actually jump before they put the nets?
02:19:40.000And there's a whole of government policy and a whole of, I don't even say government, it's really society that we all have to kind of collectively look at this.
02:19:47.000And it's going to take the private sector as well.
02:19:51.000Because Apple would tell you, okay, I'd love to open up a plant here.
02:20:08.000It tells you that we're not educating people in the skills that are necessary to engage in these jobs.
02:20:14.000There's a lot of technical skills that we are not teaching because, so this gets to education policy, why aren't we promoting more STEM? Why aren't we promoting via the federal loan program, student loans, why aren't we promoting things and majors that actually get us to a higher paying job?
02:20:36.000Why should the taxpayer be on the hook for a major that is guaranteed not to pay anything once you graduate?
02:20:43.000What are you going to do with that degree and whatever?
02:20:52.000These are not high-paying things, and they're not useful for the economy that we want.
02:20:56.000So what kind of incentives need to shift is my point.
02:21:01.000To encourage more of that so that Apple, when they do look at a place to build a new factory, they can be confident that people will actually show up to work there.
02:21:47.000It's a place I never thought I would be.
02:21:51.000The day before I decided to run for Congress, I was about to take a job working at the Department of Defense, just kind of moving along my same trajectory in the national security space.
02:22:33.000Whether you're running for the first time or whether you're trying to move up to a different position, it's just like, you just got to do what feels right when the people want it.
02:22:41.000And the people will let you know when they want it.