00:00:34.000The most insane part of it, which I guess was before you got there, to me at least, is you come into work every day in the White House, right?
00:02:01.000And it was super humid, you know, mid June in D.C.
00:02:04.000And I think the weather actually helped cool it down a little bit because by about 10 o'clock or so, I was not thinking it's hot as hell out here anymore.
00:02:15.000Yeah, it wasn't too bad, but I talked to Justin Gaetje about it, and he said it was a problem when he was fighting.
00:04:05.000Like, I loved the delay reaction to where, you know, somebody get a good punch in or, you know, you get a takedown and then it was almost like the wave.
00:05:39.000Yeah, there was some conversation going on between him and Max Holloway, and I was like, you know, Max is saying he can't fight, like something's wrong, and he's saying, Fight me.
00:05:55.000It's always so the very last fight where the ref tried to call it at the end of the third round, and then because he was saying that there was a concussion issue, I mean, I couldn't tell what was going on.
00:08:02.000What's crazy about it to me is just how much the sport has replaced boxing.
00:08:08.000And, like, there's still obviously boxing is still a big deal and fighters still get paid a lot of money.
00:08:13.000But, like, I remember when I was, I don't know, in high school, I feel like people would get really excited about the big heavyweight title bout.
00:10:39.000Instead of having his hips down, his knees up, what you're supposed to do is heavy leg curls with the leg and elevate the hips up and pull it way back.
00:11:46.000It was harder than anything I've done in politics.
00:11:48.000But to the point where all of my comms people, the thing they were most worried about was they're going to ask you about Michelle Obama being called a man.
00:12:28.000What he is, is he's a very good fighter, first of all.
00:12:32.000But sometimes it's not enough to get attention.
00:12:35.000And so what Josh has done is created this persona, like this pro wrestling bad guy persona.
00:12:40.000When you talk to him off stage, he's like very normal, very smart guy.
00:12:44.000It's just like he's decided, like, look, I want to maximize the amount of eyeballs that see me, and I'm going to create this crazy persona.
00:13:22.000I work in a business where obviously people make life and death decisions all the time.
00:13:27.000And I'm always a little bit caught off guard by the culture that just overreacts when clearly the thing that Josh is trying to get is the overreaction in the first place.
00:16:49.000He always, he's a huge pro wrestling fan.
00:16:51.000Well, so, well, He so Tony, I like I'm a huge fan of his comedy.
00:16:56.000I've only you know met him a couple times, I don't know him particularly well, but he's actually like you know more political, I would say, than most comedians.
00:21:59.000So, my first experience with Skid Row was so Usha used to work at this like very fancy litigation firm in Southern California.
00:22:09.000Before she was second lady, she was a corporate litigator.
00:22:12.000So, there's a Christmas party in downtown LA, and you get these instructions from her firm, and they're like this really convoluted way of this is how you have to get to this Christmas party.
00:22:23.000And I'm like, why do I have to follow these directions?
00:22:25.000Why don't I just Put it in Google Maps, right?
00:22:27.000This is like five or six, seven years ago.
00:22:29.000So we realized that the reason why they gave you these convoluted directions was so that you could avoid Skid Row at night.
00:22:36.000And so you get to this party, you drive through Skid Row if you follow Google Maps' directions.
00:22:43.000You get there, and it's like this beautiful facility with fancy food and fancy wine.
00:22:49.000And then there are armed guards outside of it and these gigantic walls.
00:22:53.000And I realized when I was there, you know what this reminds me of?
00:22:56.000This reminds me of going to the U.S. Embassy in Port au Prince, Haiti.
00:23:01.000Like, super security, crazy wealth and privilege and status on the inside, and squalor and misery on the outside.
00:23:10.000Like, it's the first time I'd ever thought America, like, this part of America is actually more like a third world country than anything that I thought we'd ever become.
00:23:45.000Not just super sus that Spencer Pratt, who was in second place, got overtaken by Nithya Rahman in the mail in ballots, but that the mail in ballots also passed a tax hike.
00:24:37.000The crazy thing about it, too, is it's that, okay, so after the initial ballots all came in, it was Karen Bass was number one, Spencer Pratt was right behind her, and then number three, whatever this woman said.
00:24:52.000So you would expect the mail in ballots to be more or less like the original ballots in terms of one, two, and three.
00:24:59.000I'm not saying Spencer Pratt's going to win the mail in ballots, but it just so happened that the third place person, in relative terms, did a lot better than the first and second place person.
00:25:44.000But I mean, okay, so you asked the question: why do all these blue states or why do all these big cities, population centers, end up becoming blue?
00:25:54.000And I think it's like a very complicated, right?
00:25:56.000So, one thing, and you said this a few months ago, and like when you said it, I was like kind of annoyed by it, but then I like thought, there's like an element of truth to it, which is that Republicans still fundamentally have a cool problem, right?
00:26:09.000There's something more charismatic, more cool about.
00:26:13.000The Democrats, as opposed to the right.
00:26:29.000But the point is that there's something, you know, like, okay, if you're a pop star, you're a rock star, you're an actor, you're in all these cultural centers, you're more likely to be left than right.
00:26:40.000And so I think that a lot of young people who are attracted to these population centers.
00:26:43.000They sort of move along with the prevailing culture.
00:26:46.000I think that's one thing that's going on.
00:26:48.000I think a second thing that's going on is the people who are sort of attracted to a certain kind of right of center politics.
00:26:56.000They want the suburbs, they want the single family home, they kind of want to be left alone.
00:27:01.000They don't want sort of to be able to hear what their neighbors are doing.
00:27:03.000So I think a little bit of it's just cultural self segregation.
00:27:06.000And that's meant that a lot of these population centers have gone blue.
00:27:57.000And there should be laws against that.
00:27:59.000First of all, the idea of mail in ballots for anybody other than people who are invalids, who can't leave their homes, or military, or people that for some reason they're serving overseas, they're doing something overseas, it should not be legal.
00:28:18.000So this raises one of my total segue here side point.
00:28:21.000But so if you remember in the aftermath of the 2020 election where there was all this like debate about was the election stolen, was the election not stolen, all the litigation that moved through.
00:28:30.000There was a case in Pennsylvania that didn't get very much attention.
00:28:35.000And I'm going to butcher it a little bit.
00:28:37.000But basically, it was a guy in a rural area of Pennsylvania saying, You're undercounting my vote because we didn't have the opportunity to do the mail in ballots like they did in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
00:28:47.000And the argument was a kind of disparate impact, right?
00:28:51.000The cities ginned up all the mail in balloting and the ballot harvesting.
00:29:21.000Change your local elections leaders, change your laws.
00:29:25.000Like that's not a remedy that the court has to fix.
00:29:28.000And so everybody saw that case and they're like, oh, The judge rules against Donald Trump, rules against Republicans for saying that there was something illegitimate.
00:29:36.000But no, actually, the judge kind of said, there is something kind of fishy here.
00:30:32.000Persuasion skeptical of what the Democrats are doing.
00:30:35.000Like, if you don't want to cheat in the election, then just make everybody actually show an ID.
00:30:40.000What the other thing people don't realize is I didn't realize this until a couple years ago.
00:30:44.000The voter ID solves a lot of the mail in ballot problem because if you have to show an ID in order to get a mail in ballot, in order to actually confirm that there is a real identification attached to that vote, that solves a big chunk of the problem.
00:32:22.000The implication of their argument is literally like blacks and Hispanics cannot go to the DMV to get an ID.
00:32:27.000By the way, if you look at the polling, Black Americans are as pro voter ID.
00:32:31.000Even though most black Americans vote Democrat, they're still pro voter ID as much as white Americans is.
00:32:37.000Most Americans are voter ID, they want voter ID except for operatives.
00:32:41.000So I'll offer on the Joe Rogan podcast this deal as vice president of these United States that if Democrats really don't think that there's any cheating, give us voter ID.
00:33:35.000Like, if you ever, okay, I'm sure you hear people talk about the filibuster all the time.
00:33:40.000I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole.
00:33:42.000Here's what the filibuster is it is a pure Senate rule, it is a creation of the Senate procedures, which basically says that anything that has to do with the budget is a 50 vote threshold, and anything that, everything else, non budgetary, is a 60 vote threshold.
00:34:00.000Now, as you can imagine, there's some gray area on things that maybe count as budget issues and should be 50.
00:34:06.000Or are not budget issues and count at 60.
00:34:09.000So, what we have tried to persuade the Senate to do is to treat the voter ID as something that can fall within the 50 vote threshold.
00:34:19.000And there is no law, there's no provision in the Constitution.
00:34:23.000It is legitimately that there are senators who are so attached to the idea that budget is 50, non budget is 60, that they're quite literally willing to prevent voter ID in America.
00:35:00.000And then this one comedian, this black comedian, did this hilarious video where he was like circling around a computer, staring at it, like touching it, like he didn't know what it was.
00:35:18.000So many of these Democratic talking points presume that their own voters are actually idiots.
00:35:24.000That's actually there's a big difference between, you know, Republicans, we sort of presume that our voters are adults, and you don't see that with a I'm not saying every Democrat, of course.
00:35:33.000I don't want to cast too broad of a brush here, but it's like, you know, Gavin Newsom did this speech a few months ago.
00:35:39.000The president, I think it's the funniest thing ever because he's like speaking to a group of black leaders and black businessmen, but it's like an audience that is 95 percent black.
00:35:48.000And they're asking him about his dyslexia and his struggle with education.
00:35:52.000And he basically says, Yeah, you know, I'm not very smart like a lot of you.
00:36:25.000Look, there's a real populism that I'm very much a fan of because I think you should be responsive to people.
00:36:30.000But there's like a faux populism of the way that I'm going to appeal to people is by assuming that they're idiots and acting like they're idiots.
00:37:01.000So the debate between Biden and Trump during the 2024 cycle, and I'm there, I'm actually doing an interview for a documentary when the debate starts.
00:37:12.000And there's this clip of me, the debate starts, I'm in the middle of this interview, there's a big screen behind me as I'm talking to the camera, which is here, and I kind of freeze and I look back at the The TV, and I'm like, oh my God, like this is actually happening.
00:37:27.000Biden is imploding because if you remember, it was obvious from the get go.
00:37:30.000So I go to the spin room afterwards, and that's where all these reporters and all the surrogates of the candidates.
00:37:37.000This is before I was the VP nominee, and I'm just like, talking about how great the president did, how bad President Biden did.
00:37:43.000I see Gavin Newsom there, and he literally looks like he's seen a ghost.
00:37:48.000I've never seen a person who, as good of a bullshitter as he is, who realized.
00:37:53.000There was no selling that performance.
00:37:57.000Try to put yourself in the perspective of a human being.
00:37:59.000I always try to be empathetic where Joe Biden has just had that debate, and you have to go on CNN to talk about how great of a job Joe Biden did.
00:38:08.000Well, my favorite is Joe Scarborough because Joe Scarborough before it was like, I'm going to say something and F you if you can't take it.
00:38:17.000This is the sharpest Biden we've ever seen.
00:40:05.000His medical professionals have stated that he made a full recovery and suffered no lasting brain damage or cognitive impairment from these procedures.
00:41:11.000And then all of a sudden pretend that she's the best thing ever.
00:41:13.000And like this idea, like complete flip of her being the least popular vice president ever, always sticking her foot in her mouth, always saying crazy shit.
00:41:32.000Legitimately, when the campaign consultants told me, Hey, we're going to hit this line because Kamala Harris came out in favor of taxpayer funded sex changes for illegal aliens.
00:41:43.000And I remember thinking to myself, Come on, you guys.
00:42:31.000Their party in 2020 got kind of taken over by the radicals.
00:42:35.000And I think actually maybe you're seeing a little bit of that happening right now, where it seems like the radical organizations, the nonprofits, the donors are pushing the party in a direction that most of the voters haven't gone in.
00:42:48.000Like you ask why Joe Biden was the nominee, and I'll say something in defense of Joe Biden.
00:42:53.000So, like, was he the most effective politician?
00:42:58.000And clearly had shown the negative signs of aging.
00:43:02.000But he was kind of the only candidate.
00:43:04.000If you go back to 2020, who could hold together like the reasonable middle class black American in the Atlanta suburbs with whatever is going on on the far left of the Democrat Party?
00:43:18.000And I think this is sort of the issue their party has.
00:43:20.000I mean, to be candid, our party has its own coalition problems, and it's always tough in a two party system to hold everybody together.
00:43:28.000I think it's really tough on the Democrats because the core of their party, like the most important voting block in the Democratic Party, Is middle class black Americans, socially moderate to even socially conservative, maybe a little bit more economically populist on certain business and tax issues.
00:43:45.000They don't want to give tax breaks to major corporations.
00:43:47.000They also don't want to trans the kids.
00:43:51.000But then you've also got the crazy people, and you have to kind of hold that together.
00:43:58.000I think the argument for Biden was he was one of the only people who could hold that together, even though he was an awful politician in his own right, even before he was old.
00:44:06.000Well, it's because he was Obama's vice president.
00:44:41.000I mean, it's like, you know, we could bring some of this stuff up, but it's like they would get him eating ice cream in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable.
00:47:15.000Well, the people that, you know, one of the things I had James Tallarico on the podcast, and one of the things that I think he has a really good point about, even though I know you're Catholic and you're very religious, putting the Ten Commandments in schools.
00:47:29.000I don't think it is the right way to do it.
00:47:34.000And this is a guy, Tallarico, who was in seminary and is very Christian.
00:47:38.000He just thinks that even though he believes in the Ten Commandments, if you're just only representing the Christian faith in these schools, you're forcing your religion into other people's lives and that this is going to push people away from Christianity rather than encourage them to pursue it.
00:48:00.000Yeah, I mean, I think you'd never want to force things on people.
00:48:04.000I think one of the core Christian contributions to Western civilization is the idea of freedom of religion.
00:48:11.000It's actually very much a Christian idea because you recognize the dignity of each individual, and part of recognizing that dignity is that each person has to find their own pathway to God.
00:48:34.000You could make an argument why you should have a bunch of different religious tenets in schools.
00:48:42.000I think in the Supreme Court, there actually are a lot of different sort of historical, cultural, legal documents that are up there.
00:48:49.000I want to say that Moses coming down with a tablet is one of them, but I think there actually are other cultural, maybe even other religious elements of this, like where you recognize that a big part of sort of the law giving tradition in Western civilization is some of these religious texts, not exclusively Christian religious texts.
00:49:08.000Obviously, some Jewish, there's like an important contribution from the Muslim world in this.
00:49:14.000So, I guess I don't think of it as exclusionary while also recognizing that America is a society.
00:49:21.000Our founders were people who were very much influenced, even if they weren't Christians, a lot of them, of course, were, but were very influenced by Christian culture and articulating American law.
00:49:32.000So, my argument would be even if you're not a Christian, like, does seeing the Ten Commandments let me put it a slightly different way.
00:49:41.000Does seeing the Ten Commandments force religion on a non Christian child?
00:49:46.000I mean, my argument would be no, and I'd illustrate this by saying, well, there are all of these ways in which you actually could try to force religion on a child, right?
00:49:56.000Well, it's not the worst way to force religion on a child, but to have it and not represent any other religion This is Texas, by the way.
00:50:03.000So what he's talking about was that there's these Christian nationalists, these guys that are very wealthy that are trying to fund Christian schools and trying to defund public schools or any other kind of religious school.
00:50:18.000What they want to do, and they pass this to get the Ten Commandments in all public school classes.
00:50:22.000He's fundamentally opposed to that as a Christian because he thinks it's going to force people to have this in their class and it's going to push people away from Christianity.
00:50:33.000I understand the argument, I just don't see it that way.
00:50:36.000I guess if I'm a non religious student and I'm sitting in there and I see the Ten Commandments.
00:50:44.000At the very least, I think I can appreciate it.
00:51:00.000First of all, I think that you I mean, I'm pretty sure Muslims, I'm not hardly an expert on Islam, but I think all of the Abrahamic faiths recognize the Ten Commandments as like a significant thing.
00:51:13.000But I think if I was a Hindu looking at the Ten Commandments I mean, again, it's hard for me to say this, right, from my perspective, but I certainly went through an atheist phase in my youth.
00:51:22.000And what I would see that as, as a non religious person or a different religion, is I would say this is like an important cultural element of the Western civilization, which is the foundation of the classroom that I'm sitting in.
00:51:36.000And this idea that the law comes in as sort of above any man, even if you don't believe in God yourself, I think that's like an important concept.
00:51:45.000I mean, if you look at the Ten Commandments, probably eight of them or something that I would hope that everybody would agree with, even if they're not themselves religious.
00:51:56.000I would not be offended if I sat in a classroom as a Christian or if my kids sat in a classroom as a Christian and saw a religious text that wasn't Christian on the wall.
00:52:17.000If it's like something crazy, but no, I mean, if it's something that is like culturally interesting, I guess I don't have a problem with my kid reading something.
00:52:29.000Like, if you have a classroom and the teacher is Christian and the teacher wants to have it in their classroom, maybe that's one thing.
00:52:36.000But if you're mandating that you're going to have the Ten Commandments in classrooms, that's a different thing because now you're pushing Christianity on kids.
00:52:47.000And as a Christian, he's saying, I think this is going to push children away from Christianity.
00:52:53.000So, again, I understand what he's saying.
00:52:56.000I just think that part of living in a society.
00:52:59.000Where you have different people with different perspectives.
00:53:02.000But you do have I mean, Christianity is the majority religion of the United States.
00:53:06.000It is the religion that was extraordinarily influential to our founding, to the constitutional principles.
00:53:12.000Again, freedom of religion is itself not really a liberal concept.
00:53:15.000It was originally derived from a Christian idea about free will and the dignity of the person.
00:53:23.000I think part of that is that you accept that you're going to have exposure to different things.
00:53:28.000And if a state legislator In a majority Christian state, it's not like they're putting the Ten Commandments in front of these kids and saying, you have to read this and write it 500 times a day.
00:53:42.000They're exposing kids to something, and I'm comfortable with kids being exposed to a lot of different things.
00:53:48.000I think that's part of living in a society where there's a free exchange of ideas.
00:53:52.000What I worry about with Telerico's perspective here is again, I'm not saying that I don't want kids to be exposed to anything that is outside of the Christian canon.
00:54:03.000I actually want my kids exposed to things.
00:54:06.000I write about this in the book that I think it's important to have a ground and enough faith that you can engage with a lot of different ideas and still ultimately sort of hold on to your Christian faith.
00:54:16.000But isn't part of just living in a pluralistic democracy that people are going to be exposed to different things?
00:54:25.000And I would kind of put it on Tolerico in a slightly different way that for a long time in this country, there were actually Supreme Court rulings that said that you cannot pray in a school.
00:54:37.000Even a student organization led by the students, or that you cannot put the Ten Commandments up, even a teacher who chose to do it in their own classroom.
00:54:49.000I think you're always trying to strike this balance, given that we have the First Amendment in this country, between allowing the practice of religious faith in public spaces and possibly forcing religion on other people.
00:55:02.000I think you have to strike that balance the right way.
00:55:05.000I guess I just say if the Ten Commandments being in a classroom is the thing that you think is forcing religion on somebody, was he equally offended when the Ten Commandments?
00:55:16.000We were like quite literally prohibited from being listed in a building.
00:55:20.000I don't know if he was offended by that or if he was opposed to that.
00:55:24.000But the idea of being exposed to it is one thing, it being mandatory is another.
00:55:31.000And to mandate that in classrooms is a different thing because you're promoting, clearly promoting Christianity.
00:55:37.000And his position is that promoting Christianity in that way is going to have an opposite effect on children.
00:55:45.000And so you're not just exposing it to them, you're pushing it on them.
00:55:47.000And especially if you're pushing it on children.
00:55:49.000who come from a household that has a different faith.
00:55:52.000I guess I just think the balance in our country the last 30, 40 years has actually been much more in the other direction, which is that we try to completely remove religion from the public square.
00:56:01.000I think that poses its own problems because people practice their faith in all kinds of ways.
00:56:08.000Don't you think that that's the responsibility of churches and synagogues and in the community?
00:56:15.000If you want to promote religion, promote it that way.
00:56:17.000But promoting in public schools should be just educational.
00:56:21.000If you're in a religious class and a Classes teaching about religion, that's a different story.
00:56:29.000It's certainly the responsibility of churches and synagogues and mosques and so forth.
00:56:33.000But I also think that the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist sort of said this that if your approach to religion in public life always and everywhere is to push it out of the public square, then you're actually embracing a religion of your own in the public square, which is secularism.
00:56:53.000You're just taking one religion and replacing it with secularism.
00:56:55.000And I guess what I'm saying is I'm kind of comfortable with people of different faiths sharing the public square together.
00:57:01.000But part of that is that if I'm in a 95% Christian community and my local city council wants to put up a nativity display on Christmas Eve, I'm okay with that.
00:57:12.000And that was actually, for a long time in our country, actually prohibited.
00:57:16.000And so what I think is that we got we sort of put ourselves in this frame in this country where we said every public display of religion is somehow illegitimate.
00:57:37.000I don't walk into the White House, tell my employees, you need to follow Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
00:57:43.000I just try to live my life in a way that hopefully makes people a little curious about what motivates me and what inspires me.
00:57:51.000But I also don't think that the expectation should be that we tell religious people they're not allowed to be religious in the public square.
00:57:58.000Because I think that's what we've done over the last 30 or 40 years.
00:58:04.000I see the Texas thing as an attempt to correct that.
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00:59:00.000Well, I think living by example is probably the best promotion of any good way to live your life, whether it's Christianity or any other religion.
00:59:09.000I think that's definitely the way to do it.
00:59:10.000But The point is that this is being promoted by very wealthy people who are Christian nationalists, who want this to be.
00:59:49.000And then there's people that, again, they live their life in a very beautiful way and they follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and they're very admirable.
01:00:02.000And I think that's very attractive and it makes people very curious about that religion.
01:00:07.000I think that brings people to Christ and I think it brings people to religion.
01:00:11.000But then there's people like, did you read that?
01:00:16.000Report that came from at the start of the Iran war, where there was a guy who was an officer, a non commissioned officer, who was at a briefing.
01:00:30.000And this guy came in and was explaining to them that they didn't need to be afraid because this war was important because Trump had been anointed by Jesus Christ to bring about his return.
01:00:44.000And the way they were going to, Jesus is going to return, is by bombing Iran.
01:00:57.000Military commander tells troops bombing Iran is part of God's divine plan.
01:01:02.000So we started getting calls in the wee hours of Saturday morning from people saying their commanders were just jubilant about this, trying to tell people, don't worry, it's all part of God's plan.
01:01:12.000They promised a 200 mile long river that is four and a half feet deep, filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill.
01:01:21.000At the Battle of Armageddon, Weinstein said.
01:01:46.000I mean, for what it's worth, my attitude on this stuff is I mean, first of all, as a Christian, you sort of believe that everything is part of God's plan, even things that are.
01:01:59.000He urged us to tell our troops that this was all part of God's divine plan, and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the book of Revelations referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
01:02:11.000He said that President Trump had been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth.
01:03:39.000I mean, you're essentially letting these people know that you believe that Trump was anointed by Jesus to bomb Iran so that Jesus can come back to us.
01:03:49.000So that Jesus can come back in a fire of our marriage.
01:03:50.000If I were to say, I'd be like, can I get the fuck out of here?
01:04:10.000Okay, here's the other thing I'll say is having heard about this for the first time just now, to your point about the media, I do think it's possible, let's be honest, that whatever that dude said, maybe it was good, maybe it was bad, has been misreported by the press.
01:04:34.000It's also possible that this is the other thing.
01:04:36.000He said the commander supposedly had a big grin on his face when he said all this, which made his message seem even more crazy.
01:04:43.000And I think that's, again, I don't think anybody should have war is sometimes necessary, but it's never a good thing.
01:04:53.000And I think that's like a fundamental Christian principle there are just wars, there are necessary wars, but war is always something that you try to avoid.
01:05:00.000Right, but saying that this is what's being referenced in the book of Revelation.
01:05:26.000Also, quite possible that you've got a really loony guy who is a Christian nationalist, who is a commander, and who is in this position where he's actually excited because he does think that this is a holy war and this is going to bring back Jesus.
01:05:43.000I mean, America's got 330 million people, and we've got a lot of people who believe in a lot of things, but I can assure you that we don't encourage people to talk like that.
01:05:52.000And again, all I can do as a Christian leader, I'll look into that story certainly, but all I can do as a Christian leader is talk about how I think about questions of war and peace, which is we try to do the right thing.
01:06:03.000We try to figure out what it is that is consistent with Christ's moral teaching, and we try to, you know, comport our foreign policy with the cause of justice.
01:06:14.000And that's what we try to do, recognizing it's always going to be imperfect.
01:06:17.000But I don't think that we should ever have an attitude towards war like this is a great thing.
01:06:21.000I'm going to grin and smile about that.
01:06:23.000All I'm saying is I'm skeptical that anybody took that approach because the media misrepresents everything.
01:06:28.000Do you think that this, the way that you just described it, aligns with our campaign in Iran?
01:06:34.000Well, I think that the goal is certainly good, which is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
01:06:41.000And I think that there are obviously a lot of questions about how best to achieve that.
01:06:47.000There's both a short term and a long term piece of it.
01:06:50.000I think the short term piece of it is effectively what's already been done, which is you destroy the nuclear sites and you destroy and eliminate the ability to rebuild the nuclear sites.
01:06:59.000I think there's a longer term thing, which is where a lot of the debate is focused on right now, which is that building a nuclear program is hard, but it's not impossible.
01:07:09.000And it's expensive, but it's actually not even that expensive if you look at it.
01:07:12.000I mean, you could go on YouTube right now and find out how to build an atomic bomb.
01:07:16.000So part of our Iran policy, and this is where I get frustrated with the people who say you should never negotiate with Iran, part of our Iran policy is solving the long term problem.
01:07:27.000That if we could create the sort of circumstance where Iran would commit not just to not have a nuclear weapon right now, but over the long term to not try to rebuild that capacity, like, yeah, I think that that is a good and valuable thing.
01:07:42.000If it was your call, would you have done exactly the same thing?
01:07:46.000Well, one of the president said publicly that J.D. was less enthusiastic about it, I think was the exact phrase that he used.
01:07:54.000I mean, my attitude towards this man, as you know, is the vice president.
01:08:00.000Like, my job is to give the best advice I can to the president of the United States.
01:08:04.000I think he's said a little bit about what that advice was.
01:08:09.000But once the president makes a decision, so long as I think that it's legal and ethical and all that stuff, and I certainly think whether you agree or disagree with it, what we've done has been legal.
01:08:19.000My attitude towards it is I try to make it as successful as possible.
01:08:23.000And I've got friends, of course, I think you've expressed some skepticism of this.
01:08:27.000I've got a lot of friends, both in private and public, who've expressed skepticism of this who say, well, this is terrible.
01:08:33.000We disagree with the decision, et cetera, et cetera.
01:08:40.000To Monday morning quarterback a decision that was made three months ago.
01:08:43.000My approach to it is to try to make it as successful as possible, which is why I've poured my heart and soul into these negotiations, which is why I've tried to make that goal, Iran not having a nuclear weapon, something that's not true both, not just now, but is true in the long term.
01:08:57.000And that's the way that I try to approach it.
01:08:59.000So, what is going on with Iran where it seems like the president keeps saying that a deal has been reached, negotiations have been successful, and then it all falls apart?
01:09:42.000You've got the crazy people, you've got the pragmatists.
01:09:44.000So, when we struck this MOU, and really what the MOU says, and it was misrepresented more than almost anything that I've ever worked on in public life, what it says is Iran is going to open the Strait of Hormuz, the violence is going to stop, and then we're going to negotiate to see if we can come to a broader deal on the long term nuclear issue.
01:10:57.000I think that's entirely appropriate, of course.
01:10:59.000If they're going to shoot at ships, we are going to shoot at the people who are shooting at the ships, or we're going to destroy the facilities that they're using to shoot at ships.
01:11:13.000And there's a few more days of negotiation.
01:11:16.000And then the phase they're in right now is the hardliners have really, really reacted strongly to all the oil that's coming out of the Strait of Hormuz.
01:11:24.000And they've basically said, we're going to try to shut this thing down.
01:11:28.000We're scared about losing our leverage.
01:11:30.000Now, the pragmatists in their system are saying this was a mistake.
01:11:39.000But what we're doing is a delicate diplomatic dance where we're using economic leverage points, we're using carrots and sticks, we're trying to talk to the pragmatists.
01:11:49.000And then, of course, when they commit acts of violence, we're responding to it.
01:11:52.000And all those things are happening simultaneously to get us on a better trajectory.
01:11:56.000Now, that said, yes, right now there's shooting right now.
01:12:37.000There are people who are super hawkish in the American system who have attacked the deal and, frankly, in some ways have tried to derail the deal.
01:12:47.000And what I always say to those people is, what is your proposal?
01:13:08.000Could take $100,000 and go buy a bunch of drones on the black market and post yourself on an island in the Strait of Hormuz or near it, and you could fire drones at those ships.
01:13:22.000Some oil and gas is still going to get out because some ships and some ship captains are going to say, screw you.
01:13:27.000Now, the United States can help that, right?
01:13:29.000We can shoot down some of those drones, we can shoot down some of those missiles, and so we can facilitate the flow of traffic.
01:13:35.000But the people who are like, you cannot negotiate with the Iranians, The reason why that's fundamentally idiotic is because so long as you have some person who's willing to fire off a few cheap drones, you're going to have some ship captains who say, no, no, no, we're not willing to do this.
01:13:52.000So we got to kind of use all tools at our disposal.
01:13:55.000The military is one tool, but diplomacy is another tool.
01:13:58.000And I'm very frustrated by the Americans and frankly by people in other countries who are like, you cannot negotiate with the Iranians.
01:14:06.000Well, then what is your proposal to get people to stop shooting at ships in the Strait of Hormuz?
01:14:49.000But what does that accomplish if there's still a crazy person who's still unwilling to shoot a few drones at the Strait of Hormuz?
01:14:55.000What the president has done, I think, very, very capably, is said, we're going to use military force in this situation when it's connected to something we're trying to achieve.
01:15:05.000So if you shoot at ships, we're going to shoot at the facilities at which you used to shoot at the ships.
01:15:11.000But we're not just going to do something open ended indefinitely.
01:15:14.000We're not just going to bomb and bomb and bomb.
01:15:16.000We're going to try to use our military force as one of the many tools that we have to solve the problem.
01:15:20.000And obviously, like I'm biased, but I think that's exactly the right approach.
01:15:24.000I actually, you have to read between the lines a little bit because if you look at what Mike Pence or some of the conservative hawks, like people who voted for us but have been very critical of me, very critical of the administration, if you actually look at what they're proposing, they just want the military campaign to go on forever and they can't actually identify what it is that they're trying to accomplish.
01:15:45.000None of them can identify what it is they're trying to accomplish.
01:15:48.000And I read two things between the lines.
01:15:51.000I think some of them want us to accomplish a complete change in the government of Iran, to topple the clerics and to replace those clerics with somebody who's You know, much friendlier.
01:16:03.000But, like, look, what is our experience with doing that?
01:16:09.000And so, like, if the Iranian people want to rise up and change their government, that's up to them.
01:16:14.000But we're not going to send 150,000 ground troops in order to accomplish a change in a regime unless the people on the ground themselves want to accomplish that outcome.
01:16:26.000Now, we're not going to send the troops in regardless.
01:16:28.000But, like, to propose sending in the troops, you're basically saying that the U.S. military. Should do the job for the Iranian people, we're not in that business anymore.
01:16:41.000And then I think a second outcome that people are, whether they're aware of it or not, is what I call the Libya outcome.
01:16:48.000So if you look at the end result of our Libya policy after Gaddafi was killed by the Obama administration, by the way, again, a very stupid decision, what happened?
01:16:58.000Libya basically turned into a failed state.
01:17:00.000You had a refugee crisis, you had people pouring into Europe, pouring into other parts of Asia, other parts of Africa.
01:17:06.000You had a lot of violence, a lot of terrorism come from that.
01:17:09.000I do think that there are people who would like that to be the outcome in Iran.
01:17:13.000But then I say, again, what is in our interest?
01:17:16.000How is it in the United States' interest to have 94 million desperate people flooding into Europe, flooding into the United States, to have sort of the terrorist infrastructure that can get established when you fan terrorists all over the world?
01:17:33.000And so our policy right now, what we're trying to accomplish, is get the straits open, ensure the free flow of oil and gas.
01:17:41.000Obviously, we want to keep the Iranians from having a nuclear weapons program and using the tools of diplomacy and military power to accomplish that.
01:17:50.000And Libya failing and the collapse of Libya is a lot of what's fueled the migrant crisis in Europe as well, correct?
01:18:00.000That in Syria, another failed state that was created by bad Middle Eastern policy.
01:18:04.000So there is precedent for the United States doing this.
01:18:07.000Every time that it has happened, it's caused a refugee crisis, it's caused a spike in terrorism, and it's also, not incidentally, to the moral considerations.
01:18:14.000It's led to a lot of innocent civilian deaths.
01:18:28.000So this is another just bullshit argument that the critics made against the deal.
01:18:32.000And again, like I, just to back up a little bit, this is my own little hobby horse, but look, the coalition that Donald Trump piloted to the 2024 election campaign, it was a landslide.
01:19:39.000If you want to have a hawkish policy towards Iran, the idea that Donald Trump has betrayed you because he's also trying to negotiate to get a good outcome for the American people is crazy.
01:19:51.000You've seen a lot of these people completely flip.
01:19:54.000On him, and that brings me to the $300 billion point.
01:19:58.000What we did with the MOU is we actually worked not just with the Iranians but with the Gulf Arab states.
01:21:07.000Would we release the sanctions that would make it possible for the UAE and Saudi Arabia and other countries to invest in Iran?
01:21:13.000Our attitude was well, isn't that a victory for us?
01:21:16.000If Iran's biggest enemies see that they have changed themselves so much that they're willing to invest in the Iranian economy, isn't that like the definition of a win win?
01:21:26.000And then you had all these people saying, no, no, no, no, you can't give them $300 billion.
01:21:30.000It's like we're not talking about giving them $300 billion.
01:21:33.000We're talking about letting other countries invest in Iran.
01:21:36.000If Iran has changed the way that it treats the Gulf Arab countries, it's fundamentally between them, meaning the Iranians, and the Gulf Arab countries.
01:21:44.000So there's this line in the MOU that basically says that if Iran meets all of its obligations, then we will permit other countries to invest in Iran.
01:21:53.000And that, like again, the hawks attacked us and misrepresented this and lied about it and said the Trump administration is going to give the Iranians $300 billion.
01:22:07.000It's totally fake, it's completely made up, and it was done purely in order to politically tank the negotiation.
01:22:15.000So there's been this interesting dynamic here where, as we've been trying to negotiate, there have been these extraordinarily well-funded efforts to tank the negotiation, to prevent us from reaching a deal, to change American public opinion, which, by the way, if you look at the public opinion, people love the idea of actually getting to a final resolution on this thing.
01:22:38.000Americans do not - they're not game for long-term.
01:22:42.000You know, open ended regime change wars in the Middle East.
01:22:45.000They're okay with us using the military to accomplish discrete objectives.
01:22:51.000They're not OK with open-ended obligations.
01:22:54.000What do you think the motivation of the Hawks is?
01:22:56.000Do you think this is – are they influenced by defense contractors?
01:23:02.000Are they – what is – What's the reason why they're so keen on continuing to bomb?
01:23:08.000I think with any big group of people, you have a diversity of opinions.
01:23:31.000There was a Times story that came out yesterday that basically there are certain influencers in America who are being paid in order to attack the deal.
01:23:42.000I think some of it is just pure political ideology, right?
01:23:46.000It's foreign policy perspectives that are much different from mine.
01:23:50.000They think that America should just, that we can basically, you can wave a magic wand with the military and accomplish whatever you want.
01:24:32.000It's like worth reading because it lists a bunch of people who have quite literally been paid by a former Trump campaign person who was himself paid by certain elements within the Israeli government.
01:24:47.000And those people are attacking me viciously for quite literally trying to accomplish.
01:24:52.000The negotiation objective that the president set for the country.
01:25:13.000Coming after me saying that people have come after me and say that I'm influenced by Qatar, that I'm influenced by foreign governments, that I take my marching orders from Tucker Carlson.
01:25:23.000There's just so much bullshit out there when what I'm actually trying to do is accomplish what the President of the United States told me to accomplish, which is a settlement of this that accomplishes our objectives.
01:26:00.000I don't even mind an effort to try to influence foreign governments try to influence the United States all the time.
01:26:07.000Israel does it, other countries do it.
01:26:09.000It's just sort of the nature of the beast.
01:26:12.000What bothers me is actually when Americans allow meaning American leadership allows that influence to affect their judgment and to affect what they are advocating for.
01:26:27.000People are always going to try to influence the United States of America, whether they're allies of ours or whether they're enemies of ours.
01:26:33.000But again, when I open up the pages of Time magazine and I see that there's a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and oh, by the way, many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways, my response to that is, well, go to hell.
01:26:53.000I'm going to do what I have to do for the American people.
01:26:55.000I represent Americans first, and that's the way that I've tried to do this job.
01:27:41.000I've never heard a good compelling argument for why I'm an anti Semite, even though I've been accused of being an anti Semite by many people.
01:27:48.000But it's what always I say to these guys is look at public opinion.
01:27:56.000Look at the way young Republicans versus Republicans over the age of 65 approach this issue.
01:28:03.000Like, right now, Israel is losing the public opinion battle in the United States of America.
01:28:19.000Okay, my attitude is towards this Israel is an ally.
01:28:23.000Like France or like the United Kingdom, we're going to have disagreements with them.
01:28:28.000We're going to have agreements with them.
01:28:29.000There are areas where we're going to have similar interests and areas where our interests are going to diverge.
01:28:33.000So, my approach to this is to say, you know what?
01:28:36.000When we're partnered, great, let's work together.
01:28:39.000And we're not, let's just be honest about it.
01:28:41.000And I, for that, people attack me for being an anti Semite or anti Israel, and they don't see the writing on the wall that I'm actually just the guy advocating for a normal relationship with a normal country that's based around shared interest as opposed to based around, you know, something else.
01:29:00.000So, why is Israel losing American public opinion?
01:29:09.000Well, the narrative is that Israel has a very disproportionate effect.
01:29:54.000Than that, the concern is that they're spying on American politicians.
01:30:01.000There's concerns about funding, there's concerns about influence, there's concerns about whether or not politicians are whether they're aligned with Israel or whether they're aligned with the United States first.
01:30:13.000Well, there's certainly like I definitely get those concerns, but my sense is that the way that all foreign influence works in the United States is people try to manipulate American public opinion.
01:30:26.000And then from manipulating a public opinion, they try to get the outcomes that they want.
01:30:30.000I mean, this thing is a very good example of this.
01:30:33.000So, you know, like we know, I'm telling you, beyond a reasonable doubt, we know that the negotiation strategy that the president has asked us to pursue, and again, with limitations, like when the Iranians hit ships, the president has been willing to knock the hell out of the Iranians in response.
01:30:51.000This is not just a negotiation, it's negotiation, it's military, it's all these things.
01:30:56.000But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, That there have been people within the Israeli government who are trying to actually shift us away from that policy because they want to continue the military campaign.
01:31:09.000And by the way, there are people within their government that I love, I have good relationships with.
01:31:13.000I hope and I don't think that they're part of this.
01:31:17.000I mean, the ambassador of Israel to the United States I think is actually a really good guy.
01:31:23.000Obviously, he cares about Israel first.
01:31:43.000But I guess what I would say to the Americans who sort of see this and are frustrated by it, my attitude would be you should be frustrated at American leaders who are persuaded by this, affected by this.
01:31:57.000Countries are going to do what countries do.
01:32:00.000I really don't, it doesn't bother me that Qatar tries to influence the United States of America, and they do.
01:32:04.000I like a lot of the Qataris just like I like a lot of the Israelis.
01:32:07.000It doesn't bother me that Israel tries to do this.
01:32:09.000It frankly doesn't even bother me that Russia or some of these other countries do it.
01:32:12.000It's just the nature of being a political leader in 2026.
01:32:17.000What does bother me is when those operations, those influence campaigns, actually affect American political judgment because they shouldn't.
01:32:28.000shouldn't, because we should be thinking what is in the best interest of the United States of America.
01:32:32.000Do you think that Israel is affecting American political?
01:32:36.000I mean, I certainly think that there are a lot of talking points and there are a lot of arguments that make their way into American political discourse.
01:32:55.000I think there are a lot of social media campaigns that definitely influence Americans and affect Americans.
01:33:01.000Do I think that it's been dispositive on any particular issue?
01:33:05.000Like, I think that's a much more difficult question.
01:33:09.000Started this war in Iran without the influence of Israel?
01:33:13.000I think the president, completely separate from any influence from Israel, believes very strongly, and again, I agree with this, that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.
01:33:24.000And I think he was willing to do things.
01:34:34.000I've seen the decision making up close again.
01:34:36.000Whether you agree or disagree with our negotiation, or whether you agree or disagree with the decision to launch the campaign Epic Fury to begin with, the idea that Donald Trump is being like.
01:35:28.000You're basically saying the fear is that whatever's in the Epstein files was used to blackmail the administration into doing the Iran thing.
01:35:38.000Or at the very least, the people that were involved in the Epstein files that didn't want them coming out had undue influence.
01:35:46.000Again, like say this with all candor, like we absolutely screwed up the comms of the Epstein files, like we just did.
01:35:56.000But do I think the reason we screwed up the comms is because we were trying to hide something?
01:36:01.000I think the reason we screwed up the comms of the Epstein files is one, you know, Pam said, Pam Bondi said, the client list is on my desk, right?
01:36:11.000Well, see, they had binders that were standing in front.
01:36:16.000But those binders were largely documents that had already been released, right?
01:36:18.000So here's let me try to define the purpose of that performative display of the Epstein files.
01:36:25.000She was saying there's tens of thousands of hours of film.
01:36:30.000I don't know what the purpose of it was, but I know that the effect of it was to make people mistrust the entire effort.
01:36:37.000What I think was happening look, I know Pam.
01:36:41.000I don't think there's anything malicious going on.
01:36:43.000I think Pam was trying to respond to the political moment.
01:36:47.000I think she overstated what we had and what we didn't have.
01:36:50.000And I think that she got roasted for it publicly by a lot of people, including me.
01:36:55.000Like, you know, you and I have talked about this a lot.
01:36:58.000I'm like one of the OG Epstein conspiracy theorists.
01:37:00.000I've probably gone down every single rabbit hole we could go down, most of them today.
01:37:05.000Look, the original sin of the Epstein investigation, and obviously I'm biased here, but it was not what Donald Trump and the administration did in 2025.
01:37:18.000It was you have to go back to 2007, 2008.
01:37:20.000The original Alex Acosta investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, where he basically dropped the federal charges.
01:37:27.000I think Epstein ended up getting prosecuted on some sort of local thing.
01:37:32.000But the original warrant, he would be the original warrant back in 2008.
01:38:59.000He actually said, nope, we're going to release these files.
01:39:02.000He thought, you know, he was annoyed by the story.
01:39:04.000He was annoyed by the Democrats accusing him of doing things bad.
01:39:08.000By the way, like, do I think there is any, I've never seen a single piece of credible evidence that the president of the United States engaged in wrongdoing with minors ever.
01:39:18.000So, like when the president says the hoax, that's what he's talking about is this democratic idea that he somehow was a pedophile.
01:39:36.000We find out 3 million of them are actually responsive, has something to do with the Epstein estate.
01:39:40.000We release all of them, with the exception of a few things that are like the courts have said that we have to redact certain things or we can't release certain files.
01:39:49.000But, like, we did release all of them.
01:39:56.000And again, the problem here is not like anything that's in the files or not in the files.
01:40:05.000The problem is if you go back to the original investigation, it was designed in a way that was way too narrow.
01:40:12.000If there was a broader conspiracy, and you know my view is that there probably was, the evidence that existed in 2007, that was the opportunity to get it.
01:40:22.000So when you say there probably was a broader conspiracy, what exactly?
01:40:33.000There's this funny New York Times story that's somewhat true, somewhat false, but where Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff, says, Well, we know JD's a conspiracy theorist on this.
01:41:03.000You know, I think there's a separate conspiracy that hasn't gotten covered as much, which is that Epstein actually, okay.
01:41:12.000If you go back to the original Epstein guy, was Les Wexner, okay, who Columbus, Ohio was the wealthiest person in Ohio, maybe still is the wealthiest person in the state of Ohio.
01:41:27.000Knew about the Wexner Epstein relationship is that Epstein was his tax guy.
01:41:35.000That Epstein was like the genius at identifying weird tax strategies that would allow you to not have to pay taxes.
01:41:43.000But if you were being a little skeptical, would also say that it would allow Epstein to either blackmail people or to have a separate nexus of influence and control on rich and powerful people.
01:41:53.000And so I think there's an underreported, underexplored story of was Epstein like doing a lot of tax stuff that was not on the up and up?
01:42:04.000And is that one way in which he gained blackmail?
01:42:22.000He built relationships with a lot of other rich and powerful people who just didn't have any real moral judgment about the fact the guy was obviously a scumbag.
01:42:31.000And again, to go back to defending Donald Trump, I know people don't want to hear this these days, but like, who was the guy?
01:42:37.000People say Donald Trump's blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein.
01:42:40.000Who was the guy who narked on Epstein to the Palm Beach police?
01:42:57.000We did mishandle, especially the communications of it.
01:43:00.000What do you think should have been done?
01:43:01.000I think that we should have just dropped everything at the very beginning.
01:43:04.000And obviously, it takes a little time to review the stuff.
01:43:07.000Find the stuff to redact things where you have victims and so forth, but we should have just done it as quickly as possible.
01:43:12.000But some of the stuff that was redacted, some of the names that were redacted weren't victims.
01:43:17.000So, yeah, I've looked into this and my understanding of this, having looked at a lot of this, but not all of it, is that it is sometimes hard to draw a distinction between victim and coke.
01:43:31.000And like, let me highlight this in a very sort of obvious way.
01:43:36.000Ro Khanna, who's been one of the most, one of the loudest voices on the Epstein fight, well, He became very loud on the Epstein files the minute Donald Trump became president, didn't seem to care about it during the Biden administration.
01:43:46.000He actually brought one of the Epstein victims, I think, to the State of the Union last year, or maybe it was the year before last.
01:43:53.000Well, like that victim, and I'm not accusing, I'm not saying she wasn't a victim.
01:43:57.000I don't know anything about her particular case.
01:44:01.000She was also listed as a co conspirator in some of these documents, right?
01:44:05.000So there's an idea that some of the people who were engaged in the sex trafficking were also facilitating it as well.
01:44:11.000So they were incentivized to get more girls.
01:44:13.000Yeah, but what I, but yes, that's right.
01:44:15.000But the idea is that it's hard to sort of, it's sometimes a little bit of a gray area between, you know, some of the people who were alleged victims were also alleged co conspirators.
01:44:25.000And so what DOJ tried to do was kind of make that judgment as best they could and release as much as possible.
01:44:32.000But it's clear that he was trying to get in contact with people that he felt were influential.
01:44:38.000It was clear that he was trying to get people to get together on the island and meet at parties.
01:44:46.000So, there was something he was doing where he was trying to either influence people or compromise people.
01:45:27.000Conspiracy theories, one of the ways you discredit a conspiracy theory, I've thought about this a lot, is to try to hide it.
01:45:33.000Another way you discredit a conspiracy theory is by flooding the zone.
01:45:37.000So, one of the things I've tried to do when looking at all this stuff is to try to understand sort of where it fits in and to try to separate the real from the fake.
01:45:46.000But one really interesting element of the whole Jeffrey Epstein saga, okay, so he dies in 2019, right?
01:45:52.000This is at the very end of the first Trump administration.
01:46:03.000This is a friend, but I don't want to reveal confidences here.
01:46:06.000It coincides very closely with the end of what you might call the era of censorship in academia.
01:46:13.000So, back in 2019, 2020, we reached sort of peak academic censorship where people wouldn't publish a medical study because it might have sort of disparate impact racial undertones, or people were getting fired from academia for not doing land acknowledgement, stuff like that.
01:46:41.000But like when he died, it's almost like the era of censorship started to break because he wasn't just, he was also plugged into a lot of in academia, but also, you know, he was plugged into the social media companies.
01:46:53.000Like this is a dude who knew everybody.
01:47:35.000Look, he clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence.
01:47:42.000He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.
01:47:45.000In fact, one of the interesting things the Epstein saga reveals about, and I try to make this point, is one of the reasons why I'm always careful and I say there are some elements within the Israeli government who don't like our peace process because there are a lot of elements within the Israeli government that actually do like our peace process.
01:48:04.000That this indefinite campaign is not good for them either.
01:48:08.000And the Epstein thing is interesting because, as much as I know Prime Minister Netanyahu, not a particularly popular person in the United States of America right now, Epstein seemed to be connected to the elements of the Israeli deep state that were left of center.
01:48:26.000Like I've always found that fascinating.
01:48:28.000It wasn't like he was super connected to the right of center of Israeli politics, America, he was connected across the board.
01:48:36.000Like he had Republican friends, he had Democratic friends.
01:48:39.000He had much deeper connections to the Israeli left of center than right of center.
01:49:52.000Even if you have some scumbags who are willing to introduce him to Joe Rogan in 2017, there are a lot of Joe Rogans, or at least some, who are going to say, wait a second, I'm going to Google this guy and find out that he's a predator.
01:51:21.000But I think that one of the things that I've learned about the job is you're doing so much on the day to day.
01:51:30.000Like you're calling senators and trying to get them to pass a piece of legislation.
01:51:34.000You're meeting with staff about what should go in the housing bill.
01:51:36.000You're negotiating with the Iranians or the Qataris or the Israelis about something that's going on in the Middle East.
01:51:43.000And a lot of it, like the UFO thing, like I've said that I'm going to look into the UFO thing.
01:51:50.000And I've been saying that for a year and a half, and I haven't done it yet because I haven't had the time.
01:51:55.000And so some of this is like you just have to have the time to actually.
01:52:00.000Punch through the walls and to like go to the gatekeepers and say, You have to open up that gate because I'm the vice president.
01:52:06.000And some of it is just hard to actually get to because I don't have the time to sort of focus on that one issue for any particular period of time.
01:52:13.000So the answer is you have unlimited access to information.
01:52:16.000The constraint is not people tell me no.
01:52:19.000The constraint is you're just so busy doing other shit.
01:52:25.000The UFO thing, I think, would be something that I would want to pursue.
01:52:35.000So the question is are these special access programs that are above top secret and that this is our own stuff, or is this something that's far more bizarre and something that is interdimensional from another planet, whatever?
01:53:20.000I will say that is one of those conspiracy theories that there are a lot of people in our government who are interested in this, meaning our current political leadership who are interested in this question.
01:53:39.000Nothing has really happened yet, which makes me a little bit less interested in it.
01:53:45.000Because there are a lot of people with access to those files and access to that information, and nothing has changed since Biden left office.
01:53:51.000Which makes me think other people have looked into it and they just haven't necessarily found something.
01:53:55.000But anyway, I eventually, I promise you, I'm going to sit down and spend a couple of weeks trying to figure out what's in these files.
01:54:19.000Well, I. First of all, not just in Christianity, but in a number of world religions, there are a number of mystical things that happened, extra dimensional, extra.
01:54:38.000I'm not one of these people who's a hyper rationalist.
01:54:42.000I think that there are things happening in the world that we're not always seeing.
01:54:56.000So, if you look historically at things that are similar to the alien phenomenon, where, oh, some strange being, it kind of looks like a human being but doesn't look like, but it's not human, and it shows a particular interest in human beings, and then it takes the human beings and does weird experiments on them.
01:55:23.000I think my argument is that's either bullshit, right?
01:55:26.000You're either talking to a crazy person, which I don't like.
01:55:28.000I'm not saying just because I believe in the supernatural doesn't mean I believe in everything supernatural.
01:55:33.000But if we're talking about an extraterrestrial being that is human like but not human, that contains effectively infinite powers and is torturing human beings, you can call it an alien if you want, but I think there's a lot of historical precedent to call that a demon.
01:55:53.000Well, a lot of these stories and these accounts.
01:55:59.000We have one right here on the coaster.
01:57:50.000This spaceship for five days is what he said, and that they had fixed him, they healed him, and then they had communicated with him telepathically, and he had had this very bizarre encounter with these beings that aren't from here.
01:58:07.000Or if they are from here, they're very different than us.
01:59:12.000We're capable of understanding that human beings are far more complex and evolved than chimpanzees.
01:59:18.000We could imagine a world where if we don't blow ourselves up.
01:59:24.000And there's not a nuclear bomb, and we don't get hit by an asteroid if we live another million years, that we would have technology that's indistinguishable from magic.
01:59:55.000So you're asking, you're like talking about what it is that these things actually are.
02:00:03.000And I guess what I'm talking about is how would a human being with my level of intelligence or your level of intelligence in 2026 understand what's going on?
02:00:11.000But from a biblical perspective, there's a very big difference between a demon and a hyper intelligent being from somewhere else.
02:00:20.000I mean, a demon or a hyper intelligent malicious.
02:00:27.000If demons are real, If there really are dark forces in the universe and they're disembodied dark forces, these things that exist, and then there's also powerful light forces in the universe, they don't have to be mutually exclusive to the concept of hyper intelligent other species when you're looking at an insanely vast universe.
02:00:51.000You're looking at an insanely vast universe.
02:00:54.000I don't think they have to be, but I think that it is interesting to me that for most of human history, we would have understood supernatural, hyper powerful, hyper knowledgeable things as sort of celestial or celestial.
02:01:16.000We would have thought of a cell phone as being sorcery.
02:01:18.000I mean, that doesn't mean it's sorcery.
02:02:01.000I totally concede and agree with that point.
02:02:05.000I guess what I'm saying is it's a distinction that is conceptually interesting to me, but if a space alien with superhuman technology comes to the earth and has malicious intent, I don't know how I'm supposed to tell the difference between that and a demon.
02:02:25.000If they have malicious intent, but I mean, isn't that also the case with visiting people?
02:02:44.000Are we talking about something different or are we talking about a hyper advanced version of that?
02:02:49.000We're talking about, I mean, as I understand it, we're talking about things that exist outside the United States, sorry, outside of the earth.
02:03:31.000Maybe there's some point at which the conceptually interesting discussion of what it is is separate from how it appears to me and how I'm going to understand it as a human being in my particular social and cultural context in 2026.
02:03:55.000But if you're looking for me to concede the point that there is something different or could be something different between an angel, a demon, a space alien, a supernatural.
02:04:03.000But non any of those other things being yes, I can see that.
02:04:09.000Yeah, the question is what do these special access programs like?
02:04:15.000What is the information that's available?
02:05:58.000So, Hal Put off, who used to work for NASA, said that he was brought in during the Bush administration where they were going, they were proposing disclosure.
02:06:10.000And they were saying, this is what they were saying.
02:06:12.000They're saying, we have biological remains.
02:06:44.000And when they compiled this list, Every one of them had more in the con than in the pro, and they decided against disclosure because of that.
02:06:56.000Now, if that's the case, what are we talking about?
02:06:59.000Like, who has this information, and what is this information?
02:07:04.000I mean, if that wasn't just a thought experiment, if they weren't really just fucking with these people, which I don't understand why they would do that, but let's assume what is known, and why would they prevent that information from getting out?
02:07:26.000Well, a lot of people, including intelligence officers, different people in the government, are in this documentary.
02:07:34.000And one of the things that they're saying is part of the problem with all this is if they have had these programs going on for so long, that means they've been misappropriating funds and they've been lying to Congress.
02:07:46.000So all these people that were involved in the program.
02:08:01.000The problem with that is if you've got unlimited money and you've got misappropriation of funds and lying to Congress, I guarantee some of that money has gone to places it shouldn't have gone.
02:08:17.000So it's always very hard to engage in these super generic, super general, I should say, hypotheticals because.
02:08:26.000You know, like, yeah, if, if, look, we've got remains of space aliens and we're hiding them, then there are a million other sort of, there are a million possibilities for that.
02:08:42.000The reason I'm skeptical that it's true that we have the physical remains is not because I don't think that's something that is physically possible or that the government is willing to do and able to do a lot of crazy stuff in our history and the history of all governments.
02:09:05.000I don't mean to insult him or say I disagree with him about everything.
02:09:09.000I made this point to Dave when we talked.
02:09:11.000It's like if we have literal Space alien remains in the custody of the United States government, there is no way that that wouldn't leak out in some way.
02:09:29.000But with cell phones and every way that we have, it's plausible to me you could hide that in an era where you have to have a giant camera the size of these antlers in order to take a photo of something.
02:09:50.000Because you know that if you have any sort of top secret, like if you go into a skiff, like there's no way you're bringing cameras in there.
02:10:28.000Certain devices like give emanate signals that they can pick up on, Bluetooth and all that shit.
02:10:33.000But like, but to have access to go into a room where they have these things and no one did have these things, I guarantee you they're going to make sure no one's got anything.
02:10:45.000They could easily scan you to make sure that you don't have any kind of electronics, any kind of camera, any kind of recording device.
02:13:01.000What the pilots' reaction to it is not like they're looking at a visual or on a camera.
02:13:08.000It's like they're looking at something else that's really, really weird and difficult to explain given what they know about physics and aeronautical engineering, et cetera.
02:13:16.000So, anyway, I am fascinated by this, but I just don't want to tell people like, oh, I've uncovered the truth or I haven't because I haven't looked at it yet.
02:14:09.000He was a fighter pilot that said that.
02:14:11.000When they upgraded their equipment on these fighter jets in 2014, all of a sudden they started seeing these things that were staying completely motionless at 120 knot winds.
02:14:23.000And they were a cube inside of a sphere, a black cube inside of some sort of.
02:15:10.000His argument is in the same way that I would say, what's the difference between.
02:15:16.000An extraterrestrial and an angel or a demon, depending on its intentions, from the perspective of a human in 2026.
02:15:23.000His argument would be what's the difference between a space alien and a human being, but just a human being with super advanced technology, right?
02:15:32.000And so I don't know if this is still his view, but he kind of was like, let's say you had human beings who just were super scientifically advanced.
02:15:44.000Like what we know of the laws of physics, as I understand it, is that light speed is sort of the Upper limit of what one of our spaceships could travel.
02:15:53.000You can't go any faster than the speed of light.
02:15:55.000Well, that's a problem because everything else that could support extraterrestrial life is many, many, many, many light years away.
02:16:04.000His argument to me again back in the day was if you figured out a new physics in the same way that you had an understanding shift from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics, if you have a new understanding of physics that allows you to travel much faster than the speed of light, you could just have human beings either from a different planet or maybe they went to Mars and started their own civilization and then that got old.
02:16:28.000At this point, they are many millions of light years away, but they can move through space and time in a way that is quite literally like.
02:16:35.000Divine from our perspective or space aliens, but they're just human beings.
02:16:41.000It could be human beings from the future.
02:16:44.000If time travel is possible, why would it also?
02:16:46.000But also, we know that life exists on Earth.
02:16:49.000So if life exists on Earth, Earth is a planet.
02:16:53.000There are hundreds of billions of stars that have hundreds of billions of planets.
02:17:00.000We have no idea how many planets there are in the known universe that could potentially support life.
02:17:06.000And if these things live on these planets and they live far longer than we have, like if you showed a nuclear bomb to someone from a hundred years ago, they would say that's the craziest fucking thing I've ever seen in my life.
02:17:22.000You show them a reactor, show them a cell phone, show them that television.
02:17:26.000So it's like my dog with a light switch, right?
02:17:28.000Just be able to FaceTime someone in New Zealand.
02:17:46.000And one of the things I've talked with Elon about this, and Elon is obviously a super smart dude, but I've never heard a super satisfying answer to this.
02:17:54.000One of the things that worries me like, I want humans to be a multi planetary species.
02:17:59.000I want us to go to Mars instead of a colony.
02:18:02.000And, you know, like, that's sort of I love humanity.
02:18:06.000With space travel, that I've again not heard a satisfactory solution to is you know, when we're outside of the Earth's gravity, our genes, like our actual DNA, seem to not function as well when it's not on Earth style gravity, which makes sense, right?
02:18:29.000We developed in these conditions with this gravity.
02:18:33.000So, whenever you have somebody who goes to the International Space Station for like three months or six months and they come back and they are totally jacked up because, like, literally the cells in their body.
02:18:42.000Are starting to like discombobulate in response to a low gravity environment.
02:18:47.000I don't like, we have to figure out a solution to that problem.
02:18:50.000That to me is sort of the most interesting part of space travel, of going to Mars, of setting up a colony on another planet is if you set up a colony on Mars, but and what it takes you like two years to get there and two years to get back or something like that.
02:19:11.000If you're in space for four years, that, that, That part of space travel is very fascinating to me, and I don't know that I've heard any satisfactory solution to it yet.
02:19:21.000I don't think conventionally there is a satisfactory solution, but if you're talking about manipulating space time and not traditional propulsion, you probably can figure that out.
02:19:30.000You could essentially contain this environment in exactly the same way it is and travel to somewhere else with that environment.
02:19:38.000So, this is the idea of them living under the surface of the ocean.
02:20:27.000Speaking of communists, the Democratic Socialists of America, that's actually what they do at their events, they throw the ice cream into the Boston Harbor instead of the tea.
02:20:39.000I'm really concerned that people think that's a good idea and that they think that socialism just hasn't been done correctly.
02:20:48.000That drives me nuts because I think a lot of really well intentioned, really kind and empathetic young people think that that's the way to go.
02:20:57.000And I do not think they understand the dangers of this ideology because it always leads to one thing it leads to a very powerful.
02:21:09.000Military government that controls the population.
02:21:22.000And when you're hearing like Mom Dhani talk about freezing rents and taking bad landlords and then confiscating their property, you're like, do you, this is step one of what's happened in every communist dictatorship throughout history.
02:21:49.000So I don't know who said this, but the whole argument of communism is that you seize the means of production, but because the means of production, the most powerful means of production, is the human mind, you ultimately have to get into totalitarianism.
02:22:01.000You have to have control of that most fundamental element of the human person.
02:23:00.000So this is one of the things I talk about in the book is like there is a Christian idea of political economy that's actually been lost in American politics, where it's like we think of it as libertarianism, the hardcore free market.
02:23:13.000There actually is a third way that has existed in pretty much all Christian economic thinking going back 2,000 years ago, which is that, yeah, extreme wealth inequality does create problems, but you still got to have private property.
02:23:32.000You still have to have a state that protects private property rights.
02:23:36.000There's a way to balance these things that I think we've sort of lost in our country a little bit.
02:23:40.000When I like, okay, let me play devil's advocate with.
02:23:43.000The DSA because I think that their ideas are crazy, and I think that you're right.
02:23:50.000They will lead to a very totalitarian place.
02:23:51.000I'm not defending a single thing that they say, particularly their hatred of ice cream.
02:23:55.000Single thing that they say, particularly their hatred of ice cream.
02:23:59.000What I am saying is, and maybe this is just sort of the way my mind works, I tend to be a little bit more empathetic.
02:24:07.000Why are young people attracted to socialism in 21st century America?
02:24:12.000One of the best interviews that Charlie Kirk ever gave, it was right before he died, it was an episode that he did with Tucker Carlson where he talked about the fact that if you don't give young people a stake, if you don't give them ownership, if you don't give them a sense of the American dream and of possibility in the future, they're going to become socialists.
02:24:30.000Like, if you have a zero sum environment for a 25 year old in this country, they're going to start to say the only way for me to get anything is to take away from somebody else.
02:24:39.000So, we have to get away from the zero sum thinking.
02:24:42.000I think that's the root cause of this.
02:24:44.000But I also think that, look, we've ran an experiment in the United States of America.
02:24:49.000I think that we have undone that experiment, taken a different direction in the Trump administration, where we ship all the factories overseas and let low wage foreigners make our stuff.
02:25:01.000That was a bad deal for American workers.
02:25:03.000Again, it takes a long time to reverse that trend, but I think it's one of the best parts of Trump administration policy you do see that trend starting to reverse.
02:25:12.000This idea that nobody should own anything, we should all become renters, whereas what we're trying to do is lower interest rates.
02:25:19.000You actually have seen housing costs stabilize in the country over the last year and a half, frankly, because of immigration.
02:25:24.000We had way too many people going after way too many homes.
02:25:45.000But I really do worry, and I see this frankly more in my own party than I do on the other side.
02:25:50.000There is this revulsion to socialism that's totally justified without enough thinking about how did we get here in the first place.
02:25:58.000And if, man, if we don't fix that, and I would say if we don't get back to a more Christian sort of understanding of economics, socialism is the alternative.
02:26:13.000And in some ways, Joe, the game is rigged.
02:26:15.000I mean, if you look at - I mean, again, I just - I think so much of housing because - this happened, I think it was during the presidential campaign, maybe it was right before.
02:26:41.000And this young woman, successful engineer, makes a higher salary than most Americans.
02:26:48.000She just sort of like tossed out there that, you know, when her parents' generation was coming up, it was like possible to own a house and to raise a family and not be worried that much about things.
02:26:59.000And my thought was okay, you're an engineer.
02:27:02.000You make way more money than 75% of people your age, maybe 90% of people your age.
02:27:07.000And you think that it is like this ridiculous, unachievable objective to have literally what your parents had.
02:27:13.000Which is a decent job, a nice house, and a safe place.
02:27:17.000Literally, that same dinner, another guy, another friend of my wife's was talking about this.
02:27:24.000He, South Indian family, grew up, his parents immigrated.
02:27:38.000When I was growing up, all of my kids that I played with, that I rode bikes with, that I was playing street hockey with and football with, All of those kids were the sons of enlisted Marines in Oceanside, California.
02:28:15.000But one thing I try to persuade my fellow Republicans of is socialism is the alternative if we don't have a pathway to give people a sense that the system is not rigged.
02:28:25.000And that the American dream is attainable.
02:28:38.000We ran the experiment of offshoring all of our industrial jobs, of becoming a services and finance economy, and allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable, line goes up asset.
02:29:16.000And this is part of our job to provide an option that isn't burn it down but is not just doing the same things that we've done for the past.
02:29:22.000They're also terrified about the future because of AI because they feel like jobs are going to be taken away and there will be no place for people that have.
02:29:31.000Education in very specific avenues, like very specific jobs, are going to just be irrelevant.
02:30:12.000It also created a lot of jobs that didn't exist before.
02:30:14.000He was like, My concern here is not that 50% of Americans are going to be unable to find a job.
02:30:21.000There will be some displacement, some sort of churn in the labor market, but that's not the main issue.
02:30:27.000He said, The main issue, if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, is that there was a lot of demand for workers, but the inequality in the country Got completely out of whack.
02:30:36.000Like, this is the era of the robber barons.
02:30:39.000And then the robber barons in both Europe and the United States led to fascism.
02:30:56.000It's one of the best things that I think has ever been written by a Christian leader.
02:30:59.000It's written in the late 19th century.
02:31:02.000And the basic argument of it is that in the age of industrial churn, There has to be a middle way between six year olds working on the factory floor and socialism.
02:31:14.000And part of that solution is to give workers a sort of say in what's going on, give normal people some power in this system.
02:31:25.000And I think that's the thing we have to figure out with AI.
02:31:28.000I won't say that I have all the solutions because I haven't, but I think the fundamental question is how do you ensure that normal people have some control over this?
02:31:37.000Control over what their kids are seeing, control over the economic forces that are being unleashed by AI, some certainty that they're not going to wake up in a world where they can't buy a home but some other guy owns 35 mansions.
02:31:53.000That to me is the fundamental challenge of AI it's going to unleash a lot of wealth creation, but if that wealth creation all goes to some segment of people, you're going to have communism.
02:32:04.000That is the choice before us a lot of wealth being created.
02:32:11.000But if you don't ensure that there's some broader prosperity from that wealth creation, like we have run this experiment before and it leads to communism.
02:32:25.000I mean, look, this is what I'm saying.
02:32:28.000I'm being honest with you that I don't have a magic wand.
02:32:31.000I think there are a few things that we should sort of take from this.
02:32:35.000I think, okay, the first is that we should give workers a real say at the bargaining table, okay?
02:32:43.000What really worries me about AI is the fact that private sector unions have largely disappeared from the United States of America.
02:32:53.000There are a couple of exceptions, but if you go back to why did the United States and Britain weather the Industrial Revolution better than literally every other Western country, I think you could make a good argument.
02:33:05.000Right now we have very weak religious institutions.
02:33:07.000Number two, I think you could say strong worker participation institutions.
02:33:11.000Not just private sector labor unions, that was a big piece of it, but people don't realize that.
02:33:17.000You know, Hollywood, major studios would actually work with community groups and churches to sort of help develop content.
02:33:29.000Now, this was organic, this was a natural cooperation.
02:33:31.000This wasn't mandated by some law, but where they'd go and say, Help us produce content that actually speaks to your membership, that speaks to your community.
02:33:41.000And there was this sense of participation in American society that I think we've lost.
02:33:46.000And that's the thing that I think we have to rebuild a little bit.
02:33:49.000It's interesting that the Trump administration, the president, Personally, certainly me, have been accused of being too pro labor for Republicans.
02:33:56.000But one of the reasons why I'm pro labor as a Republican is because - and I'm not saying unions are perfect, some of them have very serious problems.
02:34:07.000Like the alternative may very well be communism in the United States of America, not next year, but down the road, you've got to give people a seat at the table.
02:34:16.000And I think that's one answer to the question.
02:34:18.000I think a second answer to the question is competition.
02:34:22.000So, if you go back again to what worked and what was broken about the Industrial Revolution, hyper monopolist style companies that had way too much power.
02:34:35.000I mean, Teddy Roosevelt famously talked about how some of the steel trusts were more powerful than the United States government.
02:34:44.000Your vote didn't matter as much because the corporations were more powerful than the government.
02:34:49.000I think reining that in, making sure that, like, what's the most obvious way to give normal people participation?
02:34:55.000But if a single corporation has monopolized an entire space, then you don't have a real democracy unless you rein in the power of that company.
02:35:08.000And I think that is another big risk with AI.
02:35:10.000It's that we have a hyper monopolist who dominates the space and then influences the government, influences the nonprofit sector, and then real people are effectively cut out of the bargain.
02:35:22.000So, again, I'm not going to pretend sitting here that I have all the solutions.
02:35:25.000I think about this more than almost anything else right now.
02:35:39.000Like what could be done on a federal level to implement that?
02:35:44.000Well, you know, I think one of the things and we've we've looked at legislation along these lines, we haven't yet pushed anything.
02:35:50.000But, you know, one problem with the 20 with with like the private sector labor union, one reason why your Democrats will say your private unions are at super low participation rates because the government.
02:36:04.000There's like some element of truth to that.
02:36:06.000But the reality is that a lot of workers don't see the utility in joining a union because it's like, in a lot of ways, it's a 20th century institution when you need a 21st century institution.
02:36:16.000So I think updating the modern union to be, to make more sense in the 21st century, I think that's a part of the story.
02:36:37.00020th century labor law presupposes a sort of zero sum conflict between the company and the union.
02:36:43.000And that where you've seen unions actually thrive, certain places in Europe, it's a little bit more cooperative.
02:36:49.000And the unions actually have a little bit more power themselves where they can negotiate with the corporation with a little bit more breadth and a little bit more freedom.
02:37:00.000Whereas in the United States, we sort of set a floor.
02:37:03.000We create a very small number of things the union can actually negotiate over.
02:37:07.000And so a lot of people say, well, why would I join a union?
02:37:37.000We're going to have to be willing to use it in the 21st century.
02:37:39.000And when it comes to unions, what Like, what is wrong with the current structure in terms of what power the unions have to negotiate for labor?
02:37:55.000So, this is a concrete example that Oren uses all the time.
02:38:00.000So, in some European countries, you have a minimum wage, right?
02:38:04.000In some European countries, the union can actually cut a deal with the employer to where you pay a brand new employee.
02:38:14.000Less than the minimum wage, then you pay a more senior person higher than the minimum wage.
02:38:21.000But in order to pay the junior employee less than the minimum wage, you have to provide them job training and better benefits and so forth.
02:38:27.000And so the idea is you turn the employee for the first couple of years, you turn the company almost into an educational institution.
02:38:35.000But in order to do that, the union has to have flexibility.
02:38:38.000That kind of arrangement is effectively illegal in the United States of America.
02:38:42.000So it's that you create the ability for the union to be more flexible in how it negotiates.
02:38:47.000You don't set all the terms for it, you allow the union to figure out what's in the best interest of its membership.
02:38:53.000But people are opposed, like initially knee jerk reaction to lowering wages and lowering minimum wage.
02:38:59.000I mean, most people feel, and I agree, that minimum wage is almost impossible to live off of, especially with A hundred percent.
02:39:07.000But what these unions are not asking for, I mean, you have to kind of trust the labor representation of the people to sort of make the right arrangement for them.
02:39:19.000And so it's not, hey, let's create a minimum wage or a wage floor that's lower than the minimum wage.
02:39:27.000It's what about taking for the first year of a person coming into the labor market where they work an internship for zero dollars, right, at a company?
02:39:37.000Why don't we allow our workers to work effectively an internship, get the training they need, get the benefits that they need, and then join the workforce full time at a much higher wage?
02:39:48.000The idea is that you trust the union to come up with this stuff, or the labor organization, whatever you want to call it, is you actually give the union the ability to sort of negotiate over this stuff on behalf of its members.
02:39:59.000You don't assume the way the United States we do it is we basically take all that authority away from the union itself and we try to settle this stuff at the level of the government.
02:40:11.000But again, where unions have been more successful, where they actually have higher membership and participation rates, what you see is These organizations actually have much greater flexibility.
02:40:26.000And that ends up meaning that more people want to join.
02:40:28.000That means these organizations have more power.
02:40:30.000And then that means they can figure out the arrangement that works best for their membership.
02:40:36.000You have to trust that people are willing to do this thing for their own benefit.
02:40:43.000And so long as they've got the right authority and so long as they've got the right tools, you can trust people to do what's in their best interest and these organizations to do what's in the best interest of their membership.
02:40:54.000Well, the problem that people would have with that is that corporations have a responsibility to their shareholders.
02:40:59.000They always want to make the most money possible.
02:41:01.000They have to make more money next quarter than they made this quarter.
02:41:04.000One of the ways they do that is by paying people less.
02:41:07.000But that's why I think you have to give workers some seat at the bargaining table.
02:41:11.000There is a theory of economics that dominated in the late 20th century America, which is that basically the labor market was entirely efficient.
02:41:22.000And maybe the corporation didn't want to pay their workers more money, but they would be forced to pay their workers more money purely because if they didn't do that, then they wouldn't be able to get enough workers.
02:41:32.000Now, I do think that there's an argument for like, there are all of these ways why we should give workers more bargaining power.
02:41:38.000One of them, and we've spent a lot of time talking about labor organizations, and that's important.
02:41:42.000Man, one of the reasons why I'm such an immigration hawk is because it is really important not to flood the country with low wage immigrants.
02:41:49.000Because if you give a corporation a choice between a low wage immigrant, And a native worker who's going to require, by the way, a native worker of any race, they're going to be forced to pay the native worker more if there's not a pool of low wage workers to go to.
02:42:05.000And this is like a consistent finding in the economics literature, but also just common sense that when you flood the country with low wage immigrants, this is why I think the DSA types are a little full of shit when they talk about helping normal people.
02:42:18.000If you want to help a normal person, don't provide a corporation nine low wage migrants.
02:42:25.000To compete against them when they're bargaining for wages.
02:42:28.000You actually give workers more power when you have a more restricted immigration policy.
02:42:33.000Well, this is that's the that's that's where the real con is, right?
02:42:39.000You've told me that you had a conversation with someone who was at the head of some corporation that was upset that they were trying to shut down illegal immigration because he said it's Head of a hotel chain.
02:42:50.000Because he said basically, I want to be able to pay my workers less money and it's very hard because the native workers expect higher wages.
02:43:04.000It was like unintentionally hilarious.
02:43:05.000It was like unintentionally hilarious.
02:43:08.000And it's talking about why Apple would choose to manufacture in Asia over the United States of America.
02:43:18.000And it's talking about how the American workers, and it's almost kind of judgy towards the American workers.
02:43:23.000It's like, well, the American workers want to go home and see their kids and have dinner with their kids.
02:43:29.000And it's like, by the way, you go to the Foxconn factory in Apple and China, the Foxconn factory that develops products for Apple in China, and what do you see?
02:43:41.000Because, yeah, the workers work 72 hours a week and they sleep in little apartments, four to a bedroom, but they also are so miserable, you have to take steps to prevent them from killing themselves.
02:43:54.000So, you know, what I want out of American life is a little bit more dignity, a little bit more, oh, you know, yeah, I can afford to feed my family.
02:44:03.000I can also go home and actually watch my kids' baseball game.
02:44:06.000And that balance, I think, if you're looking at it from a pure profit motive, You know, maybe the corporation is going to think like that, which is why you have to give the people real power to push back and advocate for their own interests.
02:44:19.000I think a lot of people in this country, if they had to choose, especially people that have money, if they had to choose between a phone that was manufactured in America where people were paid a very good wage and had benefits, and you have an iPhone that has a little American flag on the back and you have one that doesn't, I think a lot of people would buy the one with the American flag on the back because.
02:44:42.000They would feel better about their purchase.
02:44:44.000They'd feel, I feel weird when I'm holding a phone and I know that someone was working in some factory in some foreign country, working 15 hours a day.
02:44:58.000They'd much rather it be made locally.
02:45:01.000They're willing to pay a little bit more so long as it's healthier and it's made locally.
02:45:06.000There obviously are exceptions to every rule, but I do, again, I think that we have run the experiment where we just try to do everything.
02:45:16.000With low wage foreigners, whether they're in the United States via illegal immigration or whether they're outside the United States via offshoring and outsourcing.
02:45:26.000And what it has led to is, I think, a society where socialism is a bit on the rise.
02:45:31.000And one of our jobs in the administration, I think about this all the time, is how do you make things.
02:45:38.000I'm not saying we're perfect and I'm not saying there isn't a lot of work to do because there is.
02:45:41.000Like we were left in quite a hole by 40 years of bad policy.
02:45:44.000People always talk about the Biden administration inflation.
02:45:47.000Yeah, the Biden administration inflation was terrible.
02:46:11.000So you had a good CPI report, a consumer price inflation report today.
02:46:18.000Yes, I don't ever get to the 9% inflation of the Biden administration.
02:46:22.000Yes, the Trump administration has had a much better record on inflation than the Biden administration.
02:46:26.000Nothing close to 9%, even in our worst month.
02:46:29.000But some of this stuff is actually much longer term.
02:46:32.000This is 40 years of failed bipartisan leadership, which has created really a kind of shell corporation out of the United States of America.
02:46:41.000We don't make enough of our own stuff.
02:48:05.000Congressional representation away from areas that have lower illegal immigration, which is its own problem.
02:48:12.000So, yeah, it's the thing that I don't understand about the democratic socialists of America.
02:48:18.000Obviously, I disagree with a lot of their ideas, but if you go back to Cesar Chavez, one of the original founding fathers of the American workers' rights movement, he was a hardcore restrictionist on immigration because he thought that the bosses would bring in low wage immigrants to compete.
02:48:37.000Against his workers, and that would drive down their wages.
02:48:41.000Yet the DSA, which says they care about the wages of workers, is quite literally like an open borders organization.
02:48:50.000I tend to think that it's all BS, that they are actually pursuing a set of policies that are good for.
02:48:59.000corporations care way more about open borders than they do about any other policy the DSA cares about.
02:49:07.000While these people say that they're trying to fight for workers and they're trying to fight for the working man, The actual end result of DSA policy is to flood the country with low wage immigrants, which will destroy the middle class of this country.
02:49:20.000In fact, we have run this experiment for decades now, and we have a much weaker middle class than we did before it started.
02:49:26.000And I think this is a part of the problem that this country has that there's this narrative Republicans are cruel and they're anti worker and that they're anti lower class people or lower middle class people.
02:49:46.000But, you know, it's one of those things that it took a long while for it to set in.
02:49:49.000It's going to take a long while to get out of it.
02:49:51.000But what I just try to remind people is that anybody who actually cares about the safety of your community is going to care about not empowering police brutality, but empowering the good cops to do what they need to do.
02:50:05.000Anybody who cares about law and order is going to want to throw violent criminals in jail, not close down the prison.
02:50:11.000Anybody who cares about your wages and your Safety is going to want to control the border.
02:50:16.000So, I just all I can think to do is to remind people that I'm not saying Republicans are perfect.
02:50:23.000And, you know, I have disagreements, of course, within my own party all the time.
02:50:27.000But fundamentally, our party is right now pursuing a much better set of policies when it comes to safety of your home, your wages, your ability to keep more of your money.
02:50:41.000I just got to keep preaching that message.
02:50:43.000You know, the chips fall where they may.
02:50:45.000And if you just look at the result of what you see in these cities where they don't enforce crime, where they don't enforce immigration laws, they provide sanctuary states, you see disasters over and over and over again.
02:51:25.000I think part of it is we haven't done a good enough job of actually going to some of these places.
02:51:30.000Part of it is that it is shifting, and sometimes these shifts just take a long time.
02:51:33.000If you look, the Republican Party under Trump's leadership is way more working class, way more middle class than the Republican Party of 20 years ago.
02:51:41.000So these things are starting to shift.
02:51:43.000But the public safety thing is very interesting to me because, like, one of the promises of America is that every man, woman, and child, rich or poor, black or white, deserves public safety.
02:51:57.000Like, every rich person ever has had public safety.
02:52:00.000Every rich person ever has been able to afford some security guard to make sure that somebody comes and tries to steal their stuff or Kidnap their kids, they're protected against that.
02:52:10.000What America did is we democratized public safety.
02:52:14.000Every person gets to keep their property.
02:52:17.000Every person gets to not be stolen from.
02:52:19.000Every person gets to walk down their neighborhood at night without being mugged.
02:52:23.000Obviously, we have imperfectly applied that.
02:52:27.000What the left has done over the last few years, why I think the crime thing is it's not just a sort of public safety thing, it's also a class thing, is they have made Working people less safe.
02:52:41.000Like, if you look at my neighborhood, the neighborhood that my working class grandparents raised me in, it became less safe over time.
02:52:50.000And really, working class neighborhoods had much higher rates of violence, much higher rates of carjackings, and so forth.
02:52:58.000That happened during Biden's administration.