Matthew Iglesias, author of the book One Billion Americans and host of the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience joins me to talk about the idea that we need to have a billion Americans. We also talk about immigration and the role of immigrants in the United States, and why they should get a path to citizenship. And we talk about whether or not we should have a legal process for people to come here once they re here, whether they re adopted or whether they got here with their parents, or whether their parents came here with them once they were born here. And we answer the question: How many people would you like to be born in America if we had a billion people? and why does that seem like a good idea to you? This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. We mixed this episode with music written and produced by Matthew McElroy. Additional music was done by Ian Dorsch and Ben Kotler. The show was mixed by Zac Schmidt. Additional mixing and mastering by Matthew McLennan. It was edited by Haley Shaw and Sarah Abdurrahman. Our thanks to our sponsor, Vayner Media, and our producer, Alex Blanchard and our sound engineer, Ben Kwan. Music was made in part 2 and editing by Rachel Ward, and additional mixing by Matthew Bollandrews, and music was provided by Matthew Blanchor, and the help by Matthew Kucharski. and Alex Pizzi. Thank you to our editor, and thanks to Rachel Ward for his excellent mixing and editing and mastering and mastering, and mixing and mixing, and his excellent sound design, and editing, and Matthew Pizzano for his amazing editing and editing skills, and background music, and all of his excellent editing and mixing at the Slow Boring Newsletter and the excellent editing at The SlowBoring Newsletter, and also our good sound design and editing at the Fast Boring Podcast. , and our excellent sound effects, and thank you for all of your feedback, and so much more thanks to the help from our amazing sound effects and his amazing mixing, thanks to a gratefulness, and by our good friend , and our amazing engineering, and the amazing editing, for making this podcasting help and editing.
00:01:39.000How much pushback have you gotten from this idea?
00:01:42.000Because it seems like a lot of people think that overpopulation is a giant problem.
00:01:48.000And then when you say, we should triple plus the amount of people in the United States we want to compete with the rest of the world, I would imagine a lot of people are like, what are you smoking, Matthew Iglesias?
00:02:06.000No, yes, there is concern about overpopulation.
00:02:11.000That's something that, you know, so there's people from the right, they don't like immigrants, they don't like immigration, and Why is that?
00:07:20.000And growth has been important to that historically, right?
00:07:23.000Like, why is the United States a big deal country, and Canada is like, you know, like our cute little brother?
00:07:29.000And it's because a lot of people live here.
00:07:32.000You know, Canada's nice, but there's no people, no real strength there.
00:07:35.000Second, I think it'll make us a more prosperous country.
00:07:39.000What we do as modern day Americans is we do stuff for each other, right?
00:07:44.000Whether that's we make show, we write books, we teach in schools, we run restaurants, we're doing services to each other.
00:07:51.000And you get more prosperity when you have more people and more ability to sort of have those interactions.
00:07:57.000When you're talking about China and the NBA and Hollywood movies, a lot of people think of those things, the interactions that Hollywood has and the NBA has with China as being insidious.
00:08:10.000They don't think it's a good thing at all that China has that kind of an influence.
00:08:14.000And they also think it's embarrassing.
00:08:16.000Like a lot of people think that it's embarrassing for the NBA when the negative tweets, when they're in support of Hong Kong, And then all of a sudden there was some pushback and the NBA was removed from viewership in China and there was a lot of sponsorships being pulled and it became a giant issue.
00:08:35.000And then all of a sudden you saw the NBA kind of backtrack and kind of kowtow and a lot of people found that to be pretty disgusting.
00:08:42.000We don't want the United States to ever be a country that's doing that to China, right?
00:08:47.000If China has a bunch of, I don't know what they're really into over there, ping pong players?
00:08:56.000So imagine if Chinese basketball becomes super popular in the United States and then the Chinese basketball players in the United States start talking shit about how Apple uses slave labor.
00:09:06.000And we go, hey, hey, watch your fucking mouth, bro.
00:09:10.000We won't pay for your Chinese basketball anymore.
00:09:13.000And then all of a sudden China backs off.
00:09:15.000We would think of that as being pretty gross by the United States of ignoring some human rights violations.
00:10:03.000Your growth to increase every year, no matter what, and God knows where that goes.
00:10:09.000I'm not a mathematician or an economist, but if you extrapolate and keep going with that, it leads to preposterous outcomes, right?
00:10:17.000That's what people would be worried about tenfold if there's a billion people here.
00:10:22.000They'd be like, oh my God, we'd be even more ruthless and more cutthroat and maybe more competitive with the rest of the world, but in what way?
00:10:30.000Well, so here, let's talk about the China thing.
00:10:33.000The NBA is under China's thumb because they need access to that market.
00:13:36.000We've got to ask Southerners how to be more polite like Canadians.
00:13:42.000Well, one of the things that I think and one of the things that I've said about Austin in particular is that I love the fact that there's friendly people and I think one of the reasons why they're friendly is there's not that many of them.
00:14:18.000And when you're on the highway, like if you drive and you have to go to Orange County and you're on the 405, you just want Godzilla to come out of the ocean and just start heating cars.
00:14:27.000You're like, this is fucking ridiculous.
00:14:31.000It's like every time you want to go, if you want to go to Orange County, say if you want to go to Disneyland or something like that and take your family, you've got to leave hours earlier.
00:14:40.000Hours earlier than you think you need to.
00:15:07.000But it does, when they have these rat population density studies, it does mimic what happens in big cities in terms of violence, in terms of mental illness.
00:15:16.000Like when you have a certain amount of rats in a large containment, you know about all this, right?
00:16:10.000So what they're studying there, I think, is crowding.
00:16:14.000You know, which is not exactly the same as density because we, you know, like we build buildings, right?
00:16:22.000So people in New York have small houses by American standards, but big houses by European standards or Japanese standards, right?
00:16:32.000We're still taking up space because we're sort of building structures.
00:16:36.000So I think we have to look at what we're doing with our housing laws, with our land use laws.
00:16:42.000One of the reasons Texas has been such a center of growth, so many people are coming here, is that the Texas legal framework actually lets you come here, right?
00:16:52.000You want to throw up some houses in the Austin area, Houston, Dallas.
00:17:25.000They can't get space and they can't sort out their transportation infrastructure.
00:17:29.000Los Angeles poured all this money into building out the LA Metro, but then they didn't align their zoning, you know, so people don't live near the stations.
00:18:06.000But when you have a well-designed system where people live near the stations, where the jobs are near, where they come together, you know, people do it.
00:19:16.000And I do think that focusing on what brings us together versus some of the other governments out there and on the possibilities of growth...
00:20:02.000This country together, people with different religions, people different ethnic backgrounds, people with different ideas, is loyalty to, you know, certain concepts, right?
00:20:23.000And to me, that's important, you know?
00:20:25.000And I was surprised doing some of the virtual touring on this at how much conservative people were like, wow, I can't believe you wrote this book.
00:20:37.000And how much some people on the left were just skeptical of not like the specific ideas, but of the general concept of like wanting America to be awesome.
00:20:48.000Of positive feeling about nationalism.
00:20:54.000Something's happened over the last decade where you say the word nationalism and somehow it gets equated at least peripherally or in the neighborhood of white nationalism.
00:21:25.000If you say you're a patriot, people go, oh great, you're stockpiling food and guns and you're ready to take over and you only like white people.
00:21:34.000No, and it should be the opposite, right?
00:21:36.000That if you think about the history of white nationalism in America, right?
00:23:26.000I only like people who look similar to me.
00:23:28.000That's one of the dumbest ideas of all time.
00:23:31.000And the fact that that idea is still...
00:23:34.000It's so prevalent that you have to argue against it.
00:23:37.000That it's one of those things that you know it's really...
00:23:39.000Until Charlottesville happened, when you see those guys walking with their tiki torches going, they will not replace us.
00:23:44.000I was like, that's never going to happen again.
00:23:47.000If that hadn't happened, I would have said, there's no way after the civil rights movement, after all we've been through, particularly today with the internet and the way people can exchange ideas, there's no fucking chance you're going to have a bunch of assholes that only think that America is supposed to be about white people and they're walking down the street with Home Depot torches.
00:24:05.000It's like one of the dumbest things I've ever seen in my life.
00:25:09.000In the suburbs of D.C., there's a lot of Vietnamese people, a lot of Vietnamese restaurants out there.
00:25:14.000The last time I went out to get a banh mi place, there was a Viet Cajun crawfish broil thing, which comes from Houston because Vietnamese people came there.
00:28:20.000So sometime next year, maybe, I'll get my mole Thanksgiving.
00:28:25.000Well, what I do is with leftovers, I take leftover Thanksgiving turkey and I just take a plate and dunk some habanero sauce all over the plate and then dip the pieces of turkey in that habanero sauce and woo!
00:29:22.000There's something about cooking with that indirect heat from the smoke.
00:29:25.000It's not like cooking over a regular grill.
00:29:29.000Because the smoke is really doing all the cooking for you.
00:29:31.000It's almost like a And they seal so good that it's like you're not losing moisture and you've got this amazing retention of heat so the temperature stays at a good...
00:29:42.000But having the turkey brined first, man, that made such a big difference.
00:29:59.000But if you're a restaurant and you have turkey on the menu and you have turkey right next to like a T-bone steak, people are going to be like, mm.
00:30:05.000It's going to make a steak every time.
00:31:06.000It took a long time, but they eventually got them all.
00:31:09.000We also went through a fire, and the fire actually burned down our chicken coops, but the chickens got out while the fire was burning their chicken coop.
00:31:16.000It created a hole, and they got out, and they were wandering around the yard, and so we saved them from that and then put them into a smaller chicken coop.
00:31:25.000But the area that we lived in, there was so much fire that I think the amount of animals was greatly reduced.
00:31:31.000And the coyotes, they got very clever and they literally pulled the chicken wire off of the chicken coop and created a small hole big enough for them to get inside.
00:31:54.000If you want to really get into what happens when animals get pressured and different methods of adaptation, there's a great book by Dan Flores called Coyote America.
00:32:05.000And it's all about the coyote and how one of the reasons why they spread across the country, they were persecuted first by wolves.
00:32:14.000Like when wolves would encounter coyotes, they would kill the coyotes.
00:33:53.000They're mad about what they want you to be versus what you actually are sometimes, you know?
00:33:56.000And then they're also – you're dealing with – it's not a large number of people that are mad.
00:34:02.000It's a small number of very aggressive people that want to affect the way you do things and want to change the way you talk and change who you talk to and change what you do.
00:35:07.000It's just a small percentage of people that have got into this idea of platforming and deplatforming and going on someone's platform and amplifying someone's broadcast.
00:35:20.000Like, there's all these terms that people are using now.
00:36:13.000Well, and there's a fantasy that you can sort of make disagreement go away if you, you know, try to shut down certain cultural avenues.
00:36:25.000I mean, I think you saw that a lot in the election that just happened, and you continue to see it in politics, that it's frustrating to people that they can't just win everything and have all their ideas go through.
00:38:35.000And I think because we've accepted this idea of censorship and deplatforming as a viable alternative to listening to things that upset you.
00:40:34.000But goddammit, that's how people learn that your perspective is better or your perspective resonates more or your perspective makes more sense.
00:40:42.000Well, and what I think really ideological people don't understand is that most people – like the technical term, political scientists call it, is they're cross-pressured.
00:42:47.000It's also, there's a tendency to embrace this polarization and to almost solidify it.
00:42:53.000Even AOC, after the election, wanted everybody to put together a list of people that were supporting Trump and that voted for Trump and donated to Trump.
00:43:00.000I'm like, Jesus Christ, are you really asking people to make lists?
00:44:23.000I think what you're saying is you want people to actually understand what they're arguing about, and the people that are going to actually understand what politics are all about are going to be really into it.
00:50:26.000Court in Russia has banned Moscow's Church of Scientology, saying it does not comply with the federal laws on freedom of religion.
00:50:32.000According to Russia's TASS news agency, the country's justice ministry brought the case against the church, which is heard in Moscow.
00:50:39.000So— So, Scientology, it says, why is Scientology banned in Germany?
00:50:44.000The German government does not recognize Scientology as a religion.
00:50:48.000Rather, it views it as an abusive business masquerading as a religion and believes that it pursues political goals that conflict with the values enshrined in German constitution.
00:50:56.000This stance has been criticized by the U.S. government.
00:50:58.000So it does, but it says, why is Scientology banned in Germany?
00:51:41.000His crazy is that he believes that if you see a car broke down the side of the road, you've got to go over and help them because you're a Scientologist.
00:51:58.000All my friends that have met him, I'm like, dude, the guy looks at you, he remembers your name, he's got like fucking laser beams shooting out of his eyeballs.
00:54:35.000I want to know why you think the way you think.
00:54:38.000And especially this subject, because I keep going on about how I think there's something about...
00:54:43.000Let's go back to this rat population density thing.
00:54:47.000What they did was they took these rats, they put them in a large container, a large area, and they only had a couple of rats and the rats just behaved like rats.
00:54:55.000And then as they ramped up, it mirrored essentially all of the problems you see in big cities.
00:55:55.000Not only do they walk faster, they talk faster.
00:55:57.000So if you listen to a certain amount of people form sentences, you can get a very accurate number, like really close, to what the population density or what the population of that area is, which is really interesting.
00:56:11.000Yeah, so there's a reaction that we have to each other.
00:56:14.000Too many people makes people walk faster and talk faster, and some people love that.
00:56:19.000And my friends that live in New York City that love it, one of the things they say is the city's got so much energy, so much energy.
01:01:10.000The latency is a killer, but the latency is not as bad if you have headphones on, if both of you have headphones on.
01:01:15.000The problem is oftentimes one person has speakers and the other person is using headphones and when the one person is talking, the way Zoom works and Skype works, It's very difficult for you to hear the other person talking while you're talking.
01:01:30.000It sort of drowns everything out and it fucks up.
01:01:34.000I've had some brutal conversations with people where they literally don't even hear what I'm saying.
01:02:25.000Yeah, yeah, and I'm Jewish mostly, and, you know, New York, New Jersey, and, you know, it's a stereotype, but, like, we're always talking over each other at dinner, you know, family, and my wife, she's a waspy person, a little more reserved, and I think the first time she came home to see my family,
01:02:42.000Like, Everybody's just yelling constantly.
01:02:44.000But to me, it's a very natural way to communicate.
01:02:49.000Yeah, to have a little overlap, right?
01:02:51.000And part of being human is understanding those cues.
01:02:55.000And when you intersperse the technology and the latency and the lags in there, it's a very different experience.
01:03:02.000And professional interviewers figure out how to do it because they're pros, but it's not normal.
01:03:08.000Yeah, you have to work with it, and it's difficult, and oftentimes professional interviewers, they actually use that to talk over each other.
01:03:15.000If you're watching CNN, if there's opposing viewpoints, oftentimes these fucking anchors just talk over people, and they don't let the person get their point out, and they also know that they only have seven minutes, and they're also working towards a soundbite.
01:03:27.000As much as they're having a conversation, they're probably more likely setting traps or anticipating outcomes and working towards some sort of gotcha moment, and this is...
01:03:40.000And they tell you if you get, you know, I've gotten media training, you know, to go on cable, right?
01:03:45.000And then what they tell you is before you go on cable, because you're only going to be on there for a couple minutes, you decide what you want to say, right?
01:03:53.000You distill it to a few quick talking points, and you just make sure to say that no matter what question you get asked.
01:05:00.000If I go on one of those shows and I have a viewpoint or a perspective that's definitely different than the person who has a perspective, I want to listen to that person.
01:06:03.000I'm trying to get it from their perspective.
01:06:05.000Sometimes people will say things, and I had an idea of what I believed before I started talking to them, and then they start talking, and I go, oh, that makes sense.
01:06:43.000If you ever concede that the other perspective might have some merit or that you don't have all the answers, then you're taking the L for your team.
01:06:54.000And people are going to be disappointed in you.
01:06:56.000And I don't ever want to be in that...
01:08:28.000The only way they have conversations is if it's an echo chamber and there's two people like Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo agreeing on something and they have some thing and they agree about and they talk.
01:08:50.000Or like an idea that's controversial, like your idea of a billion Americans.
01:08:54.000Like this is an idea that I think should be expressed in a long-form conversation because it's the best way to look at all your perspectives and see why you...
01:09:05.000And I think, you know, like right away, my perspective was I don't think that that's a good idea because that's too many people.
01:09:12.000But I see what you're saying and I listen to what you're saying and I go, oh, okay.
01:10:38.000I'd have a fat internet cable, and I'd hire someone to drill through the ground to whatever the fucking nearest point is, and I'd be on a mountain.
01:10:46.000Not that I don't like people, but I really, really like nature.
01:10:50.000I mean, I like to go, but the thing is, like, outside of the pandemic, my job involves enormous groups of people together, right?
01:10:58.000I'm a stand-up comedian, and I do these giant places where there's thousands of people, and then I do the UFC, so I do commentary, and there's thousands of people.
01:12:31.000And even though fishing tackle is very modern, using a spin casting reel, and you've got monofilament line, and these hooks that have been designed and engineered...
01:12:46.000There's something about catching a fish that ignites a primal part of whatever part of you that's left over from back when this was the only way you were going to survive is if you caught a fish.
01:13:01.000And it was probably when you were catching it with a net or with a stick or whatever the fuck they figured out how to use back then.
01:13:08.000That part gets ignited because it's a part of what we are.
01:13:12.000Also part of what we are is we lived in nature.
01:13:15.000Humans always lived in nature until X amount of thousands of years ago when agriculture and cities and condensed living, people were tribal and they stuck together and they were mostly hunters and gatherers.
01:13:30.000That shit is in our DNA, and it's very hard to get out.
01:15:18.000So we figured out that we can light corn chips on fire and then slowly dry out these sticks and get them to the point where they were flammable.
01:15:25.000And then take some wood from some areas where it doesn't get direct rain on it.
01:15:31.000And like underneath it was kind of dry.
01:20:04.000Well, it's weird, though, because it's like, I mean, this is like the worst thing, but, you know, it's so boring being on an airplane, and that's just what people want to do.
01:24:28.000We should all wash our hands more, probably, going forward, just like our kindergarten teachers told us.
01:24:33.000But it's been such an incredibly stressful time, and I will be fascinated to see when people start getting vaccinated, Like, how bananas do things get?
01:24:47.000Like, people are gonna be really excited to, like, get back out to the club, you know, to, like, have fun, go to shows, have just, like, huge parties.
01:25:58.000It's basically probably the same impetus, the same reason.
01:26:02.000I mean, people were locked up for a year or so, and it was a far more disturbing pandemic because it was killing really young, healthy people with powerful immune systems.
01:26:11.000Their immune system is actually attacking them.
01:26:13.000That was a really scary, dangerous time for this country.
01:26:17.000And the bounce back was appropriately wild, right?
01:27:00.000The problem that a lot of people have is that this was fast-tracked, and they get nervous about possible potential side effects.
01:27:13.000And we don't know what those are going to be.
01:27:14.000And then there's a lot of people that are very uncomfortable with the idea of getting very sick after they take the vaccine, which seems to happen with 80% of the people that take it.
01:28:02.000Yeah, I mean, well, I can't say, I don't know, you know, I mean, I've read the sort of report, the readout from Pfizer and Moderna, BioNTech, and they said there were very few serious side effects.
01:32:48.000If that is all it is, it's just you have severe chills and you feel like shit for a couple days, that is way better than getting the coronavirus and risking the potential death and side effects and long haul people.
01:34:38.000I would really like to not get COVID. Yeah, sure.
01:34:42.000But what if there's a similar situation with the vaccine?
01:34:46.000What if the vaccine, and this is not outside the realm of possibility, that the vaccine gives some sort of a side effect that's unintended?
01:35:00.000This is a completely new process, much faster than any process that we've ever experienced before when it comes to the development of vaccines.
01:35:07.000I mean, it's an unusually rapid development because they have this mRNA.
01:35:56.000I want to encourage people to take vaccines as a responsible person.
01:36:01.000But also knowing that the supplies will be short.
01:36:04.000If somebody doesn't want it, somebody else will take that dose.
01:36:09.000You know one of the best things in terms of outcomes is vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiencies are a huge part of negative COVID outcomes.
01:36:22.000I've seen some people, some studies about that, yeah.
01:36:25.000In one study, 84% of the people that were in the ICU had deficient levels of vitamin C and only 4% had sufficient levels of vitamin D. Vitamin D is a huge problem.
01:36:45.000And it's weird because we call it a vitamin, but it regulates so many things in the body and it has a significant impact on the immune system.
01:36:51.000But you never hear anybody telling you to supplement with vitamin D. You're not seeing this from any of the leaders, any of these politicians that are shutting things down.
01:36:58.000Even Fauci has said it recently that vitamin D does seem to have a pretty significant impact.
01:37:04.000But health experts, like people that study the mechanisms of disease and vitamin supplementation, particularly Dr. Rhonda Patrick had a A thing on her Twitter where she published a study that showed positive outcomes in COVID. Vitamin D is a huge factor.
01:37:22.000Are you supplementing with vitamin D? I am, yes.
01:37:25.000I mean, I don't want to, I don't know, just like one of those things.
01:37:28.000But I also, the thing I try to do, I try to make sure I'm going outside, like we were talking about before.
01:37:34.000I mean, I am not super read in on the vitamin D science.
01:37:40.000But I have heard this, and it also seems like a situation where there's no possible harm, right?
01:38:45.000I mean, obviously, it's important to do those kind of studies.
01:38:48.000But I do think that one thing we've seen throughout this pandemic is doctors are a little too hesitant to draw conclusions based on lower quality studies when that's the best evidence that's available.
01:39:03.000It's like, when you have a problem, you want to...
01:39:06.000These aren't lower quality studies that are indicating that vitamin D is good for your immune system.
01:39:09.000What it's saying is that there's no way to do double-blind, placebo-controlled studies on vitamin D with people with COVID. You'd have to give them COVID. It's a real issue, right?
01:39:18.000But what they are showing is that people with significant levels of vitamin D, people that have sufficient levels of vitamin D, have overall, the percentage of people that have a better outcome is huge.
01:39:31.000When you look at the number of people that have insufficient levels that wind up in COVID units, when you're looking at what vitamin D does, that's well understood, its impact on the immune system.
01:39:43.000It's weird to me that people don't take care of their health and don't actively make conscious decisions to make their body healthier, but are relying only on science to come along and give them something.
01:40:00.000When there's so much evidence that shows that you can significantly increase your chances for a good outcome if you do catch this disease and maybe even possibly ward off catching it with a stronger immune system.
01:40:16.000But yet, so many people aren't doing that.
01:40:18.000Well, and that's something we know about health in general, right?
01:42:46.000One of the richest, most technologically advanced societies that exist out there, but our population health is not great, right?
01:42:56.000Primarily because of what we eat and the amount of physical exercise that we do.
01:43:02.000I think in our lives and in our politics, it's not the subject of enough emphasis because it's less comfortable than kind of hoping for pharmaceutical breakthroughs.
01:43:15.000Although fortunately, we are getting some pharmaceutical breakthroughs, it looks like.
01:43:19.000I'm not picking on you, but you understand that the way people would criticize this They would look at you and look at the choices that you've made and say, this is crazy.
01:43:31.000This guy just wants to get a shot in the arm and doesn't want to do the other things that could significantly impact your health.
01:43:40.000You've decided to, for whatever reason, just say, I'm going to get this shot and then I'm going to be good.
01:43:48.000Whereas there's a lot of evidence that shows that you could increase your health.
01:45:18.000Lots of people have quit smoking over the years.
01:45:21.000But something that was helpful is that at that time in the history of our society, it was becoming kind of stigmatized.
01:45:31.000You know, like, you couldn't smoke anymore in a bar or restaurant.
01:45:34.000They were getting rid of, like, the smoking sections in the airports and stuff.
01:45:38.000So already before I quit, it was like I knew I was out there, like, on the margins, you know, like, standing outside in the cold and the pouring rain, being like, what am I doing?
01:46:21.000I don't know how much of that is accurate because I'm just basing it off that movie, but from the things that I've read, the articles about, like, they researched the actual chemicals that they're putting into cigarettes when they were making that movie, and it's based on a real scientist who actually was working for the tobacco companies and was worried about his life because he was testifying about these chemicals that they're putting into these cigarettes that make them even more addictive than just regular cigarettes.
01:46:44.000Like, if you take, like, American Spirits or one of those home-rolled cigarettes you can make, those are bad, but they're not as bad.
01:47:08.000Like, why do we have M&Ms in the office?
01:47:10.000Now, some people can just walk between the men's room and a stack of M&Ms and their desk all day, every day, and not stuff their face with M&Ms.
01:47:22.000But I never find myself sitting in my basement being like, what I ought to do right now is stop working, go walk three blocks to the store, buy a bunch of M&Ms, and eat a bunch of sugar and gross quality chocolate.
01:48:18.000HEPA filters and doing things that they can to prevent people from showing up at work sick, whether it is a COVID test for all your employers.
01:48:28.000I have a friend who owns a restaurant and she's implementing that and trying to do COVID tests for everybody that works there.
01:48:33.000Well, what they should have done was make testing much more available.
01:48:38.000Much more broad, much more widespread.
01:48:40.000But you don't understand it's complicated.
01:48:42.000It's like it's not that they shouldn't have done it.
01:48:44.000It's like they didn't have a test for it.
01:49:07.000But, you know, like some universities, because they have their own lab infrastructure, you know, have gone really big on testing their students.
01:49:32.000I think one good thing that may come out of this, if there is any good thing that would come out of this, is that in the future, if another pandemic arises, we'll be much better prepared for it.
01:49:40.000I think we'll be more accustomed to the idea, and people will take precautionary steps quicker than they did back in, you know, April.
01:49:49.000And I definitely own more little HEPA air purifier machines than I used to.
01:49:56.000People, they understand how they can get them.
01:49:58.000I mean, one of the more unfortunate things that happened was Fauci told people not to wear masks, and the masks aren't going to help you.
01:50:03.000And the reason why he did that is because he didn't want people buying masks and them not being available for first responders.
01:50:09.000Obviously, the problem with that is now you know that they're willing to lie if they think it's within everybody's best interest if they tell you something that's not true.
01:50:18.000And the problem with that is, of course...
01:50:20.000Then everybody's like, well, what the fuck?
01:50:22.000Now, how do I know when to believe you?
01:50:24.000Like, don't believe me back then, because I only said it back then because I didn't want you to buy them all up.
01:50:29.000But now that they're available everywhere, yes, you have to wear them.
01:50:32.000What I really hope they do, and I don't think they'll do it, but, you know, the military does an after-action report on something.
01:50:39.000You look back, not to point fingers, not to be mad, but to, like, try to understand, what did we do?
01:52:38.000And if you listened at that time, you know, you would know about masks, you would know about the efficacy of quarantines, you would know about aerosolization and ventilation and stuff like that.
01:52:50.000And we were just really slow and got to be smarter.
01:52:54.000Yeah, it definitely was not our finest hour, like you said.
01:52:57.000One thing that I think we've got to really talk about, Jamie, we wanted to talk about this before.
01:53:01.000There's a thing that's going around that it's a video clip that's been edited, and it's edited to make it seem like Bill Gates is saying that he's pushing this vaccine because it's extremely profitable, and that there's a 20 times the amount you put in,
01:53:26.000What he's saying is in vaccinating people and preventing illness, the health benefits to the economy overall has a tremendous impact in a positive manner and is explaining this with third world countries and he's talking about it purely from a humanitarian perspective.
01:53:50.000He's not talking about it from this profiteering vulture perspective It's a social prophet.
01:53:57.000He's saying it, and it's really disingenuously edited, and it was passed around to a lot of people.
01:54:04.000I watched the video, and I was like, who would fucking say that?
01:55:27.000I think the numbers that you ran through were if you had put that money into an S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, you'd come up with something like $17 billion, but you think it's $200 billion.
01:55:38.000Okay, so this is the distorted version.
01:55:43.000You can see in there that it's edited.
01:56:09.000When you take these vaccines, get them to be very inexpensive by making big volume commitments, have that right relationship with the private sector, Get the delivery system so they're really getting the coverage out there.
01:56:26.000And 20 years ago when we created these new multilateral organizations, Gavi for the vaccines, Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria, we didn't know they'd be successful.
01:56:37.000They've gone through lots of challenges about making sure the money gets there, making sure the efficiency is right.
01:56:43.000But as we look at upcoming replenishments for those, And we've got so much distractions politically that the international needs like this could get eclipsed if we're not careful.
01:57:01.000It's been $100 billion overall that the world's put in.
01:57:04.000Our foundation is a bit more than $10 billion.
01:57:08.000But we feel there's been over a 20 to 1 return.
01:57:11.000So if you just look at the economic benefits, that's a pretty strong number compared to anything else.
01:57:19.000The human benefit in millions of lives saved.
01:57:22.000So, you know, we're here with a pretty strong message that although all these other issues are very important, let's not forget about the great success in global health and maintaining that commitment.
01:57:34.000I think the numbers that you ran through were if you had put that money into an S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, you'd come up with something like $17 billion, but you think it's $200 billion.
01:58:00.000And, you know, people have edited that and they're passing it around like, oh, my God, this guy's a monster just wants to give you this vaccine because he wants to make money.
01:58:12.000There's this weird conspiracy that Bill Gates is some fucking demon that just wants to make money off of vaccines and he's pushing vaccines.
01:58:50.000You've got to listen to what he's talking about as the benefit for society.
01:58:54.000It's not just financial benefit from the companies that are making these vaccines.
01:58:59.000It's also the benefit for these children growing up and contributing to society, and that the more we put into this, the better it is for everybody.
01:59:06.000And what he's talking about is trying to think smarter about philanthropy.
01:59:36.000Some people I'm friendly with run called GiveWell, and they do all this kind of analysis.
01:59:40.000And so they show that giving insecticide-treated bed nets to people in West Africa to keep malaria off them, that's incredibly cost-effective.
01:59:51.000A group called Deworm the World, and they help kids in, I think, Central Africa with these intestinal worms that make it impossible to sort of be well-nourished because you've got parasites living in you.
02:00:04.000And it's a hard problem, right, to understand not just how can you help people, but what's the best way to help people.
02:00:11.000And, you know, what Gates is saying is that childhood vaccinations are really up there.
02:00:15.000They're high on the list of high return public health interventions because when you could save a kid's life, that does so much good, you know, broadly speaking.
02:00:25.000But it's bizarre that someone was willing to edit that clip and make it look like a completely different thing that he was saying.
02:00:31.000And that this is one of the things that's going around today, is that Bill Gates is somehow or another this evil person that wants to vaccinate everybody because he wants more money.
02:02:51.000If you can solidify your position within an ideology, like this ideology accepts me, I'm a part of this tribe, I'm going to say some shit, that guy's a fucking Nazi.
02:04:46.000And the emotional commitment that you have to it and the connection.
02:04:50.000Like Jamie Kilstein is a guy who used to be like a deep social justice warrior and then he got attacked by them and ostracized for like Not even anything that makes a lot of sense.
02:05:02.000But then was really kind of open about how crazy he was while he was doing it.
02:05:08.000He was like, I would post something on Twitter and then I'd be incessantly checking it throughout the day and walking down the street checking it and trying to respond and see who's responding to me and then feeling when someone was angry at you like, ah!
02:05:19.000And then like getting involved in that and...
02:05:31.000But what I do do is I'll follow a few people that are mentally insane, like literally genuinely mentally ill.
02:05:37.000They're intelligent people that have gotten lost in the Twitter web, and they're stuck.
02:05:43.000I'll go to their timeline just to reinforce that this is actually what's happening, and I'll see the degrading of their mental clarity over time, the fighting with people that goes on all day long.
02:05:59.000Literally, you look at their posts from the beginning when they start to when they end for the day, and it's 11 hours of fighting with people on Twitter.
02:06:07.000And you think about, what else could you have done with that time that would have been productive?
02:06:11.000Did you learn anything about people during this time?
02:06:18.000Go fucking get a pickup game of basketball going or something.
02:06:21.000What do you need to do that will give you some sort of a competitive feeling that instead you're risking your emotions and I think taxing your mental health?
02:06:47.000And so many people are involved in it.
02:06:49.000So many people are locked into these really weird, condensed conversations where you're getting what Alan Levinovitz calls processed information.
02:07:00.000And he's like, it's bad for you the same way processed food is bad for you.
02:07:54.000Right, and hard to just kind of step away from.
02:07:56.000I've come to have dialogue with Nobel Prize winners, with businessmen, with successful politicians, with a lot of interesting writers and thinkers and academics.
02:08:08.000Scholars, but then I've also gotten sucked into being mad that nobodies are dunking on me.
02:09:20.000But I do think a lot of Americans don't understand how Russian nationalists see the world, right?
02:09:28.000And they feel that there was a bait and switch after the Cold War, that it was supposed to be that communism was bad, that the Soviet dictatorship was bad, and that they liberated themselves from this bad regime,
02:09:45.000and that they were going to now have a better country.
02:09:48.000But then it flipped to America, quote unquote, won the Cold War.
02:09:54.000And then there was an ongoing process of anti-Russian American foreign policy that continued forward.
02:10:01.000And so that instead of disbanding NATO because the Cold War was over, it expanded, right, to the Czech Republic, to Estonia.
02:10:12.000You know, there was war in Yugoslavia against Russia's traditional ally in Serbia, all these different kinds of things.
02:10:19.000I don't, I don't really endorse this point of view.
02:10:23.000I mean, I'm not a Russian nationalist.
02:10:25.000But it's interesting to hear from Russian patriots, how they see this, that they feel that the United States, instead of saying, hey, congratulations, You're not under communism anymore.
02:10:43.000That we sort of doubled down, right, on geopolitical rivalry after then, and that they are just pushing back.
02:10:51.000So they're pushing back by undermining democracy and pretending to be various groups and having them meet up and compete against each other and starting conflict.
02:11:01.000Yeah, that's where you get into the flaws.
02:11:03.000You say, well, how does it help to be trying to sow racial chaos in the United States?
02:11:12.000So that's why I say, like, I don't endorse it.
02:11:14.000But I do think that Americans benefit from, I mean, not just Russia, but just, like, trying to understand what the world looks like to some of these other countries that are, like, the bad guys, quote-unquote, in our narratives.
02:12:41.000I mean, it's a question of, do they feel that we are actually helping them with their problems with their own government, or are we...
02:12:51.000I mean, you look at some of our friends in that region, the Saudis and the Emiratis and stuff.
02:12:59.000Those governments aren't so hot either.
02:13:02.000I don't know how they feel about wrestlers attending protests, but I'm guessing not that good.
02:13:10.000The Khashoggi thing is just fucking hot.
02:13:12.000I mean, have you, you know, Brian Fogel, the guy who did that documentary, Icarus, you know, he has a new documentary coming out called The Dissident about the Khashoggi.
02:16:42.000Right, but that's saying that the media is only going to produce things that get the most amount of views and not produce things of quality.
02:16:50.000Not produce things that they think are going to be interesting or intriguing.
02:18:03.000That maybe there's a way that with this idea that you have of...
02:18:22.000I mean, the idea is that it would be better to have a big aspirational goal.
02:18:30.000And so that kind of growth, that we are going to triple the population, that we are going to support people having bigger families or families at all, that we're going to be more open to immigrants, that we're going to build the infrastructure transportation-wise that it takes,
02:18:45.000that we're going to dedicate ourselves to being number one forever and not kind of slipping behind China and India.
02:18:52.000How does this help stop this polarization that we're experiencing?
02:18:58.000Because it gives us something to work on together, right?
02:19:02.000It's like going to the moon or facing down the Soviet Union.
02:19:06.000It's a project that right now for the past 10, 15 years, all of our politics is picking at the scabs of Of sort of division that exists in our society, which are real, you know, like,
02:19:22.000lifestyles are different, values are different.
02:19:24.000I mean, everybody knows that you go around.
02:20:10.000And like, don't we want to stay, number one, don't we want to have the biggest market, the biggest economy?
02:20:17.000So you think that it's ever possible, though, to, if we got big enough, we could ignore the influence of China?
02:20:24.000Do you think they would put that money aside?
02:20:26.000Because China's always going to be big.
02:20:27.000Well, I don't think you ignore it, but you are able to have the upper hand.
02:20:32.000Do you really think that we could ever get to a point where Marvel would say, you know what, fuck China, we're putting a Tibetan guy in there?
02:21:53.000It's a clever little way of being a bitch.
02:21:56.000Do you remember when the World Health Organization, there was a spokesperson for the World Health Organization being interviewed by this woman?
02:22:02.000And she kept asking them about Taiwan.
02:24:30.000Yeah, there was a video about all the different things they've done to films to cater to Chinese markets and how different they make these movies.
02:24:45.000I think that the more America has clout, the more we can say...
02:24:51.000Look, you have to say no to Chinese censorship if you want to be in the American market.
02:24:56.000I don't think that's going to be a realistic approach if we slip and fall further and further behind.
02:25:02.000But they don't know that there's Chinese censorship until after the fact we find out, well, Doctor Strange's mentor was actually supposed to be a Tibetan man.
02:25:42.000Because, you know, there's this, which I found distasteful, even though I'm a giant Tarantino fan, his portrayal of Bruce Lee is just not accurate.
02:26:00.000Tarantino, one of the rare directors with the power to demand final cut on his relatively expensive films, reportedly has no intention of re-editing the picture.
02:26:08.000Not for Shannon Lee, not for Chinese censors squeamish about the film's graphic violence, not for any reason.
02:26:13.000Yeah, he refuses to re-cut for the Chinese market.
02:26:16.000Yeah, and I mean, you know, I don't know.
02:26:47.000He's kind of doubled down on the criticism of that.
02:26:49.000But I don't think he was a Bruce Lee fan.
02:26:51.000I think if you're a deep fan of Bruce Lee...
02:26:55.000You could say, because of some things that he said, that maybe he was arrogant.
02:27:00.000I would argue that he's very confident, and one of the reasons why he's very confident is he was, at the time, the premier martial artist of the generation, and reintroducing martial arts, and also a pioneer of this eclectic style of martial arts, which was...
02:31:02.000Than looking at Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and saying, oh, well, these are movies about criminals in Southern California who say funny stuff to each other.
02:33:07.000There's a lot that we could do to have better transportation infrastructure in terms of pricing our roads, in terms of being smarter about how our commuter rail works, in terms of being smarter about how we locate houses.
02:33:19.000I mean, if you like to nerd out on transportation stuff, the book is in it for you.
02:33:25.000But it is true that this would be tough.
02:33:28.000That America does not have a great record at its civil engineering.
02:33:33.000Our projects are incredibly more expensive than what people in Europe and Asia spend on them.
02:33:39.000And getting control of that and executing things that really make sense would be challenging.
02:33:46.000Because when you look at our fast-growing cities, I mean, we've talked about Los Angeles, but, you know, you look at Atlanta, you look at Dallas, places that a lot of people are rushing to.
02:34:39.000But, you know, we're getting better at those kind of pollution things, right?
02:34:44.000The air and the water are much cleaner than they were a couple generations ago.
02:34:49.000We are, you know, even beyond like the electric cars and all that really good stuff, even our gasoline powered stuff has gotten cleaner, which is all really good.
02:34:58.000And, you know, so I don't think that we have sort of unmanageable waste problems or are going to in the future, particularly because you consider, look, if more people move here, it's not like there wouldn't be waste, like, back where they were coming from.
02:35:11.000Have you ever seen what happens in Los Angeles when it rains?
02:35:27.000He's from Argentina and he didn't understand that when you deal with rain and the runoff, you literally shouldn't be in the ocean because it's toxic.
02:35:37.000Because he basically got poisoned because he's in this water that's just filled with pollution because it's all coming down the LA River, which is really just a fucking cement tube.
02:35:46.000So it's in plastic and garbage and all the oil from the water, or the oil from the roads rather, because it never rains.
02:35:55.000And when it does rain, you're dealing with layer upon layer upon layer of oil that's just seeped into the city streets.
02:36:02.000And all that shit, all the pollution, all the brake dust, everything, it's washed off into the ocean.
02:36:09.000Imagine that with three times the number of people.
02:36:13.000This is like an area that I wish I knew more about.
02:36:16.000I know that in the part of the country where I live, that there used to be much, much more severe problems with wastewater runoff into the Potomac River, into the Chesapeake Bay.
02:36:27.000And there was a big effort to mitigate it, and I honestly don't know exactly what it was.
02:36:34.000This is like, you know, I got to do a good interview.
02:36:39.000It is doable, is I guess what I'm saying.
02:36:42.000A lot of East Coast rivers, the Hudson, around where I grew up, have gotten much cleaner over time by trying to manage the wetlands, things like that.
02:36:51.000I don't know what the Los Angeles situation is exactly.
02:36:54.000But so, I mean, this is definitely the area where I kind of take the most heat from people, is on these environmental, ecological-type issues.
02:37:08.000At the same time, I don't think we can have a solution for our society that involves shrinking and having fewer people, right?
02:37:20.000Or just wishing away the desire for economic development in the third world, right?
02:37:27.000Or developing world, I guess is the polite phrase for it.
02:37:31.000Either we are going to be able to come up with You know, the electric vehicles, the clean fuels, the next generation nuclear stuff, all those kinds of things that let us have a prosperous, clean planet or else we're not.
02:37:49.000But saying, well, we're going to like shrink our country or not allow people to move here.
02:37:55.000To me, that's like a kind of a fake solution.
02:41:15.000And they have to replenish that soil with nitrogen.
02:41:18.000They have to do different things to try to fertilize the ground.
02:41:21.000But there's an estimation of the number of years that we have of topsoil left, and I think it's less than 60. I think some crazy low number.
02:42:00.000But you can't feed enough people with fast food and all the things that people desire today with the structures that are in place in terms of delivering chicken to Chick-fil-A and beef to Jack in a Box.
02:42:12.000You're not going to get that through the same kind of regenerative agriculture because it doesn't yield the same amount of animals per acre.
02:42:19.000You'd have to have much more ground and you'd only have a certain amount of areas that are capable of doing this.
02:42:25.000You have to have areas that are growing a lot of grass naturally.
02:42:28.000You have to have areas where these cattle can live year-round.
02:42:32.000There's a lot that has to be in place.
02:42:34.000There's going to be a lot of issues about agriculture.
02:42:38.000This is not really about population growth, but about the sustainability of the food system and also I mean,
02:43:05.000Like, the processed food machine is an incredible business success story, but it's not good for us as people and probably not sustainable as a sort of soil management thing.
02:43:34.000But we are on the wrong side already of that curve, right, in terms of these, like, meat yields and factory farming and overuse of the antibiotics and stuff there.
02:43:46.000If we were to pull back on those kind of things that are problematic for completely separate reasons, that actually increases the amount of, like, grain and acres and stuff that's available because meat is this incredibly inefficient use of the land.
02:45:02.000No, I mean, we would be redirecting our agricultural product from external markets to an internal market.
02:45:09.000Yeah, but you're saying this like you're the Chinese government and not individual farmers and businesses that have set up a life of doing things a certain way.
02:45:17.000Like, this is not like you can have some national government mandate where the...
02:45:23.000They come in and tell you, this is what you're growing now.
02:46:56.000The other really weird thing is that we're the world's number one agricultural exporter.
02:47:01.000Number two is the Netherlands, which, you know, that's like a tiny-ass country, super-duper crowded.
02:47:09.000But that's because their farming operates on totally different principles from ours.
02:47:14.000Everything's in greenhouses, and the yield per, what do they call it, hectare over there is astronomical compared to what we do because it's a much more capital-intensive system.
02:47:26.000But, you know, they get staggering amounts of fruits and vegetables and things like that grown out of very, very small areas of land over there.
02:47:36.000So there's a lot of different things you can do with an agricultural system.
02:47:40.000But our way is just great at using land lavishly because we have a lot of land and not a lot of people want to work on farms.
02:48:54.000Yeah, but the growing of all that food is beneficial to society.
02:48:59.000And the reason why they received subsidies in the first place was this all post-World War II. You know the whole reason for it, because they thought that there was going to be legitimate—they really thought there was going to be a problem with the food supply.
02:49:15.000And so to subsidize the farmers meant that, listen, we're going to make sure that we put money into this so we have a stable food supply so that we have stockpiles.
02:49:26.000So there is a situation where something's wrong.
02:49:56.000But there has to be a way to use regenerative agriculture where there's a natural method, and the natural method is how the world works in terms of the wild.
02:50:09.000The animals chew the grass, they shit it out, it fertilizes, and because of that, in the wild you have rich soil in a lot of the places where there is grass and these animals grazing.
02:50:21.000You don't really have that when you beat that ground into the dirt, you know, literally and figuratively, over and over again.
02:50:29.000Some method has to be devised in order to make that soil...
02:52:21.000I was in Denmark one time, and so people took me to see a factory or some kind of facility where they were turning pig shit into biodiesel to run, you know, fuel trucks.
02:52:33.000And it was the most foul-smelling thing that I've ever seen.
02:53:02.000You know, figuring out a way to incorporate animal manure and agriculture and food waste and use that for composting and to have some sort of a natural way of living and dealing with the land.
02:53:20.000Now, look, I mean, I think these like agricultural questions are really, really fascinating for the sort of long term environmental picture of the planet.
02:53:31.000But I feel pretty confident that it is solvable.
02:53:36.000How would you solve the topsoil issue?
02:53:40.000I mean, as you say, it is difficult politically to get people to change anything, but we have a lot of money, right?
02:53:47.000There's a lot of federal policymaking going into the agricultural process, and we probably have to put more into it because, you know, you're going to ask people to change.
02:53:59.000And then, as you say, we've got to tell you, look, if you want to get this money, you have to move to these more integrated methods where you don't have the same crop in the same field year after year after year.
02:54:10.000What about people that aren't receiving subsidies?
02:54:12.000What about people that are just growing food and selling that food?
02:54:16.000How do you get them to shift and what do you do?
02:54:18.000Well, I don't think there's a big problem with the smaller, they call it specialty crop kinds of things.
02:54:26.000I mean, I might be wrong, but my impression is that these problems come from the large, like, one-crop enterprises that are sort of dominant in the Midwest.
02:54:37.000That's not historically how farms have been But it's very effective labor-saving technique.
02:54:46.000You know, because if everything's the same, you can run a giant tractor off it.
02:54:50.000But what could fix the topsoil issue on these enormous places?
02:54:55.000Well, you're going to have to find a real topsoil guy.
02:55:46.000The other question is, moving a bunch of people into the country that don't exist here right now, what would change with the quality of life for the people that live there?
02:56:00.000I mean, I talk a lot in the book about the studies of the, it's called Mario Boatlift, sort of influx of people from Cuba into Miami circa 1980. Scarface.
02:59:53.000I mean, they just- Well, you're talking about a billion people.
02:59:55.000You're not even just talking about the people that exist now.
02:59:58.000Well, you're talking about people having more kids.
03:00:00.000So just in Trudeau's government, they implemented a policy like this in Canada last year, maybe two years ago.
03:00:06.000They do a phase out, you know, like you were suggesting.
03:00:09.000So it's only people, I think it's like the bottom 60 or 70% of the Canadian income service from Get It.
03:00:15.000It's a very effective way to combat child poverty.
03:00:18.000The Trump administration, they wouldn't put it this way, but they, in their tax law, they expanded the child tax credit and sort of took a step in this direction.
03:00:27.000So it's, I think, less radical than you might think.
03:00:32.000I mean, if the Senate Republicans were doing it, at least moving in that way, It's a pretty liberal idea.
03:00:38.000I mean, Democrats, Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennett had a proposal that's similar to this.
03:00:45.000They call it the American Families Act.
03:00:47.000So there's a fair amount of political support for these kind of ideas.
03:00:51.000And I think it could do a lot to reduce child poverty, which is good.
03:00:55.000I think it's sad to have kids growing up in poverty and to strengthen families, which is something conservative people care about, as well as more progressive-minded people.
03:01:07.000Well, I certainly am in favor of doing anything that's possible to lessen child poverty and child starvation and hunger and child health care and making sure that people are taken care of.
03:01:18.000But when you're dealing with a billion people and you've got X amount of hundred dollars per month That's going to how many hundreds of millions of families?
03:01:33.000Well, but it's also more taxpayers, you know?
03:01:35.000I don't understand how you think this is only a few billion dollars.
03:01:38.000This sounds like it's in the trillions.
03:02:14.000I'd say, you know, you get rid of child tax credit, you get rid of some of the tax-deferred savings accounts, like the 529 for kids' college tuition.
03:02:23.000Because these are other ways the government funnels money to families with kids, but usually in regressive ways that mostly help rich people.
03:02:31.000A lot of people have a real problem with universal basic income and the same people that have a problem with welfare.
03:02:36.000They think that it reduces incentives.
03:02:40.000It reduces people's desire to do better and it increases their reliance on the state.
03:02:51.000I mean, I don't think that a modest supplement to people's incomes makes the difference between whether or not they, like, want to go out and work.
03:03:07.000Well, desperation is the mother of invention, right?
03:03:09.000When people are desperate, they do things that make them, you know, they work harder to try to get ahead.
03:03:16.000And a lot of times people with families...
03:03:18.000And they realize that, oh my god, I have to take care of this family and these people that I love so dearly, I'm gonna really bust my ass and work hard.
03:04:10.000I think you are still easily at the margin where going out and working and having some more money makes a real difference in your life and in the life of your family.
03:04:19.000And do you think that this will strengthen- Poverty.
03:04:24.000You know, also, economically speaking, right, it's like the value of having somebody work 70 hours a week as opposed to 40 as a low-paid retail worker, like, that's not high.
03:04:44.000I think the idea is that the best case scenario is that they work their way up.
03:04:51.000So they work really hard in the beginning and then they use that money to get themselves out of a jam and then they keep improving their condition.
03:05:00.000Obviously there's examples that we could both pull of pro and con.
03:05:04.000You know, where it works and where it fails miserably and, you know, people's lives fall apart and you don't take care of your children and they grow up all fucked up because their parents aren't home because they're working for a small amount of money.
03:05:15.000Look, I think that we have more cases where people are going to be able to work their way up if they, as children, are well taken care of.
03:05:24.000You know, if they have stable housing and a stable food supply and things like that.
03:05:35.000To let people sort of have that kind of upward mobility rather than saying, well, we've got to, like, crack the whip.
03:05:41.000Along the lines of what Bill Gates is saying is about making sure that children are healthy and that it pays off in the long run.
03:05:46.000Yeah, I mean, he's talking on the very low level of, you know, the developed world and basic vaccinations.
03:05:51.000But yeah, I mean, to say to somebody in Kenya, like, well, if you want your kids to not get sick and die, like, maybe go work a little fucking harder, man.
03:06:27.000The problem that people have with relying on the government also is that you're relying on the government to divvy up this money correctly.
03:06:34.000And then you're relying on the government with no auditing at all.
03:06:38.000You don't get an account balance sheet of where your taxes went.
03:06:43.000The government's going to do what they always do when you give them plenty of money.
03:06:48.000There's a lot of suspicion of the government in America.
03:06:51.000This is not a country of people who love the state, have a lot of confidence in government programs.
03:06:57.000I think at the same time social security is something that people really like and appreciate because actually cash benefits are much more transparent than the idea that like – sometimes people will say it's very fashionable in the business world to be like, well,
03:07:13.000we need these like complicated like job training programs and we're going to give people the skills they need.