00:00:31.000So here's your book, Deception, The Great Cover-Up.
00:00:36.000You were a lone voice of reason during the pandemic that, you know, for me, you were extremely valuable.
00:00:44.000And I was cheering you on every step of the way when you were grilling Anthony Fauci.
00:00:50.000With all due respect, you do not know what you are talking about.
00:00:56.000That guy was driving me fucking crazy.
00:01:00.000It was mind-numbing how many people were going along with it and how many people just accepted what he was saying, ignored all the evidence that pointed to gain of function research, didn't freak out when it was quite obvious that he was lying about gain of function research.
00:01:16.000And I just thank God that you were grilling him.
00:01:23.000One of the greatest tragedies, and we knew this within days, was that children weren't getting sick, but that should have been used to our advantage.
00:01:41.000Right, but most of them had a very mild illness.
00:01:44.000And the point is, is that we knew this in China in the first couple of weeks, and we could have left the schools open.
00:01:50.000And some countries left the schools open.
00:01:52.000For the most part, Sweden left their schools open and treated this completely different and turned out with a similar, everybody wound up with a similar death rate with primarily the people dying were people who were older and overweight or both.
00:02:05.000And well, the argument was, you're going to bring it home and you're going to infect your grandma and she's going to die.
00:02:12.000The argument didn't really hold water though because everybody got it anyway.
00:02:15.000But we didn't know that in the beginning, right?
00:02:17.000In the beginning, they were lying and they were saying that, although we now know that there was no data that showed that the vaccine stopped infection and stopped transmission.
00:02:39.000And there would be the exceptions to the rule.
00:02:41.000But most of the people, the death rate we already knew in China was very, very small once you added in the kids.
00:02:48.000Initially, they were saying it was a 3% death rate, which would have been, instead of 1 million people, you know, would have been significantly more.
00:02:57.000But they knew the death rate was less than that in China early on.
00:03:01.000But part of the reason they thought it was so high is they weren't counting all the asymptomatic cases.
00:03:05.000You know, they knew how many people were sick and how many people died, but the denominator was the number of people who actually were sick or who actually got the infection, but they weren't counting millions of people.
00:03:16.000But Anthony Fauci denied this at every step.
00:03:19.000He denied that natural immunity would protect you.
00:03:21.000And one of my favorite quotes was from a guy named Martin Koldorf.
00:03:25.000He was an epidemiologist at Harvard who ended up getting fired.
00:03:29.000But recently he tweeted out, as about a year or two ago, he said, well, we knew about natural immunity from the time of the Athenian plague in 436 BC.
00:03:38.000And we knew that knowledge until 2020.
00:03:40.000Then we lost all knowledge of natural immunity.
00:03:43.000But the good news is in 2025, we're starting to get back that knowledge.
00:03:47.000But this was, Anthony Fauci knew better.
00:03:50.000You know, he couldn't even read his own basic immunology books about the fact that you do develop immunity.
00:05:03.000And for someone who is, you know, up until 2020, I mean, I was reasonably distrustful of mainstream news, but in a normal way, like I'm sure they bend things a little bit or twist things a little bit.
00:05:16.000I would have never thought I would watch a campaign against me like that, where every night it was horse dewormer, horse dewormer, Joe Rogan, dangerous conspiracy theories, COVID denier, vaccine denier.
00:05:33.000I think it brings up a broader question, too, that when people tell you there's a consensus, and because the consensus exists, you cannot object.
00:05:41.000I think that's a real danger to openness, to new ideas, but it's also a danger in medicine.
00:05:47.000And in medicine, to say this is the consensus, and we're not going to do this.
00:05:50.000So in the first month of this, maybe first or second month, Fauci comes in and I said, you know, many people who die from the flesh-eating bacteria, which is not the same, but it's a serious illness.
00:06:02.000What they give them to try to treat them to prevent death and loss of limbs is high-dose IV steroids.
00:06:08.000And I had a friend whose life was saved.
00:06:10.000He didn't lose any of his limbs and he had this terrible illness.
00:06:12.000And so I asked Anthony Fauci, I said, Do you think there's a chance as they're getting very, very sick and their lungs are filling up with fluid that we could try high-dose IV steroids like we do in other infections?
00:06:22.000And he says, oh, no, no, we've tried that.
00:06:24.000Turns out, and we mentioned this in the book, the best treatment when you were just about to go on the ventilator or on the ventilator, when you have a 50% chance of dying at that point, was IV steroids, an old generic medicine that a big pharma doesn't make much money off of.
00:06:39.000Which steroids in particular were they?
00:06:41.000It's called solumedroll, but it's just IV steroids.
00:06:44.000And it was a 36% reduction in death, which is pretty significant when you're in the ICU.
00:06:49.000The people in the ICU were very, very sick.
00:06:51.000It was a third of them had a reduction in death by taking IV steroids.
00:06:57.000But he was dismissing it from the very beginning and already acting like, oh, I know it's not going to work.
00:07:02.000And we're going to try remdesivir, which turned out not to work very well.
00:07:05.000Not only that, it gives people kidney failure.
00:07:08.000Well, I mean, he has a history of using medicine that has already been through the approval rating with, you know, what they did with AZT during the pandemic of AIDS.
00:08:00.000All the unknown about whether you're going to die or not, you survived and you're done.
00:08:04.000But instead, we told people you might get it again and you still might die and you've got to wear a mask all day long when in reality we should have been celebrating the people who recovered and letting them have their freedom back.
00:08:15.000Well there was also this kooky thing where after you got over the disease they wanted you to get vaccinated which was strange.
00:08:22.000It was almost like they wanted you to join the team.
00:08:35.000But she went to the hospital with COVID.
00:08:37.000They wouldn't admit her until she was vaccinated for COVID while she had COVID, which is actually against all recommendations.
00:08:45.000And this is the problem with the mass vaccination thing.
00:08:48.000If you're going to Walgreen, do you think they ask you if you've had COVID recently before they gave you a shot?
00:08:53.000And so really the best medical recommendation for a young person is one, you don't need the COVID vaccine, but you certainly shouldn't be taking it close to when you've had an infection because you've got an immune response that's going against the disease.
00:09:06.000Then you add in another stimulant to it.
00:09:08.000That's actually related to an increase in the rate of the heart inflammation that comes along with vaccinating some of the young people.
00:09:14.000Well, there's also the weirdness of what happened during the Reagan administration with vaccines where they're no longer liable for any vaccine injuries.
00:09:25.000And when you call this a vaccine, it's very different than any vaccine that had ever been used before.
00:09:32.000But yet you have all of these injuries that people have no recourse to.
00:09:37.000Yeah, my dad was in Congress at the time and voted against giving them the liability protection.
00:09:43.000And he also was there when they had the swine flu epidemic.
00:09:47.000And in that, more people died from the swine flu vaccine.
00:09:50.000I think there were no deaths from swine flu.
00:09:52.000They said, oh, it's going to take over the world.
00:09:54.000And, you know, we're going to lose 5% of our public.
00:10:31.000But, you know, the disease aside, what was it like for you to watch this play being run?
00:10:41.000Because that's essentially what it was.
00:10:43.000It was like there was a play being run, and you had to follow whatever their narrative was to the T, or you'd be attacked.
00:10:54.000And you would see these people that were acting like soldiers for the pharmaceutical drug complex.
00:10:59.000I mean, they would go out there and just brutally attack anybody who deviated from the narrative, say the most awful things, talk about how there was blood on your hands.
00:12:26.000And they said, well, and she survived.
00:12:28.000But while she was there, they decided to test her for antibodies to the Spanish flu because when she was six months old, her mother was coming across the Atlantic.
00:12:50.000But what was it like being in the government and seeing all this play out and that it was illogical, it didn't make any sense, but yet everyone was following the playbook.
00:13:05.000Well, people without any kind of scientific background were lecturing people.
00:13:09.000Sherrod Brown, Sherrod Brown from Ohio was a center.
00:14:01.000One of my favorite scenes was there was a musical performance where there was a bunch of flutists and they had masks on with a whole cutout so they could play their flute through the mask.
00:15:05.000And now the recommendation, even from the American Pediatric Association, who are terrible, they're the worst people in the world on vaccine mythology and religiosity.
00:15:44.000And they've made the mistake because sometimes they had the first rotavirus vaccine 15 years ago they gave.
00:15:50.000They'd take it off the market because six months later, they learned that something called intosusption, where the intestines go inside each other, which can be a real problem for a child, was happening more often with a vaccine.
00:16:05.000It's like you and I would sit down and we'd talk about your drugs, and I'd talk about the side effects of each one, what your disease is, and what we can do.
00:16:12.000Like, I'm not completely, like, for example, with the COVID vaccine, I don't think children should take it because they think the risk of the heart inflammation is greater than the chance of the disease.
00:16:22.000Early on, they said for old people and overweight people that reduced hospitalization and death.
00:16:28.000But I've been talking to the CDC because I want to know is that still true.
00:16:33.000The virus has progressively gotten less dangerous.
00:16:36.000The community's progressively gotten more immunity.
00:16:39.000So what was true in 2020 may no longer be true.
00:16:42.000I want to know if you're over 65 and I give 1,000 people the vaccine, the brand new one, whatever it is, and I give 1,000 people no vaccine, is a reduction in hospitalization and death?
00:17:13.000Because big pharma is just making a gazillion dollars off of still scaring everybody over 65.
00:17:19.000And if it still works, I'll come on your show and say, take it if you're over 65.
00:17:24.000But I don't know if it works, and I doubt that it works because I don't hear of anybody dying from COVID anymore.
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00:18:41.000That's drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan or visit the link in the description to get started.
00:18:48.000Well, it's also this weird binary thing where it's like there's one thing that you could take and that's it.
00:18:54.000There's no talk about strengthening your immune system with vitamin supplementation and what are the other options that you could have once you actually get sick.
00:19:12.000And really the two things that were controversial, at least among a lot of things, but ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, people will ask me about it and I'll say I don't know.
00:19:23.000And so it's very difficult because if you took in, let's say 2020, the virus was dangerous, and let's say you took 5,000 people under the age of 50 and you gave them ivermectin, and you did 5,000 people and you gave them nothing, almost nobody died in either category.
00:19:48.000So to figure out, since the death rate was so low for healthy people, you might need 10,000 people in each arm of the study to figure out what works and what didn't work.
00:19:57.000There were some international studies showing ivermectin worked and hydroxychloroquine.
00:20:01.000There weren't many here, but Fauci shut them all down.
00:20:04.000They started a study and then he shut it down.
00:20:06.000How does one guy get that kind of power?
00:20:57.000Fauci recommended against masks in a very public interview that was a video where he was talking about, you know, it's not going to help you.
00:21:03.000And worse, maybe you'll mess with your face.
00:21:06.000Yeah, well, the good one was that Birdwell woman.
00:21:29.000The surgical mask, a little better, but if you have these big gaps on either side, do you think the virus isn't going around the mask?
00:21:34.000And it probably goes through that mask also.
00:21:37.000The N95 mask, if you're a doctor or nurse and you're going in and out of a room and you wash your hands and throw away the mask, there probably is some value.
00:21:45.000So in the hospital, they recommended this.
00:21:48.000But one of the reasons Anthony Fauci was such a danger is what he recommended was actually dangerous.
00:21:53.000So he's wearing a Washington Nationals cloth mask to show people, or he's wearing a Black Lives Matter mask to show people he cares.
00:22:04.000But if that's the advice and you're 75 years old and your wife has COVID and you're going in her room to take her food and you wear a cloth mask, you're risking getting COVID and dying yourself.
00:22:53.000The flu vaccine doesn't really stop with it either.
00:22:55.000And I'm trying to get more statistics on the flu vaccine as well to see if it's accurate.
00:23:00.000Because I think they lie to us every year about, you know, they say, oh, well, it wasn't this, it wasn't even the same category or type, but you're getting some crossover effect.
00:23:10.000I think most of the time that is being inflated.
00:23:15.000What they're telling you is not actually true.
00:23:16.000And I'm trying to get them at the CDC to study all of this again because they have the power and the numbers to look at large numbers.
00:23:23.000And let's be objective and tell people, you know, what is the odds next year the flu vaccine will work for you.
00:23:28.000And we used to say, well, it may not work, but if you're at risk, go ahead and take it.
00:23:34.000Now they want everybody to take the flu vaccine.
00:23:37.000And it probably is probably better unless your child has an immunodeficiency disease to go ahead and get these and develop immunity over time.
00:23:54.000I think if they were here, they would argue that it's science and it isn't for profit.
00:23:59.000But they argue vigorously against revealing if they're receiving money from big pharma.
00:24:05.000So what I ask is if you're on the vaccine committee and you're going to recommend that every child get a COVID vaccine, shouldn't you have to release whether you get royalties from big pharma?
00:24:15.000And Anthony Fauci in committee said, we don't have to do it.
00:24:18.000The law, and he quoted the law, says we don't have to do it.
00:24:21.000So for two, three, four years now, I'm still trying to get this passed.
00:24:25.000I've gotten all the Republicans to agree to it, and I've gotten all the Democrats but two or three.
00:24:30.000And I'm still trying to get it passed unanimously.
00:24:32.000But it would say if you're a government scientist and you get royalties from Pfizer or from one of the big companies, you have to actually list it on a form.
00:24:41.000And really, you should be then recused from voting.
00:24:43.000Well, also, why are doctors allowed to be financially incentivized?
00:24:48.000Yeah, that should be considered to be unethical or inappropriate.
00:24:54.000We did change some of the things with pharma and gifts to doctors about 10 years ago.
00:24:58.000It is better than it used to be as far as gifts to doctors, except for then they don't call this a gift.
00:25:03.000I think this should be under the gift ban.
00:25:05.000You should not be getting paid to use certain things because I think it's actually malpractice to give children the COVID vaccine.
00:25:39.000And it's the one sort of exception to we have all these things preventing kickbacks to doctors, except for vaccines, and that's somehow exempt.
00:25:48.000So, yeah, no, we've looked at whether legislation could fix this, and I don't think we've found a good answer, but I have definitely looked to see if there's a way Congress could try to fix this.
00:25:57.000What's amazing to me is how many people in the general public are not skeptical.
00:26:03.000How many people in the general public will hear this kind of conversation and immediately their hackles get up and they want to argue against this?
00:26:34.000And in George Washington's day, it was actually live.
00:26:37.000So what you did is, if you'd had smallpox and you were doing pretty well and you survived, and you didn't have a bad case, you had a minor case, you had four or five POCs, not a lot, as you were recovering, that open a scab, take pus from your arm, stab somebody else's arm, and take the pus from your infection and stick it into somebody else.
00:27:10.000And so people actually chose, but people weren't being forced to do it.
00:27:14.000But the George Washington case is very instructive.
00:27:16.000Martha wants to come visit him at the camps, at the war camps, and there were more deaths in the Revolutionary War from disease than there were from bullets.
00:27:23.000He says you can't come until you're vaccinated for smallpox.
00:27:42.000We have understood immunity for thousands of years, and yet it just went out the window with Anthony Fauci saying, well, we just don't know.
00:27:52.000We don't always know how perfect it's going to be, but we do know that nobody got COVID the second time around and had a worse case the second time around.
00:28:00.000Well, one thing we do know is that when Biden left office, he was granted this very bizarre pardon where he got a pardon that goes back to 2014 for crimes he was never accused of.
00:28:13.000I mean, it's got to be one of the first times that anybody's ever been together.
00:28:17.000Yeah, and I think it should be challenged.
00:28:19.000And so we have under the Biden administration, I sent criminal referrals for Anthony Fauci to Merritt Garland twice, and I sent them evidence that he had lied to Congress, which was a felony.
00:28:50.000The executive branch, when they communicate, they're required to keep their communications, and they're required to do it on government devices.
00:28:57.000So we have this evidence, and I've summarized it again in a criminal referral to Trump's Attorney General, and I still haven't gotten action.
00:29:05.000But there's a couple reasons we should do it.
00:29:07.000One, he shouldn't get away with lying.
00:29:09.000He shouldn't get away with destroying records.
00:29:43.000When you were having that conversation with him about gain of function research, which clearly gain of function research was being done at the Wuhan lab.
00:29:52.000And he was just standing in front saying that under the definition of gain of function research, that that does not qualify.
00:30:02.000We all knew he was lying, and he was parsing words.
00:30:05.000He was trying to have a semantics type of argument.
00:30:08.000But one of the reasons we know he's lying, and one of the things that I've presented as evidence, is there was a group text chain on February 1st of 2020.
00:30:17.000So you have all these virologists who are saying privately it came from the lab and publicly it didn't.
00:30:25.000But one of the things Anthony Fauci says about the Wuhan lab is he says, we know it's dangerous and possible because we know they're doing gain of function research.
00:31:21.000Then when he leaves the government, he gets 24-7 limo service and security.
00:31:27.000He's got people in front of his home stopping traffic like you do for a president getting in the car, which I'm okay for former presidents, but that's about it.
00:31:35.000You know, Anthony Fauci should have never got this.
00:32:21.000But his wife, if you ever had an ethical problem, you know who he went to, his wife.
00:32:25.000His wife was in charge of bioethics for the NIH.
00:32:29.000So if there was a question of whether or not his royalties were a conflict, he would ask his wife to find out if he was acting unethically.
00:32:56.000So he appointed all the people beneath him, and he stacked the deck.
00:33:00.000And, you know, I asked the question, and this was an email from Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci.
00:33:08.000He says, take them down, talking about Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH now, talking about Martin Kaldorf, and then an epidemiologist from Oxford.
00:33:19.000And so when I have scientists come before my committee, I'll ask them the first question.
00:33:23.000Have you ever or would you ever send another scientist a note saying to take down a fellow scientist you disagreed with?
00:33:32.000My goodness, that sounds like the mafia or something.
00:33:35.000It doesn't sound like someone who's supposed to be above the fray, objective scientist.
00:33:40.000Were there any other avenues for revenue for him because of the creation of the vaccine or any other medications?
00:33:49.000I don't think with the current one, we don't know all of his royalties.
00:33:55.000He would say, oh, I got $25 or something.
00:33:58.000That's not, it might have been true for a year, but there are years in the past that he was getting more.
00:34:04.000I think Open the Books or the Open Secrets, that group has gone through and through Freedom of Information, has gotten information that like 1,500 doctors got $1.5 billion or 1,500 scientists got $1.5 billion in royalties.
00:34:22.000So it's not an insignificant amount of money.
00:34:26.000And once again, I'm not even sure I'm forbidding it.
00:34:30.000I just want to know if any of them are on a committee voting for the drug that they got money from that particular drug company.
00:34:37.000The woman that was appointed for the NIH under Biden and never got approved, you know, she may well be an ethical person, but I think she's done research grants of $231 million from Pfizer, and it was listed.
00:34:51.000And it doesn't mean she's a dishonest person, but I wonder how she could be objective with Pfizer if through her career.
00:34:57.000And all that money didn't go to her, it was grants that she oversaw, and some of the money went to her.
00:35:02.000And that doesn't mean it's illegal or unethical, but I think it's hard for her to judge objectively a company that has been the main financer of her entire career.
00:35:12.000Well, it certainly incentivizes her to be more favorable towards them, clearly.
00:35:33.000And I've noticed as they go around the room, I don't know if you've seen this when they vote, they start by saying before they vote, I have no conflicts of interest.
00:35:40.000They are verbally announcing I have no conflicts of interest, which is a big improvement.
00:35:45.000But I really want to see all the scientists, who they get it from, how much, and then let, you know, part of oversight is not just Congress, it's the public.
00:35:54.000It's people who analyze these issues, looking in and seeing how much they made and what do they oversee.
00:36:16.000There was hysteria that sort of ruled the day.
00:36:20.000And I think that, you know, and this was sort of the problem and how Anthony Fauci became so prominent.
00:36:25.000You know, there was, you know, the president was out speaking, and the president speaks off the cuff and doesn't always say things that are always exactly accurate.
00:36:34.000And so as he was saying stuff, many of these sort of establishment senators were saying, we need somebody else.
00:36:40.000We need a scientist at those press conferences.
00:36:43.000So it was actually many of my colleagues who pushed Anthony Fauci, pushed them through Pence and pushed them through the president to accept him.
00:36:51.000And one of the things that's still inexplicable to this day is that as Anthony Fauci leaves government, President Trump gives him a gold medal, a presidential medal of honor, you know, as he leaves, which, you know, knowing what we know, I think should have never happened.
00:37:11.000The people that were so vehemently opposed to your position and the people that were so pro-vaccine and pro-mal, like a lot of them are still in the government.
00:37:20.000Yeah, and a lot of them are still in the news media, too.
00:37:23.000I was called all kinds of names by people.
00:37:26.000And it turns out that almost everything I was complaining about, turns out in retrospect, I was right about most of them.
00:37:31.000The masks, really, most of them didn't work.
00:37:34.000And even the ones that work, a lot of people don't realize this.
00:37:36.000An N95 mask works to a certain degree, but once you've touched it, you've contaminated it.
00:37:43.000And also, after you've worn it for four hours, the moisture from your breath gets rid of the electrostatic charge and it doesn't really work very well.
00:38:23.000If you're hiking the Appalachian Trail and you see someone out by themselves and they have an N95 mask on, you can probably guess their party registration.
00:38:48.000Yeah, one of them called me a bloviating ass, and I haven't been back on since about four years ago and said I was so awful to Anthony Fauci and that everything I said was dangerous and I was endangering lives.
00:39:33.000Yeah, it was made up, but it was made up in the wrong direction.
00:39:36.000So what he did is encourage people to stay six feet apart from people, go to a crowded room, go to choir practice, and just stay away from people.
00:39:44.000But if you're at risk, you shouldn't be a choir practice.
00:39:48.000So he actually gave you unsafe advice on the masks.
00:39:52.000Cloth masks don't work, so he's giving you unsafe advice to go help and feed your wife or your husband with a cloth mask on.
00:39:59.000Natural immunity does work, and he told you it doesn't work.
00:40:02.000It was the opposite of everything he told you.
00:40:05.000But he also never got, and I kept saying this in the hearings, he needed humility, humility to know that there's a possibility he's wrong in what he's saying and it should be advice.
00:40:16.000And this is what they don't get about public.
00:40:18.000If I were the public health doctor and a new pandemic came up, I should give advice, not mandates, advice based on the best things we know, and other doctors should give advice because there might be other doctors that disagree with me on it.
00:40:32.000It's sort of the idea of getting a second opinion.
00:40:34.000You go to your doctor and you think something's not quite right and he or she wants to operate on my leg and maybe I want to wait another three weeks, see if my leg feels better in three weeks.
00:40:43.000You get another opinion or you go home and wait three weeks and see if you get better.
00:40:53.000When you're one of the rare people that's in the government that does have a background in medicine, and at least in medical training, and you're experiencing all this illogical shit, what is that like for you?
00:41:59.000The other half still believe in natural spillovers?
00:42:01.000Three years into this, the doctor of the Senate was still recommending there are 16-year-olds that are pages, they're 15, 16 years old, that they get three vaccines.
00:42:12.000And I absolutely steadfastly think that that's malpractice and a risk to them.
00:42:17.000So I fought it, and I would come to the floor, and this is weird.
00:42:54.000Somebody might be able to find a healthy year-old that died at 16.
00:42:57.000Almost everybody that was on CNN, not to keep mentioning CNN, but they would put these people on there and they would hide the fact that they had terminal cancer.
00:43:05.000And it is sad that a child dies any time, but they were dying from their cancer and they just happened to have COVID, you know, and it was dishonest because they were trying to scare regular people.
00:43:24.000Also, there's a giant incentive that in this country and in New Zealand, they're the only two countries in the world where they allow pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise.
00:43:34.000I very rarely watch regular television, but every now and then I'll just go, what are these fucking crazy people up to?
00:43:41.000And I'll watch MSNBC or CNN and see a million drug ads.
00:43:44.000And the number of drug ads is staggering.
00:43:47.000And the weirdness in those ads, the calm tone of their voice as they list off these horrific side effects.
00:43:55.000Well, and the thing that's hard to imagine is there's sometimes for a disease that like 5,000 people in the country have, a disease that, as a physician, even though I know the names of most of the diseases, I'll be kind of uncertain about that.
00:44:07.000I don't remember seeing anybody ever with that disease, and yet it's being advertised on MSNBC.
00:44:12.000And then the question is, do you think that affects what the newscasters are saying on the news?
00:44:39.000There have absolutely been horrific side effects of a bunch of different pharmaceutical drugs.
00:44:45.000You don't hear a peep about any of that stuff on CNN.
00:44:49.000And you wonder who's buying a drug when they say, well, you could die, you could become paralyzed, you could have a stroke, you could have a blood clot.
00:44:56.000Explosive, bloody diarrhea, loss of all your memory, suicidal ideation.
00:45:34.000He is very, very powerful, and a lot of people owe him.
00:45:38.000You know, he raised money for decades, hundreds of millions of dollars, passed it out to the lesser-known senators and helped them get elected when they would get challenges.
00:46:17.000There's a real industry of farmers who grow this.
00:46:20.000And the thing is, who are we to tell somebody who can't sleep at night that an ambient is better for them than taking a hemp gummy to go sleep at night?
00:46:29.000Or a veteran who could take Percocet or some kind of psychotropic drug or who has anxiety or post-traumatic stress, and we're going to tell them they can't take a hemp gummy.
00:46:39.000I think it's insane and very much this presumption that we know what's best for everyone.
00:47:09.000The hemp, because it was legalized nationally, they were selling it across state lines.
00:47:15.000So we have big companies now that sell the hemp gummies, and you can order them through the mail across state lines until this law came about.
00:47:23.000And McConnell always felt it was an unintended consequence.
00:47:26.000And some of the growth might have been, but I don't think there were some bad products out there.
00:47:31.000And all of us, including the hemp industry, said, all right, let's regulate this.
00:47:47.000I'm for the freedom to take it, but I just sleep pretty good.
00:47:51.000So it's not really something I can attest to exactly how it works.
00:47:55.000But people who do take it to me that have one of the drinks say it might be like drinking a beer or maybe not even drinking a beer when you drink one of these THC drinks.
00:48:04.000So the cannabis businesses in the states where it's legal don't want it legal nationally because then it would interfere with their business because you'd be able to order it through the mail.
00:48:17.000Well, they'd probably accept it if we'd legalize cannabis nationally and then they would compete with hemp.
00:48:21.000What was going on is we haven't legalized cannabis nationally.
00:48:40.000CBD has a little bit of THC in it, and so do the hemp gummies have some THC in it, and then the drinks do.
00:48:46.000It's about 5 milligrams in a lot of the different doses.
00:48:49.000There are different doses, but that's the same thing.
00:48:50.000And so all of those are going to be illegal?
00:48:53.000Yeah, the McConnell language says you can't have more than 0.4 milligrams, which is such a low number that I don't think it will have any effect.
00:49:01.000I mean, frankly, the THC is the effect.
00:49:04.000And so if you make the THC number so small, I don't think people will take them.
00:49:09.000The CBD oil people might still take some of that, but I assume the effect that people are getting from the CBD oil, if they rub it on, has to be the THC.
00:49:28.000The plant, though, they change the definition of the plant that the CBD oil comes from, so they're going to have to rehybridize all these plants.
00:49:35.000What I was going to say was, my mom, not my mom, rather, my wife's mom, uses CBD with THC, and she's found that that's more effective for arthritis and aches and pains than CBD without it.
00:49:51.000She's done both, and she says the CBD with THC is more effective.
00:49:55.000And there are some people, and once again, I'm not here to tell you to take it or not take it.
00:50:00.000I'm for the freedom for people to make their own decision.
00:50:02.000There's some people with children who have seizures who take medications and the kid still has 100 seizures a day, which isn't good for your brain and for the child.
00:50:10.000And some of them have added some CBD drops they give to the child CBD oil with the THC.
00:50:52.000Are you in favor of making that illegal for me to take it?
00:50:55.000I have MS. Would you be for making it illegal?
00:50:58.000Romney looked right at him and said, I sure would.
00:51:00.000And I was like, what kind of person says that?
00:51:03.000What kind of person is so presumptuous of their moral position that they're going to tell you it's immoral to take that, but fine to take some antipsychotic drug or some kind of narcotic that the pharmacy, pharmaceutical companies sell, but we're not going to let you use marijuana?
00:51:20.000It's people that have never consumed it and have these preconceived notions of what it actually does versus what it does.
00:51:27.000I mean, you'd be surprised at how many little old ladies are taking CBD with THC in it to help with their aches and pains and help them sit.
00:51:37.000My joke when I tell people who's opposed to this, like McConnell, who's older than older than dirt, is that they all watched Reefer Madness in 1937 at the matinee, and they'll never forget what happens if you get that reefer madness.
00:51:56.000And some of them probably were alive in 1937, could have actually seen the movie.
00:52:29.000William Randolph Hearst was responsible for this whole terrifying craze of people thinking that marijuana was driving people nuts and jumping out of buildings.
00:52:39.000In 1930-something, I forget the year, they came up with a new product called the Decorticator.
00:52:46.000And it was in Popular Science magazine, Hemp, the new billion-dollar crop, because they had this new machine that allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber.
00:52:54.000William Randolph Hearst owned Hearst Publications, but he also owned paper mills.
00:52:59.000Hemp was a far more effective and far more durable form of paper.
00:53:04.000He was going to compete with hemp, and he had forests that he was using for his paper, where they were, you know, for paper mills.
00:53:12.000And hemp was going to replace all that.
00:53:16.000So they were arguing against it as a commodity.
00:53:19.000Marijuana was never a name for cannabis.
00:53:22.000Marijuana was a name for a wild Mexican tobacco.
00:53:26.000And so they started saying in his newspapers, they started printing these fake stories about how blacks and Mexicans were taking this new drug and raping white women.
00:53:37.000And that's where reefer bandis came from.
00:53:39.000And they call this new drug marijuana.
00:53:41.000This episode is brought to you by Paleo Valley, 100% grass-fed beefsticks.
00:54:41.000They have acronyms, say Patriotism, the Patriot Act.
00:54:45.000You must be anti-patriotic if you're not for the Patriot Act.
00:54:48.000But most of the things they say, it's the opposite, or someone has put something forward that really is about, like, let's say it's a banking regulation.
00:54:56.000You say, this is going to protect the poor people.
00:54:58.000But it turns out the banking regulation is easier paid for and absorbed by big banks.
00:55:03.000And so what happens to your small local bank, and you say, how come all the small banks get gobbled up by big banks?
00:55:08.000It's because you put regulations on that who favored?
00:55:11.000The big banks favor the regulations because it puts the small bank out of business.
00:55:17.000And then the new banks trying to come in can't afford the compliance cost.
00:55:22.000Right now, one of the extraordinary things we're doing with banks, and I don't think many people know this, the Federal Reserve is now paying interest to big banks on keeping reserves at the Federal Reserve.
00:55:47.000So our debt is 10 percent worse because we're now paying, and we never did this.
00:55:50.000Before 2010, we never paid interest on reserves.
00:55:55.000And what it means to pay interest on reserves is that it's an incentive for the Fed just to leave it there.
00:56:00.000Why loan it to you if you're expanding a business when I can just leave it here and get 4 percent?
00:56:04.000It also keeps interest rates from going down.
00:56:06.000Because if the Fed pays the big bank 4 percent, are they going to loan it to you for 3.5 when it can just sit at the Fed and gain 4?
00:56:13.000So it's kind of, you know, President Trump always wants what he wants, and sometimes he wants good things, but he, you know, may not go about it the best way.
00:56:24.000But one way to make interest for her is tell the Fed they can't pay interest to these big banks.
00:56:29.000Have you ever had a conversation with him about this?
00:56:30.000I've been trying for like three months to get out of conversation with Besant.
00:56:34.000And I held up one of their – with the Secretary of Treasury.
00:56:37.000I held up one of their appointees last week, which is one of the things you do to get the attention of the people you want to talk to.
00:56:42.000And they've agreed to meet with me, but we're already halfway into January.
00:56:46.000But I'm trying to get a meeting with Besant to talk to him about this idea of paying interest because they said, oh, it will only take $30 billion to set up the system.
00:58:38.000But he's going to try to diagnose things like, you know, you'll hear of a friend, you know, is like 45 years old and has pancreatic cancer.
00:58:44.000Or we actually have a former senator right now, Ben Sasse, who says he has stage four pancreatic cancer.
00:58:50.000And the reason it spreads before you know you have it, but he's trying to get a – and he has a test that measures markers just from what you exhale to try to pick up on cancers before they be detected.
00:59:03.000So there's a possibility that they can come up with some sort of a detection method to find out if you're intoxicated.
00:59:08.000And I don't know the technology that well.
00:59:11.000But it's either way, just for responsible use for adults, it just doesn't make any sense that they would change it from what it is now and make it more restrictive.
00:59:57.000I had a gentleman on my podcast named John Norris.
01:00:00.000He was a game warden in California and, you know, just checking fishing licenses and making sure that people are following the laws.
01:00:09.000And wound up chasing down a dry creek and trying to find out like had a farmer diverted the creek, like what had happened here.
01:00:18.000Well, it turned out there was an illegal grow operation by the cartel because when California made marijuana legal in the state for adult use, what they did was make it a misdemeanor to grow it illegally.
01:00:33.000So the cartel just started growing it in state parks and forests.
01:00:36.000And so they would find these heavily armed cartel operations in the middle of national parks and national forests.
01:00:45.000And, you know, his group became – he's got a great book called Hidden War.
01:00:50.000And his organization became essentially a tactical group.
01:00:55.000You know, they had Belgian Malinois and bulletproof vests and they were having shootouts with the cartel in the forest because these guys were growing this stuff.
01:01:04.000And 90 percent of all the marijuana that's sold in these states where it's illegal was being grown in a state where it's only a misdemeanor to grow it.
01:01:33.000And the way we're doing this is by propping up these illegal drug cartels the same way that during alcohol prohibition, they propped up the mob.
01:03:17.000I have several bills that we're working on and going to introduce in the near future to either try to extend the deadline and or change it.
01:03:24.000I'd like to change it where if your state has regulated it, the federal government would accede to your state regulation or allow your state to regulate it.
01:03:38.000It's got to be very bizarre being a rational person working for the government.
01:04:11.000You know, I worked as a physician for about 20 years before I ended up running.
01:04:15.000And really, you have to have a real career because politics, one, isn't that great a career.
01:04:19.000And two, there's no guarantee you can be the smartest person in the world, not win.
01:04:23.000It doesn't always, you have to be in the right, right person, right time, right place, and a little bit of luck.
01:04:28.000Yeah, and, you know, it's like, how can someone effectively govern if you haven't experienced life outside of the government?
01:04:39.000It just doesn't seem even rational that you could be a person that would be a good representation of all these hardworking people if you've never actually had a job.
01:05:47.000Well, it actually always has applied on the oceans.
01:05:50.000We have always – we've had drug interdiction, but we have always stopped boats and asked to search them.
01:05:56.000If they flee or shoot at the Coast Guard, they will get shot and blown up, but it's usually an escalatory sort of steps.
01:06:04.000We know that when the Coast Guard boards vessels off of Miami and off of California, one in four of the boats they board don't have any drugs on them.
01:06:12.000So I look at my colleagues who say they're pro-life and they value God's inspiration in life, but they don't give a shit about these people in the boats.
01:06:20.000And are they terrible people in the boats?
01:06:46.000You can probably go about 100 miles before you have to refuel, 2,000 miles from us.
01:06:51.000They have to refuel 20 times to get here.
01:06:53.000They really – it was all a pretense and a false argument.
01:06:55.000But I guess what I don't feel connected to my Republican colleagues is that those lives don't matter at all and we just blow them up.
01:07:02.000And against all justice and against all laws of war, all laws of just war, we never have blown up people who were shipwrecked.
01:07:11.000It's against the military code of justice to do that.
01:07:13.000And we're doing it and everybody just says, oh, well, they're drug dealers.
01:07:16.000Why do you think they were attacking those people?
01:07:19.000Because I've heard a bunch of different theories and one of the big theories was they were trying to get the cartel upset at Maduro in order to get him out of office.
01:07:28.000It's all been a pretense for arresting Maduro.
01:07:34.000We've got to show you we care about drugs.
01:07:36.000But the weird thing about it is they really care about drugs except for the former president of Honduras, Hernandez, who was given a 40-year sentence, was tried, was found guilty.
01:07:46.000He was given 40 years in a U.S. jail, and he's let go at the same time we're arresting Maduro because he's attacking the United States with drugs.
01:08:19.000That's why I've opposed it because, look, I have no love lost for Maduro.
01:08:23.000I wrote another book called The Case Against Socialism.
01:08:25.000I think the socialism, historically, there's been a link between socialism and state-sponsored violence.
01:08:31.000And so in the book, we talk about a 16-year-old girl who has a gang, and her gang's turf or territory are the dumpsters outside of restaurants to scavenge for food.
01:08:42.000That's what Maduro and Chavez did to Venezuela.
01:09:07.000But should the president of the United States, no matter who he or she is, have the ability, without a vote of Congress, the people's representatives, just go snatch people out of jails in Brazil and put a new government in it?
01:10:35.000For example, I think one of the things I think there's a good feeling towards America from a lot of Venezuelans right now that are happy that Maduro is gone.
01:10:42.000But ask them again in six months if we're still controlling their oil and we're doling out a little bit of money.
01:10:49.000But the money is not going to the people.
01:10:51.000It's going to the socialist government.
01:10:52.000So you realize we've traded one socialist for another.
01:10:56.000Maduro is gone, but his second in charge, who is elected with him and holds all of his beliefs, is there.
01:11:01.000And if she graciously or fearfully decides to accept what they're telling her, that we're going to confiscate all the oil and we're going to sell it on the international market.
01:11:11.000We're going to give her a little bit back if she behaves.
01:11:14.000And let's say that austerity doesn't lead to a real vibrant economy.
01:11:19.000I think six months from now, the people will be just as upset as they were.
01:11:23.000And they'll still have the same government, essentially.
01:11:28.000So one of the things that I've read was one of the primary reasons why we went in was because Russia and China were also interested in Venezuela's oil.
01:11:38.000And China had met with Maduro literally the day that he was kidnapped by the United States, right?
01:12:07.000So this Monday, I sent the president a text and he responded to him.
01:12:12.000I said, the ambassador called me and he said their president's been trying for several months to get a phone call through and he'd love to talk to President Trump.
01:12:20.000And the good thing about President Trump, and this is something I always really like about him, he'll make decisions on the spot.
01:12:25.000He didn't ask a committee to vote on whether he can talk to the president.
01:12:31.000And the president still has good instincts.
01:12:33.000I disagreed with the bombing of the boats and the bombing of Maduro.
01:12:37.000I'm not too unhappy with the result, but I don't want the chaos to spread to Colombia.
01:12:43.000And I think Colombia does cooperate with us, particularly on the drug trade.
01:12:47.000It's not perfect, but they do cooperate.
01:12:49.000But he did end up making a phone call to the president of Colombia.
01:12:53.000And I think the setting is for less of a problem.
01:12:58.000And you say, well, why have things changed from where he was talking about regime change in the campaign?
01:13:03.000Some of it's the influence of the people around him.
01:13:05.000I've jokingly said we ought to pass a law saying Lindsey Graham shouldn't be allowed in the White House because I think he is a bad influence.
01:13:44.000When you see these things at play, like the kidnapping of Venezuela and the bombing of the boats, how informed are you about why they're making their decisions?
01:13:56.000Are you – do you have conversations with the people that are making the decisions?
01:14:25.000Because if they're – if you look at it geographically, like you were just saying, they're so far away from us.
01:14:30.000They're on small boats and they're not bringing those drugs to the United States.
01:14:34.000And the only way they can make war with the drugs is if they're hitting you over the head with the drugs and then making you take the drugs, all right?
01:15:03.000All of a sudden, we're going to believe that, well, gosh, there might be the wrong – we might blow up the wrong truck or maybe we got the information wrong.
01:15:16.000Amidst all this, Coast Guard is still stopping dozens of boats.
01:15:19.000But they tell us we're only blowing up the ones that are related to the terrorist, the trend de Aragua or whatever.
01:15:28.000I don't know how they can know that with certainty.
01:15:31.000I don't know how they can know with certainty that some of – I think most of these probably were drug boats.
01:15:35.000So why do you think they're doing it then?
01:15:36.000They wanted regime change and I think Rubio has wanted regime change.
01:15:40.000He's been itching for it for 15 years and I think he has a great deal of influence with the president.
01:15:44.000And they have convinced – and it's selling someone like the president that he can use his power for good is an argument that I think a lot of people would succumb to.
01:15:58.000And if it all works out and freedom rings true in Venezuela, people will say, well, gosh, yeah, I think he did.
01:16:04.000And that's why now people think he did the right thing.
01:16:07.000I think people don't know yet what's going to happen, whether or not people are going to be happy keeping the same socialist government, whether they'll have a free election and somebody else to win isn't known yet.
01:16:17.000But I do think that while he's done that and it seems to have worked, it's my job and others to say that really invading Greenland is not a reasonable thing, invading Cuba, invading Colombia, that there has to be pushback.
01:17:36.000And they've actually persuaded some otherwise good people in my caucus to say, well, normally I would be against bombing another nation's capital and removing the leader.
01:17:45.000Oh, but he was indicted for the indictment.
01:19:10.000Well, there's a lot of, you know, there's I think a country suffers and they want people justifiably want better stuff for the people there.
01:19:17.000I think they also do worry, as you mentioned earlier, they says too much influence of Russia and China there.
01:19:25.000I think that's what I've been reading most.
01:19:27.000That makes sense is that the concern was that China or Russia was going to ramp up oil production.
01:20:34.000I don't know the details of which kind of oil they have.
01:20:37.000But I think there probably are some technological problems.
01:20:40.000But I think there's – I think it's easy to make the argument that they're not hitting their maximum efficiency with the current socialist government.
01:20:50.000But the – what I had read about the extraction was that the oil that is in Venezuela is almost like asphalt and that it requires all these – That could be.
01:21:05.000And so there may be more difficulty than Saudi Arabia.
01:21:07.000But I think also the system, you know, so when you look at Venezuela and you look at what happens under price controls, you need prices to go up and down based on demand because if you don't, you have shortages.
01:21:19.000If you set the price too low and I'm a manufacturer, I'm not going to sell it for that.
01:22:17.000But also by you having to pay 30 percent, it's going to teach you to be a better planner the next time because you can't keep borrowing at 30 percent.
01:22:27.000But the marketplace demands the 30 percent is what the market will bear.
01:22:31.000And if it was too much, then the interest rate will come down.
01:22:33.000And no one should borrow at 30 percent.
01:22:35.000I mean they should teach in high school how people to plan their budget so you don't do that.
01:22:40.000Put those in on college students, those kind of credit people that are a little bit more at risk.
01:24:12.000But if you don't allow them to move, that sends a signal back that we're buying too many houses and we're building too many houses and we'll slow down.
01:24:20.000If you just send the signal to keep interest rates at 2, you get the boom so high up here that the crash is devastating like it was in 2010.
01:24:28.000What are your feelings about corporations buying up personal homes?
01:24:32.000Like there's Blackstone and there's a bunch of different corporations that have bought – I don't know if it's Blackstone, but I heard that Blackstone – there was a drop in their stock price because of this thing that Trump is trying to do now to stop corporations from buying individual family homes and then leasing them out to people.
01:24:55.000So in a free market, in a free world where you can choose a hemp product, you also make contracts with who you sell to.
01:25:03.000So for me to tell you – to me it's a freedom issue.
01:25:06.000If I tell you you can't sell your house to Blackstone, that's me limiting your choices.
01:25:11.000Maybe Blackstone is going to give you 5 percent more.
01:25:18.000But I think if you look at this carefully, for example, what's – one of the impediments or one of the costs of buying a house is the real estate price.
01:25:26.000So the realtor takes – they used to take what, like 6 percent.
01:25:29.000But now sometimes you can get 3 percent and you go through a bigger company.
01:25:34.000So corporatization or making something bigger where a bigger entity owns something sometimes leads to lower costs because they can actually lower costs.
01:26:10.000And interest rates are still high too.
01:26:12.000Yeah, I think the fear is like people are terrified that these enormous corporations are going to buy up all of the single-family homes and you won't be able to get one and you'll be forced to lease a home and you'll never be able to own a home.
01:26:27.000I think I would probably want to study it more thoroughly to find out if that's actually the result because some people talk about a fear of it happening.
01:27:09.000I think the – it's a reaction to think big is bad and that these big players are going to rip us off.
01:27:15.000But if it's a free contract, I think more of whether or not I should infringe on your liberty and tell you you can't sell your house to Blackstone.
01:27:22.000I think that's me limiting your ability to contract with whoever you want.
01:27:28.000It's – I think the fear is – well, the only reason why they would be doing it is that they could make more money leasing the homes out than – Yeah, I don't know.
01:27:38.000It's the same way with buying apartments too.
01:27:40.000I'm guessing they bought apartments too because kids are staying in apartments longer and the apartment business has been a really good business for like the last 10 years buying apartments.
01:27:52.000I mean the real disaster isn't stuff like that, the marketplace.
01:27:55.000The disaster of like rent and homes and not having enough places like to live in Manhattan, which is very expensive, or New York in general.
01:28:04.000And I'm positive the socialist is going to make it worse.
01:28:09.000So if you're in the middle of Manhattan and you can get apartments for $300, you're like, oh, that's great.
01:28:13.000But if I'm the landlord and all the stuff is broken in there and there's holes in the walls, I'm not fixing it for $300 a month.
01:28:20.000I need $3,000 a month to keep the place up.
01:28:23.000So what happens is the apartments go to – into ruin and also there's a shortage.
01:28:30.000You need money and you need big people with money to build apartment complexes, particularly in New York where you got to tear something down and build something new.
01:28:37.000I'm not doing it if you're going to tell me what my rent is going to be.
01:28:42.000And the one thing people don't understand about it because they fear somebody being ripped off and how expensive something is, is there was an economist, Joseph Schumpeter, and he put it this way.
01:28:54.000He said the miracle of capitalism is not that the queen can buy silk stockings, but the factory girl can.
01:29:00.000But in the beginning, the first person and the only person to buy them will be queens and kings and rich people.
01:29:07.000So the story of calculators, my dad had a calculator.
01:29:10.000He was a doctor and we were well-to-do.
01:29:12.000We weren't extraordinarily rich but well-to-do.
01:29:14.000He had a calculator for $300 in the 1970s.
01:29:18.000All he could do was add, subtract, and multiply and it was about this thick and this big.
01:29:23.000But you can go tour a condo and pretend to buy a condo and the real estate agent will give you a calculator now.
01:29:29.000But in the beginning, only rich people got them.
01:29:31.000But if you forbid rich people from getting them at a high price, the only way it gets to a low price, like Tesla started with more expensive cars at a high price.
01:29:39.000They're coming down, but they only come down because rich people bought them first.
01:29:43.000So we can never be of the notion that we're going to make things better by preventing prices from being too high in something.
01:29:52.000So the queen may have bought the first silk stockings, but eventually capitalism brings the price down enough that you have mass distribution and actually a factory girl can buy them.
01:30:02.000Cell phones are a good argument about that.
01:31:31.000What if we spend 1% less next year on welfare, and I'll tell my party they have to spend 1% less on military?
01:31:39.000If you do that across the board, but you'd have to include the mandatory programs, you can balance your budget gradually over a five-year period.
01:32:05.000But there are some people on the left who live and die by public TV, and they think it's the greatest thing, and it's an offense to them.
01:32:13.000So rather than cut 100% of it, let's cut the – and you can balance the budget right now if you cut 6% of the military, 6% of Sesame Street, 6% of everything everybody wants.
01:32:54.000But let's say you got $100 million last year, and because we're short of money, everybody has to get less this year.
01:33:00.000Would it be okay if I only vote for $94 million for you next year?
01:33:04.000And when you put it that way – and they're usually in there with tears running down their face talking about their mom and their grandmother and Alzheimer's, and they're worried they're going to get it.
01:33:12.000But to a person, you look around the table, and they say, well, that sounds kind of fair.
01:33:40.000But would you spend less, or would you just limit the purchasing to non – We'll probably be lucky just to limit the purchase, but I would spend less.
01:33:46.000But you couldn't spend – but how could you spend less?
01:33:48.000You would have to give them less, and you'd say, hey, not only can you not buy sugary drinks, but now you'll have less money to buy healthy food, which is more expensive.
01:33:55.000Well, what you would do is – Do you know what I'm saying?
01:33:59.000If you had a budget, let's say it's $100 million, and next year the food stamp budget is going to be $94 million, and you say you can't buy Coca-Cola and Pepsi and sugar drinks, they would still have to make their decisions with a little bit less, but they, on average, are spending 6% or – yeah, I think it's about – no, I think it's about 10% of the dollars are going towards these sugar drinks.
01:34:21.000They would have to make decisions to do it.
01:34:23.000But I think even something like food stamps, there's a strong argument, oh, people will be hungry.
01:34:28.000Hunger is not a problem in our country.
01:36:28.000There was a book written by Charles Murray years ago called Coming Apart.
01:36:31.000And it compared people and said these are the rich people in your society and these are the poor people.
01:36:36.000It was just divided into two groups and the two main statistics that put you in either rich group or poor group, having kids before you were married, and education.
01:36:46.000Charles Murray, isn't that the guy that had very controversial ideas about race and IQ?
01:37:40.000But I actually think you need to go to the grocery store with people and show them all the crap they're putting in their cart that they shouldn't be putting in.
01:37:46.000That sounds like you're for another government program.
01:38:31.000I think that there's a problem in that people are very set in their ways, and they've developed a pattern of behavior over the course of decades.
01:38:40.000So you're not just going to shift with a change in policy and a reduction in their food stamps.
01:40:32.000And I actually don't want – you know, the goal is – see, people think the goal is we need more Medicaid.
01:40:37.000No, what we need is less people on Medicaid.
01:40:39.000The goal should be an economy where 5% of the economy, really in a good functioning world, 5%, 6%, not much more than that, shouldn't be able to take care of themselves.
01:40:49.000There really should be health care that almost everybody can afford except for a small percentage of people.
01:40:57.000You know, once you have kidney disease, you're on dialysis, it's a story on expense.
01:41:11.000I see – and I see where they're going to argue against what you're saying about food stamps and, you know, from this libertarian perspective.
01:41:19.000But I think you're absolutely right in that you should be allowed to do whatever you want with your own money.
01:41:24.000But if you're going to get government assistance, there should be some sort of a limitation to you getting food that's only healthy.
01:41:30.000We shouldn't be paying for you to kill yourself.
01:41:32.000Just like you can't buy cigarettes, right?
01:41:48.000If he only does one thing, and one thing he's remembered for is treating sugar as a – not a sin, as a bad food.
01:41:57.000Sugar added to convince us that adding sugar to cereals and all these things that we add sugar to, that it's bad for your health, that will transform the people who accept that.
01:42:09.000And the education, the understanding of that.
01:42:28.000But since the government is responsible for so much food anyway, think about how healthy – I don't think we should have sugar drinks in high schools.
01:42:36.000They have machines in all the high schools.
01:42:37.000They say, oh, we get extra money for our football field.
01:42:40.000Let them put non-sugar drinks in if you really want their real advertising dollars.
01:42:45.000I mean, look – but again, if you're a kid and you work and you've got a job, you're working at a corner store and you're making whatever you make, $15 an hour, whatever – not even.
01:43:07.000So if you're a kid and you make $7 an hour, let's say, working at a store, and you want to use that $7 to buy a Coca-Cola and a pack of ringdings, who cares?
01:43:21.000But the point is when the government is giving you money, I think it's very reasonable to say this money can – like we're supposed to be helping you get back on your feet.
01:43:33.000This is the problem with social safety nets, where I'm a big believer in it.
01:43:38.000When I was a child, my family was poor and we were on welfare and we were on food stamps.
01:43:43.000But they worked their way out of it and then when I was in high school, they were doing really well.
01:43:49.000So it's like – it's a very valuable thing for families that are down on their luck and things aren't going well.
01:43:56.000And I'm a big believer in – I think we should treat this country like a community.
01:44:01.000And when you have the downtrodden and the people that aren't doing so well, I think it's really important to help them.
01:44:07.000I think to let abject poverty and starvation exist in a country that has such extreme wealth is abhorrent.
01:44:16.000But I also think people get very dependent on social safety systems and social safety nets.
01:44:23.000And when you have people that have generation after generation have existed on welfare, then it becomes a problem.
01:44:29.000And it becomes a problem where we have to figure out how to motivate people or educate people as to choices that they can make that will be more beneficial to their lives to provide for themselves and be outside of it.
01:44:44.000Another thing that's going to mess with that motivation is unhealthy food because one of the surest ways to keep people unmotivated and have no energy is to keep them unhealthy.
01:44:59.000You have more energy to go pursue your dreams and do the things you want to do in life.
01:45:03.000If you're constantly dealing with type 2 diabetes because you've been eating sugar all day and garbage all day and you're morbidly obese, you're not going to have the same energy as a person who's eating healthy food and getting up early and drinking water.
01:45:20.000And it's just – it's going to affect the choices that you make because it's more burdensome to carry around that body.
01:45:26.000Yeah, I think that – and I don't disagree with what you're saying on having a safety net.
01:45:31.000But we have to have tough love involved with it and we have to have the idea that it's temporary and we're trying to get you to another place.
01:45:39.000It can enable people to continue bad choices over and over and over again and say, well, we just have to take care of them.
01:45:55.000And once you've had the kids, I'm not against that.
01:45:57.000They're there and you've got to do some of the kids.
01:45:59.000But we didn't give it to able-bodied, you know, 21-year-old men who are in college didn't get it or able-bodied men who are out of high school didn't get it.
01:46:09.000You didn't do that because they need to work and they still can work.
01:46:11.000There are jobs everywhere for able-bodied people.
01:46:14.000So we have to look carefully at all these programs.
01:46:17.000And this is what some people on the left complain about.
01:46:19.000Able-bodied people, if they get something, should be very, very temporary, if at all.
01:47:33.000And the reason you have to express that is otherwise you lose hope.
01:47:36.000If you live in a poor area of town and, you know, you're a single mom and everybody tells you, you know, you're just never going anywhere, that's when your reaction is I might as well steal or sell drugs or something.
01:47:48.000But instead, the message to our young people is it should be.
01:47:52.000There's never been a better time to be alive.
01:47:55.000I believe that so strongly and that we're doing a disservice to our young people by saying you're a victim.
01:48:29.000I mean, you literally can do a manual job, earn enough money to start your own small business.
01:48:34.000You know, if you're in high school and you're a decent student but you're not a rocket scientist and you don't love reading books and you don't love math but you're pretty good and you're intelligent enough, if you do HVAC, you'll have one hell of a career.
01:48:48.000You go to a technical school in Louisville, all of the people in the class – I went to one recently.
01:48:53.000There was 100 people in the class for HVAC, fixing air conditioners.
01:48:56.000Every one of their tuition was paid for and they had a job if they completed the course.
01:49:00.000And HVAC – if you're an HVAC worker, I'm guessing – I'll bet you you could make $80,000 to $100,000 a year fixing air conditioners.
01:49:07.000But if you start your own HVAC company, you'll be the richest man or woman in town.
01:49:12.000They're – in my town, the people in the HVAC companies are some of the richest people in our town.
01:49:17.000Well, it's a good argument also with automation and AI because automation and AI is going to do a lot of jobs that people are going to school for unfortunately.
01:49:28.000A lot of people are getting degrees that are going to be irrelevant when automation and AI takes whatever percentage of jobs it's inevitably going to take.
01:49:39.000But trades, being a carpenter, being a plumber, those are always going to be valuable.
01:49:44.000I think things like that – you may have technical assistance when you get there that a computer helps diagnose the problem and helps fix the air conditioner.
01:49:51.000But I don't think the jobs – I talk to people every day and many of them are – Well, you're going to have to carry things and install things.
01:49:57.000You're going to have to get in to open up walls.
01:50:00.000But I talk to everybody every day and they're scaring the world saying there will be no more jobs and everybody will just sit around looking at each other.
01:50:06.000And I really – I don't – I hope that's not true.
01:50:10.000And I – you know, they're richer and smarter than I am maybe, but they all say it's going to happen.
01:50:14.000But I say if it happens, what will also develop is secret societies.
01:50:19.000And they'll be like speakeasies and you'll go down the stairs.
01:50:22.000You'll knock on the door and someone will decide.
01:50:24.000You'll do the password and you'll go inside and you'll be able to build shit in there.
01:50:27.000You'll be able to like grout bricks and put them together.
01:50:48.000This is – I taught a course in this.
01:50:50.000So when we have AI, people are saying the jobs disappear, work will become so foreign, but there will be a small remnant that searches for work.
01:51:00.000And after you build stuff in the little speakeasy down under with a secret password, you'll have to destroy it before the government comes.
01:51:06.000So that's just my theory of what's going to happen.
01:51:13.000He thinks that we're going to need universal basic income.
01:51:16.000And he thinks it won't actually be universal basic income.
01:51:21.000His rose-colored glasses version of it is universal high income because he believes that AI is going to create so much wealth that there will be so much money that people won't have to work anymore.
01:52:04.000And with regard to work, I think work is something so necessary that the problems we have in our society are with the people who aren't getting the benefit of working.
01:52:15.000And so I see work and I would mandate work for welfare programs.
01:52:19.000I don't – if you're able-bodied, you would have to work.
01:57:06.000So I think it's not yet known what we will think of, what may pass as work.
01:57:10.000Maybe art is work at some point and everybody's an artist.
01:57:14.000But maybe there also are people who like to – you know, even now, there's automation and we can grow with pesticides and fertilizers and stuff.
01:57:53.000There probably will be some things that maybe AI could do it, but maybe you'd rather a human do it.
01:57:58.000Even now with art, my wife, Kelly, has written a children's book and she's looking at art.
01:58:05.000She looked at the AI and it was pretty darn good, but she really wanted an artist because she wanted something to be – to have real meaning, you know, and to be something that people connect with.
01:58:16.000You know, for children's books, a lot of it is connecting with the pictures.
01:58:19.000Well, I certainly think there's going to be a lot of value in art that's made by humans.
01:58:23.000Just like there's value in music and even films, you know, that's the argument that – you know, I had Bradley Cooper in here the other day and we were talking about the concern that a lot of these artists that create films, they're really worried that they're going to start using digital actors and doing everything through computer-generated AI prompts and films even being written by AI prompts.
01:58:48.000My favorite Dilbert cartoon is this woman comes up to Dilbert and she says, I'm really worried about the robots.
01:58:55.000I'm worried about automation and I'm worried my son won't get work because of the robots.
01:59:01.000And Dilbert looks at her and he says, well, you know, I've met your son and he could be replaced by a hammer.
01:59:07.000Always has been this fear, but we have to have innovation and get around it.
01:59:12.000There will be, you know, technical jobs, other jobs.
01:59:17.000I guess I'm not – I'm an optimist just by nature and I – technology historically has not destroyed jobs.
01:59:25.000It's created jobs and we're way better off.
01:59:28.000You know, absent the industrial revolution and all those inventions, we'd still be living 98 percent of us on $2 a day.
01:59:37.000One of the things I want to talk to you about is what's going on in this country right now.
01:59:42.000Well, one of the big ones, one of the big things that's in the news is this whole Minnesota thing, particularly – a lot of things to cover.
01:59:50.000But particularly fraud and that they're uncovering a lot of fraud that it seems like not only was there a lot of fraud, but a lot of these people that were getting a lot of money from this fraud were donating to politicians.
02:00:05.000There's I believe $35 million by daycares was donated to Democrats in Minnesota last year.
02:00:12.000Is that an accurate – is that an accurate number?
02:00:31.000Well, they're looking into California fraud now because of Minnesota fraud and it's – look, just the homeless thing alone, just the fact that California spent $24 billion on the homeless can't account for where the money went and the problem just got worse.
02:00:46.000Well, there's a couple things about the refugee thing.
02:00:49.000I don't think refugees should get welfare and I have a bill to say they shouldn't get it.
02:00:53.000If you come to this country and your church sponsors somebody to come to it, you support them.
02:01:29.000The figure appears to come from viral social media posts, widely shared video alleging that the daycares – So here's the problem with this.
02:01:37.000If this fraud is as widespread as it is, you're going to get a lot of people that are covering their tracks right now.
02:01:44.000And so one of the ways to cover the tracks is to debunk things and to post stories.
02:01:49.000And I don't think we really know how much money is missing.
02:01:53.000I think part of the reform is we just shouldn't give out welfare.
02:01:56.000This doesn't mean we shouldn't help people.
02:01:58.000But if you're coming to this country and you want to experience the greatness of this country and someone sponsors you, they should take care of you.
02:02:04.000But what happens is most of these charities that work on bringing refugees in, they have a big heart.
02:02:16.000So according to our AI search, it says, Fact-checking organizations review campaign finance data and public records report no evidence that Minnesota daycare or childcare operators donated anything close to $35 million to political campaigns.
02:02:30.000One fact-check notes that the supposed charge circulated online misrepresents or fabricates contribution totals and far exceeds what small childcare businesses would realistically give.
02:02:42.000But it depends on how much money they're making.
02:02:45.000When you say small – just I don't like the way they phrase that, small childcare businesses, because you're talking about a large number of these businesses.
02:02:53.000And so the total, the all told, what is the number, especially compared to large corporate donors, that's fact, right?
02:03:01.000Also, they're listing Snopes as a source, which I don't like.
02:03:20.000If they can speak English and they're pro-Western, they need to stay in their country and be the founding fathers of their country.
02:03:26.000If the people who speak English and are pro-Western all leave, then all the crazy jihadists are the ones going to run the government.
02:03:33.000So part of the reason the Taliban runs Afghanistan, again, is 80,000 of the best people probably came over here that speak English and have some kind of knowledge.
02:03:43.000They should have stayed in their country.
02:03:44.000But isn't that kind of a simplistic perspective because a lot of those people would be dead?
02:04:08.000What I'm saying is from the perspective of the people, the government that was in place for the 20 years that we were there was a moderate government that was friendly to these people.
02:05:09.000That's the problem is the refugee status, right?
02:05:11.000And then they figured out, gosh, they are smart at one thing.
02:05:14.000That's those learning centers, those leering centers where they're smart at those.
02:05:17.000Well, I mean, once you realize that you can get a lot of money doing that.
02:05:21.000There was also autism diagnoses and then they'd open up an autism center.
02:05:25.000And, you know, all that money going overseas.
02:05:27.000I don't fault people for taking advantage of a system that has giant loopholes in it, especially when you come over here from a war-torn country and there's a bunch of people that are already doing it.
02:07:54.000This is this one weird website that we found the other day, Just the News.
02:07:58.000So this website, Just the News, published a report saying – a report recently that revealed Transportation Security Administration has flagged approximately $700 million in declared U.S. cash.
02:08:10.000But the question is like where is Just the News getting this information from?
02:08:16.000But why is it one weird right-wing website that is reporting this that everybody refers to when they're talking about this – the number attached to this fraud?
02:09:10.000The next step would be, OK, we know how much is going on in Somalia.
02:09:14.000Let's look at every airport around the country and see who else is shipping money out.
02:09:20.000Yeah, we tried to find that the other day too, but we couldn't find any – we tried looking at different money that was like, how much does a TSA flag over the entire course of the year all over the country?
02:09:42.000One of the things I was reading recently is interesting because Minnesota has this one group of immigrants in the Somalis, but they also have another group in the Hmongs.
02:09:53.000And they have a completely different result in terms of the amount of people that are on welfare, the amount of people that graduate from college or high school, the amount of people that are on Medicaid.
02:10:05.000All of them are like radically different.
02:10:08.000It's much lower in the Hmong community.
02:10:41.000They called themselves the People's Coast Guard of Somalia because the Europeans were dumping toxic waste off the coast and killing all their fish, and they were fishermen.
02:10:51.000So they started kidnapping the people that were in these boats and then, you know, to try to get a ransom because you've destroyed our fishing ground.
02:10:58.000And then they went, oh, well, you know what?
02:11:01.000It's probably easier to just kidnap people than it is to be a fisherman.
02:11:04.000So the discussion reminds me of a story.
02:11:07.000So the Hamongs versus Somalis, why are 86 percent of the Somalis still on Medicaid and why are the Hamongs doing better?
02:11:14.000So they used to always make this argument that Sweden is so great because it's socialist and that Swedes are all just doing fine.
02:11:24.000And so they were talking to Milton Friedman about that, and he was over there, and they were bragging about the country, about how great Sweden was and everything, and they were attributing it to socialism.
02:11:34.000And he looked at them, and he says, you know, the Swedes are very happy.
02:15:21.000So you've got to give less money to the refugees, and then you have to have more scrutiny of it.
02:15:25.000But the interesting question is if I put forward a bill that says we're going to audit all the welfare, not just the refugee program, we're going to audit all the cash transfer programs for every state, do you think any Democrats will vote for that?
02:15:41.000Well, also, it would be terrible for their base if they found out that these are the people that are voting to audit.
02:15:46.000But you could argue you're actually making it better for poor people because I'm trying to get rid of the Somalis stealing it so more of the dollars actually go to people who are poor.
02:15:55.000Great to say, but most people think you're trying to reduce the amount of money that a hungry family gets.
02:16:00.000That's how they would frame it, and then people would frame it as you being cruel.
02:16:09.000So speaking of which, what was your take on the border being wide open for the last four years?
02:16:19.000And not just wide open, but they were encouraging people to come to America, telling them how to do it, and even helping them get across, giving them EBT cards, giving them cell phones.
02:16:34.000I do believe that they understand that most of the people coming across will ultimately be voters and that two out of three will vote Democrat.
02:16:51.000It's all about voting demographics, and they want these people to come in because many of them are suffering, you know, through sex trafficking, all the other crap that went along with this mass migration.
02:17:01.000So I don't think it's necessarily a best place to be, but I'd say it's one of the most extraordinary accomplishments.
02:17:07.000You know, as you know, I occasion on the other side with Donald Trump, we don't always agree on everything, but on the border, I think he did a fabulous job by sheer force of personality.
02:17:17.000He fixed it before any money was allotted.
02:17:20.000He fixed it in the first three months, and it went from whatever the number was down.
02:18:40.000No citizenship, but a potential path to citizenship?
02:18:45.000I think it's better just to say the tradeoff is this, that you came illegally.
02:18:49.000Right now the law says you've got to go back, and you'll never get in, basically.
02:18:54.000So the compromise is you came in illegally, you just don't get to be a citizen your kids will be.
02:18:58.000Now the new ones, the 8 million that might have come in last year, some of them need to go back, and particularly any of them committing crimes.
02:19:05.000And I think people are very open, and I think the Trump administration has sent a lot of criminals back.
02:19:51.000Because why are they counting people and giving congressional seats based on people that aren't citizens?
02:19:59.000If they changed that alone and made it so you're counting people, but you're only giving congressional seats based on the amount of citizens.
02:20:07.000We could change the law, but changing the law is difficult.
02:20:10.000You know, I mean, you have to end up getting 60 votes, which means we need seven Democrats.
02:20:14.000Right, but it's not a crazy law to begin with where you can get congressional seats based on the amount of illegal aliens you have in your area, which is crazy because then it encourages you to bring in illegals so that you get more congressional seats.
02:20:30.000You give those people Medicaid, you give those people food stamps, and then they're on your side.
02:20:34.000And it's part of the answer to immigration that makes it less of a burden on us is if we base our society on work, we put a wall around our welfare system, and we don't give it to people, refugees or immigrants, legal or illegal.
02:20:51.000And what that does is you're going to select out for people who work.
02:20:54.000And that's why I try to say, and not many people on my side will see this, say this, I think some of the best Americans just got here, frankly.
02:21:47.000Let's find a thousand people who are in Texas illegally and do a poll and say, would you accept this?
02:21:53.000Would you accept that you don't get to vote during your lifetime, but your kids will get to vote if they were born here in exchange for not having to worry about being in a car accident or being sent back to Mexico?
02:22:03.000I'll bet you 80 percent of the people who are illegally would take work without citizenship.
02:22:08.000But you know who wants the citizenship and doesn't care about work?
02:22:37.000And that's one of the craziest things that California has passed where you're not allowed to show ID when you vote, which is just – you're essentially saying you're encouraging fraud.
02:22:54.000It's insane that they could say that with a straight face and have any sort of a weird, you know, gaslighty answer as to why that would be a good thing.
02:23:03.000Yeah, but it sort of shines a light on the gulf in our country between, you know, one party and the other.
02:23:10.000The gulf is so huge that they really don't want to verify who the voters are.
02:23:14.000They come up with arguments that just frankly aren't true.
02:23:19.000Oh, there's racism in the ID and stuff.
02:23:22.000Almost all the voter ID bills have said you can get an ID for free, you know, to make sure there isn't some sort of inherent racism.
02:23:30.000Well, also, you needed an ID to prove that you had a COVID vaccine just a few years ago.
02:26:04.000And if you can't force them to do it, if they don't agree with it, and if the people in the state largely, if they vote against it, and if you have a large percentage of population of illegals, like, say, California, not just a large percentage of populations that are illegal, but a large percentage of people that think that those illegals are a part of the community.
02:26:41.000I think that local police is better than national police.
02:26:45.000But the only way you can have local police is the local police have to enforce the law.
02:26:48.000And so they are breaking the law and having an obscure – a bizarre way of interpreting the law to say we are going to defy the national immigration laws.
02:26:58.000So I think it would be better done by the local cities.
02:27:01.000But if the local cities aren't going to do it, then you have to have national agents going in.
02:27:15.000But what was your take on the actual shooting itself?
02:27:18.000You know, I don't know that I want to go too much into the specifics of it because I don't want to pass judgment like a jury would because really someone will have to go into and look specifically at every fact and every angle and every angle of camera.
02:27:33.000So I don't like to judge criminal things that happen in our country and say, well, that person needs to go to jail or that person is innocent.
02:27:41.000I don't know that I can make that judgment.
02:27:43.000And then am I coloring the situation for anybody who will have to make that judgment someday on some kind of jury?
02:27:53.000How many people have been sent back during the time of this administration?
02:27:58.000So in the year now that this administration has been operational, how many illegals have been rounded up and sent back?
02:28:08.000I know a lot of people self-deported when Trump got into office because I think they were probably worried about being sent somewhere that they didn't want to be, which was a thing.
02:28:17.000I've seen somewhere that it doesn't greatly exceed some of the deportations under Obama, that the numbers aren't as big as you think they are.
02:28:24.000Right, but I think the deportations under Obama, what they're counting is people that snuck across the border and were turned back, not people who were snatched up at Home Depot and then brought to some country that they didn't even come from.
02:28:49.000Public estimates indicate the Trump administration has removed on the order of a few hundred thousand people since returning to office January of 2025, not millions.
02:29:08.000Because it was 20 million over four years, right?
02:29:11.000Isn't that what the number is on the high side?
02:29:13.000Yeah, I don't know what the number is.
02:29:15.000The numbers are in the millions, but I think it's hard to estimate because some of them didn't get, you know, if you're not getting caught, how do we estimate how many there are?
02:29:24.000But I think millions of people came in and I think it was a tragedy.
02:29:28.000And like I say, you know, it's one of the things Donald Trump has been an absolute success on is controlling the southern border.
02:29:35.000Yes, and it should have been done a long time ago.
02:29:38.000But the question is, like, how effective is the removal process?
02:29:42.000And is it do they have a quota that they have to meet?
02:29:47.000Is this why they're being so aggressive about it?
02:29:49.000So it says here, October 2025 Homeland Security Update referenced in one overview stated more than 2 million people were removed from the country in 2025.
02:29:58.000But that total combined formal deportations, which were 527,000 with roughly 1.6 million people who voluntarily left or lost status rather than being physically deported.
02:30:12.000Separate NPR report described about 600,000 deportations in 2025, along with about 1.6 million immigrants.
02:30:20.000So similar off by, you know, OK, let's see here, reflecting broader crackdown.
02:31:14.000Okay, it says from 2020 to 2024, government data shows roughly 11 to 12 million encounters in italics with people crossing the U.S. border illegally and mainly at the southwest border because many people try to cross multiple times.
02:31:30.000The number of individuals is slightly lower than the number of encounters.
02:31:50.000U.S. Customs and Border Protection counts encounters, which includes apprehensions between ports of entry and people deemed inadmissible at ports of entry.
02:32:11.000I think it'd be safe to say that whatever the encounters are, the actual number is probably higher, even if you have, you know, people getting caught multiple times.
02:32:21.000That's a lot of people, whatever it is.
02:32:25.000That's a that's a that's way bigger than the city of Austin snuck in illegally in four years because they wanted them to be here and they didn't want to enforce it.
02:33:00.000But one of the one of the real problems is now ICE are villains.
02:33:04.000And now people are looking at them like murderous military people that are on the streets of our city and they're masked up, which is also a problem.
02:33:34.000So I saw this terrible story about this family that was killed where these guys pretended to be a UPS driver and they showed up and they made their way into the house and killed people because they were dressed up as a UPS driver.
02:33:48.000If you could pretend to be a UPS driver, for sure, you could pretend to be an ICE agent, especially since they're completely anonymous.
02:33:56.000So think about how many people can get arrested or robbed or by criminals.
02:34:19.000I think you could make an argument when you're working right along the border or at night with large groups that there's a lawlessness to the cartels that hiding the identities of ICE along the border.
02:34:33.000It's a little harder to make the argument.
02:34:36.000And I saw this image in a courthouse in Chicago where it's a big elevator and the ICE agents all have masks on and they're arresting people and it's all women and children in a big elevator in a courthouse.
02:36:17.000And you're going to need police officers to do that.
02:36:19.000But those same people that believe that might also believe that once someone is here, they should be able to stay in this country.
02:36:26.000And ICE is operating illegally and we shouldn't have militarized groups of people roaming the streets, just showing up with masks on, snatching people up, some of them U.S. citizens, and shipping them to countries they didn't even come from.
02:36:40.000So that's why they have to wear a mask.
02:36:42.000If you want them to do that job, if you want them to be able to deport 500,000 people over a year, which is a lot of people, if that's the real number, you know, they're going to be – their life is going to be at stake.
02:36:53.000You're not going to be able to get people to do the job unless you allow them to be anonymous.
02:36:58.000And then, again, allowing them to be anonymous creates a whole host of other problems where you could have people pretend to be them.
02:37:05.000And how would you know who's who and who's not?
02:37:07.000Some people have offered sort of an in-between where they wear badges that have a number or a first name on them such that when you're arrested, if I think you've abused my rights in arresting me, Steve, you know, and a number, 324.
02:37:25.000People are going to dox them instantaneously.
02:37:28.000Their face will be on the internet instantaneously.
02:38:35.000But in an ideal world, the way we fix this and have less ICE agents in cities where they're having a very difficult job is the local people do their job and they're not sanctuary cities.
02:38:45.000Well, how could you stop sanctuary cities?
02:38:48.000I'm saying – but what I'm saying is that some of the blame for ICE being there is the left and their policies of sanctuary cities.
02:38:56.000So when they want to just say, oh, we hate ICE and we don't want ICE in our city, maybe they should be reflecting that ICE is in your city because you're disobeying the law and when someone is arrested and they're clearly not a citizen, you're not reporting them to ICE.
02:39:36.000They think that once people are here, they should be able to stay.
02:39:39.000And this is what my friend Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy.
02:39:43.000And I think there's a balance to be achieved.
02:39:48.000I just don't know how it gets done because I see both perspectives.
02:39:53.000I see the perspective of the people that say, hey, there was an illegal program moving people in here to get votes, moving people in here to get congressional seats.
02:40:04.000We've got to take those people that got in and send them back to where they came from or do something because if we don't, they're going to keep doing it if they get in office again in 2028 and it's going to accelerate.
02:40:15.000And you're going to have to take away some of the damage that's been done to a true democratic system because you've kind of hijacked it.
02:40:25.000And then I can also see the point of view of the people that say, yeah, but you don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don't have their papers on them.
02:40:36.000Are we really going to be the Gestapo?
02:40:57.000But I think the argument needs to be made again and again.
02:40:59.000And the left needs to hear that they have created this situation by disobeying the immigration laws, by ignoring the deportation orders, by not reporting people who are committing crimes.
02:41:10.000Now, we're not talking about some guy mowing lawns.
02:41:13.000We're talking about somebody who stole a car, somebody who raped somebody.