The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1454 - Dan Crenshaw

00:00:00.000 Congressman, how are you, sir?

00:00:02.000 Hey, I'm doing well, Joe.

00:00:03.000 Good to see you again.

00:00:04.000 You look official, bro.

00:00:05.000 You look very official.

00:00:06.000 You have an American flag in the background.

00:00:08.000 You got books.

00:00:09.000 Have you read those books?

00:00:10.000 Be honest with me.

00:00:11.000 Yeah, that's a good question.

00:00:13.000 Some of them.

00:00:14.000 I mean, this one's like a congressional cookbook.

00:00:16.000 I'm not going to read that, so obviously.

00:00:19.000 Some of these I have, or at least I dabble in books.

00:00:22.000 I'll look over a book mostly.

00:00:24.000 I've definitely read my book.

00:00:25.000 That one's up there.

00:00:27.000 I've read that way too many times.

00:00:28.000 I hate reading it now.

00:00:29.000 And that's the one that's out right now.

00:00:31.000 Yeah, I wrote it.

00:00:31.000 That's the one that's out right now.

00:00:32.000 Yeah, that comes out, I don't know when we're posting this, but Tuesday, April 7th.

00:00:37.000 That's tomorrow.

00:00:38.000 Yeah, that's exactly when this will come out.

00:00:40.000 So, perfect.

00:00:42.000 Fortitude.

00:00:42.000 We need that right now.

00:00:45.000 And we do.

00:00:46.000 We do.

00:00:47.000 Now, the rest of this, I just kind of set up for this.

00:00:50.000 I found that weird-ass painting right there.

00:00:52.000 It's some flea market in San Diego back when I was stationed there.

00:00:56.000 It's a bunch of ships.

00:00:58.000 It looks like a horrible idea for a tattoo.

00:01:02.000 You know, sometimes people have those really bad old ship tattoos.

00:01:07.000 Yeah, I feel like there's worse tattoos you could get.

00:01:10.000 Oh yeah, I've got them.

00:01:12.000 What about the typewriter?

00:01:14.000 Do you use the typewriter?

00:01:15.000 Is that legit?

00:01:17.000 That is a legit typewriter.

00:01:19.000 That was my granddad's old typewriter.

00:01:21.000 I saved that.

00:01:23.000 They kept it in pretty good shape.

00:01:24.000 I didn't really have to do much restoring, but you can still buy the ink for that.

00:01:28.000 We used to have it set up in the house so when guests came over, they could typewrite a message.

00:01:33.000 So it's like a guest log.

00:01:35.000 It's kind of cool.

00:01:36.000 That is cool.

00:01:37.000 So what's your take on what we're going through right now, Dan?

00:01:41.000 For everybody in the future, this is a day...

00:01:44.000 It's basically a month into extreme coronavirus lockdown for the country.

00:01:50.000 It all started sort of in the beginning of March.

00:01:53.000 Now here we are in the first week of April.

00:01:55.000 And everybody's stir-crazy and weirded out by this, including me, and I'm sure you as well.

00:02:02.000 What is your take on this?

00:02:04.000 Wow.

00:02:05.000 Generally speaking, I remember the weekend where everything all of a sudden shifted.

00:02:09.000 It was the March 14th weekend.

00:02:11.000 I remember that weekend because it was my birthday.

00:02:13.000 And I remember how everybody was basically still going out to bars and restaurants and then all of a sudden everything changed.

00:02:20.000 The entire paradigm changed.

00:02:23.000 And I could go through a long timeline of how we got there.

00:02:26.000 There's a lot of finger pointing right now, a lot of opportunism.

00:02:29.000 The reality is...

00:02:30.000 A lot of us didn't, pretty much everybody, didn't know a whole lot.

00:02:34.000 And then we ended up in this situation where now, my general take on it, we are in a, what I would call a tactical retreat.

00:02:42.000 So I'm going to use a military term there to describe what we are doing.

00:02:45.000 We all of a sudden ran into a hail of gunfire.

00:02:49.000 And I think about this in military terms.

00:02:51.000 We're on a patrol.

00:02:52.000 We run into a hail of gunfire.

00:02:53.000 We're not really sure what hit us.

00:02:55.000 We have a basic idea.

00:02:56.000 We know who they are.

00:02:57.000 We know generally what the enemy is.

00:03:00.000 But we weren't quite sure how to combat it.

00:03:02.000 So we took a retreat, tactically speaking.

00:03:04.000 That retreat looks a lot like a lockdown.

00:03:06.000 Don't talk to anybody.

00:03:08.000 Don't touch anybody.

00:03:09.000 Maintain that social distancing.

00:03:11.000 Lock things down.

00:03:12.000 We have to slow the spread and allow our backup, our public health system to catch up.

00:03:18.000 At a certain point, we have to come out of that tactical pause.

00:03:21.000 We have to come out of that retreat and start engaging in the enemy a little bit.

00:03:27.000 Now, we do that slowly and we do it carefully.

00:03:30.000 I like to look at it that way as the conversation about how to reopen society.

00:03:34.000 At 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.

00:03:48.000 Now, there's some talk of when this is going to end, and I don't know how you even make that distinction.

00:03:56.000 How does one make a decision?

00:03:59.000 And 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.

00:04:15.000 When does that end and how does one decide when that ends?

00:04:22.000 Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to think about that.

00:04:24.000 From 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.

00:04:36.000 When the R is less than one, then you can start reopening.

00:04:40.000 So R being less than one means for every contagious person, they infect less than one other person.

00:04:45.000 Right now, that number's around just over two.

00:04:47.000 Okay, so there's an obvious spread that occurs.

00:04:52.000 That...

00:04:53.000 I think those are valid assumptions.

00:04:55.000 I definitely question using those as our standards.

00:04:59.000 I 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?

00:05:14.000 Because I think we have to come to terms with a very certain truth, which is we cannot indefinitely lock down.

00:05:20.000 Those costs are enormous.

00:05:22.000 And they're not just costs to our 401ks and our jobs.

00:05:26.000 I mean, there's a public health cost there, too.

00:05:28.000 You know, I speak with doctors here in Houston.

00:05:30.000 We don't have a huge case number in Houston.

00:05:33.000 Our hospitals are like 50% empty right now.

00:05:36.000 And 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.

00:05:44.000 So a lot of stuff isn't getting done from a public health side.

00:05:47.000 Also, there's, I think, the obvious public health crisis when people don't have jobs, there's divorce rates, there's suicides.

00:05:54.000 We have to really take all of this into account as we talk about when to reopen society.

00:06:00.000 Yeah, you and I privately had this conversation through text messages about the way reporters are using this moment to criticize Trump in ridiculous ways.

00:06:13.000 And one of them was This questioning of whether or not he should describe these drugs that have some promise, which many doctors are describing.

00:06:25.000 Hydroxychloroquine 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.

00:06:40.000 What 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.

00:06:51.000 He's not telling people to go take it.

00:06:53.000 He's not advocating it.

00:06:54.000 He's not pretending that he's some sort of a medical professional.

00:06:57.000 He's just talking about some things that show promise in the medical community.

00:07:02.000 What is your take on all this?

00:07:04.000 Because it's a weird situation that he finds himself in with the press, this very strange antagonistic position.

00:07:16.000 Yeah, you know, the press needs to figure out who they want to be.

00:07:22.000 It's actually like chapter two in my book.

00:07:24.000 It's called Who's Your Hero?

00:07:25.000 And that conversation is about who we think we should be.

00:07:29.000 Like, what kind of people do we think we should be?

00:07:31.000 What does it mean to be a good American, a good citizen?

00:07:33.000 The press believes it is their duty to only be adversarial to politicians, mostly conservative politicians.

00:07:41.000 They don't treat Democrats the same way.

00:07:44.000 And that is their job.

00:07:45.000 Okay, I wish they would treat all politicians the same.

00:07:49.000 To an extent, that is their job, to be adversarial, to question what is coming out of government.

00:07:55.000 But I would argue that their main purpose is to simply educate the public.

00:08:00.000 Educate the public with full context, full understanding of what's going on.

00:08:07.000 I think on that point they're utterly failing, to a huge extent.

00:08:11.000 I 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.

00:08:19.000 And they do.

00:08:20.000 They completely waste time.

00:08:22.000 I mean, how many reporters actually get access to the president?

00:08:24.000 I 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.

00:08:37.000 They play these gotcha games.

00:08:38.000 You know, they'll ask questions like, what do you want to say to people who are upset with you right now?

00:08:43.000 It's like, how is that a good question?

00:08:46.000 How is that news?

00:08:47.000 Right.

00:08:48.000 In the middle of the pandemic.

00:08:49.000 I mean, it's so utterly absurd and unnecessary.

00:08:54.000 I actually have a whole list of questions.

00:08:56.000 I don't want to read them all.

00:08:57.000 They're a complete waste of time, and I think they're failing us miserably.

00:09:02.000 And then there's the opportunism that occurs.

00:09:04.000 Listen, 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,

00:09:21.000 so there's been a change.

00:09:23.000 That's fine.

00:09:24.000 That makes total sense.

00:09:25.000 That provides context to the reader even.

00:09:27.000 It might be biased and whatever.

00:09:29.000 But to only do that indirect questioning with the president, just to try and play this gotcha game, it's not helpful.

00:09:38.000 It's not helpful at all and it's not informing anybody in the least.

00:09:42.000 You know, you mentioned the president talking favorably about the chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine.

00:09:50.000 And 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.

00:10:01.000 I might be misspeaking.

00:10:02.000 It's poison.

00:10:04.000 Yeah, it's an ingredient on fishbowl cleaner, fish tank cleaner.

00:10:07.000 And so they saw it and they ingested it, which was obviously a terrible idea.

00:10:11.000 Nobody told them to do that.

00:10:13.000 And then the media, instead of saying, wow, this is a shame that they did this, They blame the president.

00:10:20.000 And they blame the president for talking about what is a, at least anecdotally, a proven way to combat this disease.

00:10:28.000 We don't know through clinical trials whether in mass it'll actually work, but to express optimism over it.

00:10:36.000 It 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.

00:10:50.000 I mean, that's why I wrote this book.

00:10:52.000 The book is about outrage culture and this sort of weird new cultural need to just go after each other in the worst of ways.

00:11:02.000 There's a new ability to do that.

00:11:05.000 I 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.

00:11:18.000 They're hoping that they're going to create this viral video that's going to accelerate their career.

00:11:22.000 It's very self-aggrandizing.

00:11:25.000 And it's disturbing that...

00:11:27.000 There's not someone who stands out that does these sort of press junkets that doesn't do that.

00:11:34.000 Yeah.

00:11:35.000 I actually write about that exact point in my book.

00:11:38.000 What we've begun to do is reward this sort of, I would say, overly passionate emotional behavior.

00:11:48.000 So we've replaced sophisticated reasoning with outrage.

00:11:53.000 We've started to change who we actually view as heroes.

00:11:56.000 This is how I describe it.

00:11:57.000 We all have hero archetypes.

00:11:59.000 And we grew up this way.

00:12:01.000 There's fictional characters like the Jedi.

00:12:04.000 That's like a hero archetype or Superman.

00:12:06.000 We kind of look up to this person.

00:12:09.000 Or, like, real characters, like Rosa Parks or Jesus.

00:12:13.000 Like, 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.

00:12:29.000 We've sort of turned that on its head in our current outrage mob culture. 0.76

00:12:33.000 Like, we see somebody who plays the victim, and we cheer them on.

00:12:37.000 When in reality, what we used to do was see somebody who overcame adversity, who was a true hero, and then we cheered them on.

00:12:43.000 We've totally reversed that.

00:12:45.000 And so you actually get more points if you're more snarky, if you're meaner, if you're playing this kind of cheap shot game.

00:12:54.000 And in my book, I use this example of this group of veterans.

00:12:58.000 They were waiting for me outside of my office as I was going to vote.

00:13:03.000 And I knew something was off because veterans my age, we never wear the ball cap with the gold letters that say veteran on it.

00:13:12.000 We never wear that, but these guys were wearing that.

00:13:14.000 So that was my first sign that something was different about these guys.

00:13:17.000 But they just asked for a picture, and I figured that was it, and then we'd keep going.

00:13:20.000 But the second thing that was off was they weren't looking at the camera.

00:13:26.000 They were fiddling as I was posing for this photo, and that was strange.

00:13:31.000 And it turns out they were just getting their own video camera ready to record, and then they start following me and just go nuts. 0.91

00:13:36.000 They lose their minds. 0.93

00:13:38.000 Talking about Trump and, you know, betraying the country and just all this nonsense.

00:13:44.000 So they were just trying to have a gotcha moment with you?

00:13:47.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:13:48.000 This is what they do.

00:13:50.000 They're an activist group, and they'll corner people like me and try and get a viral video going.

00:13:55.000 And then it's up to me at that point to just understand what's happening and just kind of walk silently.

00:14:00.000 And I kind of engage with them in some funny ways.

00:14:02.000 But they were becoming extremely emotional.

00:14:05.000 I mean, their voices started to crack.

00:14:07.000 And what were they saying about you or to you?

00:14:12.000 How could you betray the country by supporting the president?

00:14:16.000 Things like that.

00:14:17.000 Mostly sloganeering.

00:14:18.000 This wasn't a deep conversation by any means.

00:14:21.000 But that's the point.

00:14:23.000 The point is that they're rewarded for that overly emotional, in motion, filming while walking type of scenario.

00:14:33.000 And then there's this whole deal where I have to get in the elevator because that's how I get to the votes.

00:14:39.000 I leave my office on the fourth floor in Cannon.

00:14:42.000 I take the elevator down to the basement and I walk across.

00:14:45.000 That's just my route.

00:14:47.000 But what they do is as I get into the elevator, they're like, no, he's hiding from us!

00:14:52.000 He's running away from us!

00:14:53.000 And the Newsweek writes up the same story.

00:14:55.000 There's this entire culture behind this notion that you have to use as much emotion as possible.

00:15:04.000 And express your anger in the most exceptional of ways.

00:15:08.000 Otherwise, it's not worth listening to.

00:15:10.000 But we haven't stopped as a culture, and we have to stop rewarding it.

00:15:14.000 And that's what I talk about.

00:15:14.000 We have to stop rewarding that kind of behavior so that it actually ceases to...

00:15:21.000 Well, they accomplished what they wanted to do.

00:15:23.000 We're talking about them right now.

00:15:24.000 Although you didn't give up their name.

00:15:26.000 Good for you.

00:15:27.000 But you talked about them, and that's what they wanted.

00:15:30.000 I mean, there's so many groups out there that are...

00:15:32.000 I don't even know if they have an endgame.

00:15:35.000 The endgame seems to be just get attention and shine the light on these atrocities or whatever they feel like is an atrocity.

00:15:44.000 It is attention.

00:15:45.000 It happens on both sides.

00:15:47.000 I'm pretty...

00:15:48.000 I'm careful in my book to actually criticize both sides on this one because I do see it in the conservative circles.

00:15:55.000 It's different.

00:15:56.000 The kind of outrage culture that happens in conservatism is certainly different and less widespread than happens on the left.

00:16:03.000 It is more about attention-seeking.

00:16:06.000 And I always tell people that.

00:16:08.000 If your main goal is getting more followers and more clicks, then You have to reevaluate what your priorities are.

00:16:17.000 And I worry about the activist community as well.

00:16:22.000 Activists sometimes don't want to win.

00:16:24.000 They don't actually want to win the argument.

00:16:26.000 And that should concern us.

00:16:27.000 Because, at least politically speaking, my goal is to win the argument.

00:16:31.000 And to win the argument, I have to actually persuade people.

00:16:33.000 That should be the goal, those lengthier conversations.

00:16:37.000 Again, 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.

00:16:48.000 Well, 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.

00:17:02.000 I'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.

00:17:12.000 There's so many people on the left now that want to silence people.

00:17:16.000 Freedom of speech was always a core tenet of what this country is based on, the ability to express yourself.

00:17:23.000 But there's so many people that want people deplatformed for having views that they disagree with or ideas that they disagree with.

00:17:31.000 And this is an enormous problem, obviously, in social media.

00:17:36.000 Well, 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,

00:17:52.000 hey, there's too much economic cost, we need to reopen the economy and get people back to work.

00:17:57.000 If it was things like that, Twitter was taking them down.

00:17:59.000 I don't know if they're still doing that, but I heard reports of it.

00:18:04.000 And on a broader scale, yeah, the attack against freedom of speech is by far one of the most concerning elements.

00:18:12.000 That concerns, I think, classical liberals, and if that's how you would describe yourself, I don't know.

00:18:18.000 To all of us in the political world, Joe Rogan's political leanings are like the great mystery.

00:18:23.000 And frankly, we kind of like it that way.

00:18:24.000 It keeps you out of the fray.

00:18:26.000 It's more of a mystery now because I said that I wouldn't vote for Biden, that I said I would vote for Trump over Biden.

00:18:33.000 All these people went crazy.

00:18:34.000 But let me be clear.

00:18:35.000 You know what?

00:18:36.000 I'd also vote for Whoopi Goldberg over Joe Biden.

00:18:39.000 I'd vote for Mike Tyson over Joe Biden.

00:18:42.000 I 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.

00:18:49.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:18:51.000 It's not an endorsement of Trump.

00:18:53.000 It is me saying, you shouldn't have a man who's clearly, clearly in the throes of dementia.

00:19:00.000 I 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?

00:19:16.000 Well, there's cognitive decline.

00:19:18.000 He's an older man that has mental issues. 0.70

00:19:22.000 And... 0.92

00:19:22.000 You know, not to be cruel to him. 0.92

00:19:24.000 He's suffering medically.

00:19:26.000 This is a real issue.

00:19:28.000 And the Democrats want to sweep that under the rug. 0.51

00:19:30.000 And Trump is already chewing him apart.

00:19:33.000 He's already dismissing him.

00:19:35.000 I 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.

00:19:44.000 And it's Trump saying...

00:19:46.000 He used to do it in a press conference and they asked him a question about something that Biden wrote.

00:19:50.000 He goes, Biden didn't write that.

00:19:51.000 He's like, that's a Democratic operative.

00:19:54.000 He didn't read it.

00:19:55.000 He probably doesn't even know what's going on right now.

00:19:57.000 And he's going to continue to do that.

00:19:59.000 And it's such a vulnerable point.

00:20:02.000 And I don't know why the Democrats thought it would be a good idea to take someone who's clearly got a problem.

00:20:11.000 I don't want to be mean to the guy, but we've all seen it.

00:20:15.000 That's not normal.

00:20:16.000 It's not normal to forget when he's talking about the creator and he literally loses what he's saying.

00:20:23.000 He's like, you know, the thing.

00:20:25.000 I misquoted the Declaration of Independence twice now.

00:20:29.000 It's a very simple document.

00:20:31.000 I don't understand.

00:20:33.000 There's a bunch of those things.

00:20:35.000 Like when he was talking about the cure and losing what he's saying, that you have to take care of the cure.

00:20:41.000 He's struggling.

00:20:43.000 The guy's struggling.

00:20:44.000 He's tired.

00:20:45.000 This is an extremely stressful process to run for president.

00:20:48.000 And 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.

00:20:57.000 Yeah.

00:20:57.000 And on a more...

00:20:59.000 From 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.

00:21:07.000 You know, there's plenty of...

00:21:09.000 Bad faith journalists out there who continue, and politicians, including Pelosi, who continue to repeat that Trump has the deaths of thousands on his hands.

00:21:19.000 I think that's a horrible, horrible overstatement.

00:21:21.000 I mean, to say the least, it's just fundamentally not true.

00:21:24.000 But 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.

00:21:33.000 And I go through a long...

00:21:35.000 I've recorded a podcast.

00:21:36.000 I almost have as many subscribers as you do now, I'm sure.

00:21:41.000 No, I don't.

00:21:43.000 Where I go through a timeline of what actually happened, right?

00:21:47.000 Let's actually look into this debate in an objective way of who knew what and when.

00:21:53.000 Because you can criticize people for sure, because hindsight's 20-20.

00:21:56.000 But it's important to put yourself in the moment and what we all knew at certain times when certain decisions were made.

00:22:03.000 And 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.

00:22:20.000 And Trump was ripped apart for that.

00:22:22.000 Biden ripped him apart for that.

00:22:23.000 Biden continued to rip him apart for that up until a couple weeks ago.

00:22:26.000 So these decisions saved countless lives.

00:22:31.000 And 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.

00:22:37.000 And we would be in a much different place right now.

00:22:39.000 To 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.

00:22:47.000 Well, I feel like we do need to repeat them.

00:22:49.000 It is obvious, but that's crazy that this is the guy that's running for president.

00:22:53.000 And 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.

00:23:05.000 I mean, anyone who's not in severe cognitive decline.

00:23:09.000 I mean, pick a person. 1.00

00:23:11.000 Shit, I'd vote for Hillary before I'd vote for him. 1.00

00:23:13.000 Literally. 1.00

00:23:14.000 I mean, I just think the poor guy shouldn't be in the position he's in.

00:23:18.000 I don't understand why they're doing that.

00:23:20.000 I mean, anyone else could have been Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg.

00:23:25.000 Pick a person.

00:23:26.000 They all would have been a better choice.

00:23:28.000 I mean, this is crazy.

00:23:29.000 And I don't know what their strategy is.

00:23:31.000 I don't know why they decided to do this.

00:23:34.000 It makes no sense to me.

00:23:35.000 It's very, very confusing.

00:23:38.000 Yeah, 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.

00:23:51.000 They don't think Bernie can win the general election.

00:23:56.000 I tend to agree with that, and I'm very much against Bernie winning the general election, but that's not the point.

00:24:04.000 The point is that the DNC didn't want that, and they made moves to make that happen.

00:24:12.000 The Democratic Party, as a whole, is trying to find out who they are.

00:24:18.000 I look back in time, and the Democratic Party, to me, seems more like a Labour Party.

00:24:25.000 And that changed over time into a highly progressive activist party, where the labor side of that is really just an afterthought.

00:24:35.000 And it has really become this sort of, well, a democratic socialist party.

00:24:42.000 When do you think that happened?

00:24:45.000 Very recently.

00:24:46.000 Because I wouldn't even describe President Obama as, I mean, he definitely paved the way for it.

00:24:53.000 He's definitely way more progressive than Clinton, but it appears to me that it happened very recently.

00:25:00.000 I have another theory as to how this happened.

00:25:03.000 I 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,

00:25:21.000 you know, coming up from the children of the 60s and that kind of revolutionary feel.

00:25:26.000 This 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.

00:25:38.000 I 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.

00:25:48.000 And it was almost like there was this sort of unspoken balance.

00:25:54.000 And I'm not even sure that they believed it themselves.

00:25:57.000 But over time, their young people did believe it.

00:26:00.000 And so now you have AOC, who I think truly believes these things, truly believes in the virtues of socialism.

00:26:05.000 I think Bernie believes in the virtues of socialism.

00:26:08.000 I think he's dead wrong on this.

00:26:10.000 But he believes it.

00:26:11.000 And I think a new generation of progressives are true believers in a way that I'm not so sure they were before.

00:26:20.000 And they're much louder because of their platforms on social media.

00:26:23.000 And they're able to change the direction of their party in a much more powerful way than I think they had been able to in the past.

00:26:30.000 And we see that in Congress.

00:26:32.000 To an extraordinary degree, where somebody like me now views Pelosi as sort of in the middle between moderates and extremists.

00:26:40.000 And, you know, 10 years ago, we would have described Nancy Pelosi as an extremist.

00:26:45.000 But now I view her as sort of center-left. 0.98

00:26:47.000 And 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.

00:26:58.000 So it's an interesting battle.

00:27:00.000 Do you think that this shift is because it seems like nothing works perfectly?

00:27:05.000 And this hasn't really been tried or implemented on a large scale in the United States.

00:27:09.000 Democratic socialism.

00:27:10.000 They don't think of it as socialism, the way Bernie describes it.

00:27:13.000 When you talk to him in person, it sounds very reasonable.

00:27:15.000 It 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.

00:27:28.000 Do 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?

00:27:45.000 Yeah.

00:27:46.000 Well, I mean, I would, of course...

00:28:00.000 I would also put it into this other way of thinking about it.

00:28:06.000 Yeah, you can put forward these...

00:28:10.000 We're good to go.

00:28:32.000 It would have drastic effects on everybody's 401ks, on pensions.

00:28:36.000 And these are working class people that own these things. 0.95

00:28:38.000 This isn't just the wealthy that they describe it as.

00:28:41.000 So on one hand, there's always a lot more layers to the policy that they put out than they're really letting on.

00:28:50.000 And there's a lot more second, third order consequences than they're letting on.

00:28:53.000 On the other hand, as far as it not being tried...

00:28:58.000 What they're describing is a fast path to the nationalization of production, owning the means of production, setting price controls.

00:29:09.000 And they talk about setting price controls.

00:29:12.000 Setting wages is price controls.

00:29:16.000 Setting prices is price controls.

00:29:18.000 I mean, we passed a bill out of the House, H.R. 3, which they claim lowers people's drug prices.

00:29:23.000 And these evil Republicans like us, we're all against it because...

00:29:27.000 Because we just don't want people to have low drug prices.

00:29:29.000 Of course, that's not true.

00:29:30.000 The reality is that when you analyze what it means to implement price controls, you lose supply.

00:29:38.000 That's just Economics 101. That has to be true.

00:29:41.000 It always is true.

00:29:41.000 That'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?

00:29:55.000 And what price to sell it at?

00:29:57.000 And that they would be a perfect utopia after that.

00:29:59.000 Well, of course it doesn't work, even for something as simple as farming and food production.

00:30:03.000 It doesn't work at all.

00:30:05.000 People starved as a result.

00:30:07.000 And so it's even more unlikely that it would work for more complicated parts of the economy, like wages and drug prices.

00:30:13.000 Because 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.

00:30:24.000 And 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.

00:30:30.000 And what I tell people is, Affordability is definitely important, and we should continue to tackle that problem, and there are ways to do that.

00:30:39.000 But the thing has to exist before you can afford it.

00:30:42.000 It has to actually exist.

00:30:44.000 Can I pause you for a second there?

00:30:45.000 How do you implement that without putting a cap on the amount that a drug can cost?

00:30:53.000 I mean, how do you make it more affordable?

00:30:56.000 Well, there's other bills that we're in favor of that do that.

00:31:02.000 One way is improve the way that generic drugs get to market.

00:31:07.000 Just like any innovation, there's a patent on it.

00:31:10.000 Once that patent ends, what happens is some pharmaceutical companies do take advantage of the system.

00:31:15.000 Maybe they continue to put out different drugs that are slightly different than the last one.

00:31:19.000 It extends their patent.

00:31:22.000 Or they'll actually pay off generic manufacturers to not produce it.

00:31:27.000 So there's a lot of these little loopholes that we can actually tackle surgically and make sure that doesn't happen.

00:31:32.000 We also have to remember, a lot of these stories are anecdotal.

00:31:40.000 They are about a few different drugs.

00:31:42.000 And 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.

00:31:58.000 And so how do we do that?

00:32:00.000 Well, I mean, there's ways.

00:32:01.000 There's ways to reinsure it at a certain cap.

00:32:04.000 So 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.

00:32:18.000 There's more complicated ways to do it with the way that Pharmacy companies do rebates with the insurance companies.

00:32:27.000 That gets into a really complicated discussion.

00:32:29.000 But there's ways to do that, for instance, for insulin.

00:32:32.000 That was a Republican bill that we tried to pass in ENC that got shot down.

00:32:36.000 But it would have driven down prices for something like insulin.

00:32:40.000 Was there anything else attached to that?

00:32:42.000 I mean, why did it get shot down?

00:32:43.000 That was just an amendment.

00:32:44.000 Because people don't understand it.

00:32:46.000 Listen, I think Democrats...

00:32:49.000 They love the idea of these very simple fixes.

00:32:52.000 We want things to be cheaper, so they will just be cheaper by law.

00:32:56.000 We want people to make more money, so we will just make the minimum wage $15.

00:33:00.000 We'll just make it that way.

00:33:02.000 And everything will be fine.

00:33:04.000 There'll be no consequences to that.

00:33:05.000 No second and third order effects.

00:33:07.000 But there are second and third order effects.

00:33:09.000 And when we ignore those second and third order effects, we ignore them at our peril.

00:33:12.000 And in the case of the $15 minimum wage, well, you can't ignore the fact that companies are just going to hire less people.

00:33:18.000 Their budget doesn't change just because you change the minimum wage.

00:33:22.000 With respect to drug innovation, they just won't invest in something.

00:33:27.000 And 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.

00:33:37.000 I can't remember the average on top of my head, but it's enormous, in an enormous amount of time.

00:33:42.000 And so you're not going to get somebody to take that risk if there's not any payoff at the end.

00:33:48.000 And I think that's what we forget.

00:33:50.000 We have to balance that quite a bit.

00:33:53.000 I would also remind everybody of this with respect to the drug price discussion.

00:33:57.000 That bill, that H.R. 3 bill, it won't become law because the Senate won't take it up and the President won't sign it.

00:34:03.000 But if it did, it wouldn't hurt big pharma.

00:34:06.000 I think Democrats would like to believe that it would hurt big pharmaceutical companies.

00:34:10.000 It wouldn't.

00:34:11.000 It 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.

00:34:21.000 These startups start it and then they get bought out by the bigger companies.

00:34:24.000 That's sort of how the system works and it's a very dynamic system.

00:34:28.000 It's why we are by far the number one innovator in the world.

00:34:31.000 No other country innovates like we do.

00:34:33.000 They don't do the research like we do.

00:34:35.000 If 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.

00:34:46.000 I can relate that back to the coronavirus discussion too, because there's a big discussion about, you know, should we have Medicare for All?

00:34:55.000 Doesn't coronavirus prove that everybody should have free healthcare?

00:35:00.000 And again, what I have to remind everybody is, If we had Medicare for All, what we're basically talking about are price controls.

00:35:08.000 Because Medicare already pays below average payment for anything.

00:35:13.000 For whatever service, for whatever doctor visit.

00:35:15.000 It's about 60-70% on the dollar.

00:35:19.000 What does that mean?

00:35:20.000 Can I stop you right there?

00:35:20.000 Medicare is available for who right now?

00:35:25.000 Seniors.

00:35:26.000 Medicare is a senior program.

00:35:28.000 So what age does it kick in?

00:35:30.000 Is it 65?

00:35:33.000 I believe so.

00:35:34.000 Yeah, I don't want to confuse it with Social Security.

00:35:36.000 So 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.

00:35:50.000 Yeah.

00:35:53.000 We could even debate the merits of Medicare on its face.

00:35:58.000 But Medicare for All would be available for everybody.

00:36:01.000 Now, 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?

00:36:16.000 Okay, so once you fix prices...

00:36:20.000 Well, imagine this.

00:36:21.000 Imagine if the government said that your podcast could only take $100 per ad and that was just the price fix from now on.

00:36:30.000 What incentive would you have to really expand your audience?

00:36:34.000 What incentive would you have to keep going or expand the business?

00:36:37.000 You wouldn't be able to.

00:36:39.000 It's similar under any industry.

00:36:41.000 Once you fix that price, you're going to reduce the supply that goes into it.

00:36:46.000 Can I stop you on that analogy?

00:36:48.000 Here's the problem with that.

00:36:50.000 There would have to be a reason why they would say that I could only get $100 per ad.

00:36:54.000 The 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.

00:37:02.000 And the idea is that healthcare should be something that we provide so many services to people that we are united, right?

00:37:10.000 We're the United States of America.

00:37:11.000 We're supposed to be a gigantic community.

00:37:14.000 And 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.

00:37:22.000 We would like everybody to do their share, and we would like everybody to chip in so that this is possible.

00:37:28.000 But there's a big difference between that and fixing the price on an ad.

00:37:34.000 Well, no, but economically there's no difference.

00:37:36.000 Morally there is, and I agree with you morally.

00:37:38.000 We have the same goal of getting everybody adequate care.

00:37:42.000 But from an economic standpoint, my point still stands, and you can apply that to any industry.

00:37:48.000 I 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.

00:37:56.000 The reason I don't describe it as a...

00:37:58.000 It's not in your...

00:37:59.000 It is both a moral and an economic issue.

00:38:03.000 For my argument that you will reduce supply, that is fundamentally true.

00:38:09.000 It is fundamentally true.

00:38:10.000 We see it in other countries.

00:38:11.000 It'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.

00:38:17.000 And actually, I have them here.

00:38:18.000 I could take the time to pick them up.

00:38:20.000 But I'll give you the bottom line up front.

00:38:23.000 We have...

00:38:24.000 Overwhelmingly, per capita, more ICU beds in this country than any other Western country.

00:38:31.000 Overwhelmingly, per capita, we have more ventilators than any of these other people.

00:38:35.000 We're all freaking out right now because we're worried about our ventilators and our ICU beds.

00:38:40.000 On a per capita basis, our system has way, way more than the UK, than Italy, than Spain, than Germany, all of them.

00:38:48.000 Like orders of magnitude more.

00:38:51.000 Okay, so Also, we're the ones who innovate.

00:38:55.000 I mean, the vast majority of research and development, new drugs that come out, that comes from this country.

00:39:00.000 So these are facts that we can't escape.

00:39:02.000 If we do price controls, and Medicare for All is fundamentally a system of price controls.

00:39:07.000 If we do that, economically speaking, we absolutely will reduce supply.

00:39:12.000 Now, I understand the moral argument you're making, which is we still want to help people.

00:39:16.000 Yes, we should.

00:39:16.000 We should be looking for the ways to do that.

00:39:18.000 But 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.

00:39:26.000 If 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.

00:39:36.000 Can I pause you there?

00:39:37.000 What you're saying makes a lot of sense.

00:39:39.000 Is there a way to do both?

00:39:41.000 Is 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?

00:39:56.000 That's certainly the goal, right?

00:39:58.000 And that should be the goal.

00:39:59.000 And 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.

00:40:07.000 I've come to believe that our goals on immigration are actually not the same.

00:40:10.000 So it's hard to compromise.

00:40:12.000 On healthcare, they should be the same.

00:40:13.000 Because we want everybody to have access to quality healthcare.

00:40:17.000 Now, they have a very different way of getting to that point.

00:40:20.000 We have probably a much more complicated...

00:40:22.000 We recognize how difficult it is to get to that point while also ensuring that we maintain quality and innovation.

00:40:31.000 What I'm working on personally is the primary care side of things.

00:40:36.000 So primary care doctor, that's your first point of contact in healthcare.

00:40:40.000 And the system that I think works best for that is direct primary care.

00:40:44.000 So direct primary care basically means that you, Joe, you're a doctor.

00:40:48.000 You can handle about 250, 300 patients at a time.

00:40:52.000 They all pay you a subscription fee of about $75 a month, and they have full access to you.

00:40:58.000 So it's like less than a cell phone bill.

00:40:59.000 This already exists.

00:41:00.000 This model is prevalent.

00:41:01.000 It's growing.

00:41:02.000 I would like to see it grow much faster.

00:41:04.000 Okay, how do you do that?

00:41:05.000 Well, we can't subsidize lower income people in order to do that.

00:41:10.000 Now, how we do that is very complicated.

00:41:11.000 That's what I'm working out within our complicated system.

00:41:15.000 But that's an idea to make that free market model actually take off.

00:41:21.000 So 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.

00:41:28.000 And you have access to preventive medicine, you have access to telemedicine, you actually have a doctor-patient relationship.

00:41:35.000 That makes it a lot easier to start solving the rest of the problem, making our insurance market more competitive, putting more choice in it.

00:41:43.000 Directly subsidizing those who need it, but in a way that looks a lot more like Medicare Advantage.

00:41:48.000 So Medicare Advantage is a part of Medicare that basically forces competition and choice between insurance companies.

00:41:54.000 It came out to be a lot cheaper than we originally thought it would in the early 2000s when this thing was created.

00:41:59.000 This was a Republican plan because there's certain foundations that I think we have to adhere to anytime we want to problem solve.

00:42:06.000 Choice and competition are among them.

00:42:08.000 You can't escape those things.

00:42:10.000 And 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.

00:42:22.000 And because the other thing I push back on a little bit is the health care is a right statement.

00:42:32.000 And 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.

00:42:42.000 And it's hard to call something a right when that right requires the service of somebody else.

00:42:46.000 Don't we already do that?

00:42:48.000 Don't we already do that with the firemen?

00:42:50.000 Don't we do that with the police department?

00:42:51.000 Don't we do that with public schools?

00:42:54.000 Not exactly.

00:42:56.000 No.

00:42:56.000 I mean, we have public services that...

00:42:58.000 I would distinguish those public services from something like...

00:43:02.000 A direct point of care.

00:43:05.000 And I would distinguish them to an enormous extent.

00:43:07.000 And here's why.

00:43:09.000 You can add a few hundred thousand more people to the nation's population and it doesn't change the mission of the military.

00:43:18.000 It doesn't take anything away from them.

00:43:21.000 But 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?

00:43:33.000 Because there's only a select number of doctors.

00:43:35.000 And 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.

00:43:43.000 I actually never finished that point.

00:43:46.000 The 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.

00:43:54.000 They're not going to invest in that extra ICU bed.

00:43:56.000 They're not going to buy those extra ventilators.

00:43:58.000 They're not going to hire those other doctors. 0.88

00:44:00.000 A doctor doesn't want to be a doctor because they don't make the amount of money that they thought they would make.

00:44:04.000 They're doing extra work because there's more people who now have access to them, but there's less of them.

00:44:10.000 So wait lines are huge and they're seeing multiple more patients a day.

00:44:14.000 Doctor burnout increases quite a bit.

00:44:16.000 That's the quick answer as to why that happens.

00:44:20.000 Does that kind of answer your question?

00:44:22.000 It's getting really deep on this.

00:44:24.000 Yeah, the human right issue.

00:44:26.000 We kind of moved around with that.

00:44:29.000 The idea that it's different than the fire department or the police department.

00:44:34.000 Well, it's not a right either, actually.

00:44:35.000 The fire department's not necessarily a right as we would describe it.

00:44:39.000 But it's a public service that's provided to everyone.

00:44:42.000 Yeah.

00:44:44.000 It 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.

00:44:52.000 But wouldn't the result be the same if it's provided for everyone?

00:44:56.000 Not from a practical standpoint, just because it's much easier.

00:44:59.000 Again, 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.

00:45:10.000 Does that make sense?

00:45:12.000 I think if we're trying to compare them in that sense, that non-rival attribute matters quite a bit.

00:45:22.000 If I'm describing that correctly.

00:45:24.000 So what you're saying is because competition is necessary with medical innovation and also doctors profit off of being exceptional.

00:45:34.000 So they have incentive to be exceptional.

00:45:38.000 No, no.

00:45:39.000 What I'm saying is if you have...

00:45:41.000 If you have 10 doctors that are serving a community, every time that doctor is serving somebody, it means somebody else can't see them.

00:45:49.000 Well, isn't that just a signal that we need more doctors and more hospitals?

00:45:53.000 It is.

00:45:54.000 They're understaffed?

00:45:56.000 It would be, yes.

00:45:57.000 But I'm saying that's how it's different from a fire department, which is sort of lying in wait for a fire to occur.

00:46:02.000 Well, if there was more fires...

00:46:05.000 Yeah, but just unlikely most of the time.

00:46:07.000 I'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.

00:46:20.000 And you kind of just said it yourself.

00:46:23.000 It would be a signal for there to be more doctors, which is why the free market price points are so important.

00:46:32.000 Because the only way to signal that is to actually, that demand raises prices.

00:46:39.000 When 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.

00:46:45.000 I would say that they've tried that in the past.

00:46:48.000 It never works.

00:46:49.000 It never, ever works.

00:46:51.000 The 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.

00:47:02.000 And so it's not just healthcare that this is a problem, it's It's every aspect of society.

00:47:07.000 So if I can go back to what you were saying earlier.

00:47:09.000 So 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.

00:47:18.000 Let'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.

00:47:24.000 And you're just looking at the first step of the problem.

00:47:28.000 You're not looking at the secondary or tertiary issues.

00:47:33.000 Instances are things that are going to go sideways once you do implement that first step.

00:47:37.000 Is that what you're saying?

00:47:39.000 That's 100% what I'm saying.

00:47:42.000 Socialism leaves out some very important things like human nature, for instance, and this notion that we need incentives.

00:47:54.000 Socialism doesn't believe in incentives, doesn't believe that we need incentive to do things.

00:47:59.000 There's this utopian belief among the hardcore socialists that humans will act in this kind of philanthropic manner, no matter what.

00:48:11.000 Like, we're going to do the most amount of work, even if that reward is overwhelmingly taken away from us and redistributed.

00:48:17.000 But of course, that's not how it would actually function in reality.

00:48:20.000 You would start to It just wouldn't, right?

00:48:24.000 Now, 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.

00:48:32.000 You pretend to pay us, we'll pretend to work, right?

00:48:34.000 That was the saying from the Soviet Union.

00:48:38.000 I think we intuitively understand that.

00:48:40.000 And when that happens, again, the same thing with Medicare for All.

00:48:44.000 If you have price controls, your incentives change.

00:48:47.000 And if we're not really serious about understanding that aspect of these policies, then we're not thinking through them correctly.

00:48:56.000 And I understand a lot of Democrats would say, well, it's Medicare for all, it's not socialism.

00:49:01.000 And 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,

00:49:18.000 which means that you now have a right to somebody else's services.

00:49:20.000 These are things that have been proven not to work.

00:49:25.000 And I think we have to understand that as we try to move towards the mutual goal of getting everybody access to healthcare.

00:49:33.000 Well, it doesn't work with everything, but doesn't that work with the fire department?

00:49:37.000 Isn't the fire department, in a lot of ways, a socialist institution?

00:49:43.000 No, no.

00:49:44.000 Again, I still say it is not because it is not under any obligation to serve everybody that demands its service, right?

00:49:52.000 It's there for specific emergency service as a public good.

00:49:56.000 But it's there for fire.

00:49:57.000 If there's a fire, they come in and help you.

00:50:02.000 There's not a financial incentive for them to do so.

00:50:07.000 Right, but on a practical level, though, imagine the scaling that has to occur if you're doing that with medical care.

00:50:17.000 And I think that's the difference, both from an economic point and a practical standpoint.

00:50:23.000 You're talking about socialism overall, not just involving medicine.

00:50:29.000 You're talking about socialism in general, and I'm saying, isn't the fire department an example of socialism that works?

00:50:36.000 Well, it's definitely not an example of socialism.

00:50:38.000 I 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.

00:50:47.000 Right, but they're funded by the people.

00:50:49.000 It's funded by people overall.

00:50:51.000 It doesn't cost people money to use them, and the people have these as a basic part of our society and our civilization.

00:51:00.000 No, I understand that.

00:51:00.000 And I have no problem with that.

00:51:02.000 I just would not call them socialists.

00:51:03.000 What would you call the fire department?

00:51:05.000 How does it get funded?

00:51:07.000 It's a public good.

00:51:08.000 How does it get funded?

00:51:10.000 It's a public good.

00:51:11.000 It's funded by the public.

00:51:13.000 But it's not relying on the tenets of socialism to function.

00:51:18.000 And so now we're kind of having a discussion of definitions.

00:51:23.000 And this is an important discussion to have because...

00:51:29.000 Well, even Bernie Sanders doesn't call it socialism.

00:51:32.000 He'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.

00:51:42.000 Yeah.

00:51:43.000 There's a lot in that.

00:51:45.000 So I think Bernie, yes, he does say democratic socialism.

00:51:48.000 I 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.

00:51:59.000 Elizabeth Warren talked about the same things.

00:52:01.000 Now, we really are talking about nationalizing things.

00:52:03.000 When you're talking about mass price controls across all industries and wage controls, you really are talking about more of an actual socialism.

00:52:12.000 Again, 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.

00:52:23.000 That is a public good.

00:52:24.000 We've never, in our culture, in our economics, we've never defined these things as socialist institutions.

00:52:30.000 A socialist institution effectively means you're seizing the means of production and you're forcing everybody into a centralized planning state.

00:52:41.000 You're telling people what they will earn and what you will pay them, how much they can sell.

00:52:46.000 You start to take more control over the economy.

00:52:49.000 A lot of the policies set out by Bernie Sanders are movements in that direction.

00:52:53.000 The fire department is really not.

00:52:56.000 Again, that is a public service.

00:52:58.000 It has a defined budget.

00:53:01.000 It has a defined role.

00:53:07.000 It doesn't meet any of those other attributes or elements that I describe when I describe what a socialist is.

00:53:13.000 And so this gets into another question, like, well, maybe Bernie just means the Nordic countries, right?

00:53:18.000 And, 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.

00:53:28.000 We'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.

00:53:37.000 When we look at their regulatory standards, they're quite liberal.

00:53:41.000 When we look at their corporate tax rates, it's very low.

00:53:44.000 They don't have a minimum wage in many cases.

00:53:48.000 And so, you know, they're not socialist countries.

00:53:50.000 What they do have is a very generous welfare state.

00:53:56.000 And even that is different than socialism.

00:53:59.000 It's a giant welfare state.

00:54:00.000 Now, I'm still against that in many ways.

00:54:02.000 I think there's consequences to that giant welfare state that they now have to suffer with.

00:54:09.000 As 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.

00:54:20.000 We see the same thing out of Israel.

00:54:21.000 We see the same thing out of India.

00:54:23.000 It used to be much more deeply socialist countries.

00:54:26.000 A 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.

00:54:39.000 When you say public good, right?

00:54:41.000 This is what you feel that the fire department is.

00:54:43.000 It's a public good, right?

00:54:45.000 Do you think that it's possible to implement something like that in regards to medical care?

00:54:52.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:52.000 I mean, so this is a discussion.

00:54:54.000 If we get our definition straight, we're just saying, okay, we just want another public good, and it's medical care.

00:54:58.000 So it's a more accurate way of describing it.

00:55:01.000 I think people don't care what it's called, right?

00:55:03.000 We just want healthcare.

00:55:05.000 Yeah.

00:55:06.000 Right, but then we get back to the discussion we had before.

00:55:09.000 Okay, what if we did that?

00:55:10.000 Well, there's a cost to it, and it's a hell of a lot more than the fire department and police department.

00:55:15.000 The cost, by most estimates, is in the mid-30-something trillion dollars.

00:55:21.000 Per year?

00:55:22.000 That's a cost for over 10 years, so about $3.5 trillion per year.

00:55:27.000 So that's basically doubling our budget just every year.

00:55:32.000 That's in addition to what we already spend.

00:55:34.000 Okay, so that's additional federal spending.

00:55:36.000 Some people try to massage those numbers and say, oh, but that's actually cheaper than what we have now if you add it all together.

00:55:43.000 That is false.

00:55:45.000 That is completely false.

00:55:46.000 Again, I have a whole podcast where I actually...

00:55:48.000 I interviewed the guy who made that study, the economist who did that study.

00:55:53.000 And that's not a controversial study.

00:55:54.000 Everybody basically agrees.

00:55:56.000 Elizabeth Warren's plan was 50-something trillion dollars. 1.00

00:55:59.000 That's adding what we already spend to the new spending that would have to occur.

00:56:02.000 So what does that mean in practice?

00:56:04.000 It means doubling or tripling your taxes, unless we try to deficit spend it, which I think would be crazy.

00:56:10.000 So it means doubling or tripling your taxes.

00:56:12.000 And then the question is, okay, fine.

00:56:14.000 Well, I do want to double or triple my taxes.

00:56:15.000 I mean, some people will say that.

00:56:16.000 I don't actually believe them.

00:56:18.000 I bet once they got their taxes, they would totally change their mind.

00:56:21.000 But let's say they're totally into it.

00:56:23.000 Let's say they actually want to do that.

00:56:26.000 Then you have the second and third order consequences, which is, okay, what are you getting for this?

00:56:30.000 What is this new utopia that we really live in where healthcare is free?

00:56:35.000 And 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.

00:56:50.000 So if we're doing that, we're drastically cutting prices that we pay doctors and hospitals.

00:56:56.000 If 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.

00:57:05.000 So we're losing those quality points.

00:57:08.000 Again, so how do you get people care?

00:57:10.000 Well, the main problem we have with healthcare in this country is that it costs too much.

00:57:15.000 That's fundamentally the problem.

00:57:17.000 It is too costly.

00:57:20.000 And so from the Republican side, what we'd rather do is actually target the source of the problem, make it easier to get insurance.

00:57:27.000 Because right now, I mean, you know, it's for so many Americans, that insurance is just too expensive.

00:57:33.000 If you have it through your employer, it's usually pretty good.

00:57:36.000 People are pretty happy with that.

00:57:38.000 But 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.

00:57:48.000 Then you can still protect people with pre-existing conditions.

00:57:51.000 We like things like either high-risk pools at the state level or reinsurance programs.

00:57:57.000 You can continue to make improvements to the system that make it affordable for people.

00:58:08.000 Sorry, broke up there for a second. 0.75

00:58:10.000 This whole connection of doing things remotely sucks. 0.72

00:58:14.000 Can you say that last statement again? 0.96

00:58:17.000 Just the last few words that you said?

00:58:22.000 You were talking about insurance.

00:58:24.000 Here's my question about the whole thing.

00:58:26.000 Insurance still has to pay for it then.

00:58:29.000 Someone's still paying for all this healthcare.

00:58:31.000 If the insurance companies aren't making any profit because they're paying for all the healthcare, then what happens then?

00:58:37.000 Do we fund the insurance companies?

00:58:38.000 How does all this stuff get evened out?

00:58:42.000 Are you referring to cases where the cost of somebody's care is so astronomically expensive that even the insurance company can't afford it?

00:58:51.000 Well, look, here's the problem, right?

00:58:53.000 People can't afford health care, so we get them insurance.

00:58:56.000 Insurance takes care of health care.

00:58:57.000 How do the insurance companies make any money then?

00:59:02.000 Well, I mean, they make a profit just like anybody else.

00:59:04.000 But 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.

00:59:16.000 You know, they are a natural, there's different elements of the healthcare system.

00:59:24.000 On 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.

00:59:31.000 The insurance company's job is to say, hold on a second, why are you doing this?

00:59:35.000 What is the reason for this?

00:59:36.000 What's the outcome that we expect from this?

00:59:38.000 So that naturally drives, that's a natural, you know, bulwark against higher costs.

00:59:46.000 The government would, in a Medicare for All scheme, the government would simply replace that insurance company.

00:59:51.000 We should be very careful when assuming that the government will somehow be better at that than insurance companies.

00:59:57.000 I'm not saying insurance companies are great at all.

00:59:59.000 Everybody doesn't seem to like them.

01:00:01.000 But I also don't want the government doing it.

01:00:04.000 I don't want to be in a case like in Great Britain where the government will say, you know what?

01:00:09.000 Your granddad's not on the ventilator anymore.

01:00:11.000 We're done with that.

01:00:12.000 Or your baby can't get that care.

01:00:13.000 I mean, we've all seen these stories.

01:00:16.000 And we don't have that issue in America.

01:00:19.000 But can I pause yet?

01:00:20.000 Don't we have a problem with insurance companies not want to pay for certain things?

01:00:25.000 They might, but the care still happens.

01:00:28.000 The hospital has to eat that care a lot, and there's different funding mechanisms that reimburse them.

01:00:34.000 I'm not defending our healthcare system.

01:00:37.000 I want to be clear about that.

01:00:38.000 It's definitely not perfect.

01:00:39.000 It's a huge patchwork.

01:00:40.000 But no, that's not the way it happens over there.

01:00:44.000 Because 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.

01:00:55.000 That is the decision, and that's what they have to deal with.

01:00:59.000 And so it is different.

01:01:01.000 But don't they have some private healthcare over there as well?

01:01:05.000 I think they might have elements of it.

01:01:07.000 Same with Canada, but not for basic care.

01:01:11.000 For other kinds of healthcare that aren't necessarily...

01:01:15.000 Yeah, like elective stuff.

01:01:17.000 Orthopedic surgeries.

01:01:18.000 Yeah, and I'd have to really get some details for you on what each country does, but it's limited.

01:01:24.000 They limit what they can actually do.

01:01:25.000 I 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?

01:01:35.000 Thank God.

01:01:36.000 But 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.

01:01:52.000 And 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.

01:02:09.000 What do you say to that?

01:02:12.000 I 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.

01:02:25.000 So I'm talking about the 70s.

01:02:28.000 And when Reagan came to power, we reversed a lot of that, and we've been in a pretty good trend ever since.

01:02:37.000 I know what people are saying, and you repeated it, which is, our system doesn't work.

01:02:42.000 Well, I actually want to push back against the premise that our system doesn't work.

01:02:49.000 The evidence for that is not great.

01:02:52.000 I think there's a lot more evidence to suggest that we live in the best time in history, in modern times.

01:02:59.000 It's hard to argue otherwise.

01:03:02.000 I would agree.

01:03:02.000 There's certain problems that people point to, especially millennials, people my age.

01:03:09.000 Housing is more expensive.

01:03:12.000 Our purchasing power isn't as good with, say, things like housing and healthcare.

01:03:16.000 These are true statements.

01:03:17.000 It also depends on where you live.

01:03:19.000 The problem, Joe, is people are identifying issues.

01:03:24.000 They're not putting them into context and perspective.

01:03:27.000 But 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.

01:03:37.000 People forgot to ask the question, why is it that I can't afford this?

01:03:41.000 People are instead jumping to a solution that is, frankly, very shallow and simple, which is make housing cheaper.

01:03:48.000 Make healthcare cheaper.

01:03:49.000 How?

01:03:49.000 Write a law.

01:03:50.000 Say it's cheaper.

01:03:51.000 Well, no, that's not how it works.

01:03:53.000 We can't just do that.

01:03:54.000 We have to first ask the question, like, why did this happen?

01:03:56.000 So in California, let's talk about housing for a second.

01:03:59.000 California and Texas don't have the same problems.

01:04:02.000 And housing in Texas is much easier to come by than it is in California.

01:04:06.000 Why is that?

01:04:07.000 Well, as it turns out, we don't have zoning here in Houston.

01:04:10.000 You can build where you want to build.

01:04:12.000 It's much easier.

01:04:13.000 I talk to developers who develop here and develop sometimes in California.

01:04:16.000 It'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.

01:04:24.000 So what is it?

01:04:25.000 Too much government control, frankly.

01:04:28.000 In San Francisco, you can't build anything else.

01:04:30.000 They don't allow building high-rises full of apartment buildings.

01:04:33.000 So it's no surprise that supply is too constricted and prices have to go up for the intense amount of demand that's out there.

01:04:40.000 We don't have those same problems in Texas.

01:04:42.000 Okay, so again, it's like, why is this happening?

01:04:45.000 Same with healthcare.

01:04:46.000 Healthcare is not a free market.

01:04:47.000 It hasn't been in basically forever.

01:04:50.000 And prices have gone up as a result.

01:04:52.000 Now, healthcare is a lot more complicated than housing, and we've spent a lot of time talking about it already.

01:04:56.000 But we really have to ask ourselves why something is so expensive, what we're getting from that.

01:05:02.000 And then we intelligently look at what are the solutions to solve it.

01:05:08.000 California is a mess in a lot of ways.

01:05:11.000 There's a lot of problems.

01:05:13.000 But you really feel like the reason why San Francisco's housing...

01:05:16.000 I mean, it's gone up radically with the tech boom.

01:05:20.000 I mean, I think a lot of it is supply and demand.

01:05:23.000 A lot of it is just...

01:05:24.000 Yeah, that's what I meant.

01:05:25.000 But it's also people that just have ridiculous amounts of money. 0.98

01:05:28.000 And 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. 0.99

01:05:43.000 I agree with you. 0.98

01:05:44.000 It is a supply and demand issue, and the supply hasn't caught up with the demand.

01:05:48.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:05:49.000 The government won't allow more supply to be built.

01:05:52.000 Well, they're trying not to ruin the city, too, though.

01:05:56.000 Yeah, and that's fair.

01:05:57.000 And that's totally fair.

01:05:59.000 And 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.

01:06:05.000 But what's weird is they have no problem with homeless people.

01:06:11.000 When was the last time you've been to San Francisco?

01:06:16.000 It's been a while, but I have been there quite a number of times.

01:06:19.000 And I was going to say, I spent 10 years in San Diego.

01:06:21.000 San Diego doesn't have these problems.

01:06:23.000 Well, it's a far more conservative place.

01:06:25.000 And they let big buildings get built.

01:06:28.000 I used to live in downtown San Diego.

01:06:30.000 And when I was there, it was one way.

01:06:34.000 And now, there's 15 more high-rises.

01:06:38.000 And the rent has basically stayed the same.

01:06:41.000 So, which is good for renters.

01:06:43.000 It's bad for owners and developers.

01:06:45.000 But, 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?

01:06:53.000 Like, kind of Marxist screaming and yelling is all about.

01:06:56.000 But the irony is that the policies they want to implement help those people.

01:07:01.000 And if we let more deregulation occur, you're helping the renters whose rent hasn't changed in years.

01:07:07.000 And I know this.

01:07:09.000 I follow the market in San Diego very carefully because we still have property there.

01:07:15.000 And so I rent out to people.

01:07:17.000 I have not changed the rent.

01:07:20.000 We're good to go.

01:07:38.000 Well then fine, but you have to be comfortable with the prices the way they are and then deal with the homeless population on top of that.

01:07:43.000 The homeless population is insane.

01:07:45.000 I mean, you've never seen anything like it.

01:07:47.000 Los Angeles as well.

01:07:48.000 Go to downtown LA and drive around and it doesn't even seem like it's real.

01:07:53.000 It seems like it's a movie.

01:07:56.000 It's really sad.

01:07:58.000 And there's no solution.

01:07:59.000 There's no solution that's on the table.

01:08:01.000 There'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.

01:08:10.000 Because there didn't used to be 70,000 homeless people in the city, and there is now.

01:08:14.000 So obviously something went wrong, and over a period of 10 years, 70 million people, 70,000 people, and how many...

01:08:22.000 Throwing out a bunch of numbers here that don't make sense.

01:08:24.000 How many million people live in LA? It's like 20 million people, and there's 70,000 homeless people, right?

01:08:29.000 Is it something like that?

01:08:30.000 That is a crazy number.

01:08:32.000 70,000 is a good-sized town.

01:08:36.000 It is.

01:08:38.000 And I wouldn't say there's no solutions.

01:08:40.000 Although, there's no solutions being proposed in California.

01:08:42.000 I mean, you're correct about that.

01:08:43.000 They should propose solutions, and they could look to Houston for some ideas.

01:08:46.000 What have they done?

01:08:48.000 Well, we...

01:08:50.000 We took it seriously.

01:08:53.000 One thing we do is a housing first type of policy.

01:08:56.000 So 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.

01:09:06.000 So 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.

01:09:15.000 You can't just camp on the street.

01:09:18.000 Right.

01:09:18.000 So that's the first thing.

01:09:20.000 You have to actually make it illegal, but then put systems in place to actually help them.

01:09:26.000 But it does have to go in that order.

01:09:28.000 In California, their main problem is that they...

01:09:33.000 They allow it.

01:09:34.000 And in Austin, we have this problem.

01:09:36.000 Because Austin is a very liberal city.

01:09:38.000 And 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?

01:09:44.000 No.

01:09:44.000 We're actually just going to solve this.

01:09:46.000 We're going to put everybody somewhere else.

01:09:48.000 We're going to take them away from, you know, because people are camping out right outside businesses downtown.

01:09:52.000 Right.

01:09:52.000 We can't do that.

01:09:53.000 So 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.

01:10:05.000 There's also a good private...

01:10:06.000 There's a real non-profit sector in Houston that works together very well with the city over time.

01:10:13.000 A lot of private investors...

01:10:15.000 I went toward this shelter.

01:10:18.000 They try to maintain it mostly for families.

01:10:22.000 But this shelter, man, you go into this thing, it looks like a new college campus.

01:10:47.000 Is there anything on the table like that for California?

01:10:54.000 I don't know, man.

01:10:55.000 I'm a Texas guy.

01:10:57.000 There should be.

01:10:58.000 I don't know.

01:11:00.000 I could guess, but I'd be speaking out of turn.

01:11:04.000 I don't know what the...

01:11:05.000 What the deal is.

01:11:06.000 I just know you guys are sheltered in place.

01:11:08.000 It's growing like barnacles here.

01:11:10.000 It's really strange.

01:11:11.000 I mean, I've been here since 94 and I've never seen anything like the current situation.

01:11:15.000 And like you said, it's a crime they're allowing to take place.

01:11:19.000 You can't litter. 1.00

01:11:20.000 So how come you could just leave your shit under the underpass? 0.99

01:11:23.000 I mean, you can't walk under underpasses in a lot of Los Angeles. 0.99

01:11:27.000 And I mean, I'm not exaggerating.

01:11:29.000 There's needles and cans and garbage and cardboard and tents and bikes.

01:11:35.000 It's nuts.

01:11:36.000 I mean, it's really, really strange.

01:11:38.000 Almost every underpass in certain parts of LA, you'll find homeless encampments.

01:11:44.000 Yeah.

01:11:45.000 I mean, it's a stain.

01:11:48.000 What are they doing right now during coronavirus lockdown?

01:11:51.000 That's a very good question.

01:11:52.000 I don't know.

01:11:53.000 How is that enforced?

01:11:53.000 We're locked down.

01:11:55.000 I go here, I go to the grocery store, I go home.

01:11:58.000 That's basically all I've been doing for a month.

01:12:00.000 And that's most people that are...

01:12:03.000 Following the regulations, it's all they're doing as well.

01:12:05.000 So I don't know what they're doing.

01:12:07.000 I haven't seen any talk about it.

01:12:09.000 I'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.

01:12:17.000 So they had to shut down parking at the beaches and they've slowly tried to close the loopholes, the loopholes for knuckleheads, basically. 0.99

01:12:25.000 Yeah.

01:12:27.000 Is there an end date to California's lockdown?

01:12:30.000 I believe they're talking about having it the end of April, but I think there was some talk about it now being the end of May.

01:12:38.000 Find that out, Jamie.

01:12:40.000 Jamie doesn't have a laptop in front of me because we're doing this.

01:12:44.000 I don't know.

01:12:46.000 I think it's flexible, too, because if the cases keep rising or they stop falling, who knows?

01:12:55.000 There's...

01:12:56.000 You know, healthcare, and this is a healthcare issue, obviously, is so complicated and there's so many levels to it.

01:13:04.000 But I mean, I think one of them that we really have to address is diet and obesity.

01:13:09.000 There's a giant problem with diet and obesity in this country, healthy food, eating the proper food.

01:13:17.000 And, you know, I had a friend who said...

01:13:20.000 They 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.

01:13:34.000 And I said, yeah, what about people who do...

01:13:36.000 What about fat?

01:13:37.000 What about people who are fat?

01:13:39.000 Are you going to use the same logic with them?

01:13:41.000 Because you can't fat shame.

01:13:44.000 So can you tell, hey fatso, you can't get the same healthcare that a healthy person does.

01:13:49.000 Well, 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?

01:13:59.000 Yes, they are.

01:14:01.000 What we have a problem is people who don't self-care.

01:14:04.000 We have a giant problem with that.

01:14:07.000 People who don't take the necessary steps personally.

01:14:10.000 Now, is this because of education?

01:14:12.000 Is it because of ignorance?

01:14:14.000 Is 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?

01:14:25.000 I 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.

01:14:42.000 There's a lot of things you can do that are free to take care of your body.

01:14:46.000 Yeah, I agree.

01:14:48.000 I think it's indicative of...

01:14:51.000 A problem in our culture where we've started to sideline this notion of personal responsibility.

01:14:58.000 Chapter 7 in my book.

01:14:59.000 I forgot.

01:15:00.000 I've got to talk about my book.

01:15:01.000 Fortitude.

01:15:01.000 Available now.

01:15:03.000 Order from your local bookstore.

01:15:06.000 They need more help than Amazon.

01:15:08.000 Did you read the audiobook version of it?

01:15:11.000 Yeah.

01:15:12.000 Good.

01:15:12.000 Thank you.

01:15:13.000 14 hours.

01:15:14.000 Very important.

01:15:15.000 I enjoyed that. 0.94

01:15:16.000 If some other dork was reading for you, I'd be very upset.

01:15:19.000 Yeah, no, I was very much against that.

01:15:22.000 And so, yeah, we got it done.

01:15:25.000 Chapter 7 is called A Sense of Duty.

01:15:27.000 And, 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.

01:15:43.000 That's fundamentally the government's role.

01:15:45.000 You have God-given rights, and These are life, liberty, property.

01:15:51.000 Effectively speaking, life, liberty, and property.

01:15:54.000 In the Declaration, Jefferson wrote, the pursuit of happiness.

01:15:59.000 And they choose these words really carefully.

01:16:02.000 Now, part of the exchange there is a necessity for citizens to live with a sense of duty.

01:16:09.000 And to live as a citizen, this idea of citizenship and to do what is right, to do what is good.

01:16:16.000 It's hard for me to imagine that people are just so uneducated that they don't know that they're unhealthy.

01:16:21.000 You know, I think they know it, right?

01:16:23.000 The problem is that they don't care.

01:16:27.000 That's a problem.

01:16:28.000 And you're getting at that problem.

01:16:30.000 I don't know if that's true.

01:16:31.000 I don't think it's that they don't care.

01:16:33.000 I think they have no discipline.

01:16:35.000 I don't think it's that they don't care.

01:16:37.000 Well, what's the difference?

01:16:37.000 Well, there's a difference is they've never been taught to push themselves.

01:16:42.000 There's a lot of people...

01:16:43.000 Look, it's just so easy to get by.

01:16:45.000 They haven't read my book.

01:16:46.000 Well, that's one of the reasons why I love the title of your book.

01:16:48.000 Fortitude is what people need.

01:16:50.000 And also, they need to understand that there's a great value in doing difficult things.

01:16:56.000 And this society...

01:16:58.000 What chapter is that?

01:17:00.000 Chapter 8. The name of the chapter is called Do Something Hard.

01:17:04.000 Good for you.

01:17:06.000 Well, listen, man, that's true.

01:17:08.000 Look, you're a Navy SEAL, man.

01:17:09.000 You know it.

01:17:10.000 You get it.

01:17:10.000 You live it.

01:17:11.000 This is what we need.

01:17:12.000 We need more people who understand that I know it's hard to get up.

01:17:17.000 I know it's hard to do things.

01:17:18.000 I know it.

01:17:19.000 It's hard for me, too, but I still do them.

01:17:21.000 And you should do them too.

01:17:22.000 It should be something that we encourage everyone to do.

01:17:26.000 And that we all talk about.

01:17:27.000 And that we all praise each other for.

01:17:30.000 And we all get excited about accomplishing these things.

01:17:33.000 And taking care of your physical body.

01:17:35.000 Taking care of your meat vehicle.

01:17:37.000 If everybody just did that, we would have...

01:17:39.000 Healthcare costs in this country would be radically decreased.

01:17:43.000 That's a fact.

01:17:45.000 That's a fact.

01:17:46.000 That's an absolute fact.

01:17:48.000 If 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.

01:18:03.000 We're not talking about breathing underwater.

01:18:05.000 We're talking about things that can be done by the average person.

01:18:10.000 I don't think the notion of personal responsibility is talked about enough as...

01:18:15.000 It's almost...

01:18:16.000 Conservatives talk about it all the time.

01:18:18.000 It's one of the things I appreciate about conservatives.

01:18:22.000 But it's kind of used against us a lot, right?

01:18:25.000 It'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.

01:18:35.000 Yeah.

01:18:35.000 Whatever.

01:18:36.000 And 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.

01:18:47.000 And personal responsibility, as a foundation of our culture, it's important because it leads to empowerment.

01:18:55.000 It gives us the agency to control our own destiny.

01:18:59.000 If you're constantly...

01:19:01.000 In victimhood, if you're constantly being told that you can't control your own destiny, well, that's fundamentally disempowering.

01:19:07.000 And that's a terrible psychological state to be in.

01:19:10.000 And the other thing I tell people is that is a fundamental American attribute.

01:19:15.000 There's some interesting polling out there.

01:19:18.000 I forget the numbers, right?

01:19:20.000 But I always have them in a speech that I give.

01:19:23.000 And when you ask people...

01:19:26.000 What's the exact question?

01:19:29.000 It's like...

01:19:32.000 Do you have, or do things that happen to you, are they within your control or outside your control?

01:19:39.000 It's something like that.

01:19:41.000 In Germany, the answer was overwhelmingly, things are happening to them outside of their control.

01:19:50.000 Do you understand what I'm saying?

01:19:52.000 In 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%.

01:20:02.000 So there's a pretty marked difference, and that's a uniquely American thing, that we believe we are in control of our own destiny.

01:20:08.000 We 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.

01:20:18.000 And I think the world recognizes that, too.

01:20:22.000 When you go around the world and you ask people, where would you rather be if you could immigrate right now?

01:20:29.000 What's your number one destination?

01:20:31.000 Well, it's the U.S. of A, like, overwhelmingly.

01:20:34.000 The second place is Canada and Germany at, like, 6% of respondents.

01:20:38.000 The U.S.A. is, like, 21% of respondents.

01:20:40.000 So second place isn't even close.

01:20:42.000 And 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.

01:20:53.000 Obviously, we're in a crisis technically right now, of course.

01:20:55.000 But this rhetoric was prevalent before all this.

01:20:59.000 For all of that commentary, it just isn't true.

01:21:05.000 And 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.

01:21:22.000 And 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.

01:21:39.000 And 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.

01:21:50.000 And when you undermine personal responsibility, you disempower people.

01:21:53.000 And fundamentally, to me, that's what socialism does, because you're telling people each to their need, each to their ability.

01:22:01.000 What 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.

01:22:09.000 It's their right, and we should distribute that accordingly.

01:22:11.000 Everybody's perfectly equal.

01:22:13.000 What 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.

01:22:26.000 They're so happy because they just want to work hard and move up.

01:22:30.000 And they're just so excited about this meritocracy that we've built into our culture.

01:22:37.000 Well, Cubans are such a great example. 1.00

01:22:39.000 My 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. 0.92

01:22:49.000 It's really hilarious and it's true.

01:22:52.000 Yeah.

01:22:53.000 And they do appreciate that aspect of this country.

01:22:56.000 I think one of the things that you said earlier is that we live in the best time ever in history.

01:23:01.000 And I agree with that.

01:23:02.000 The consequences of it being such a great time are it's far easier to get by.

01:23:09.000 Because it's far easier to get by, people look for things to be more difficult than they actually are.

01:23:16.000 They look for things to be more stacked against them than they actually are.

01:23:20.000 They look for more of a woe-is-me standpoint.

01:23:23.000 When you find people that actually have a real difficult life, they don't look for things to be hard.

01:23:29.000 They find hard things everywhere they look.

01:23:32.000 And oftentimes you find that those people that have a real struggle.

01:23:37.000 There's a great documentary called Happy People by Werner Herzog.

01:23:41.000 It's about people who live in Siberia.

01:23:43.000 And it is a brutal, difficult existence in extreme cold.

01:23:47.000 But these people are overwhelmingly happy.

01:23:51.000 I 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,

01:24:09.000 they're out there trapping and hunting and fishing and farming and gathering up enough food to survive in the extreme winters.

01:24:17.000 And it really shows you that human beings need difficult tasks.

01:24:23.000 We need things to be tough to do.

01:24:26.000 And 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.

01:24:39.000 It's built into us.

01:24:41.000 Yeah, it really is.

01:24:43.000 This is why I wrote a whole chapter on this.

01:24:45.000 Do something hard is a real deep dive into the benefits of suffering.

01:24:49.000 Yes.

01:24:50.000 And I distinguish between just going through something hard, like getting blown up in the face.

01:24:55.000 Like, yeah, that's suffering, but it's not self-imposed.

01:24:57.000 I wouldn't wish that upon anybody.

01:24:58.000 I'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.

01:25:06.000 But you should habitually move into a self-imposed You were about to say something.

01:25:33.000 Just that alone creates character, creates a different kind of person, and the type of people that gravitate towards those endeavors, they're special people.

01:25:44.000 They are, but I didn't write this book for them, and I wrote it for everybody.

01:25:49.000 And what I point out is, listen, SEALs have our hard thing, and it's BUDS, which is an acronym.

01:25:56.000 It stands for Basic Underwater Demolition slash SEAL Training.

01:25:59.000 It's six months of hell, and It pushes you beyond limits you ever thought you had, Hell Week especially.

01:26:08.000 And when you're done with that, when you come away from Hell Week, there really is this sort of spiritual awakening.

01:26:15.000 It's that you have higher confidence, you feel prepared for anything.

01:26:18.000 Even in some of the worst situations, you can think to yourself, well, it's not quite Hell Week, is it?

01:26:25.000 And so you're able to have much more perspective.

01:26:29.000 We're lacking in perspective quite a bit also.

01:26:31.000 Chapter 2 is called Perspective from Darkness, and I point this fact out that too many of us have gotten so comfortable.

01:26:37.000 We've removed suffering from our life to such an extraordinary degree, and that's not a bad thing, okay?

01:26:43.000 That's a...

01:26:46.000 That's an element of the modern times that we live in, and I'm happy we live there.

01:26:50.000 But the reality is that my ancestors were struggling through Texas trying to find water on a daily basis.

01:26:56.000 And 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.

01:27:04.000 So 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.

01:27:10.000 And to remind yourself of that, again, the Do Something Hard chapter is...

01:27:16.000 One, it's a deep dive into the psychological literature, which I just enjoy doing.

01:27:21.000 There's a lot to back this up, whether it's modern psychology, the history of Stoicism, or the Bible.

01:27:28.000 All of these texts, these ancient pieces of wisdom that have been around for a very long time They all talk about this.

01:27:37.000 They 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.

01:27:51.000 I 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.

01:28:02.000 There's real benefits to this, but you have to do it.

01:28:06.000 And it doesn't have to be Joe Rogan's life.

01:28:10.000 I wonder if a lot of people look at your life and they're like, that guy is too productive for me.

01:28:15.000 And it's just too intimidating.

01:28:17.000 And maybe that's so, but don't compare yourself to other people.

01:28:20.000 Compare yourself to who you were yesterday.

01:28:24.000 Is that a Jordan Peterson?

01:28:26.000 That might be a Jordan Peterson chapter.

01:28:27.000 I think it is.

01:28:28.000 I think I just quoted that.

01:28:29.000 But the point is, these things are true because they're true.

01:28:32.000 That's why Jordan Peterson says that, because it's true.

01:28:35.000 I don't pretend like I'm the first one to come up with these ideas.

01:28:38.000 I'm just trying to put them into language that people can understand and use my life experiences to bolster those lessons.

01:28:46.000 But it just has to be harder than what you did yesterday.

01:28:50.000 And maybe it's physical, but not everybody can do physical things.

01:28:52.000 Maybe it's hard for you to finish a project at home.

01:28:55.000 Just do that.

01:28:55.000 Maybe take a cold shower.

01:28:57.000 You feel tougher the rest of the day because you're like, you know what?

01:29:01.000 I just sat in 10 minutes of icy cold water.

01:29:03.000 I didn't do that the day before, but I did it today.

01:29:06.000 Now I feel a little bit more like a badass.

01:29:09.000 I feel more like a badass than I did yesterday.

01:29:11.000 It's small things.

01:29:13.000 It's the self-imposed suffering is so important for our lives.

01:29:16.000 For me, it's usually physical, right?

01:29:18.000 I want to do this challenge of a workout.

01:29:21.000 That kind of keeps me sharp.

01:29:23.000 Or maybe it's like running for Congress or something.

01:29:26.000 I don't know.

01:29:26.000 We all have something, and I'm just saying you have to find that and make it habitual.

01:29:32.000 It can't just be once, either.

01:29:34.000 Because SEALs can get soft, too.

01:29:35.000 We 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.

01:29:47.000 Yeah, I feel that resilience is almost like a muscle.

01:29:50.000 It's something that you can build, and it's also something that can get soft.

01:29:54.000 And I think that, look, I love comfort, don't get me wrong, but I don't appreciate it unless I've done something difficult.

01:30:02.000 If you look at all the different things I do and say, oh, you're real productive and that's nice.

01:30:07.000 Dude, I also like to watch TV. I like to put my feet up.

01:30:10.000 I like to kick back.

01:30:11.000 I like to have a beer.

01:30:12.000 I like to relax. 0.99

01:30:13.000 But I don't like to relax if I'm not doing shit. 0.99

01:30:16.000 I know me. 0.98

01:30:17.000 I get mad at me if I'm not doing anything.

01:30:19.000 I don't like me when I'm not productive.

01:30:22.000 But when I am productive, I also can enjoy to relax.

01:30:26.000 I enjoy relaxation, and I don't enjoy it unless I've earned it.

01:30:30.000 And I think that's what people need to do.

01:30:31.000 They need to earn their comfort.

01:30:34.000 You have a proper sense of shame, which is what you're describing.

01:30:38.000 That's chapter six.

01:30:43.000 You're describing this stuff because you already know this.

01:30:46.000 When you read my book, you'll be like, I already know all this.

01:30:50.000 Because it's true.

01:30:52.000 I'm trying to give these lessons out in a clear and coherent and fun way, but these things are just true.

01:30:57.000 You feel bad when you don't act the way you envision yourself to be.

01:31:02.000 You have this hero archetype, and I've talked about hero archetypes before.

01:31:05.000 You have this idea of what you think is the right way to be.

01:31:09.000 And you're trying to live up to that at all times.

01:31:11.000 We often fail.

01:31:13.000 And you've built that archetype over time.

01:31:15.000 Maybe looking to others is the right kind of hero.

01:31:18.000 Maybe you've seen how successful people are and you're like, I want to be like that.

01:31:21.000 Maybe you do it in comedy or fighting or whatever it is.

01:31:24.000 You're like, they have a way of doing something that maybe I should mimic.

01:31:28.000 And so you've built this over time.

01:31:30.000 And you know, only you know, really, when you don't meet that standard.

01:31:35.000 When you don't meet that standard, there should be a degree of shame that you feel.

01:31:39.000 And again, this is a problem I've viewed in society where I don't know that people are feeling that shame anymore.

01:31:47.000 It's almost the opposite.

01:31:49.000 And when you don't feel that shame, you can't feel a sense of duty to be that citizen that we talked about earlier.

01:31:55.000 And I find this to be a big problem, even with the small stuff.

01:31:58.000 And 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.

01:32:12.000 Absolutely.

01:32:12.000 And know it's easy and you're like, ah, somebody will do it.

01:32:15.000 They have people.

01:32:15.000 They have people who take care of this.

01:32:18.000 But why?

01:32:19.000 Why don't you just put it away?

01:32:21.000 And if you don't put it away because you're in a rush, because your kid is screaming, and maybe you have a good reason not to put it away.

01:32:28.000 But the question to ask yourself is, did you feel bad about it?

01:32:31.000 Right.

01:32:32.000 Did you feel bad about it? 0.89

01:32:33.000 And if you didn't feel bad about it, what the hell is wrong with you? 0.61

01:32:37.000 Yes.

01:32:37.000 These are very simple lessons.

01:32:40.000 We have to start small.

01:32:41.000 We have to start small.

01:32:43.000 The shopping cart one is a great example.

01:32:45.000 That's such a good one.

01:32:46.000 It's such a classic.

01:32:47.000 Yes.

01:32:48.000 It's so good.

01:32:49.000 It just makes you mad. 0.99

01:32:50.000 It's like, ah, I've found the greatest parking spot, and then that damn cart's right there. 0.99

01:32:55.000 Just so easy to do. 1.00

01:32:57.000 Just put it back, bitch. 1.00

01:32:59.000 Just walk it over there, put it in the little stall, and you feel better. 1.00

01:33:04.000 You're like, look, I did it.

01:33:06.000 You know what I do? 0.93

01:33:07.000 I bring it all the way the fuck back to the supermarket.

01:33:10.000 I put it back in the thing right in front. 0.96

01:33:13.000 Yes!

01:33:13.000 I don't even put it in the stall.

01:33:15.000 I walk those extra steps.

01:33:16.000 And it doesn't take much time!

01:33:18.000 But I feel like I did something.

01:33:20.000 Even if it's just a trick.

01:33:23.000 The grocery store doesn't even have to put those little sections out in the parking lot.

01:33:26.000 They could just tell you to walk it all the way back to the door. 1.00

01:33:29.000 Walk it back, bitch. 1.00

01:33:30.000 But the reason why I like the little stalls is because of people that do have kids. 0.99

01:33:33.000 If there's a mom and she's got a baby with her, great. 1.00

01:33:36.000 Give her a way out.

01:33:38.000 Or hire some kid to gather those things up while people are walking out with them.

01:33:43.000 Fine. 1.00

01:33:43.000 But if you're just a guy and you're shopping for yourself and you don't put your car back, fuck you. 1.00

01:33:50.000 And that sense of shame that you're talking about, that really is important. 1.00

01:33:55.000 People need to feel shame if you've come up short like that, because you can do better.

01:34:00.000 You can do better, and you should want to do better.

01:34:03.000 The way to get ahead in life is to do everything that way.

01:34:09.000 The way you do everything is the way you do anything.

01:34:12.000 The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

01:34:14.000 That's really what it is.

01:34:16.000 Just do the right thing.

01:34:18.000 Do it the way you're supposed to do it.

01:34:19.000 You can do it, and you'll feel better. 0.99

01:34:21.000 If you're supposed to get a workout in today, you're like, oh, fuck, I'd rather just sleep in. 1.00

01:34:26.000 No, just fucking get your ass up and do it and you'll feel better. 1.00

01:34:30.000 When it's done, you're like, damn, I did it. 1.00

01:34:32.000 I can do this tomorrow too. 0.99

01:34:34.000 You can.

01:34:35.000 And it's momentum.

01:34:35.000 And just developing that momentum.

01:34:38.000 It's a skill.

01:34:39.000 It's like everything else.

01:34:40.000 It's like learning how to be polite.

01:34:42.000 It's like learning how to be cordial.

01:34:44.000 Learning how to be a nice person.

01:34:45.000 These are learned things. 1.00

01:34:46.000 You can't just accept that you're a piece of shit and this is just the way you are. 1.00

01:34:50.000 No, just look at yourself as if you were another person judging you. 1.00

01:34:54.000 Because if you are a person who's like a life coach judging you, what would you tell you to do?

01:35:02.000 That's exactly right.

01:35:03.000 And 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.

01:35:12.000 So the solution is effectively saying what you're saying.

01:35:16.000 And I write a lot about it.

01:35:17.000 I write about the psychology behind it.

01:35:19.000 But 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.

01:35:34.000 We've started to change the definition of what's right and wrong in this post-modern society.

01:35:43.000 Let me think of some examples of what I mean by that.

01:35:47.000 In one part, I do bring up the example of Of how we view, you know, assistance, like government assistance.

01:35:55.000 And there's the movie Cinderella Man where Russell Crowe plays the, whatever the name is, the boxer.

01:36:04.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:36:05.000 And, you know, he gets a welfare check at the beginning of the movie.

01:36:07.000 By the end of the movie, he's pulled himself back up and he returns it.

01:36:10.000 And that's sort of like our classic heroic thing to do.

01:36:14.000 Like, you know what?

01:36:15.000 Like, we believe in helping people who need it, but we also believe that you shouldn't take it if you don't need it.

01:36:20.000 It seems like a pretty good piece of civic duty to live by.

01:36:26.000 And 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.

01:36:37.000 So I was in a classroom full of fellow Navy service members, none of which were SEALs, none of which had been in combat.

01:36:45.000 None of which appeared injured in any way.

01:36:47.000 I was the only one with like a visible injury where it's obvious as to why I'm being medically retired.

01:36:52.000 And so we're all getting medically retired.

01:36:55.000 And 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.

01:37:02.000 And what I would call a very generous benefit.

01:37:05.000 You know, people would disagree with me on that, but I think we get a generous benefit.

01:37:11.000 To 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.

01:37:25.000 That it is so ingrained in our new culture that it was actually in the curriculum at a government classroom.

01:37:32.000 And this kind of stuff is cheered on.

01:37:35.000 And I see this a lot.

01:37:37.000 People will tell a story of victimhood and be cheered.

01:37:40.000 But we're not supposed to cheer for that.

01:37:41.000 We might feel compassion for them, but to cheer for them?

01:37:45.000 And this explains why we're seeing these sort of hoaxes that we've seen.

01:37:49.000 Like, why did Jussie Smollett feel that he had to say that two MAGA guys in Chicago beat him up?

01:37:55.000 We didn't ask enough what the underlying psychology behind that was.

01:38:01.000 Why do that?

01:38:02.000 And I think the reason is because we started to elevate victimhood.

01:38:05.000 We 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.

01:38:28.000 Yeah, I think that's a very good point.

01:38:30.000 I think what you're saying is absolutely correct.

01:38:32.000 I think victimhood should be...

01:38:35.000 Look, if you are an actual victim...

01:38:39.000 I mean, I feel for you.

01:38:40.000 It's terrible. 0.94

01:38:41.000 But if you're not a victim and you're playing up victimhood, it's disgusting.

01:38:46.000 It's one of the grossest things that you see in our culture, especially when we're talking about how easy society is.

01:38:51.000 Now, 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.

01:39:02.000 Like, boy, did you miss the point.

01:39:04.000 That's why it's so foul for us.

01:39:06.000 When 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.

01:39:18.000 It's one of the grossest things that you could see in a successful culture.

01:39:22.000 I mean, there's people out there that really are injured, like yourself, from combat.

01:39:26.000 There's people out there that really are sick.

01:39:28.000 There's people out there that are really victimized by violent crime.

01:39:32.000 And to fake it, it's such a disgusting insult to people that actually are injured.

01:39:40.000 Yeah, and that's like the most extreme, I think...

01:39:44.000 That's the extreme consequence of this victimhood culture. 0.98

01:39:47.000 Because there's definitely a difference between real victims and victimhood culture.

01:39:49.000 We have to distinguish between those two things.

01:39:51.000 And we have to respect somebody who's actually a victim.

01:39:54.000 In my case, in the disability insurance thing, I didn't take it.

01:39:58.000 But 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?

01:40:12.000 And the reality is I don't think people would.

01:40:14.000 I don't think I would be called out for that, even though I'm perfectly capable of working.

01:40:18.000 Yes, I'm kind of blind and I can't see even out of my good eye, but I can work.

01:40:22.000 I mean, I've shown that.

01:40:23.000 I can work.

01:40:24.000 Why would I take that?

01:40:25.000 That wouldn't be just.

01:40:27.000 I think that would go against our classical definition of what is fair and just.

01:40:31.000 And yet, in our current culture, I don't believe that anybody would call me out for that.

01:40:37.000 And I should be called out if I had taken that money.

01:40:40.000 I really believe that.

01:40:42.000 Just because I was already getting benefits, right?

01:40:44.000 I'm not saying I shouldn't get anything.

01:40:45.000 I was blown up and then had to get out of the Navy as a result.

01:40:48.000 But...

01:40:49.000 But I feel our culture is a little bit backwards on this, and it worries me a great deal.

01:40:53.000 We've changed a few definitions, like what it means to be a victim.

01:40:57.000 I think we've changed that definition overwhelmingly.

01:40:59.000 And we've changed the definition of justice also, and injustice, and what an injustice actually is.

01:41:06.000 We've forgotten how to distinguish between discrimination and disparities.

01:41:12.000 Like, just because you don't have the same thing, does that effectively mean there was some injustice that occurred there?

01:41:18.000 We're not asking those analytical questions.

01:41:20.000 And I think that's a real problem.

01:41:23.000 And it's made debate very difficult.

01:41:25.000 It's made debate with my colleagues in the Democratic Party very difficult.

01:41:29.000 Because every disparity is assumed to be originating from some kind of injustice.

01:41:35.000 You know, every time somebody is wealthier than somebody else, the assumption nowadays is that, well, it's ill-begotten money.

01:41:41.000 And that there was some kind of injustice that occurred.

01:41:43.000 You know, when we were voting on this giant stimulus package, not really a stimulus package, more of a rescue package, remember how this happened?

01:41:52.000 There was, you know, we were negotiating through this thing, it was actually looking pretty good. 0.99

01:41:56.000 Nancy 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. 0.99

01:42:03.000 Right? 0.99

01:42:04.000 Okay, so, you know, you fast forward a few days, you ended up passing basically the same bill anyway.

01:42:09.000 That's a long story.

01:42:10.000 I'm happy to go into the details of that politically if you'd like me to.

01:42:13.000 But 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.

01:42:23.000 And we've forgotten how to ask ourselves, like, why is that?

01:42:27.000 Did they do something evil?

01:42:28.000 What exactly is evil about these entities?

01:42:32.000 You know, they employ lots of people.

01:42:33.000 They create lots of wealth.

01:42:35.000 In this particular case, they're not being bailed out.

01:42:37.000 They didn't do anything wrong.

01:42:38.000 But we're really mad at them for some reason.

01:42:40.000 We really hate them.

01:42:41.000 Because there's this sort of cultural movement towards feeling that anytime something is successful, like, our reaction should be to punish it.

01:42:49.000 And that cultural movement Worries me a great deal.

01:42:54.000 It worries me a great deal.

01:42:55.000 I think that's what leads to these sort of topics of socialism.

01:42:58.000 Well, 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.

01:43:13.000 There's also inequality of effort.

01:43:16.000 People do not put in the same effort.

01:43:18.000 And when you put in more effort, you're more focused, you're more disciplined, you do more work, you should be rewarded.

01:43:24.000 And there's people that don't like that idea. 0.99

01:43:26.000 And they don't like that idea because they're fucking lazy. 1.00

01:43:29.000 And they're weak. 1.00

01:43:29.000 And that's a fact. 1.00

01:43:31.000 And there's people in this world that are weak.

01:43:33.000 And it's an unpopular thing to say.

01:43:37.000 Because we want to say that, no, they're economically disenfranchised.

01:43:42.000 Some people are.

01:43:44.000 Yes, some people are. 1.00

01:43:45.000 And there's also some people that work like a motherfucker. 0.99

01:43:48.000 And those people get by. 0.99

01:43:50.000 And they get ahead.

01:43:51.000 And those people should be rewarded for their effort.

01:43:55.000 One 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.

01:44:09.000 That's my whole life!

01:44:12.000 That is my whole life.

01:44:13.000 I mean, everything that I've ever done, I've realized, oh, all you have to do is work harder than everybody else.

01:44:21.000 All you have to do is put in more time.

01:44:23.000 All you have to do is be more obsessed, more focused, and you can get by.

01:44:27.000 You can get ahead.

01:44:28.000 Well, the people that don't like that are the people that don't like competition.

01:44:32.000 They don't understand it.

01:44:34.000 It makes you feel bad when you lose.

01:44:36.000 Everyone should get a trophy. 1.00

01:44:37.000 Everyone should get a participation trophy.

01:44:40.000 That is a giant problem with our culture.

01:44:43.000 And this inequality, yeah, there is income inequality.

01:44:49.000 Some of it is corruption.

01:44:51.000 Some of it is bad.

01:44:53.000 Some of it is inequality of effort.

01:44:55.000 And that needs to be addressed as well.

01:44:57.000 And 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.

01:45:09.000 It's just not true.

01:45:10.000 It's not true, and it's anti-American, frankly.

01:45:14.000 I list a few tenets of a culture that make it a sustainable, successful culture.

01:45:22.000 The first one is personal responsibility.

01:45:24.000 I went into detail on that.

01:45:25.000 The second one is mental toughness, which I wrote a whole book about.

01:45:31.000 You 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?

01:45:41.000 Because 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.

01:45:49.000 But I don't want to live in that society and frankly that society can't function very well because nobody would actually do anything.

01:45:55.000 And you have to be mentally tough to deal with that.

01:45:57.000 And I think the American spirit and our history as a culture is a really, really tough bunch of people.

01:46:05.000 And I just want to remind people of that.

01:46:07.000 And I want to remind people that it's something to aspire to.

01:46:10.000 Like, this is a good thing.

01:46:12.000 Like, it's cool to be tougher.

01:46:13.000 It's not cool to be a victim.

01:46:15.000 But we have so many, like, postmodernists who actually, again, it's going back to this victimhood culture, they want you to be that victim.

01:46:21.000 And then they'll celebrate you for it.

01:46:23.000 When people tell their victimhood stories, they're cheered.

01:46:25.000 But it's like, wait a second, where's the part where you overcame it?

01:46:29.000 I thought that was the story we're supposed to cheer. 0.97

01:46:31.000 Well, they also connect competition with cruelty, and I think that's foolish as well.

01:46:38.000 Yeah, it feels bad to lose, but that's just because it feels great to win.

01:46:42.000 It's a peak in a valley thing, and you have to understand that.

01:46:46.000 Look, every competition that I've ever had, anything where I've ever competed and lost, has fueled me beyond measure.

01:46:53.000 It is what gets you by.

01:46:55.000 It's what makes you better.

01:46:57.000 One of the reasons why I understand this is because of martial arts.

01:47:01.000 In martial arts, you have to train with the best people you can. 0.99

01:47:04.000 And it fucking sucks. 1.00

01:47:06.000 You get your ass kicked. 1.00

01:47:07.000 But that's what makes you better. 1.00

01:47:09.000 You need those people.

01:47:10.000 You love those people.

01:47:12.000 They become your brothers.

01:47:13.000 It's very, very, very important.

01:47:14.000 The 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.

01:47:29.000 I mean, I'm sure it's not as tight as people that have gone through combat together.

01:47:34.000 But there's something in those people, they fuel you.

01:47:39.000 They help you. 1.00

01:47:39.000 And they help you by trying to kick your ass. 1.00

01:47:42.000 They help you by trying to be better than you. 1.00

01:47:44.000 They help you by trying to be the man.

01:47:46.000 They want to be the best they can be. 1.00

01:47:50.000 And you think about those motherfuckers when you go to the gym. 1.00

01:47:53.000 You go, God damn it, Mike is here. 1.00

01:47:54.000 Shit! 1.00

01:47:55.000 And you get fired up for that person that you know is going to kick your ass. 1.00

01:47:59.000 And they provide you with fuel. 1.00

01:48:01.000 People that are better than you provide you with fuel.

01:48:04.000 Competition provides you with fuel.

01:48:06.000 It doesn't mean you have to be mean.

01:48:08.000 It doesn't mean it's cruel.

01:48:10.000 It doesn't mean it's insensitive.

01:48:11.000 It doesn't mean that.

01:48:13.000 It just means that competition is good.

01:48:15.000 Competition is good for you.

01:48:17.000 It's good.

01:48:18.000 It shows you your better abilities.

01:48:20.000 It shows you that you can aspire to greatness.

01:48:24.000 You can aspire to be better than you are.

01:48:26.000 You can do this, and you can do this by looking at people who also do it.

01:48:30.000 They are your fuel.

01:48:32.000 Inspiration is fuel. 1.00

01:48:34.000 Nobody gets inspired by Jesse Smollett putting a fucking fake noose around his neck and walking into a hotel still holding a Subway sandwich. 0.99

01:48:41.000 Nobody's inspired by that. 0.99

01:48:43.000 Maybe you're inspired to never be that guy, but it's a weak inspiration.

01:48:48.000 You'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.

01:48:57.000 That'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! 0.99

01:49:07.000 That fucking guy, every day. 0.98

01:49:08.000 I mean, that guy's fueling millions of people just by being a badass. 1.00

01:49:14.000 Just life is hard, motherfucker. 1.00

01:49:16.000 Stay hard. 1.00

01:49:17.000 And just getting out and running every day.

01:49:19.000 Just by doing that.

01:49:20.000 Okay, I don't know him, so I have a question.

01:49:24.000 I love him.

01:49:24.000 Who is filming these videos?

01:49:28.000 His wife.

01:49:28.000 Does she have a bike or something?

01:49:31.000 She's in a car.

01:49:32.000 No, but there's been other instances where he's like climbing a mountain.

01:49:35.000 I don't know.

01:49:36.000 And it's a very smooth, like maybe she has a stabilizer, I guess.

01:49:40.000 Oh yeah, probably has one of those.

01:49:42.000 There'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?

01:49:51.000 Well, he's got a lot of money. 0.98

01:49:53.000 I mean, he sold the shit out of that book. 0.77

01:49:56.000 So it's a fantastic book, and I can't recommend it enough. 0.79

01:50:00.000 And You Can't Hurt Me, it's called.

01:50:01.000 And 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.

01:50:10.000 So it's like the audio book and a podcast together.

01:50:13.000 You know, he lives an incredible life, and he's...

01:50:17.000 That guy is an amazing source of fuel for people, but is an amazing source of fuel because of his own competition with himself.

01:50:26.000 And 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. 0.98

01:50:35.000 He wasn't born this fucking warrior that came out of the womb running 100 miles. 0.99

01:50:40.000 He became that person. 1.00

01:50:41.000 He became that person from being a slob. 0.91

01:50:44.000 And he's real open about it. 0.94

01:50:46.000 And he's even open about his own weakness currently. 0.99

01:50:49.000 He's like, sometimes I'll stare at my fucking shoes for a half hour before I run. 1.00

01:50:52.000 My shit! 1.00

01:50:53.000 I don't want to do this! 1.00

01:50:54.000 Fuck! 1.00

01:50:55.000 But then he'll go out and do it. 1.00

01:50:56.000 And while he's doing it, he'll yell.

01:50:59.000 You know, like, that...

01:51:00.000 People like that are fuel.

01:51:03.000 And there's certain people that don't like people like that because they make them feel bad. 0.94

01:51:06.000 They look at themselves and they go, God damn it, I don't work as hard as that guy. 0.97

01:51:10.000 I don't have that kind of mental toughness. 0.99

01:51:11.000 And then they try to find something wrong with it.

01:51:14.000 But it's because they're not willing to look at themselves objectively.

01:51:20.000 They're not willing to try to be the best person that they can be.

01:51:25.000 Yeah, I agree with that.

01:51:28.000 I want to introduce you to him.

01:51:30.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:51:31.000 Where does he live?

01:51:32.000 He's in Vegas now.

01:51:34.000 Vegas.

01:51:35.000 Yeah.

01:51:36.000 When do you guys...

01:51:37.000 Do you want to bring it back to coronavirus?

01:51:41.000 Sure.

01:51:41.000 I would love to.

01:51:45.000 Because this is...

01:51:46.000 I mean...

01:51:48.000 I think there's...

01:51:49.000 The thing I wanted to maybe discuss is the balance that needs to be talked about.

01:51:55.000 And we...

01:51:57.000 This is where I would have taken the conversation from earlier about the media.

01:52:00.000 How do you feel about Sweden, the way Sweden's handling it?

01:52:04.000 Because we're talking about balance.

01:52:05.000 Sweden has got a very different approach to it.

01:52:08.000 Their approach is essentially, listen, old people, vulnerable people, please take care of yourself.

01:52:13.000 Stay home.

01:52:14.000 They'll provide assistance.

01:52:15.000 They'll get you food.

01:52:16.000 They'll do whatever they get to you.

01:52:18.000 But...

01:52:19.000 People that are healthy, they want them to go out and live their lives.

01:52:23.000 They don't want the restaurants to shut down, the pubs to shut down.

01:52:27.000 This 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.

01:52:43.000 And they're widely criticized by that.

01:52:45.000 I would love to hear what you think.

01:52:48.000 Well, I think the jury's still out on whether that's a good strategy or not.

01:52:51.000 There's three different strategies, okay?

01:52:53.000 And there's a Harvard white paper that delineates these pretty well.

01:52:58.000 I spoke with one of the professors from the Center of Ethics that was an author of this.

01:53:02.000 And you can describe these three strategies in the following way.

01:53:07.000 One they call freeze in place, which is basically what we're doing right now.

01:53:12.000 It's what most countries are doing.

01:53:13.000 A hardcore quarantine.

01:53:16.000 Of course, that's different depending on what part of the country you're in.

01:53:19.000 The second, well, let me jump to the third one.

01:53:21.000 The third one would just be surrender, okay?

01:53:23.000 Let it happen, we'll deal with it as we go, but we're not keeping anybody at home.

01:53:28.000 That's effectively what Sweden is doing.

01:53:31.000 The 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.

01:53:45.000 And like I said, we're in a tactical retreat right now, but at a certain point we actually have to come back out swinging.

01:53:50.000 And we need to be prepared to do it.

01:53:52.000 Sweden took on the third approach, which is like, basically, they think they can deal with it and we're going to see.

01:53:59.000 Now their cases are jumping up pretty dramatically.

01:54:01.000 I don't know how much they'll continue jumping up.

01:54:03.000 The Swedes are also very good at culturally following the rules.

01:54:08.000 Americans don't like a lot of rules. 0.87

01:54:10.000 The Swedes will stop at a red light at 2 a.m., even though there's nobody around.

01:54:16.000 Same with people in Switzerland.

01:54:19.000 We have deeper cultural differences.

01:54:21.000 I 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. 1.00

01:54:32.000 If we want a flamethrower, In our office, we're going to have a flamethrower in our office.

01:54:35.000 I'm like, don't tell me I can't have it, right?

01:54:37.000 You can relate to that.

01:54:38.000 I have a flamethrower right behind me.

01:54:41.000 Solid flamethrower.

01:54:44.000 I'm jealous.

01:54:45.000 I don't have a flamethrower, but I have a lot of guns.

01:54:48.000 They're better.

01:54:49.000 Guns are better. 1.00

01:54:51.000 Yeah, it depends on the situation.

01:54:52.000 No, they're always better.

01:54:54.000 Unless you want to start a fire.

01:54:56.000 Well, that's what I mean.

01:54:57.000 That's the only situation.

01:54:58.000 Yeah.

01:54:59.000 Sometimes the situation is you just want to throw the fire.

01:55:02.000 Unless you're in the movie Alien.

01:55:04.000 Yeah.

01:55:06.000 The point is you need a diversity of weaponry.

01:55:10.000 That's the truth.

01:55:12.000 Right.

01:55:13.000 And so, okay, so those are the three options.

01:55:15.000 I think the jury's still out on if it works for Sweden or not.

01:55:18.000 I think it can work, and I would like to see us move to that rather quickly.

01:55:21.000 Now, 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.

01:55:31.000 I think we have to start having reasonable conversations about the costs of that, and the costs are a lot more than just dollar signs.

01:55:39.000 The costs are a hell of a lot more than just People's 401k is tanking.

01:55:43.000 The 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.

01:55:55.000 And I have a lot of problem with this.

01:55:57.000 In places like Houston, our hospitals are not overwhelmed.

01:56:00.000 They're at 50% capacity still because we're not getting that many more cases.

01:56:04.000 Why do you think that is?

01:56:06.000 Why do you think Texas is less prone to this?

01:56:11.000 Well, I guess I'll answer that question by stating why I think New York is the way it is and New Orleans is the way it is.

01:56:18.000 New York is the way it is because it's a giant city with enormous density.

01:56:23.000 It's the densest I think it's safe to say there was multiple hotspots that occurred within New York City,

01:56:39.000 and then it spread wildly because people ride subways and elevators.

01:56:42.000 I mean, it's not like Los Angeles.

01:56:43.000 It's not like Houston, where we take a car everywhere, no matter what.

01:56:47.000 There's natural social distancing that already occurs.

01:56:51.000 In New Orleans, well, they had Mardi Gras.

01:56:54.000 And Mardi Gras!

01:56:57.000 There's explanations behind these things.

01:56:59.000 And 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.

01:57:10.000 And also take into account that we can target certain solutions.

01:57:14.000 And 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,

01:57:30.000 and then come out and fight.

01:57:31.000 And what does fighting mean?

01:57:32.000 Well, while we're in wait, we're basically ramping up production of protective gear, we're ramping up production of ventilators.

01:57:39.000 Again, our system is amazing.

01:57:43.000 We're going to be producing, I think next week or so, up to 7,000 new ventilators a week.

01:57:49.000 We haven't run out of ventilators.

01:57:50.000 I went through the numbers before when we're talking about socialized medicine.

01:57:53.000 One of the benefits of our system is we are actually way better prepared than people realize.

01:57:58.000 Now, we have a big lack of PPE. There's a lot of reasons for that, and I can go into it.

01:58:03.000 One reason is that China was stopping Export from 3M from China to the rest of the world back in January and February.

01:58:11.000 This just came out in an article that was written and was confirmed by You know, 3M and a lot of people in government.

01:58:17.000 They were preventing the export because 3M produces a lot of it in China.

01:58:21.000 They were preventing those exports because they wanted to hoard the supplies.

01:58:25.000 Then they act like the good guy and go around the world giving it out.

01:58:28.000 I mean, China has to, we're going to have to really look at our supply chains and our relationship with China after this.

01:58:34.000 But that's one of the reasons we didn't have the proper amount of PPE. It also depends on the hospital.

01:58:39.000 Again, 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.

01:58:53.000 And that's just not how our system works, nor should it.

01:58:56.000 And there has to be some level of accountability at the local and state level, too.

01:59:00.000 Again, I just got the phone with some of the doctors here at the Texas Medical Center.

01:59:04.000 And 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.

01:59:12.000 And so they're just not worried about it.

01:59:14.000 We've set up the supply chains in advance.

01:59:18.000 We have to work together.

01:59:20.000 What 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.

01:59:33.000 I don't think they could pass a lie detector test.

01:59:35.000 I think it's a lot of political theatrics.

01:59:39.000 But 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.

01:59:48.000 They manage on those smaller levels.

01:59:51.000 If California wants to try a single-payer healthcare system, let's see it work in California now. 0.64

01:59:58.000 Or a smaller state, and then let's scale it.

02:00:01.000 Hell, let's see if it works in a city, and then let's scale it.

02:00:06.000 There'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.

02:00:15.000 LA is bigger than so many countries around the world.

02:00:20.000 The scale matters to a huge extent.

02:00:25.000 And 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.

02:00:32.000 As you scale it out, you just can't, right?

02:00:35.000 That's why co-ops exist in this country, like Bernie Sanders lived on one.

02:00:39.000 You can make it work if you can literally see everybody all the time.

02:00:45.000 A family unit is a socialist unit.

02:00:47.000 Teach their own, teach their needs, teach their ability.

02:00:51.000 When you scale things out, it dramatically changes things.

02:00:53.000 And we have to remember that as it pertains to dealing with the pandemic and dealing with public policy as well.

02:01:00.000 The 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.

02:01:09.000 The other problem is that they're preventing us from having the right discussions.

02:01:13.000 Because 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.

02:01:26.000 And we have to have that.

02:01:27.000 And the natural reaction from disingenuous people is, oh, well, how many lives is it worth to save a job?

02:01:35.000 And I'm like, okay, that's...

02:01:37.000 That's not the right question.

02:01:39.000 It's a very dishonest question.

02:01:41.000 And, you know, first of all, it assumes that somebody going back to work will actually cost a life.

02:01:46.000 You can't prove that.

02:01:47.000 I mean, if we're going to play this dishonest game of counterfactuals.

02:01:50.000 But also, it misses the point.

02:01:53.000 You know, we live in a world where we take risks.

02:01:56.000 And we have to take those risks and then mitigate those risks accordingly.

02:02:00.000 And we can better mitigate risk and we better understand what we're dealing with and when we're better prepared.

02:02:05.000 And those are the two things we have to do over the next month is get better prepared.

02:02:08.000 And 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.

02:02:19.000 Getting more ICU beds where they might be needed, getting more ventilators, getting more PPE. So that's the preparedness side.

02:02:24.000 And on the other side, we risk mitigate.

02:02:26.000 It's just like, you know, like you explained in Sweden, let's keep sick and vulnerable people away. 0.99

02:02:32.000 Let's target our efforts a little bit better.

02:02:35.000 Let's take a more vertical approach as opposed to a horizontal approach.

02:02:38.000 We can do this.

02:02:40.000 We 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.

02:02:49.000 Well, it's like, That's a terrible way to think about it.

02:02:52.000 I 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.

02:02:59.000 And I'm a better person than you because you have the blood of 30,000 people on your hands because you want people driving.

02:03:05.000 That's a great example.

02:03:06.000 I'm the moral one.

02:03:06.000 That is a great example.

02:03:08.000 I'm the moral one.

02:03:10.000 Yeah, and I'm worried about that.

02:03:12.000 It seems like a cheap analogy, but it's not.

02:03:13.000 It's not at all.

02:03:14.000 No, you're absolutely right, and I'm worried about that when we do go back.

02:03:18.000 I'm worried about that finger-pointing.

02:03:20.000 I 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.

02:03:28.000 We already have.

02:03:29.000 Yes.

02:03:30.000 It's already happening.

02:03:31.000 I have a bunch of quotes I could read you.

02:03:34.000 Please, read some.

02:03:36.000 Okay.

02:03:37.000 Yeah, I will.

02:03:38.000 Because I wrote an op-ed on this.

02:03:40.000 It hasn't been published yet.

02:03:41.000 But, you know, I note some of them there.

02:03:44.000 Well, Nancy Pelosi last week said, you know, responsible for the deaths of people.

02:03:51.000 Where is it?

02:03:56.000 This is why I said maybe I won't, because then I have to actually look for it here.

02:04:01.000 I wrote all this stuff down.

02:04:04.000 But there's a lot of quotes out there from media and from pundits, from Twitter users.

02:04:14.000 Well, I only quote people who are well-known, either they're well-known journalists or they're politicians.

02:04:19.000 But 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.

02:04:28.000 That's kind of the typical one you hear.

02:04:30.000 And it's certainly been said quite a bit.

02:04:35.000 And my fear is that it continues to be said.

02:04:38.000 And it prevents us from having a reasonable debate.

02:04:42.000 Because we truly need to have that reasonable debate.

02:04:46.000 The other thing that frustrates me about these kind of Bad faith arguments is that the people saying them made the same claims themselves.

02:04:56.000 February 1st, Washington Post.

02:04:58.000 Here's a headline.

02:04:58.000 Get a grip, America.

02:05:00.000 The flu is a much bigger threat than the coronavirus.

02:05:03.000 February 1st, USA Today.

02:05:05.000 Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier and more widespread.

02:05:10.000 February 3rd, Washington Post.

02:05:12.000 Why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus.

02:05:16.000 These same papers are now destroying the president.

02:05:19.000 Oh, you didn't act early enough.

02:05:20.000 You didn't do anything.

02:05:21.000 You have the blood of people on your hands.

02:05:25.000 That's amazing. 0.99

02:05:27.000 The hypocrisy is insane.

02:05:30.000 I have so many more. 0.58

02:05:32.000 Go ahead, New York Times.

02:05:36.000 Who says it's not safe to travel to China?

02:05:39.000 So this is following President Trump's extremely, at the time, a very bold move to restrict travel from China.

02:05:47.000 And, of course, all of these papers and prominent people are now saying something different.

02:05:53.000 I 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.

02:06:04.000 But I have to remind everybody how...

02:06:06.000 This is a good one.

02:06:09.000 On the same day that Trump implemented the restriction on travel, this was January 27th.

02:06:26.000 Okay.

02:06:27.000 And then they announced the...

02:06:32.000 The ban on travel as well as the task force.

02:06:35.000 January 31st, the Trump administration implemented the restriction on travel.

02:06:42.000 January 31st.

02:06:44.000 And also declared it a public health emergency.

02:06:47.000 On 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.

02:06:56.000 So, 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.

02:07:09.000 I do remember this too, and I pointed this out at the time, because a lot of people were not talking about coronavirus in February.

02:07:17.000 And 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.

02:07:34.000 So that was money that had already been spent by HHS, by CDC, that needed to be reimbursed.

02:07:40.000 So the Trump administration has already been dealing with this, and they're like, hey, Congress, we need more money, we need more supplemental funding.

02:07:46.000 He got slammed.

02:07:47.000 I don't know if everybody remembers this, but he got destroyed.

02:07:49.000 He got told he wasn't taking it seriously.

02:07:51.000 Why isn't he asking for more money?

02:07:53.000 The President's response to that was, okay, fine, give me more money.

02:07:57.000 Just write something.

02:07:59.000 That week, you know what we voted on on the House floor?

02:08:02.000 We didn't vote on more money.

02:08:03.000 They had days to give more money because this was earlier in the week.

02:08:07.000 What we actually voted on that week was 2339, which is reversing the Youth Tobacco Epidemic Act.

02:08:15.000 That was a bill to ban flavored tobacco.

02:08:18.000 According to House Democrats, things like hookah, grizzly, wintergreen, which is maybe what I... It's now illegal.

02:08:25.000 Now, it never got into law, of course, because it never went through the Senate.

02:08:29.000 But I want people to understand, like, I'm not blaming Democrats either, because there was a lot that we all just didn't know.

02:08:36.000 And 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.

02:08:45.000 It wasn't until early March that it was exploding as a virus in Iran and Italy and South Korea.

02:08:52.000 These things happened and it wasn't clear that there should be massive, massive lockdowns of society.

02:09:01.000 Those 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.

02:09:13.000 And I built this whole timeline out to show it.

02:09:17.000 And I also point out that the timeline can end.

02:09:20.000 From 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.

02:09:30.000 It will be easy, because the counterfactual is impossible to prove.

02:09:34.000 And the fact that it's so easy, that political opportunism is so easy, is what worries me the most.

02:09:40.000 And we have to have those conversations, though, about reopening society and when to do it.

02:09:45.000 And 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.

02:10:00.000 We didn't see it coming.

02:10:01.000 And when it was coming, we were real confused as to what the consequences were going to be.

02:10:05.000 And we're also not getting honest data out of China.

02:10:09.000 Right.

02:10:10.000 China is just, they are not honest about the body count. 1.00

02:10:14.000 They're not honest about any of it.

02:10:15.000 We don't really know what happened over there.

02:10:17.000 The version that we're getting has got holes in it.

02:10:21.000 Oh, yeah, let's talk about that.

02:10:23.000 I did find the quotes that I told you I had, if you want to hear those.

02:10:26.000 They're from people like Jen Rubin, like CNN. So Jen Rubin, Trump death toll equals Trump dead.

02:10:31.000 Lives that would have been spared had he acted on warnings. 1.00

02:10:34.000 The rest are victims of Trump's stupidity and narcissism. 1.00

02:10:39.000 This is from a prominent Washington Post columnist. 1.00

02:10:41.000 Again, I'm not choosing random Twitter users.

02:10:44.000 You know, from New York Times...

02:10:47.000 President Trump was so focused on fabricating threats involving Central American caravans that he was oblivious to the real threats.

02:10:52.000 So, again, I could keep reading.

02:10:55.000 I have a bunch.

02:10:55.000 But let's talk about China.

02:10:57.000 Yeah, so I just mentioned that story that just came out, which is that they actually prevented PPE from being delivered outside of China.

02:11:05.000 So, you know, our companies, 3M, they produce it there, should have been exported out.

02:11:09.000 They prevented that.

02:11:10.000 There 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.

02:11:21.000 Five million people left Wuhan.

02:11:24.000 They allowed travel out of Wuhan.

02:11:26.000 Five million people were traveling all over China, all over the world.

02:11:30.000 The reason this became so bad in Italy and Iran is because of the Belt and Road Initiative.

02:11:34.000 These are major hotspots for China's economic development and the Belt and Road Initiative.

02:11:40.000 Then let's get into the World Health Organization.

02:11:43.000 There's got to be a come-to-Jesus moment on the World Health Organization.

02:11:47.000 Again, 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.

02:11:59.000 On January 30th, World Health Organization said something along the lines of, there's no reason to be shutting down travel or limiting travel.

02:12:08.000 So they are directly controlled by the Chinese government, the World Health Organization.

02:12:12.000 It should also be worth noting, I forget the guy's name who runs it, the director of the WHO, but he's from Ethiopia.

02:12:19.000 And Ethiopia is one of these countries that has huge investments from the Belt and Road Initiative.

02:12:27.000 And 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.

02:12:39.000 He wouldn't even say it.

02:12:40.000 The woman keeps questioning him and he shuts his camera off.

02:12:46.000 Yeah, it was like when you asked me about marijuana use and I pretended I couldn't hear you.

02:12:50.000 You were joking, though.

02:12:52.000 We were right in front of each other joking.

02:12:53.000 That's different.

02:12:55.000 Yeah, he shut his connection off and then he said, China's doing a great job.

02:13:00.000 Let's move on.

02:13:03.000 Very weird.

02:13:05.000 It's so deeply corrupt.

02:13:07.000 It's so deeply corrupt.

02:13:10.000 You 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.

02:13:19.000 And 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.

02:13:30.000 But 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.

02:13:39.000 No matter what your opinion on whether it's actually racist or not, I personally don't think it is.

02:13:45.000 There's a history of calling a virus some kind of geographic name based on where it's from.

02:13:51.000 That's fine.

02:13:53.000 The point is that Chinese authorities were spreading that quite a bit in February.

02:13:59.000 So they're doing things like that.

02:14:00.000 Then they claim that perhaps it was the U.S. Army that had started the virus in Wuhan.

02:14:06.000 They haven't let international inspectors go in and investigate the origins of this virus so that we can better understand it.

02:14:15.000 There's going to be...

02:14:17.000 There already is quite a few things that we're looking at as what we can do to, one, rebalance our supply chains.

02:14:23.000 As a country, we need a better industrial policy on bringing a lot of important manufacturing back home and being more competitive in that sense.

02:14:31.000 Can I ask you this?

02:14:32.000 Is there any evidence that this was a man-made virus?

02:14:36.000 You know, this is the big conspiracy theory that there was some sort of a level four bioweapons lab in Wuhan.

02:14:44.000 Yeah, and I just don't know.

02:14:45.000 I mean, I could pontificate.

02:14:46.000 But it is true that there was a bioweapons lab in Wuhan?

02:14:50.000 Yeah.

02:14:50.000 I don't know if it's meant for weapons, but there's certainly a lab there that would have housed viruses like this.

02:14:57.000 And yeah, we just don't know the answers.

02:14:59.000 And I don't, you know, especially in my position, I don't want to pontificate.

02:15:03.000 Of course.

02:15:04.000 I don't want to assume.

02:15:05.000 Do 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?

02:15:21.000 100%.

02:15:21.000 And this is something Trump has been talking about forever.

02:15:26.000 And I think he's received skepticism from both the left and the right on that for different reasons.

02:15:33.000 Mostly from the right because we...

02:15:37.000 We 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,

02:15:54.000 right?

02:15:54.000 This comparative advantage theory.

02:15:56.000 And that's true in theory.

02:15:58.000 It is true.

02:15:59.000 But we can't ignore the consequences.

02:16:02.000 And I think we have ignored those consequences for a little too long.

02:16:06.000 What happens when you close down that factory?

02:16:09.000 Yeah, your t-shirts are 3 cents cheaper per unit, which is a really big deal for the margins of your company.

02:16:16.000 And yeah, that company can hire more people and you get a cheaper t-shirt.

02:16:20.000 But we kind of miss those manufacturing jobs.

02:16:23.000 There's also a psychological benefit to these manufacturing jobs as well.

02:16:30.000 You're creating something.

02:16:31.000 People like that.

02:16:33.000 People like to feel like they're producing something and that they have meaningful work that pays pretty decent.

02:16:40.000 So there's consequences.

02:16:42.000 There's consequences to the efficiency that has occurred.

02:16:45.000 And then there's national security consequences, and we're learning about those right now.

02:16:49.000 And it's not just medical supplies that we need to take a look at.

02:16:52.000 I'm from Houston, so our oil and gas industry is in big, big dire straits right now.

02:16:59.000 We risk the possibility that we lose energy into it.

02:17:06.000 I think the administration has been able to use some diplomatic pressure and figure that out to an extent.

02:17:13.000 We have to decide whether we think there's value in doing things ourselves.

02:17:19.000 That's the ultimate question.

02:17:20.000 And I would answer that, yes, there is.

02:17:22.000 Now, do we take it to an extreme?

02:17:24.000 No.

02:17:25.000 But are we out of balance right now?

02:17:27.000 Maybe.

02:17:28.000 Yes.

02:17:28.000 And maybe we do need to look at changing our supply chains.

02:17:32.000 Maybe that means some things are just slightly more expensive.

02:17:34.000 Maybe that's what it means.

02:17:37.000 But for a lot of items, we have to be looking at that.

02:17:41.000 We have to be thinking that way.

02:17:43.000 Well, 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.

02:17:59.000 How many people have to jump before you put nets up?

02:18:03.000 What has to happen there where your life sucks so hard to make an iPhone?

02:18:10.000 How much would it cost to make those here? 0.92

02:18:13.000 Is it worth it for us?

02:18:15.000 Is there some real value in the label that we used to love to look for, Made in America?

02:18:23.000 That's not really discussed that much anymore, but I think it would be wise for all of us to invest in that idea again.

02:18:32.000 Yeah, 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.

02:18:43.000 And 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.

02:18:51.000 So 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.

02:19:14.000 That's such a good question, by the way.

02:19:16.000 How many people actually jump before they put the nets?

02:19:20.000 What is the number?

02:19:21.000 That is just a crazy reality.

02:19:24.000 And it's also one that we just accept because we want an iPhone.

02:19:29.000 And, I mean, Apple's one of the most profitable companies the world's ever known.

02:19:34.000 I mean, it's a spectacularly profitable company.

02:19:37.000 Yeah.

02:19:40.000 And 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.

02:19:47.000 And it's going to take the private sector as well.

02:19:51.000 Because Apple would tell you, okay, I'd love to open up a plant here.

02:19:56.000 And they do.

02:19:58.000 But they'd like to do more.

02:19:59.000 The reason they don't is because when they put out that job application, nobody will show up.

02:20:04.000 Or at least not enough people.

02:20:06.000 And so what does that tell you?

02:20:08.000 It tells you that we're not educating people in the skills that are necessary to engage in these jobs.

02:20:14.000 There'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?

02:20:36.000 Why should the taxpayer be on the hook for a major that is guaranteed not to pay anything once you graduate?

02:20:43.000 What are you going to do with that degree and whatever?

02:20:46.000 Who knows?

02:20:47.000 You know what I'm talking about.

02:20:49.000 You can name a bunch, right?

02:20:50.000 Gender studies, whatever.

02:20:52.000 These are not high-paying things, and they're not useful for the economy that we want.

02:20:56.000 So what kind of incentives need to shift is my point.

02:21:01.000 To 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.

02:21:11.000 One more question, Dan, before we go.

02:21:14.000 When are you running for president?

02:21:16.000 I know you're gonna...

02:21:18.000 I'm in my 30s.

02:21:20.000 Come on.

02:21:21.000 I got so much time.

02:21:23.000 Four years.

02:21:26.000 Well, yeah, I mean, technically.

02:21:27.000 Yeah, but...

02:21:28.000 How old are you now?

02:21:30.000 How old are you?

02:21:30.000 I'm really not planning on that.

02:21:33.000 Come on, stop lying.

02:21:34.000 36. You're 36?

02:21:36.000 36. When you're 40, that'll be perfect.

02:21:38.000 That's the time.

02:21:41.000 I don't know if perfect.

02:21:43.000 I mean, I... I do like being in politics.

02:21:46.000 I like having a voice.

02:21:47.000 It's a place I never thought I would be.

02:21:51.000 The 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.

02:22:01.000 But I like this.

02:22:03.000 I've always loved policy.

02:22:05.000 I've always loved thinking through these things and kind of the foundations of what makes this country great.

02:22:11.000 And, you know, I think we've got great years ahead.

02:22:14.000 But yeah, I'm not...

02:22:16.000 I'll just answer your question super honestly.

02:22:18.000 I'm just not thinking about it.

02:22:20.000 There's so much changes in politics right now.

02:22:22.000 So much changes from year to year.

02:22:24.000 Like, so much.

02:22:26.000 It's crazy how...

02:22:27.000 It's not like a...

02:22:29.000 There's no pipeline in politics.

02:22:31.000 It doesn't work that way.

02:22:33.000 Whether 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.

02:22:41.000 And the people will let you know when they want it.

02:22:44.000 That's a very good diplomatic answer.

02:22:47.000 And I think you're uniquely qualified for politics.

02:22:50.000 I appreciate you.

02:22:51.000 I appreciate how reasonable you are and how honest and objective you are.

02:22:56.000 And I always enjoy talking to you.

02:22:58.000 So thank you very much, Dan.

02:22:59.000 And good luck with your book.

02:23:01.000 It's called Fortitude.

02:23:01.000 It's out right now.

02:23:03.000 Go get it, folks.

02:23:04.000 And I'll put it up on my Instagram and all that good stuff, too.

02:23:06.000 Thank you, sir.

02:23:07.000 Appreciate you, man.

02:23:08.000 I really appreciate you, Joe.

02:23:11.000 Stay safe out there.

02:23:12.000 You, too.

02:23:13.000 All right.

02:23:14.000 Bye, everybody.

02:23:17.000 Thanks Joe.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 07, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1454 - Dan Crenshaw

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