The Joe Rogan Experience - #1337 - Dan Crenshaw

Episode Date: August 20, 2019

Dan Crenshaw is a politician and former United States Navy SEAL officer serving as the U.S. Representative for Texas's 2nd congressional district since 2019.

Try it in there. Yeah, this one is from Goggins. David Goggins gave me this one. That's his coin? Yeah, he's got his own coin. You need a Dan Crenshaw coin, bro. I do. This is kind of a big coin. It's a fat one. It's not one you can really carry in your pocket. No, no. So it stays on the desk.

He's really trying to outdo everybody else's coin. That's David Goggins. The uncommon amongst uncommon men even with your fucking coins jesus so my coin's not gonna be that big i'm still working on it are you gonna get a coin for real we are yeah we're way behind the power curve on this we need one it's all about you know you got to get the right symbology in there you got the right amount of texas the right amount of seal the right amount of congress yeah you right amount of seal, the right amount of Congress. Yeah. Pack that into the right symbology. Yeah.

Test different ingredients. Yeah. Try it over and over again. Yeah. Until you get the bacon right. Basically. Yeah. Basically.

Well, thanks for being here, man. I appreciate it. I'm glad to be here. This is pretty cool. You rose to prominence through a joke. Isn't that strange? Yeah. I mean, a form of a joke.

Yeah. Yeah. Saturday Night Live. Yeah. That was a weird moment. I was like, ooh. It was. You handled it really well though well thank you um when that happened it was a saturday night obviously saturday night life and uh we heard about it the next morning i got a lot of texts and everybody's like oh hey man you made it It's a bunch of SEALs too. So the SEAL community is not prone to, you know,

this righteous indignation kind of reaction. They're more likely, they were more likely in private to just double down and make fun of me more. Right. Right, which I love about them. But here's what they would say, only we're allowed to make fun of you, not this guy. So that's how we found out about it.

We watched it. were we were right in the middle of the campaign well the the election was about two days away so you're you're struggling just to do all your last minute things to get the vote out and so this was it was it did not dawn upon me how big of a deal this was going to be at the time it felt more like an annoyance it felt more like okay annoyance it felt more like okay i've got a i've got to come up with a statement i'm seeing people really upset about this but i'm not going to lie to them and tell them that i'm emotionally upset like i'm emotionally triggered by this that would be a false reaction on my part um so we crafted i think the the right

statement which was listen like it's offensive doesn't mean I'm offended. And you don't have to be, you don't have to choose to be offended here. And as just a general rule, we should try hard not to offend people and try hard not to be offended. Okay, there, that's it. I'm not going to demand some apology and kind of stand on my high horse and play this aggrieved victim role which is which is the expected role to play these days we don't want to do that well good for you good for you for not doing it's refreshing yeah but the joke was kind of funny i mean i have to admit he said he's look you looked like a bad guy in a porno film that was not the offensive part what was the offensive part yeah

that part was funny now it drew a lot of questions he called me a hitman in a porno right and so the obvious question is what kind of porno is this i mean right that's the very that's that's the next thing that goes through your head has a hitman right right and like what's the role of that i mean there's just your mind goes it's all sorts of directions that that part wasn't the offensive part was he lost his eye in the war or whatever. That's what set people off. That was very dismissive. Yeah.

And, you know, after having gone on the show and seeing how they do things and how carefully scripted it actually is, it's unclear to me, and it always will be, and nobody will ever come out with the actual truth on this, on how that mistake got made. I think probably, Pete, Dave, if I'm just giving him total benefit of the doubt, and also after having met him and just having a general rule that we should try to give some people some space and assume that they're not the evil people that we might assume they are. He probably just kind of looked at the line and didn't feel like finishing it and just said whatever and it just in it in that but that caught in that and that created this you know what actually was a pretty offensive comment um but uh you know did he mean it well we'll never really know now i'll back up and say the whole premise of that joke was ill-intentioned i mean they said as much, right? They said, look at these gross people. We don't like them.

And just to appear somewhat fair, we'll make fun of one Democrat. I mean, they did say that. So, you know, this was the thrust of the entire skit was obviously not well-intentioned. But I'm not sure he meant to be as deeply insulting as it turned out to be. Yeah, he could have said the same thing, that you're an American hero, but you look like a hitman in a porno film. Yeah. It would have been funny.

Yeah. And it would have been okay. Yeah, it's the whatever, that part. He's no Joe Rogan. He was just trying to be funny, man. That's all it was. People look so deeply into why comics do things, but the majority of the reason why they say offensive shit

is because they think it's going to work. That's why. They find a thing. It's not like they harbor some deep resentment or anger towards any protected class or anything like that this is like what people who are non-comics look into it guarantee 100 like this is going to work that's all it is this is going to get a laugh that's all it is 100 and there's other things you talk about that are important to you that you're trying to figure out how to make funny but for the most part especially on something like san aaron live where they're all kind of competing to be funny together i mean that's a very weird show it is and it's it was cool being behind the scenes and watching how it all takes place um you know they they come up with these wacky ideas they they test them out

the writers go try it out they they see how it goes they change some things they'll do it in front of an audience they'll see how the audience reacts and they'll go with that um it's it's it's fun i mean it's fun to be a part of it's fun to actually get have my input on what was great about it though is that you came back after that and he apologized to you and you accepted it graciously but it also got i mean it was great for you because it got people to know who you are and then i started paying attention to you after that i started watching some interviews and watching some speeches and different things and i found you to be a very reasonable right-wing guy which i think we need way more of in this world you know it's like and this polarization of left versus right it just

seems it's so toxic right now that when you can find people that are reasonable and intelligent and and think along logical lines that you could easily follow and go oh okay maybe i agree or disagree with this guy but i see where he's coming from yeah and you're what you're getting at is a problem in politics is politicians and political leaders, I think, forgot to explain why we believe what we believe. And that's pretty important. You know, I think too often talking points are relied upon. And it's not that those talking points are false necessarily, but they're not persuasive because you haven't gone a couple layers deep. Again, I think you talk about this

a lot. Why are podcasts so popular? They're popular because people want to hear a little bit more information. They want to get a deeper understanding of why you think what you think. People are ready to hear that. They're ready for some nuance. That being said, being in politics, you wouldn't think that we're getting any closer to nuanced conversations. I think political conversations on podcasts are opening up a whole new door where you understand people like tulsi gabbard or andrew yang or bernie sanders the people that i've had i've had on this podcast one of the things that i've talked to people about they said i didn't know that bernie was like a normal person you hear him talk and you you know it's always in these

very quick sound bites on television it's always in these very quick sound bites on television he's always yelling about wealth or race or something he looks like a madman yeah but then you sit down and talk to him for in a long form conversation you let him expand on his thoughts you go oh he's a reasonable guy he just has this these are his principles these are his ideas and he's not a cartoon. Yeah, I mean, on a personal level, most people in Congress are not exactly who you think they are. They are just people. They make jokes. Of course.

We make small talk in the elevator. These things happen. Bernie in particular, he's on the Senate side. I don't really interact with him at all. Tulsi Gabbard, I think you mentioned her. We do have good conversations. That does happen. We disagree vigorously on lots of things.

What do you guys disagree on? Tulsi in particular? Sure. Well, most things, I would say. One thing she's quite outspoken about is our involvement overseas. She's much more of an isolationist than I am. What I remind people when we're talking about that particular subject, why do we keep troops in Syria? Why do we keep troops in Iraq? Why do we keep troops in Afghanistan? Isn't the war over?

Why don't we bring the boys back home? And the answer is this is not a conventional war. This is not something where you sign a peace treaty with a uniformed army. It is a different situation. We send guys like me over there so that they don't come here. We send guys like me over there so that we keep pressure on them and prevent them from having the operational space and timing to commit another 9-11. You have to understand that these people over there wake up every single day trying to plan another 9-11. It is what they do. And we've already seen an increase in ISIS activity just from the drawdown that we already did have in Syria.

So, you know, that's a fair disagreement. Again, but she's a really cool person. And I brought up Tulsi just specifically because we do talk and I just like her as a person. We just disagree on things. but there's a respect there to play devil's advocate some would say that the reason why they want to plot plot another 9-11 is because we're over there yeah i disagree with that so let's let's look at the osama bin laden um example what exactly did we do to this guy you know well we helped him right yeah exactly fighting in the night soviets with the mujahideen exactly in the he was a mujahideen fighter we helped them fight the soviets we protected saudi

araba from invasion from saddam hussein that's his homeland and yet he hated us and when we left we never occupied saudi arabia we left when they asked us to leave after we defended them and prevented another invasion from saddam Hussein after he invaded Kuwait. What is it we did to make this guy so mad? And the answer is we didn't do anything, objectively speaking. He hates us because of our Western ideology. He hates us because he hates us. And it's hard for us to understand because it's not logical, but it is the truth.

And it's the prime example of why this is a long-term fight. And it's not likely to go away anytime soon. And the last thing I would say, the world is a very small place. When we pretend to ignore things going on in the Middle East, we can pretend that they won't come here. But the reality is that's a 12-hour flight. And the speed of information travels even faster. You know, when we were seeing a lot of attacks in the U.S. and in Europe when ISIS was at its peak, at its peak strength, that was because they were able to radicalize online. Notice that they've stopped having that power, and it's because we actually took the fight to them.

and it's because we actually took the fight to them. Well, there certainly are some conflicts between their ideology and Western ideology, and Western values, but why is it that they're dedicating their entire life to try to take down America? Well, I mean, there's a... This is always the question for us, the civilians. It is a question, and you almost have to ask them

exactly why, right? But at its core, we are infidels. At its core, they're taking an extreme view of Islamic fundamentalism and believing that we are infidels that must be destroyed. I mean, that's at its core. It's less political reasons and a little bit more emotional reasoning. There has to be some part of it because of our policies and some part of it because of our policies and some part of it because of

our actions. I'm not so sure that we should always assume that it's our fault. I think that's a common theme in politics these days where anything bad happening must be America's fault, must be decisions we made. I mean, maybe, but let's objectively make the case if that's true. I think there's an automatic assumption and it's not self--evident to me but if we're in what are we in 100 and how many countries do we have bases in what's the number do you know it's a lot it might it's it's definitely over 100 yeah and if you were one of the people that is in one of those countries and you had to deal with that and you saw like the drone attacks in Yemen that have killed people and wedding parties and the kind of shit that we hope never happens again, but has happened in the past. You can kind of understand why there would be a hatred against the number one superpower in the

world. Well, opinions in these countries are not, are not homogenous, right? They're, they're, they're vastly diverse. There's a. There's millions of people in Yemen probably begging for us to come there. Same with Iraq. The Iraqis did not want us leaving. They knew this would go badly. But again, not all Iraqis, right? So it's- The ones who understood. Right. I mean, it just depends on who you talk to. So again, everything is more complex than a simple black and white scenario where America's bad or good. It's always more complex than a simple than a simple black and white scenario where america's bad or good it's just it's always more complex than that so you feel like if we did pull out of all these countries

particularly pull out of the middle east afghanistan and all the bases that we have over there that it would be uh very similar to like what's going on in iraq what happened in libya there's a power vacuum the vacuum gets filled by bad guys it'll 100 happen that way um you know and it's there's not a doubt in my mind there's not a doubt in any expert's minds who's looking at this i would also say when we're when we have a base somewhere that is that is at the that is that is at the discretion of of that uh local government there's there's no cases here except in the case of syria uh where you know their local government bashar-Assad, doesn't want us there. That's the only case that I can think of that we don't have an agreement, a status of force agreement with the government there.

So I don't think it's quite right to paint it as some kind of imperialistic occupation. It's just not how we do things. And you're right over there? Yeah, I'm just making sure the sound is off. Good for you before anything actually did happen. Now, do you think that this is a political ploy, that this is a popular thing to say? Because so many people that have a cursory understanding of foreign policy, they look at our military bases overseas and they say, hey, let's bring those people back. Let's end these wars.

Let's stop spending this money. But you're not the only one that's told me this and particularly not the only one that's told me this that has a military background saying it's virtually impossible to prevent any of this stuff without having bases over there. That's 100 percent right. Yeah. I mean, you need you need that relationship with the host nation, of course, that you want to partner with. And that's generally what we do, especially in the special operations community. When we're in 100 plus countries, we're there to partner with them. We're not there doing our own thing. We're there partnering and training and equipping and

enhancing their capabilities. So that's part of what we're doing. And the other part is just knowledge. We want to know what's happening. If we don't know what's happening, why do we have embassies everywhere? Part of that is just relationships and knowledge and understanding of what's going on, because we can't look at it from afar and actually get it. It just doesn't work that way. So, and again, I think it is reactionary to just assume that we have bad intentions all the time and that everything is America's fault. I hear that constantly, mostly coming from the left. But that isolationist sentiment certainly comes from the right as well. And it's a reaction.

It's a reaction to the Iraq War and some of the mistakes we made there. It's a reaction to Vietnam. That's never left the American psyche in many ways. But these matters are complex, and they deserve complex reasoning and analysis and a little nuanced understanding. And I just think that's how we should look at it. We don't say that we're always right. That's not what I'm saying. Right. No one gets really educated on it. It's not like there's a cursory examination of this that's given to the American person

when they sign up to register to vote. You don't say, okay, before you vote, let's explain to you what's going on and this is why there's bases here and this is why we do this. Not even as a real simple explanation of these things.

You just have to go searching for it or you have to rely on political pundits usually have a bias one way or the other it's msnbc or it's fox news and you know you you don't know where the reality is you can apply and you can apply that it's not just our foreign policy it's every issue yes you know why are things the way they are it's a really good question to ask yeah when we're trying to find the solutions for the things we don't like. The first question we should ask is why are things the way they are? And that question really gets manipulated on any issue. And it is unfortunate. How do we fix that? I don't know. My message when like high school kids are asking me, how do they get involved in politics? And what I tell them is, it's okay not to know things, first of all, and it's okay not to choose a side just yet, right? Because there's nothing wrong with your ignorance on the why behind this issue. There's nothing wrong with that. You're young.

You don't have the experiences yet. It's fine. But there is something wrong with having a very strong opinion on that when you don't actually understand it. That's what creates the animosity. That's what creates the divisiveness because once you're emotionally attached to an opinion, it's, it's not easy to,

to remove yourself from that. It takes a massive amount of, of I think humility and which is, it was an attribute we all aspire to, but maybe don't have exactly. And it's hard. And so it's okay not to know and to ask questions and to just wonder and to think maybe what I'm hearing isn't exactly the whole truth.

Maybe I'll look into it before I start posting on social media about how awful that situation is or whatever. People love to know, you know, even if they don't. They love to be the person that has the information. And one of the things that social media has done is allowed this sort of text-based debate format where people can shut people down wrong and say this the problem with that is this and this and everybody wants to be correct about things because they're married to these ideas if these ideas succeed they succeed if they they get a zinger off on someone in some sort of online political debate, they walk around like a fucking – like a peacock strutting.

They won. They got one in. And for many people, this is like the only form of competition they participate in, which I think is a real problem in our culture. Human beings desire competition, especially men. It is a giant – and when they shy away from it they usually become secretly quietly angry and they they they harbor resentment and bitterness and they never understand the feeling of losing and getting better the feeling of failing and improving the feeling of not knowing something and then learning something like these these things are critical and to pretend that you

know something when you don't it's a terrible way to go about your life yeah i mean that's a very good point on the competitive aspects of things uh you obviously compete a lot i've competed a lot in my life and i can't imagine a world where that didn't happen and i can't imagine a world where i didn't have to suffer as a kid through some losses in my soccer game and my parents didn't say well you deserve to win they said well you lost so so that's what happens and guess what welcome to life yeah i mean we still love you but you yeah you fucking lost that's life that's real should have trained harder it's uh the idea that they're doing that with these little kids man when my daughter was three she had a soccer game where there was no winners no losers like uh the other team fucking won i watched the ball went in the goal everybody was

cheering like what are we doing we don't we're not keeping score yeah this is bananas you're gonna you know it's soft times and this this is what we're living in soft times create soft people yeah that's right um and we talked about this before the show i'm writing a whole book on this actually i'm glad uh and uh it's about outrage culture it's about becoming too soft and but i but i try to make it a you know a productive conversation each chapter will be lessons you know derived from my own experiences and and derived from psychology, derived from ancient truths actually. Nothing I will say in this book is going to be new, but that's kind of the point and that's how you know it's good.

Yeah, we need to hear those things over and over again. Sometimes you forget them, sometimes they just need to be cemented in your psyche. And competition doesn't mean being mean. It doesn't mean people, they're associating it and equating it with either violence or aggression or toxic masculinity. There's all these words that kept thrown around for people feeling bad because they lost. But that feeling of feeling bad because you lost something is extremely valuable in your life. And I don't want to say it hardens you because it doesn't harden you emotionally you still are the same amount of emotional availability but you get if you're accustomed to it i always tell people young men get involved in martial arts especially jujitsu because you can do it you're not going to get brain damage you get strangled

a bunch you get your ass kicked all the time and it teaches you humility it teaches you humility and then you learn after that that you can get better and then eventually you become the hammer instead of being the nail and that's that's something you can actually apply to your real life you can understand that these lessons of failure and humility and humiliation and just getting pummeled like all that stuff pays off ultimately if you just keep showing up and that's analogous to life in life if you can just keep showing up and keep working hard you're gonna have setbacks you but you don't let them define you and you can move forward but if you don't if you just like the world's toxic we need to nerf everything and you know everyone needs a

safe space well we're just gonna make a whole island full of pussies and we're in danger of doing that yeah we're definitely in danger of doing it if it hasn't already happened in many ways and like what you're saying is intuitively true that hardship creates a stronger mind yeah right lessons but it's it's not just intuitively true this is this is in data this is in this is in science as well um and and a lot of psychological research you know this is and and we know it to be true what the reason i like actually i love the the subject of psychology because it kind of tells us things that we already intuit to be true and uh and it just makes sense and this is certainly one of those and there's a lot of studies that show people who have suffered

deep trauma um uh end up better for it as long as they're telling themselves the right stories. And so, I go into this a lot in my book too. You have to tell yourself the right story about that trauma. You have to tell yourself that you are resilient and that you are empowered to overcome it. That's a very important narrative that you have to tell yourself. If you tell yourself it just happened to you and it's not fair and everybody's out to get you, I wouldn't wish that psychological state on my worst enemies. I agree with you. Well, maybe my worst enemy.

But that's the point, right? Like you would never wish that upon somebody you like. And that's an important truth I think we have to tell ourselves. When you were in the military, is this something that they taught you or is it something that you learned through example? Yeah, I think learn through experience. So, you know, the reason BUDS, so BUDS is Basic Underwater Demolition slash SEAL training. It is our six-month trial-by-fire selection process

that we go to become a SEAL. It's the very first thing you do. And it's where you see all the infamous footage of G.I. Jane and Hell Week and all that stuff. That's all first phase and buds. And so. I like how you brought up G.I. Jane.

Yeah. It's the most hilarious. Yeah. It is. It's probably the wrong example in hindsight. But it's all the Navy SEAL movies on the military. Because I can't think of any other movies that show buds now that you bring it. Actually, Lone Survivor, the very okay the first intro i think has some but anyway find it on youtube uh most people know

what i'm talking about but uh is g.i.j is not a realistic movie it's one of the least realistic movies in every single aspect uh about the seal teams but the point is is is that there is a there's not just a hardening of the mind that occurs from hell week it's like a it's it's an it's a increase in confidence in a pretty excessive way like if i can push my limits this far imagine what else i can do and uh in that and then you and you continue to push those limits i mean just even after hell week you do it uh when you're kind of what we would what i would describe as controlled drowning and uh in second phase phase, where we learn to be super calm underwater under the worst conditions, meaning you can't breathe and you're about to pass out

and you're still going to go through procedures in a very specific way. You have to learn that calming and then you've pushed another limit and you've pushed another limit. So by the time we do get to combat, we have already suffered so badly in training that the combat doesn't feel all that bad. And we're ready to get your eye blown out of your head, like I did. You're ready for that. You understand it. And it's not surprising. You don't react in an emotional way when it does happen because you've allowed yourself to be hardened and you've told yourself the right story about that.

What is a traumatic experience? The hell we can be. It really is. I broke my leg the first time through. I had to do it again. How did you break your leg? Just a stress fracture that turned into a fracture and just snapped while we were running with the boats on our heads. So we run with these 200 or 300-pound boats on our heads.

They're basically the kind of boats you use in river rafting. But we run everywhere with them. Some estimates maybe up to 200 miles in just a week alone. So it's one of the reasons older guys, 25 and older, have a lot of hard time getting through boats. Older guys, 25, that's hilarious. Yeah, because your body just breaks right you know early 20s are probably the prime time your muscles are developed about that time

uh your bone structure can still handle the just immense amount of punishment that it's taking and uh you know except for mine we call that we know and then we'd make fun of each other and say oh nice weak genes you have there that's why you broke so your leg broke and how much time did you need before you went back to do it again uh six months so i was rolled three classes what which uh which bone a left tibia okay yeah that's a big one yeah yeah it hurt um you know it's a dangerous one to break too there's not a lot of blood flow there yeah it's amazing that you got back in there six months later a lot of times i had no guy who broke his leg and uh he was he was fucked up for a good solid couple years yeah and um and it was a risk because we weren't

sure i i frankly the command was getting impatient they're like we're not gonna let you heal anymore six months is it so go for it um and uh you know it's you know it's not like a compound fracture either. This is a crack in the bone. So maybe in any case, it worked out just fine. But it's a risky thing because I knew it broke, right? I mean, I felt it. I rounded a corner and my adrenaline kind of took me through the rest of that run. Then we sit down for lunch and I couldn't get back up from that seat. Like it was the adrenaline worn off.

There was something bad, badly wrong there. And there's always this question that the instructors will ask, are you hurt or are you injured? Because there's a difference. Yes. Like, and if you're just hurt, because everybody here is hurt.

If you're just hurt, then you're just quitting. Right. If you're injured. Okay. We might give you another chance. Isn't that interesting? That's for the average person.

That's such an alien thought. It's an alien question. Are you hurt or are you yeah it is but there's a difference there is a difference yeah now um do they have any courses where they explain to you how your mind works and how to overcome questions and doubts that that creep into your head are they just they're teaching you through fire right and we wouldn't want those courses frankly um so when you see all those like online people what you gotta do is you gotta face your fears and understand who you are and say it's gonna be okay does that drive you crazy

no don't drive me crazy i i don't mind that somebody's trying to do that i i say that we wouldn't do it because uh the point is the point is that you're already that person you're a seal before you got there okay we're just we're just making you prove it but you are already that guy okay because you never had a choice and uh there's another chapter in my book i call it no plan b you go through this with no plan b if you ever thought for a second that oh maybe i can I can make it through BUDS. Like, maybe I'll make it through Hell Week. I hope I do.

You're not going to make it. There's a choice there. You're telling yourself that you actually have a choice. I think that's with everything. Yeah, it is with everything. Again, this is an extreme example, but it certainly applies to everything. If you, it replied to my run for Congress. Like, I didn't plan anything

after the primary on march 6th they just didn't now you could argue that that was probably not a great idea maybe should have had some kind of backup plan well it worked but but but meant it was more of a mental state than it was like i don't have a backup plan i'm not saying don't have contingencies in your life i'm just saying and only you know when you've actually decided to quit right because it's one thing to be like i have tried to be an artist for so long and I'm just not good at it. And then you quit. Well, is it really quitting or is it just facing reality that you're just not good at being an artist? You know, that, so it's, it's different. You have to distinguish between those two things, but you know, you know, if you quit because you actually quit, you gave up on

yourself and that's, and, and and nobody nobody can really judge that for you and i just i think that's an important lesson and that's how you make it through buds because you never had a choice yeah i don't think there's a way you can get through what i've heard described and while having a plan b like i hope i get through this but if i don't i've got you know i'm gonna open this pizza place with my cousin and yeah i always talk about it like bandwidth and i would say to people like if you want to really do something you only have a like let's call let's like pretend you have like a certain amount of juice like your juice is 100 and when it's fully on you have 100 well if

you take 30 of it and you put it towards this and another 20 and you put it towards that well guess what you think you're all in but you're really 50% in because you've got all this 50% of your juices on all these different things. You've got to be 100% involved in what you're trying to do at your best. If you're not, like for fighting, that's a big one. When I tell guys, there's a lot of guys that I know that are kind of one foot in, one foot out, and I'm like, get out, get out,

because there's a fucking animal out there. There's some Mike Tyson when he was 20 years old and he's going to rearrange your liver like don't do it get out now because there's people that are all in and when you're half in those people that are all in you become their highlight reel that's a good that's probably good advice it's the best advice you see it you see guys that are just starting to think, well, maybe one more fight. Like, fuck. Stop. Just stop now. Yeah. Don't do it. That's how you get hurt.

Yeah. It's an interesting thing because of this world where there are so many people that are teaching lessons, that are teaching, you know, what you got. But then there's real ones like Jocko. You know, like when a guy like Jocko says something, everybody listens because he's done it. Like, this is real shit. And, you know, you see his watch every morning on his Instagram, 4.30 in the morning. So annoying. He's up.

It's fucking very annoying when you wake up at 8. I'm not a morning person. We're not all morning people, Jocko. He's not either. Guess what? He's not a morning person either. He'd like to sleep in. But he gets up and he fucking gets after it.

And that guy's fuel for fucking millions of people in this country because of his books and his videos and all the time that video good you've seen that video i don't think i've seen a lot of them i'm not sure which one you're talking about good i think about that when i run because uh like it's talking about things going wrong good oh yeah chance to get better good you know everything fell apart welcoming the free group yeah welcoming the failure and like that's Yeah. You're welcoming the failure. And like, that's just,

when I was on his podcast a while back and I hadn't gotten to his book yet and I was like, Jocko, I'm so sorry. Haven't read your book yet. He's like,

it's fine. It's just, it's one lesson you have to know. Everything is your fault. It's extreme ownership. He's like, everything we learn

in the teams. I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, I know that. Because you taught it to me. You were,

you know, he was the head of trade at when I went through and um god he just crushed us i'm sure every every uh every training op was uh there's people on this life that are crushed things yeah that guy's born he's put here to crush things he uh rolled my friend john my friend john dudley who's a a professional archery coach and a bow hunter. And he wanted to learn jiu-jitsu. So we started taking him some classes, and then he rolled with Jocko. And Jocko literally broke his neck.

He broke a bone in his neck. And he didn't even mean to. Broke the other guy's neck, just to be clear. He broke a bone in John's neck. He's got something in the back of his throat that still tickles him to this day. None of the surprises made that Jocko broke john's a bone in john's neck he's got something in the back of his throat that still tickles him to this day where it's none of the surprises made that jocko broke somebody's neck i told him i'm like don't fucking roll with that gorilla what are you crazy the guy's 5 10 he weighs 240 pounds don't fucking roll with him he's a terrifying person for jujitsu yeah built to snap

things off yeah that's what he's built for it's exactly right but people like that that you know have real lessons because of real success and real failure in life and a real understanding of what it takes to motivate people what it takes to be a leader like i think those guys are extremely valuable but they get watered down by so many people that are out there giving lessons and like making a career out of being a motivational speaker when you just want to grab them go what the fuck have you done right what have you done other than motivate people and with words that are you've just you you like collecting words out in the field and jumbling them together and you're like a word harvester

and you're putting them together but they're not really coming from a real place. Yeah, and then the question is are they successful? Maybe they are, but you're right. If you're not backing it up with, I think, real experience and a real story to frame the argument that you're trying to make, and maybe the argument's the same as the other guy that you're talking about. He doesn't really have the experience, but if it's going to be powerful and meaningful to somebody, I think it does have to come from a place of experience. Well, it's one of the reasons why I really like politicians that have served.

I think it's so critical when you're talking about sending people overseas to have an honest understanding of what that really means and to have been there. It's one of the reasons why I really like Tulsi, and it's one of the reasons why I really like you. I think that is a giant factor. I mean mean i don't want it to be mandatory but god damn when when people start talking about going to war and they have no understanding personally about what that means it bothers me yeah and it's going to war or not going to war yes we're not going to both opinions because again what me and tulsi really disagree on fundamentally, I think on a deeper level, is whether our troops out there are victims or not.

And I do – I think there's a common misunderstanding that our troops don't want to be there, that our troops are being victimized by our bad political decisions. people who voluntarily goes out there, which is, by the way, everybody, because everybody volunteers to do it, that's a deeply problematic opinion because it's just not true. The truth is that we want to be there. We want to be serving. Have you ever debated her on this and had her clarify her positions? No. No. Again, we talk a lot.

It'd be interesting to have you guys sit down and talk about it. Yeah. Again, I like we talk a lot. It would be interesting to have you guys sit down and talk about it. Yeah. Again, I like Tulsi. Yeah. So one of these days we could do that. It's also nice, too, that you guys have these differing political philosophies, but yet you can be friendly with each other. Because in today's day and age, I mean, I don't know what the fuck happened.

Somewhere around 2016 when Trump won, everybody went haywire. And now you're either with us or against us. You can't talk to Republicans. And if you do, you're a bad person and you're part of the problem and you're probably a white nationalist. And, like, it's the most divided I can remember ever this country being. Yeah, it's insane. Now, on Capitol Hill, it's a little less. I think behind closed doors,

people do talk to each other quite a bit. And I think it'd be good if the American people understood that that's actually what happens. So they, we do debate vigorously in public and, and some of us don't talk to each other, just to be clear. It's not, not every show,

not everybody. Yeah. Wouldn't that be, well, we kind of do, right? I mean, we kind of do.

I mean, I put so much of what I do every day out on social media, as other members of Congress do sometimes. Well, it's a new thing, right? Yeah. And it's a great way for people to get to know you. I think there's a lot of value in that. Yeah. You know, the old political way of thinking is don't say too much because you'll get crucified for it.

And stick to your talking points because there's just just, there was, for a long time, there's still this argument to be made that there's no reward for being open and honest about things, for having that nuanced conversation. And that is still true, by the way. I've certainly discovered it on my own. Really? How so? The backlash. I think the backlash that you'll get from certain groups of people is quick and swift and unforgiving.

And this is why – now, again, is it worth it for me? Yes, I think it is because I'd still rather have that open conversation. I'd rather sit with you for hours and actually get through this stuff. I think that that backlash is just the vocal minority. And I think there's a tremendous amount of people that are happy that you've done that and support you for doing that they're just not vocal about it i think you're probably right yeah i'm following i know for sure because when i talked to my buddies that uh you know when i said hey i'm having that dan crenshaw and i go i fucking like that guy man i'm like did you ever post'm like, did you ever post on his Twitter? No. You ever post on his Instagram? No.

There's a lot of people like that. They just, most people are not going to comment on a YouTube video. Most. Right. The vast majority. Most people are going to watch it and go, oh,

that was good. Or that fucking sucked. I've never commented on a single YouTube video. There you go. I mean, I have disparaged people who comment on YouTube videos in the past, but look, I don't have a cubicle job.

People get fucking bored. I'd probably be commenting too. But the idea that just the people that are angry at you are the only ones that are paying attention, that it's all backlash. I think you're just not seeing – you're not reaping the positive aspects of it immediately. Perspective is hugely important, and you're absolutely right. But, you know, trying to, going back to the political culture, trying to move it

into this a little bit more of an open and honest nuanced discussion I think is important. And I want to be part of that solution, and it's why I come on a show like this. It's why other politicians come on shows like this. It is moving in that direction,'s i think it's a cool thing i think so too and i think people need to understand that there's you know what are the motivations behind

these decisions like what what's the what's the thought process behind these decisions right you just don't never get that on one of those panel shows where there's two people barking over each other and you got five minutes to talk less than that you know and um that's why on every major bill i'll put out a video and i have to be conscious of how deep i can go into the policy because again people will just stop listening at a certain point so there's there is a the appetite for long-form discussion isn't all that big but two three minutes five minutes is this on youtube or what do you i put them on youtube i put them on instagram i put them on all my social media accounts. And on every big bill.

On every big bill that we're voting on. And I just try to explain, why am I for this? Why am I against this? Here's the reasons. Here's what the other side says. Here's what I say about that. And so just let me explain to you why I do what I do. And it's turned out people really like that. No, people love that.

And it didn't exist before. And it's turned out people really like that. No, people love that. And they didn't exist before. I mean, we are the first generation that's experiencing politicians having their own channels to express themselves. You used to have to go to NBC or CBS or what have you in order to – and you had to be prominent enough to have a conversation with someone. They're only going to talk to a select number of people. have a conversation with someone. They're only going to talk to a select number of people,

and the only reason why they're going to talk to those people is because they think those people would be viable in terms of the amount of numbers of people that would tune in so they could get good advertising money for it. And that's really the market. That's what it was all about. We're in this new world now, you know? And I think it's for the better for everybody. It is.

It is. I mean, like everything, it's got its pros and cons. What are the cons? Well, just social media in general i think allows a lot of the that that vocal minority who's mostly angry and it and it elevates that to a high extent um and it makes us a little angrier at each other i think and and that's that's just a downside now does that mean i want to get rid of social media no what is your take on what we're seeing now with social media in terms of, like, algorithms that sort of accentuate that hate, where they find the things that piss you off, whether you like to post about immigration or abortion and whatever it is. And that's what you're going to find in your feed. It puts that in front of you.

Yeah. You know, I think my concerns with the social media companies are more the censorship issues. I was going to get to that next. Yeah, and that's generally what we talk about. I haven't thought a whole lot about the algorithms and how that works. I kind of wish they would do it differently, but they don't. And I can't force them to do it differently, but maybe they should recognize that it is accentuating that anger quite a bit. And you have to ask yourself at a certain point, well, why?

Why encourage that? It's not helpful. No, it isn't helpful. And it seems like it's only for profit. The reason why they do it is because the more people click on things, the more advertising revenue they're going to generate. It's not a malicious idea. It's just the algorithms have figured out what's the best way to keep people engaged, and that's through outrage.

It's not through cuteness and adorable memes. It's frustrating. You know what tweet is going to get 50,000 plus likes. It's got to be hard-hitting. It's got to be hard hitting. It's got to be punchy. It's not going to be like a, your nuanced, thoughtful take on issue X is not going to get a ton of traction.

And so there's an incentive there. And again, so we can, and it's not totally the social media company's fault. Like we always have to look to ourselves as a culture, I think, and be a little introspective and just ask ourselves, like, why am I reacting? Do I want to be this way? Do I want to be that person that reacts so angrily that post comments to somebody that I would never have the guts to say to their face? Right.

You know, do you really want to be that person? We do have to ask ourselves as a culture about that. And it's this, you know, it's a lot what I wrote about after the Saturday Night Live thing. Like, let's, we have to get to this point, and it's a pretty low standard, where we're attacking ideas and not people and not the intent and character of people. And it's a low standard, frankly, as far as political discourse, but it's a good place to start. It is a good place to start it is a good place to start and there is a problem with the gatekeepers of social media and that these companies are all left with their policies and they might be right in terms of their business

practices and david uh packman came on here and argued that and actually makes a lot of sense that in terms of like how they still uh shuffle money overseas and avoid taxes and they do there's a lot of right-wing business practices but my thought on that is it's probably just compartmentalization and you're dealing with business people that have taken over some multi-billion dollar corporation and this is the business aspect of it and then you've got your social engineering aspect of it. And the social engineering aspect of it is very problematic for me. There was an article that was written recently, and one of the guys, he was saying something about me and that, no, silencing white nationalism and keeping them off your platform is not censorship. not censorship, which is the dumbest way to sort of boil down my position on censorship and ignore the real problems of other people deciding what someone can or can't say and what is or is not offensive.

One of the best examples is a woman named Morgan Murphy, Megan Murphy. Megan Murphy is her name. She's what's called a trans exclusionary. What's the word? Exclusionary. Trans exclusionary radical feminist, a TERF. And she was in a debate with- I don't blame you for not being able to remember that.

Trans exclusionary. But exclusionary is a weird word she was in a debate with people about whether or not trans women should be able to invade feminist women's spaces so a person who's biologically male who becomes a female later in life should be able to make decisions in feminist debates and right and get into their sports so she says. So she says, yes, the sports is the big one for me, particularly fighting. She says, but a man is never a woman. This is what

she says. So Twitter asked her to take it down. So she takes a screenshot of that. She takes it down, takes a screenshot of it and reposts it. Like, fuck you. Like, I'm going to put it back up again this way. They banned her for life. For life. You know who's on Twitter with no problems? OJ Simpson.

OJ Simpson murdered two people. He fucking went to jail for armed kidnapping. And he's on TV. He's on every day. Hello, Twitter world. He's fine. Hamas, among other things, too. Hamas is on Twitter.

Megan Murphy, she says a man is not a woman. She's fucking correct biologically she's biologically correct I mean if we want to decide socially and culturally that we're going to

accept this person as a woman this is a completely different discussion but she's right she's biologically correct scientists would say well here we go

we've got some chromosomes here we've got X and Y this is a penis this is a vagina this is a man this is a woman and you know maybe this person identifies with being a. This is a man. This is a woman. And, you know, maybe this person identifies with being a woman.

But she's saying you're not a woman and you're banning her for life. This is crazy. This is – That is. But it's woke culture in its most boiled down form. It has nothing to do with white nationalism. It has nothing to do with race. It has to do with a person that feels like their own particular protected group, being a feminist, being a woman, and trying to carve out rules where women are protected. And she's saying, well, I don't like the fact that these trans women are entering into this space and dominating it in certain aspects. Right.

And it's an example of this intersectional coalition that they've created coming to terms with itself. And, you know, a lot of the feminist groups aligned with us against the Equality Act, because the Equality Act would have put into real practice this, into concrete terms, biological men getting into women's sports. Yes. And so a lot among other things, by the way, that that and a lot of feminist groups were finally coming out and saying, no, this is not correct. Like we were a feminist group. So let's protect women, which I fully agree with. And but, you know, on a deeper level, it's interesting to watch that intersectional coalition just implode. desire on their part to to divide everybody up into three categories of oppressed uh the oppressors and then the champions of the oppressed right and the woke culture is the champions of course that's how they label themselves they were they labeled their intersectional coalition as the oppressed and then they lump and then they have this whole other kind of intersectional coalition of oppressors and they connect it all with the worst of the worst which is white

supremacist nazis nazis and so you're all and they say you're all connected with that somehow even even if you're just making a a pretty bland statement about uh biological men and women somehow that connects to this and this is how you see them reason their way through it and uh and what what that does is it undercuts real basic arguments because you're attacking the intent of that argument because you're connecting it with the worst of the worst right not we kill nazis that's that's what our country does we did it and so if you're connecting all of these things you disagree with with that well you don't even have to make an argument anymore yes and the idea that you're going to somehow or another convince people that everyone is a Nazi just because you say so, that's not going to work.

What's going to work is people are going to just – they're going to go to the other side. You're making more Republicans with this crazy talk. Well, I hope so. Well, that's really what's going on. I mean, my friend Chris Pratt wore a t-shirt that said, don't tread on me. I remember that. What the fuck, man? friend chris pratt wore a t-shirt that said don't tread on me i remember that what the fuck man it's a it's a goddamn ancient flag representing our separation from england and our our want to

be able to start our own country i mean that's what it was it yeah exactly and it gets to a deeper culture war one of there's many fronts on the culture wars. This is a big one. Is America based on bad things or good things? Are we good, intrinsically good, or are we bad? This is a huge fissure in the culture war right now. And I have a lot of fear that these things are boiling up and that we're destroying the things, the few things that hold us together. As a country, what makes us Americans, it's not ethnicity, it's not religion, it's not even really geographic area because our geographic area has changed over time. It is ideals. It is ideals. And those ideals are symbolized by certain things. And that's the U.S.

Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag, the national anthem. These things matter. And I think they're very important for a culture. And this actually all ties back into this sort of oppressor-oppressed kind of ideology. Because if you tell people that they're oppressed, well, then they have to look for an oppressor. And that starts small. It starts with your parent or your boss or somebody you don't like. Okay, it's their fault.

That's why I have something bad happen to me. It's somebody else's fault. And then it grows into groups. Okay, now you get into identity politics and pitting identities against each other. Then you're starting to blame institutions. Okay, and this is kind of the, this is, this is when we talk about Bernie Sanders, this is, he's doing this often. He's blaming institutions for our issues constantly. That has morphed into blaming the entire country. The entire country as an American ideal is to blame. I just think that's really,

both I think it's historically inaccurate, I think it's inaccurate objectively, but I just think it's dangerous. I don't think it can go anywhere good, unless you just want total revolution, which I think some people do. It just, it tears us apart, right? And we're getting unless you just want total revolution which i think some people do um it just it tears us apart right and we're getting divided along we're we're we're allowing the pop culture to get involved in this too so we can't share pop culture anymore uh because you know musicians

are getting involved in politics and comedians and late night shows and it's like okay well now half the country can't even watch it because those people are just telling them how stupid they are yeah we're losing these basic symbols that bring us together and then we're also losing the pop culture that kind of brings us together that should be something we can just share and then not talk politics but that's been removed as well and i just the the culture war is it it's it's not going a good direction i'm hoping that this is an adolescent stage in the development of this strange country that's an experiment in self-government. That's what I'm thinking. And I think this experiment in self-government, which is a completely new thing in human history, that's redefined the way the rest of the world governs itself.

I mean, that's what America really is. Is it perfect? Fuck no. But humans aren't perfect. There's not a goddamn human anywhere that's perfect. There's not a single culture anywhere that doesn't have something that's inherently wrong with it it's the best system for imperfect human beings yes right and it's it's a system based on the the fact the the unavoidable fact that we are imperfect yeah okay and that and that you cannot

you cannot constrain mankind's nature to the extent that progressives would like to. There's a belief from Marxist ideology and French Revolution thought that you can perfect human nature, that you can get people to be perfect eventually. If you just give the state enough control and stop certain thoughts that are bad, keep those down, elevate these other ones. You can eventually get us to where we think we should be. I think that's utopian. I don't see how that's ever possible. And I think our U.S. constitutional system understands that. You know, it's not like the founders got together and just made a bunch of stuff up, right? They were very well versed in history.

They studied it relentlessly. And they took ideas from Jerusalem and Athens and Rome and London. They took all these best ideas and these best practices and they said, this is probably how we should govern. We're first going to say why government exists. Okay, we're going to say that in the Declaration of Independence. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that, the Declaration of Independence wasn't just declaring its independence. It was also declaring why government exists. And it exists to protect unalienable rights, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, right?

He gets these ideas from guys like John Locke, who said life, liberty, and property, or those are unalienable rights. And you protect rights, you can't give them to people, but you can protect them because they're already inherent in you, they're natural rights. Okay, and then the Constitution told us how to govern. So like, how do we live together? Well, there should be checks and balances. You should have an emphasis on local state control because the problems are closest to the people, and they should be closest to the representatives down at that level.

51% of the population shouldn't be able to tell the other 49% what to do. You know, we should have an electoral college so that the biggest population centers can't tell everybody else what to do there's important structures like embedded into the constitution that have that have allowed us to actually last i think as long as we have we have the oldest political it's the oldest document in the world it's the oldest constitution in the world so we're the youngest one of the youngest countries but we're the only ones that had such a long-standing constitution i think that's important to realize too it's very bizarre that they had the insight to realize that shit could go so sideways that they put all these checks and balances together that actually can reasonably well in a reasonably well way

work today yeah i mean there's a lot of people that disagree with a lot of the aspects of it one person one vote they would like that they don't think that representative democracy is important now because we have this ability to communicate that we didn't have in the 1800s you know you had to send a fucking pony with a letter on it in order to get your word across now you can actually tweet and you could vote online if we so deem it and we made it legal um but the electoral college do you feel like that that and with things like superdelegates, do you think that that's still the way to do things? Is it still an effective way?

Yeah. Why is that? Because the alternative is the 51% versus the 49%. And what that really boils down to is New York and Los Angeles telling everybody who the president should be. But the vast majority of people don't live in New York and Los Angeles. That's exactly the problem. New York is like 20 million and seven, what is it, nine million or something in New York? I'm just saying, and that's the issue, right?

Because you really are, and when people congregate in population centers, they also tend to start to think alike. And I just think, and on a more fundamental level, look at the difference between Democrats and Republicans. People always wonder what that difference is. And there's a lot of differences, of course, but a really kind of simple heuristic to think about it is the word Democrat and Republican. Okay. One believes in a pure democracy, one believes in a Republic. I'm saying Democrats believe in total pure democracy, but when you're saying abolish the electoral college, you are saying pure democracy. You're saying 51% ofish the electoral college, you are saying pure democracy.

You're saying 51% of the population can tell the other 49% what to do. The electoral college is a check and balance against that that gives those states in the middle some kind of voice that they wouldn't have otherwise had. It makes them – why is everybody in Iowa right now? Do you think they'd be in Iowa if we didn't have an electoral college? Good deer hunting there. That's a good reason to go. They like corn? But the reality is they would only be campaigning in the big population centers.

They wouldn't bother going to the rural areas because you're going to get the most bang for your buck going to just the populated areas. In terms of campaigning physically. Campaigning physically, but also who you're accountable to. That's the most important thing. Who are you accountable to? But also who you're accountable to. That's the most important thing. Who are you accountable to?

You're not going to care if you're accountable to the rural areas like you should be and to the middle of the country like you should be because if you only care about 51% of the vote, you're just going to go to those main population centers and you're only going to talk to them and you're only going to care what they think. I don't think that's good. That's not a good – that's not good for democracy, especially when we have such a wide diversity of preferences and and uh just styles of living across the country still that important to be physically in a place to campaign to like to physically go to chicago to campaign to physically go to iowa yeah people i think people want to see you you know there's a good argument to be made that hillary clinton lost because she just didn't go to wisconsin in the last days so i think people's people want to get to know you people People want to see you. Well, the good argument with Hillary, too, is people didn't believe she had enough energy to go and campaign.

And I don't know. I never met her. I can't tell you what the inside look at that campaign was. I just know it didn't work. Yeah. Whatever happened. When you think about what are the problems that we're facing today in terms of voting and registering to vote in primaries and electing someone from your party to get to go against other parties and this whole process, this convoluted, gigantic, involved process. Could that be simplified?

Do you think that in any way doing something online and having your ability to register to vote when you get a driver's license and that it automatically registers you to vote, are there ways to get more people involved? Well, you know, there's two different philosophies here is are you just trying to get more people involved? Well, you know, there's two different philosophies here. Are you just trying to get everybody to quickly spend five minutes of their day and then vote? Well, that's what they're doing

for the most part anyway, don't you think? A lot of people? No, if you have to actually take the time to register and go to the polls, you're going to do at least a little bit more research on what's going on, I think. You haven't talked to my friends. Yeah.

Not saying everybody, but I think you'll exponentially increase that number when you... talk to my friends yeah i'm not saying everybody i'm not saying everybody but but you're gonna get but i think you'll you'll exponentially increase that number when you when you the other the other problem is simple election security and uh if we're worried about the russians hacking on our elections then i fail to see how putting everything online is also a good idea uh so that's we can't we can't be worried about both things there. And we are worried about Russians hacking our elections. They've obviously tried. You think they tried hacking the results?

I mean, they've clearly tried to influence the way people interact with each other. They tried everything. What did they try to do? They did try to hack the results. They're unsuccessful. One of the reasons they're unsuccessful is because a lot of our election machines are air-gapped. And they're also different every county you go to. I mean, so it is a mess because, you know, we allow states and counties to be in charge of that.

But that also makes it highly resilient because it's so compartmentalized. I mean, so from an intelligence operations perspective, you want things to be compartmentalized, and our election system actually meets that. And we're working a lot with, DHS is working a lot with local authorities to even improve upon that a lot. So I think we're going in the right direction. So you can't hack dangling chads. Remember those things? Dangling chads.

What were those – what was it called? Those things that hung – It was just a hanging chad. Hanging? Just hanging? It wasn't dangling? It could have been both. That's totally different.

Do you remember that? It was like they weren't exactly sure whether or not a vote counted. They had to examine them. Yeah. That seems like a silly way. I mean, if we can do banking online, why can't we vote online? Isn't there a way to make something where it's hack-proof? Is that possible?

It might be. It might be. Again, but now you're getting into a problem with identity. Again, a lot of people believe you shouldn't have any voter IDs. I think that's crazy. I think we use IDs all the time. I think you should have an ID to register so we know it's you. Right, of course.

And then you should just show your ID when you vote. But what I'm saying is wouldn't it be a better thing if more people voted? Or do you think that it's better if only the people motivated to vote and participate vote the way we're doing it now, where you have to register within a certain amount of time and you have to show up at an actual polling place. Do you think that's better? It's not self-evident to me that by nature of more people voting, things will get better. I'd like them to go vote. I'd like them to put in the work and do their civic duty and to get educated and go vote. I would like them to do that. But that's a separate discussion from just just removing safeguards on our elections

just to make it easier for them to do what is already quite easy. I mean, there's this weird argument against this. Like, it's so hard to vote. We're so suppressed. There's just no evidence of that. It's not hard, but it's not as easy as it could be if you could just register online.

Yeah, I mean, I can make a million things easier, but again, they remove safegards that that creates safe elections and and elections that we can have faith in and this is a very important thing if and i think you see this when you have this discussion with people they're already on edge about whether their vote really counts because you know some people think illegals are voting again there's not a huge amount of evidence for that either it does happen but it's not how can illegals vote i mean in place to register in in places where there's no voter id you can you can make it a lot easier where are there no where's there no voter voter id i don't believe there is in california is that am i right on that dare you

california let's check on that but um it's definitely not the law of the land everywhere in texas it is so texas is a good think, of like very – it's very easy to vote. I just can't imagine that people don't think it's easy to vote in Texas. If you're a senior citizen or disabled, you can mail in your ballot 30 days prior. We have two weeks of early voting. You can go to any election place in the county and vote from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for two weeks straight. You just hold your ballot. Yeah, yeah.

And you just show your id and you vote i mean this is i we feel in texas like it's safeguarded we're not we're not overly worried that our vote doesn't count because it's canceled out by some fake vote and uh and it's hard to and it's hard to argue that that there's um suppression either because again it's so easy to vote or you can go on election day it's just a shame that we have so little faith in our ability to do things electronically that we're worried and that we wouldn't want people to vote online because we're worried about people hacking it that's that is a shame because i just feel like if you could watch like maybe if you were going to vote online you would have to watch a five minute video explaining people's

positions on things explaining where they stand and why this makes sense and show that you and after that five minute video then you get to vote yeah that's an interesting idea um i'm not opposed to the videos of course forcing people to do things just generally speaking that's true it's tough um but it it still goes back to how do you even know it's the right person who's sitting there at the computer that's true too yeah i mean that's the that's the difficult part with your phone you have face id you know apple id yeah you know use fingerprints with other phones oh sure i mean there's interesting ideas that you could that you could look into to make this work but it's a pretty massive change, and it would be a massive federal takeover

of what is constitutionally a state's right to implement that. So, you know, it's just... And then the question is, what are we trying to fix? You know, what we're going to do is a massive change onto something. What kind of improvements are we expecting and why? And those are just good policy questions to ask.

It doesn't mean we don't have those discussions. But there's always been an issue with voter turnout correct i mean isn't it's a fairly insignificant number of people that actually wind up voting right yeah but is that because is that whose fault is that that's a good question it's people who don't go to vote right so do you think that those people like fuck those people they're just lazy and no i shouldn't have a say not at all it's just that i just would encourage them to go vote right like it's right but isn't it been fairly consistent like the the number of people that vote the percentage of people that vote across the board yeah but again

it's it's it's not self it's not self-evident that that's a problem that government's up to government now to force that into a fix. I'm not sure I see that argument. It's not self-evident that things would all be better if we forced people to vote or made it so easy that they didn't have to think about it at all and just got on their app and voted. So, yeah, it's an interesting question. Do we want to increase voter turnout? And then, yeah, sure. But how do we do it um i think civic education is a more appropriate answer to that as opposed to as

opposed to making it as easy as buying something at the grocery store civic education in what form i mean starting with our schools we just don't we don't teach a lot of civic education anymore and i think that's obvious from our political discourse sometimes uh it's it's it's not required like i think it should be you know mean, the basics, like where does government happen? If you're concerned about your schools, should you go to your congressman or should you go to your mayor or who do you go to? We don't even tell people this stuff. It's like, no, you should get involved in your school board elections for one thing,

you know, just as an example. It's just a lot of things that I think need to be taught before we, so I think we're trying to solve the wrong problem when we say, well, voting is not easy enough. I'm not so sure that we're hitting at the heart of the issue when it comes to voter turnout. When people talk about issues in this country, there's a giant divide with one thing in particular, and that is mass shootings. Mass shootings and gun control. There's a giant divide between people that are Second Amendment advocates and people that want to round up all the assault weapons

and take away all the guns, and they think the guns are the problem. When you see this pretty disturbing increase in mass shootings in this country, what is your take on it, and what do you think could be done? Well, it's awful. They're terrorist attacks, and I think it's safer to call them that. Depending on how you define a mass shooting, when we look at murder statistics, we're actually at a very very low

point in our history i mean look at the early 90s it was vastly more murders by gun uh than we have now it's just statistically speaking what's what's that because of this do they know uh well there was a massive kind of war on crime i think in the 90s uh increase in in police you know you have the some of the crime bills that went through which are obviously the source of a lot of debate right now In the Democrat primary And yeah it was just There was an approach to fix that Okay you know tackling gang violence

Tackling all of these things And we live in a much Even though you wouldn't think so Because of these kind of theatrical Again they're terrorist attacks I don't know what else to call them Because the person doing it Is trying to commit terror right and uh you know for different reasons of course but but or at least they attach themselves to some kind of reason but in the end they're they're angry at something and they're they're probably you know probably been taking

some kind of psychotropic drugs over time and they've gotten to this point and they'll attach themselves to whatever reason they need to to do this and it's awful um so you know how do you fix that um we have to understand the problem we have to diagnose it and um and then we got it and i think we have to be realistic about what the solutions really are and what our ability to influence those outcomes really is and that's a that's an emotional conversation for people. We've been dealing with it for the last few weeks, of course. I mean, it's front and center in the debate. But we've got to have it.

What can be done? Yeah. Well, so obviously the reaction by many is to go after the tool, right, to go after the guns. I don't think that's the right approach. It's not, again, it's not clear that that would actually solve the problem. There's two main requirements when you're looking at an approach to gun control. It's like, does it infringe on law-abiding citizens' rights? Number one, what's the answer to that?

And two, is it going to actually affect the outcome that we're trying to affect? Is it going to feel good or is it going to do good? Okay. And I think the vast majority of proposals fail both of those standards. They definitely infringe on law abiding citizens rights, and they probably wouldn't even solve the problem. You know, look at example is assault rifles, or let's not, well, ARs. Okay. They're called assault rifles. They're really, the reason they're in AR is because they're called Armalite. That's a brand. Assault rifle is not a, is not a real thing. It's not a real definition. And, but what if you banned them? Well, rifles are responsible for less than 3% of all gun deaths,

about 2.66% of all gun deaths okay hammers and knives i think are are responsible for far more deaths um so true yes hammers and knives are responsible for more deaths than rifles got statistics including ar my bag yeah really yeah rifles account for for 2.66 percent of gun deaths killing people with hamm are killing people with hammers? It's a good weapon, I guess. I feel real good if somebody has a hammer. If all you have is a hammer. But yeah, if you have a gun, yeah, you're doing pretty well. Even if you don't have a gun, I feel like I could stop a hammer.

Yeah, but you're a pretty good fighter. You can't do a goddamn thing about an AR. Well, that's not true. I can take away your AR. How close do you have to be to do that? I just got to reach it. It's very easy to take away an ar yeah yeah how easy i just need i just need to get a hand on the barrel you should give out ar takeaway classes yeah i know i mean i've taken those classes that's why i know it's

so easy whoever controls the barrel of any gun controls the gun right people don't quite realize that they think if they're gripping it then they control the gun that's not true right um we can we're in the weeds now yeah we're gonna do it we can demonstrate that yeah afterwards so i have a flamethrower maybe grab that yeah no rifles in here is that what that i was elon musk i wasn't sure what that was are you gonna take a picture with that later okay can i can i actually use it though we can turn it on as long as you don't cook the ceiling okay but i can pick anything else yeah you'll be the only one who's ever uh turned it on here other than elon it doesn't have to be in the room yeah it does though okay picture obviously in the room um so have you thought about this i mean if you if you had a magic wand

and they said hey dan cranshaw what can you do to solve this mass gun violence? What can you do to solve these mass shootings? Yeah. I mean, you have to target the source of them. It's just not an easy conversation. Right. And so this – let's also think about where these things started. We're talking about the theatrical mass shootings.

There's a lot of statistics out there. They'll say we have hundreds of them, which include four or more deaths. But these are usually gang violence. So gang violence, it's in a category, right? I believe there was 279 mass shootings so far this year. And some of them, they do include gang violence. I think it's two or more. Is that what it's deemed, mass shootings?

Yeah, it might be more. Which is so fucking weird that we have a statistic. Well, that doesn't count. It's only, yeah. I mean, you got to draw the line somewhere. You got to be able to analyze. If you're going to analyze it, you have to look into that. But I think the dramatized shootings that these guys are doing, it all started with Columbine.

And it's become this sort of copycat crime that has occurred over time. And we didn't have this before that. And I think that's interesting. I think it's something to take note of. copycat crime that has occurred over time and like we didn't have this before that and i think that's interesting i think it's something to take note of um and it and it's not clear what you do about that um you you have to you have to look for signs uh people before they do it and uh so one bill that i'm on which is which is i've taken a lot of fire for because people are just i think misunderstand what it actually is is the taps TAPS Act, which is the Threat Assessment Prevention and Safety Act. All this does is give local law enforcement the ability to apply for grants to get training

and behavioral threat assessment training and data analytical tools to identify these threats beforehand. And people that are opposed to it, they look at it like red flag laws, right? They combine those two quite a bit. And that's just not true. I mean, the TAPS Act doesn't actually have anything to do with guns. And red flag laws, depending on how they're implemented, could take someone who looks like they're erratic or who has a penchant for violence, and they would would say you do not have access to guns right in theory that would that would be how they work and um they would fill a gap i think and it depends on the state some states have all the ability they need to see

threatening behavior and then arrest that person uh but it depends on criminal law within that state so i theoretically red flag law would would fill fill that gap the concern with red flag laws, obviously, is is there really due process? A lot of people hear that and they're like, OK, that means my neighbor can tell on me and they're going to have my guns the next morning. Well, yeah, I mean, if that's how the law was written, then, yeah, you better be against that because that's a terrible law. Right. And and to be fair to a lot of the people who don't like red flag laws, they see how these are written in a lot of states. I think California has one. And and they see how those written and they say, this doesn't protect due process. How can we possibly before this? Now, on the other hand, there hasn't been any cases where there's been some obvious abuse of that law either. So, you know, I've encouraged the conversation. I

think the conversation has to happen at the state level because every state has different criminal law and that's where criminal law happens. It's, it's a, it does not happen at the federal level. The only other controversial approach that I've heard is putting armed police or soldiers at schools, which is like that,

that seems incredibly disturbing to me. Oh, I don't know. That you have to have people, I'm not opposed to it, but it's disturbing to me that you would have to have someone standing by ready for violence. Well, we have guards everywhere. Why not our schools? Because we've never had them before. And it's sort of signaling that we've reached this point of impasse where we have to do something about it.

And we're not doing anything to prevent these things from happening. What we're doing is protecting the people that are going to be there when these things happen. Yeah. I think inner city schools have long had police presence there. So I don't think it's totally new, the idea. And I think we could rapidly get used to it. There's a good argument to be made that gun-free zones are the first thing that are attacked, too. So, I mean, you know, it's a counterintuitive response to this, but it's true.

If I'm going to commit a terrible act, of course you're going to go to the place where you know nobody is carrying. Yeah, you're not going to a gun show. Right. Yeah. Unless you're just really looking for a fight. But there's some truth to that and it's just hard it's so hard for people to have this conversation because it's so emotional and there's a cultural fissure here too there's there's some people don't understand some people who like guns right and there's there's a cultural divide there yeah and

i just don't like people who like guns that's we have to admit that's true well they have this idea of guns that guns bring violence and violent people want guns and that that's just not true and one of the things that people like to gloss over is how many people have defended their life and defended the lives of their loved ones with guns in this country every year it happens all the time i've got a whole list of stats and examples that I could read to you right now. Unfortunately, one of the things that gets brought up during gun violence statistics, they talk about how many people die from firearms every year in this country. They're also talking about people who are defending their lives

and defending the lives of their loved ones. People get their houses broken into all the time by armed criminals, and they shoot those people, and they live to see another day, and that person dies, and that is the whole reason why people don't want to get rid of guns. Right, and I want to bring something up along those lines. So it's far more likely in countries like Great Britain that you'll get your house broken into while you are there,

far more likely than in the United States, by a good order of magnitude actually so that that why is that right because they know that there is no gun in that house and you do that in texas you there's a good chance there's a gun in that house probably 100 yeah even the liberals like they're like if you don't have a gun right hey take one of mine yeah fuck you doing without a gun so so that's an interesting point. The other good statistical analysis to do is, okay, when there's high amount of concealed carry, what does that do to crime rates? And the correlation is there's less crime. Okay, now it's not fair to say that's a causation.

That would be intellectually dishonest. But it's an important correlation to note. It's also important to note, okay, per capita, places like Switzerland and Israel have far more gun ownership than we do. People don't realize that. Is that true? Yeah. Switzerland? I wouldn't come in here and lie to you.

I know, but I'm stunned. It's a rhetorical question. Now, somebody would counter-argument that and say, no, those are government weapons issued to people. Yeah, fine, but they still are with the people. Like, the people have the guns, okay, and they're at a rate higher than the United States. I thought they were neutral over there. Yeah, yeah, but that's how they stay neutral. They have almost no crime.

Almost no crime. Israel, too. Almost no crime, except for the obvious issues that Israel has in general with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But as a criminal act, like, they have very little crimes. This is interesting. So you combine that with what we know about concealed carry data here in the United States. How do you solve this problem? The other thing to think about is the vast majority, over 50% of all gun crime, it happens in like two percent of all counties so it's highly

concentrated you can you can so as we look to solve this problem like we do have to really peel back some layers here like who is committing the crime where is it happening why is it happening um you know we can detect the tools but it's just it's so far from self-evident that that would work again going back to ars they're responsible for less than three percent of gun deaths and also let's say you banned them are you actually stopping three percent of gun deaths no because why don't they just use another gun why don't they use a different weapon why don't they use a truck like they can use if they want to kill they can kill that the the horror that we're seeing is that they like to kill this way and maybe that's like why is that and again i go back to columbine it

all started with that and that's interesting we should look at that and like what is driving people to like that well i think there are a lot of people i mean if you look at mass shootings a lot of these people when you read their description they're very disenfranchised they're very angry and when you're disenfranchised and very angry, there's like an archetype, right? There's an image that you have in your mind of shooting all these people that wronged you. I mean, this is... It goes back to our victimhood conversation. Sure, yeah.

Blame somebody else. Well, and then the real conversation is how many of these people are on psychotropic drugs? And what are those drugs? And what are the effects those drugs have on people? Well, when you look at the numbers, it's fucking stunning. Whether it's anti-anxiety medications or SSRIs or amphetamines

or whether it's whatever they're on that alters the chemical frequency or the biological structure of your brain in terms of like what chemicals are in there, serotonin, dopamine, these speeds that so many kids are on adderall and various types of speed that stuff radically changes the way you look at the world yeah how many of those drugs contribute or are a factor in these mass killings i don't know if correlation equals causation, but I do know the correlation is phenomenally high.

I mean, I think it's in the high- Five of those homes, things like that. Sure. Let's start analyzing it. Absolutely. Abuse, bullying, incels, which is a new word, involuntary celibates. Did you know about that? Huh?

You didn't know about that? I taught you about incels? You just did. Amazing. Look at that. Amazing. celibates do you know about that huh you didn't know about that i taught you about incels you just did look at that yeah there's whole groups online on message boards that they can't believe they can't get laid and they're just going fuck involuntary yeah they're just guys who can't get laid yeah that's just a fancy word for losers yeah well let's not call them losers that's what makes them crazy if there's a game there's winners and losers and that uh high school football quarterback who's banging all the cheerleaders that guy's a winner it sucks that that's true but you know another yeah it is unfair you know i'm hoping genetic

engineering fixes all that in the future but you know this is what you're dealing with a lot of times is these these guys that got a really shitty roll of the dice. And there's no other way to describe it. They got handed a terrible hand of cards. Right. And some of them are pilled up and angry and abused, and they have access to guns. And then next thing you know, there's a mass shooting. Right.

And then, again, going back to the victim of the conversation, maybe they were dealt a bad hand, but they also tell themselves the wrong story about why that is and who's to blame. And that narrative just seeps within them and it creates this. I mean, you're absolutely right. When Bernie Sanders was on here, there was one thing I thought I agreed with him on, which is we have to look at the effects of these drugs and really what they are. I don't see anything wrong with that. I think that's true. Well, it's amazing how much blowback you get from that. And it's by people that want to look at the guns. They just want to

say, no, no, no. Why are you talking about psychotropic drugs? It's the guns. No, I'm talking about the guns, too. I mean, I don't necessarily think that really angry, volatile people that have criminal records should have guns. I think they shouldn't. Right. And we already outlawed that. Yes, we do. And we

probably should have some understanding of who you are before we give you a gun. The real question is, what is that understanding and how do we go about doing that? And how do we keep people from making these incredibly rigid rules, particularly regionally, right? If you have states that decide to have incredibly rigid rules that preclude most people from having guns. I mean, that can be possible if they just devise their own tests and you're honest about your perspectives on things. And that's the fear, and it's an honest fear to have. Yeah, what is the limit?

You know, if you're on psychotropic drugs, should you be barred from having weapons? Of course not. You know, and how do you manage that? And the way we do it now, again, you have to have committed a crime of some sort. So there's other things, too. If you abuse medication, if you abuse, yeah, medication, then I think you're also, I think, according to federal law, like you're barred from owning that. You know, that's in the system.

I think dishonorable discharge from the military, things like that. So there's already a lot of standards that actually preclude you from buying a weapon. And there would be a very vigorous debate on how you add more standards to that. Dishonorable discharge keeps you from buying

a weapon? That's what I've read. We can fact check that. That's interesting. I didn't know that one. I thought you had to have a felony. Hmm. Maybe. I mean, it makes sense. But it's, there's no answers. This is the thing that domestic abuse too. I came up with

from, is there something, Jamie? Yeah. Dishonorable discharge and NFA. What's an NFA firearm? NFA refers to the national firearms act so that's what ban like automatic weapons based on a general court martial conviction a person who was convicted of a crime that is punishable by imprisonment for uh more than one year including dishonorable discharge is prohibited okay that's where i where I heard it from. Yes, okay. That's what it is. So it is true.

So if you're imprisoned, not just dishonorable discharge. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of people dishonorably discharged that probably not violently. They're not violent offenders. What's disturbing talking to you, talking to Bernie, talking to Tulsi, talking to everybody? Nobody has a solution.

I mean, with all the brightest minds that are thinking about this all the time, no one has one thing that makes sense this gets to a very deep question about what are capable and i think i briefly touched on this before like why does government exist and what are we capable of solving and what needs to be solved by ourselves you know there are there and and what is just inherent to human nature? And it's evil and we hate it and we don't want it to be there, but it is. And is it appropriate for us to scream to our politicians and say, save us? And sometimes it is. Sometimes we can solve it.

We should try. But we have to do it with some kind of constrained vision, as Thomas Sowell would put it, about what is possible. And then let's be reasonable about what is possible and hit those two categories I said. Are we infringing on the rights of everyone for the sake of doing this? And second, is it going to actually solve the problem? And those are very important questions, and if we don't frame the debate within those, I think we're not doing justice to the problem itself. True, but again, no one seems to have any logical course, any logical clear path.

Like, this is how we're going to reduce gun violence. This is how we're going to stop mass shootings. I mean, other than arming all these public places. I was in Rome recently, and when you go there, it's fucking stunning. There's military vehicles guys with guns just strapped ready to rock just standing by all over the place and it used to be that way no it didn't and i was like wow this is uh very uh it's you know

you're trying to enjoy yourself when you're on vacation you're checking all these ancient buildings then you're like oh look fucking guns military tank look at that you know yeah and it's i wish it wasn't that way yeah yeah and uh but again like you know you're right we don't we don't we haven't come up with perfect solutions we have some ideas that i think would mitigate these threats and we've discussed those at length. But none of them seem tangible. Everything seems like just talk. Well, the TAPS Act that I talked about I think is perfectly tangible.

Again, it won't solve everything, but it mitigates something. I think armed security at schools I think certainly mitigates things as far as school safety goes. So, no, I don't think it's just talk. I think those are tangible things, i i think they're perfectly reasonable um you know people just are so reluctant to think that we need armed guards at school and i understand and i'm thinking about it myself i'm like is that really what it's going to take is armed guards at school i went to high school in bogota columbia so we had armed like a lot of armed guards at our school. Your dad was a banker? Oil business?

Oil, he was a petroleum engineer. So we moved. My life growing up was between Houston and overseas. Back and forth. That would be very bizarre. Yeah, it was fun. I mean, I don't regret a minute of it. It can be hard at times. How good is your Spanish? It used to be better.

It's not bad. I'll do an interview in Spanish. Oh, really? It's not bad by any means, but it's not great. So you can go into a taqueria and hang. I would totally hang. I speak really well conversational Spanish. My Spanish, it's harder when I'm talking complex policy issues because I didn't learn that kind of Spanish.

Right, right, right. But, yeah'm pretty good um one of the things that you said that you disagreed with bernie on was lobbyists oh yeah yeah well i disagree with his notion that everything is attributable to some kind of corporate greed and therefore lobbyists it's just not the source of our problems um it's it contributes to it in some ways for sure i mean these are not these are selfish actors they they they have a role right they're advocating for a specific thing um but i i think politicians like to point to them as like the the the nia the boogeyman let's just blame them for everything

that's i i have not that has not been my experience that what hasn't it has not been my experience that these lobbyists have any kind of excessive control over politicians. I just don't see that. Okay, they, you know, a corporate PAC can give you $5,000. That's it. I mean, this is not, in no way, shape, or form can they buy anybody off. It's also a very transparent form of doing things. There's this other talking point that it's all dark money.

That's just not true. A corporate PAC is a group of people who work for a corporation. They pool their money together. They can't use company profits. Just to be clear, it's just personal money. And they have limits on what they can donate to that own PAC. And then they use that to advocate for whatever is important to that business. And I tell people, where do you work?

I'll ask you, what industry are you in? They'll give me whatever industry. And I'll say, you definitely have a PAC lobbying for you on capitol hill all right and they'll and they'll just point out bills they'll say listen this is problematic in this one this would hurt our workers this would do this and put us out of business like don't do that that's it um you know and so yeah they're selfish actors don't get me wrong like they're this is but they're advocating for their thing but that's also our democracy individuals can donate more no so an individual cap is twenty eight hundred dollars to up to a campaign and then a couple like you and your wife would can double that okay so it's basically the

same as a pack it's basically the same it's only five thousand dollars ish yep that's the maximum that is the maximum but there's also influence that comes with that on top of financial. There's also influence in terms of just cronyism and people reciprocating, getting along with each other and working, establishing long-term relationships where they agree on things and they make deals. And they make deals that might not necessarily be in the best interest of people. Like deals in terms of like what businesses get subsidies, what businesses don't get subsidies, what things get negotiated, what don't. Here's a perfect example. That's exactly why I think we should have a less powerful government

that can't be bought off like that. Yes. If you want government, because cronyism certainly happens, right? And they'll say, listen, and there's – and who can lobby? It's the bigger companies. So there's some agreement here. But it's – I think there's somewhat a misunderstanding of what's really happening. So, yeah, a big business can lobby.

And then they'll ask for more regulation. So – and then who does that really hurt? It hurts their smaller competitors. So the answer is actually who's at fault here. It's the fact that government's trying to excessively regulate so much. And it creates a situation where there's no longer competition. Okay. And that's a real problem.

Now, you know, that excessive influence, though, again, it's not something I've seen because there's a lot of competition for influence. Anybody can come to your office, and they all disagree. There's all these different interests that actually compete with one another, and they represent different interests. So it's not self-evident to me that that influence is – it's certainly not bought, and I don't necessarily believe it's excessive either. It's just not what I've seen. Maybe they just don't come to me. Well, I think it was Northwestern University did a study recently where they showed the public support for policies

and public support for bills and how low the public support is in comparison to things that get passed and how when the public – it was things that the public absolutely wanted like across the board had something in the range of a 30% chance of getting passed through. Whereas there's many things that the public absolutely did not want across the board also had a 30% chance of getting through. Whereas there's many things that the public absolutely did not want across the board also had a 30% chance of getting through. And they were talking about the various influences that lead to these policies getting passed. Now, the argument is that you're electing

representatives, those representatives don't do you justice and pass bills and enact policies that would help your community and help you, then you elect them out of office. But the damage gets done while they're there. And the idea is that these people would then go on from there once they've established that influence and once they've helped these people get jobs in the corporate sector get jobs that represent what they've done for those corporations while they were a representative supposedly of the people yeah i i think that's a you have to really dig into like what issue they're talking about what issues not supported by the public i mean that's a you'd have to unpack those statistics i think to really understand what's happening

there the but i i think that's too cynical of a way to look at politicians. I just don't feel that way about my colleagues on the left or the right. How long have you been a congressman? Seven months. Maybe it's like nine months and they start coming to you. No, we meet with them. It's just like they don't have this influence. I mean, listen, they present.

One, they generally meet with a lobbyist that they already agree with you and they're generally bringing up very minute things that are that you just would never know about if they didn't bring that to you well there's some bills that get passed like that don't like here's one right medicaid medicaid spends billions of dollars on drugs for the elderly and people that can't afford them. Billions of dollars. But by law, the government's not allowed to negotiate the price of those drugs. Okay. So the price negotiations issue. How did that happen?

Well, how did it happen? Well, it was never a thing to begin with. So there's an argument to be made that the government should be able to negotiate prices, right? The question is, what is the price? And the other thing you have to point out is there's already a strong force against the pharmaceutical industry, which is the insurance companies, because they have an interest in making sure that price is as low as possible. They're fighting all the time against the pharmaceutical companies. In the healthcare industry, all of these groups are often pitted against each other. And then as politicians, we kind of look at all of them and we say, all right, what are your arguments? What are your arguments? Is what you're saying really

makes sense? And then we have to make those decisions based on the overall good, but you're going to piss everybody off when you do that. Especially with healthcare, because a lot of these groups are pitted against each other. So you've got insurance already pitted against pharmacy. And then it becomes a pretty good question, like, what is government's role there? Because when I first looked at this problem, I said, yeah, yeah, just negotiate it. Well, that makes sense. I learned a lot more. I learned a lot more. And it's not because I met with any lobbyists. It has nothing to do with that. It's because I met with any lobbyists. It has nothing to do with that. It's because I meet with healthcare professionals and experts who know this issue

really well, and economists who, and it's very far from self-evident that this would work, and it's far from self-evident that it would be beneficial at all and actually make a difference. You know, when we look at the differences in healthcare spending between us and other countries, the drug prices actually have very little to do with that. They're able to negotiate those, but they also get last choice for medicine. When you look at Great Britain and Canada, they're not getting the premier new drugs like we have in the United States. We get screwed as Americans because the patent laws are not enforced in these other countries.

So our pharmaceutical companies um they immediately get ripped off in other countries and that that's a problem you know how do we that's that should be something we get ripped off in that they've done the research to create these drugs and these other companies in other countries just copy these drugs make generics because they have socialized medicine and their obligation is to provide medicine to the people so their obligation is to they don't care about these copyrights they just care about getting medicine to the people so their obligation is to they don't care about these copyrights they just care about getting medicine to the people now some people would argue that that is in favor of the population in favor of the people that need health care

i would argue it's not sustainable though might make you feel good but it's not going to do good in the long run because they still profit even if they're well they're they're having they're profiting because they're charging america well america is basically paying for this right okay which is which is why it's which is why it's important for like trade agreements to say hey you guys have to enforce the same patent laws that we have otherwise this this is not a sustainable situation well because eventually you don't make a profit right right and that's and that's not fair for americans so that's the new nafta deal was negotiated this way the usmca like addressing some of these concerns, for instance. And that's the right thing to do.

You have to align incentives when you're talking about any policy. We have to dig a few layers. It's never as simple as Bernie Sanders says it is. It never is. He always makes it out to be so simple. It's greed. Everything is attributable to greed. Everything is attributable to 1%.

They own you. They own the lobbyists. They own all this. this listen there's elements of truth in all of that but is but my point is it's just not the overarching thing there's so there's so much more complexities to that and we have to have those conversations and like we're just we're instead what we see is just very extreme talking points first of all very extreme interpretations of the actual problem and therefore leading to very extreme solutions to that problem. If you say the world's ending in 12 years, then why not have a Green New Deal? You're operating off of a premise that is highly extreme. It's not healthy political discourse.

It's meant to animate people. It's meant to get people upset and to have a villain it always comes back to the villain and the oppressor and oppressed it always comes back to this everything everything somebody like bernie sanders says can be traced to this specific ideology where one person is to blame or one institution is to blame and i think that's extremely unhealthy way to look at things and also intellectually dishonest i don't know the parameters of a green new deal, the new green deal,

whatever the fuck it is, but you hear it all the time. What, what is the idea behind this? Uh, at its core, uh, a complete shift to wind and solar,

uh, at its core. So, uh, an, an idea that if you do that, you will, you will have zero emissions in the next 10 years,

but it's an obsession with wind and solar, which I have zero emissions in the next 10 years. But it's an obsession with wind and solar, which I think is interesting. It bans nuclear. Remember when the talking points came out from the Green New Deal? Didn't like nuclear. So that's how you know it's not an actual environmental plan, or at least associated with carbon emissions and climate change, because why would you ban the one reliable piece of energy that we have that has zero emissions, which is nuclear. So you know it's not about that. It also includes free health care for everybody.

It includes free college. So it's like every socialist plan wrapped into one, and then they call it an environmental plan and ban fossil fuels and things like that. So that's fundamentally what it is. It's a wish list of things like that. Well, nuclear has this inherent fear of things going wrong. Chernobyl. Yeah, there is. Fuk a wish list of of things like that well nuclear has this inherent fear of things going wrong chernobyl yeah you know there is a shame on that kind of stuff but we also put nuclear reactors on like submarines and put a bunch of people on them and go down to depths and put torpedoes and stuff on them so i mean it's sure you know i mean the overwhelming it's very

safe amount of nuclear energy that's been used in this country versus the amount of times we've had nuclear disasters and there's also the problem with these old systems like Fukushima that were implemented in the 1960s and 1970s. They're not as good. Yeah, it's true, but we do have the technology to make them good, and I think we should look at ways to research more the miniaturized modular nuclear devices that are being looked at. I want a nuclear car.

Maybe we can get you one. That would be shit. We don't have them yet. Can you imagine? You should have a nuclear car, Joe. Why don't you have a nuclear car? What about a nuclear flamethrower? Now we're getting crazy.

So the new green deal is just wind and solar. It concentrates on just windmills and solar. And then the idea is to replace the grid with some sort of – I mean, California, it seems like it could be possible. Like you could just put solar panels on everybody's roof in California. You'd probably reduce the amount of electricity that we need from the grid radically. Yeah, it gets complicated because you don't have sun at night. And so this is the complication with wind and solar in general is that you need battery backup to really make this work. And that technology just isn't there.

The theoretical – It's just not there. But I mean people live off the grid with solar power. Right. But to make this – to do that – but when they don't, like I said, when there is no sun, the plants shift to either natural gas or coal or something else. But here, this is a perfect example. Like here. This is a goofy place to live because it doesn't rain. We have sun every day.

But not at night. Right, but 12 hours of sun is enough. Well, only if you have the batteries to store it. And we don't right now. If you want to shift the entire energy grid to that, we do not have the massive amounts of – there's some good data on this. I don't have it off the top of my head, but it's massive. It is a massive amount of batteries and farms to actually hold that.

There's an energy density problem with wind and solar. It's just a physics problem. So the science can only go so far. And even the theoretical limit to how much a battery can hold, which we haven we're not even, we haven't discovered yet, but it's a theoretical like capacity of a battery, uh, it would still make it very difficult to actually do this. And so it's, it's just real, not realistic. Uh, also, also there's other consequences to wind and solar, like massive, you know, solar or wind turbines. Okay. Those are, some people don't like those things uh massive amounts of space needed for for for solar and also where you're going to get that that the the special materials

needed for solar panels like there's there's other consequences to this um and it's it's it's not self-evident that that's the only possible way to do it it's not it's not like we should shun it okay that nobody's saying that it should we advocate for an all-in-above approach. If our goal is less carbon emissions, then we need to be focusing on 100% of carbon emissions, meaning the world's carbon emissions. The Green New Deal focuses on 15% of carbon emissions. Basically, it says let's kneecap the United States economy. We'll destroy fossil fuels. We'll have a utopian society full of wind and solar, even though the batteries don't exist to make that work.

But, hey, we'll make it work. And then that solves 15% of the problem and has almost no effect on the actual climate. So when I say 100% of the problem, what I'm saying is technological innovation, whether that's nuclear or carbon capture. If the goal is less carbon, then let's actually focus on carbon capture. So I just dropped a bill Senator Cornyn did on the Senate side called Leading Act. And it basically repurposes grant funds in the Department of Energy to focus on carbon capture for natural gas plants. So we have natural gas plants in Texas that are zero emissions. They take in natural gas, they operate the facility, they create electricity,

and then they recapture that carbon and they power the facility with it zero emissions so if our goal is zero emissions let's do what works and also by the way that plant can keep going no matter what doesn't matter what time of day

it is I didn't know that that existed that's amazing it's called net power we talked about something on the podcast before just as a joke I was saying

why don't they just make a giant building but make an air filter like a huge building the size of an air filter carbon capture yeah huge air filter the size of huge building the size of an air filter. Carbon capture. Yeah, huge air filter the size of a building. But apparently they're doing that.

Apparently China is in the process of building things like that. I've heard of some things in China. Because they have an air pollution problem. Yeah, a particular problem. That's different from carbon. Because carbon dioxide, you're breathing it right now. You're not polluting it necessarily. So they've got a different problem, and they're just a mess. And so that might be what they're doing. But on the carbon capture side, it's definitely happening. It's all the oil companies actually doing it, because there's actually an interest in the oil and gas industry to reduce carbon emissions. There's a huge interest. I mean, they realize where the conversation is going. And we should encourage that, you know, so there's pretty impressive big projects going on by a lot

of these by a lot of these folks so your take is that what the green new deal is i mean if i can encapsulate it you're the green new deal is basically more of an emotional plea to people that are worried about the future and that see wind and solar as being free and clean alternatives. It's a dogmatic approach to those. It's not based in – Makes people feel good. It's a feel-good thing, and it really shouldn't make them feel good. Just because of all the consequences I said about wind and solar, it's not – these aren't necessarily clean by themselves. It also involves conflict minerals, right, that you need for these –

That's what I was getting at, too. Yeah, like where do you mine these things? It's not – It's the Congo. It's not not the united states it's not the united states where we have child labor laws it's afghanistan it's the congo it's a lot of a lot of places that have these good intentions often lead to bad things so look at the ethanol issue when we decided that we wanted ethanol in our gasoline well i think it was i want to say it's indonesia or malaysia but they cleared tons and tons of forest to to make so that they could produce the ethanol oil. All right.

Carbon emissions there increased rapidly because of that, you know, all because of our good intentions. And, like, these incentives and these second and third order effects, they matter. And we have to think about them when we're talking about policy. And if our goal, again, if our goal is less emissions, then let's be thoughtful about how we approach that. Let's not decide on a solution and then look for reasons to back up that solution. Is there any other things that are on the horizon that make sense in terms of trying to mitigate all the problems that we have with carbon emissions in this country? Is there anything else that people are working on? I listed a lot of them.

The carbon capture technology, I think, is the most promising because it's profitable. You can sell carbon. There's a big market for carbon. So they can use it in cities? Can they use it other places other than plants, like you were talking about the natural gas plants? Yeah, well, you want to focus something like carbon capture

on the places that emit the most carbon. That's why it's generally focused on the plants themselves, I think. So something like net power just makes the most sense. done a study on this. If you replaced coal burning plants or the boilers, coal burning boilers in China and India with natural gas, meaning we have all the natural gas in the world, by the way, in Texas, like we can export it for decades to come. It's far cleaner than oil and coal. If you just replaced the China's India's boilers, you'd reduced emissions by 40 percent like the reason the united states has reduced emissions by i think about 15 since the year 2000 it's because of it's largely because of the natural natural gas boom the fracking business because it's so much cleaner than than these other technologies and it's profitable and it worked but when you say fracking immediately red flag right i saw that movie gas land people are lighting their water on fire yeah like there's obviously consequences to But when you say fracking, immediately, red flag, right? I saw that movie Gasland.

People are lighting their water on fire. There's obviously consequences to natural gas extraction through fracking as well, including earthquakes. Yeah, it's pretty rare. All of these factors have to combine for an earthquake to actually happen. And also the technology has progressed a huge amount. Haven't they radically increased the amount of earthquakes in places like Oklahoma just because of fracking? Yeah, yeah, and they decided that fracking did have something to do with that, but they've also figured out how to make sure that doesn't happen anymore.

How do they make sure they don't drill underground? I don't know the details. I just know there's just ways to do it. In the early days, I think there were some problems. The water setting on fire, that had nothing to do with fracking, as it turned out. That was debunked. Something else, some kind of methane emission,

but it wasn't related to the fracking, if I recall how that conversation ended up playing out. That seems like a big factor. I mean, I feel like we should know what the fuck that factor was. Yeah, I would say to people, fracking happens a lot. The technology has moved on quite a bit. It's pretty safe. And there's also-

So was the problem the initial implementation of it where they weren't really dialed in? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't argue that it was perfect. And I know it was associated with some earthquakes, but there was a lot of other factors specific to that place. Like there's not earthquakes in Texas that I'm aware of. That's where we have in West Texas, where we have most of this fracking going on.

So, I mean, just people should know. It's sort of like nuclear power, like the old plants, they really didn't know what they were doing and they made some big mistakes. I think it's probably like any technology, but I just still want to point out, it caused a huge decrease in emissions. And again, it's over.

If we're looking to decrease emissions, why don't we focus on things that work? And you have to hook people on, by people I mean the world, especially developing countries that don't care about our dogmatic approach to wind and solar. They never will.

But what can you do to help them get energy to keep their people out of poverty and because that's what they care about uh in a way that's reliable and cheap and market based because the only thing that's sustainable is market based sustainability is an important term here and i mean that not in the sense of like environmental sustainability although we are saying the same thing i mean it in terms of what policy will last and what will implode and it's an important question. And it's one reason I'm a Republican, because our policies, they don't feel good.

They're not based on emotional reasoning, but they are based on realistic reasoning and sustainability of that policy. And this is a case like that. And if you don't take into account market forces and incentives and just, I think, basic human nature, then we're not doing justice to the problem itself. Now, one of the big issues that's in the news right now is the trade war with China. I mean, this is a huge issue and it's made me dive into a lot of really weird stuff with Huawei and with Chinese governments involved in various corporations. And it's a hard concept to grasp for the average American citizen that the corporations in China are

connected to the communist government. And that this is, they work hand in hand, they do the bidding of the government, they work together, even though they are profitable, They work hand in hand. They do the bidding of the government. They work together even though they are profitable, radically profitable. They also do things specifically at the bidding of the government, including inserting shit that can allow people to spy on people, which is why they're banning Huawei devices. And it all comes back to what you were talking about earlier, too, in intellectual copyright in terms of pharmaceutical drugs the same thing could be said about electronics i mean there's entire apple stores in china that have nothing to do with apple they don't even they just make their own stuff and call it apple stuff thieves yeah it's very strange right what what do you think about this sort of

like tiger war that's going on right now that we're seeing play out publicly? Well, I think the Chinese deserve every bit of it for all the reasons you just stated. Their intellectual property theft is rampant and it has been for a very long time. And we've been in this position where our business community doesn't want to bash them too bad because they want that market to be opened up and they'll be very conciliatory to whatever the chinese want uh in order to get openings to that market and uh you know this is the and trump is the first president to really say no this is enough is enough um i've and so while i'm i'm sorry to interrupt you but you think that's because he's the first person that actually has a background in business like real big business that could be it that could be it i don't i don't know why exactly but i know

he's doing it so like that he's been talking about this for a very long time yes yeah this isn't new to him talking about this in the 90s he was yeah and uh and i i'm not overly sympathetic to trade wars especially with our allies and i was i was happy to see us getting to a deal with canada and mexico i don't see a point in strong arming them. But with China, I'm much more sympathetic to it. And I think that that should largely be bipartisan. You don't even see Democrats slamming Trump too much for this. But there are consequences. And so I would like the president to be more forthright about, listen, we are going to feel some pain too, because when you implement tariffs, you're affecting people's supply chains. And when you do do that you're hurting american businesses too

right there has to be a reason for that okay and the reason is the chinese are bad actors and we are we are in sort of an economic cold war with them the chinese think in 50-year terms we think in four-year terms they have a huge advantage in this sense they have huge advantage that they can prop up their businesses and and and and put forth their belt and road initiatives and and made in china 2025 i think is i might be getting that wrong but you know they can they can manipulate public opinion to encourage those statist policies and there's disadvantages to that too it means they're much less dynamic the fact that they steal everything means they'll never be competitive they They're not truly a great, you know, great nation the way they're making themselves out to be because they're thieves. And I think we should point that out. But we are in this cultural war with them. We are in

this economic, you know, Cold War with them. And that's nothing new, but it is coming to the forefront. And so we've got to be careful. I would prefer, you know, we take fights to the WTO. We actually have a good history of being successful in the WTO against the Chinese. And we go after singular companies like Huawei. I would like to see that. You know, again, I'm sympathetic to the tariffs, but they do hurt us. They hurt us. There are a lot of people in my district.

Texas is a good competitive market. We do well when there's free competition. And so we tend to want more free trade and more free competition because we know we can handle it. So when there's not that, it can tend to hurt because we have very complex supply chains

throughout the world. And then we have to take note of that. Well, it seems like a game of chicken almost. It is, yeah. It's what it seems like back and forth. It's like, who's going to blink? It is like that. Yeah. That's so crazy seems like back and forth. It's like, who's going to blink? It is like that. Yeah.

That's so crazy. This is how international business gets done. It seems so bizarre to a dummy like me sitting on the sidelines going, what are these guys doing? And there's no playbook that tells you exactly how you should go forth with this. And there's just, you know, and so there just isn't. And it makes it harder. You've got to take a lot of things into account and have a good end goal in mind.

And I think we could do a better job of having that. But in the end, holistically, I'm more sympathetic to being hard on the Chinese. I'm realizing as we're talking that I never really continued my thoughts on censorship in the media and i wanted to know what you think could be done in terms of how how you could stop particularly

conservative voices from being silenced on social media and what could be done do you think that like government regulation should be enacted like what what should be done to stop because there's a bunch of stuff that's gone on behind the scenes, shadow banning. What do you think about that? So Senator Hawley is looking at some legislation in the Senate on this. And I don't want to get into too much detail because I don't want to screw up the exact details of this. But it essentially gets at Section 230, which provides protections for Internet platforms. You can't be sued for libel.

Whatever you post on Facebook is not Facebook's fault. So it protects them in a way. And as it should, frankly. Because how could it be Facebook's fault? If you have a crazy comment on your YouTube videos, is it your fault? They were trying to enact that for a while. They had released something saying that we had to be in charge of the comments on our page.

I remember that. And it's crazy. Jamie and I talked about it. I was like, we're just going to shut the comments down because otherwise we're going to go to jail. Yeah. This is fucking crazy.

People are constantly posting nutty things. Right. And like, and why isn't it YouTube's fault? Why is it your fault? Exactly. You know, I mean, you were going to were gonna be responsible like where where's the blame lie and so like that's so that's why off of that though because they should so that's so that's that conversation it's the conversation of what is a platform what is a publication because you can

sue the new york times right if they if they publish something that you don't like okay so the problem we're seeing is that facebook and Twitter, they're acting like both. They're trying to get the best of both worlds where they're this like open platform, but then they can also decide and kind of act like a publisher and decide what kind of content is allowed on that platform. And the problem is the standards they're using are utterly vague and subjective and then politically biased, obviously. And so that's a real problem and so i think i think this legislation might get at kind of removing that protection and basically allowing someone to say hey you're being libelous uh and once that incentive is there it's like okay there's a better incentive now to say we are a pure platform uh you know we'll we have to have

much stronger standards in the sense of clearer standards. Maybe it's a word that you don't allow. I don't know. But at least be specific because right now it's like they define hate speech in the vaguest terms possible. Not just that. They move the boundaries all the time. Like now you can get banned for life for dead naming someone, which means like if I wrote something about Bruce Jenner looks cute in these heels, if I wrote that, I could get dead name banned for life from twitter like literally if I write Bruce Jenner looks cute in these heels oh because he's not Bruce

Jenner his son called him he hilarious in that uh whoops one of the what was it the uh the hills when the hills came back oh yeah he's yeah his son is on I think it took a lot of heat for it because he called his dad he said my dad when he became what the fuck his dad what is he supposed to say that's his actual dad i don't i don't know but that's where we've we've entered into this cuckoo land you know you can get banned for life for dead naming but again oj simpson hello twitter world yeah you know fucking kills people and he's on there no violation of terms of We looked at the terms of service. It seems like you're fine, Mr. Simpson. Please rant about politics in the draft, NFL draft.

We want to hear your picks. I don't follow him. It's fucking awesome. You should follow him. Well, Stanhope and I had an idea way back when we were hosting the Man Show. We had this idea to have O.J. Simpson. This was after he got acquitted. The Man Show. That brings up some memories

we were gonna have oj simpson wrap up every episode like mickey rooney you know mickey rooney sort of gives his well why is toothpaste always come in a tube you remember that mickey rooney's not mickey rooney what the fuck's his name uh andy rooney andy run okay yeah mickey was the actor but andy rooney would uh we were going to have him, OJ Simpson, just give some sort of down home anecdote at the end of every episode to sort of tie everything up and let you know that this fucking show is bananas. But then the whole murderer thing. No, the murder thing was before that.

This was way after the murderer thing. Oh, okay. This was in like 2002. Okay. But then, you know, Comedy Central shot shot it down but now you can actually get that on twitter i mean that is what he's doing he's he's pretending like he never murdered anybody right and he's just uh hello twitter world and he's not doing this thing well i mean it's and it's not clear to me that we should ban him you know like why why would we because because again

right what's again free speech is a very specifically protected thing. It matters to us. But this is the question. Is it free speech when it's a company that owns this platform? Should they be allowed to create their own rules? Because this is what Twitter's done. This is what Facebook's done. This is what Instagram's done.

They've created their own rules as to what is and what is not acceptable. Yeah. And that's the heart of the question. Yeah. Because we've never dealt with this. Right. Because the First Amendment was always created to protect you from government infringing on your speech. Because we always assumed that government would be the only thing powerful enough to actually infringe on your free speech. Right. We never, we forgot about this other world that we now live in. We didn't forget about it. We just didn't know about it, where there are other entities that have very, very powerful abilities

to actually infringe on your free speech. But, like you said, they are private entities. And so is it really up to government to tell the private entity? Are we enforcing the spirit of the First Amendment, or are we enforcing the First Amendment according to protecting you from government? And that's an interesting question. Should we enforce the spirit of the First Amendment? I certainly think we're encouraging it.

I mean, I'm definitely very vocal about encouraging it. And I say you don't have a – when Google was in front of me in a hearing the other day, I said, and it was Google, all of them were there. I said, you don't have a legal obligation to do what I'm telling you. But I do think you have an American obligation to actually adhere to free speech standards and to adhere to the same standards that the government adheres to, which is your speech is not protected if it incites violence directly. It's a pretty clear standard. Everything else is entirely vague. And and only leads to a slippery slope and frankly a very dangerous situation where we're just at each other's throats even worse. Because not only are you yelling at each other, but you're telling certain people that their opinions are just utterly unacceptable and can't be heard at all. If you want to create civil war, that's a really quick way to do it.

Right. When you really disenfranchise people. And it's just so dangerous and we just shouldn't do it i i fully agree and i really appreciate the way you were holding their heels to the fire on that particularly in regards to the description of people being nazis right that was you you were talking about dennis prager and ben shapiro who are jewish gentlemen who were being labeled Nazis by internal memos. And was it Google? That was Google. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's just so intellectually dishonest. So intellectually dishonest. And not only that, no pushback internally. I always tell people when they're complaining about something Trump said, they're like, look at the violence he's inciting all right and i say well you call us all nazis when you call somebody a nazi you you are calling somebody something that we agreed as americans to bomb and kill and destroy so you're labeling me with a label that we all agree should be destroyed like how is that not inciting violence by your by your standards i mean it certainly is

i mean it's you take away that name you take away the word nazi and there's far less targets for people to be upset about i mean if you just stop using that word stop using the word nazi and look there are clearly real white nationalists i mean we saw that in charlottesville when those dorks showed up in tiki torches yeah those are real yeah white nationalists. I mean, we saw that in Charlottesville when those dorks showed up in tiki torches. Yeah. Those are real white nationalists. They really are. Those are real. Yeah. There's a lot of people that are not.

Ben Shapiro's one of them. You know, you can't... And not even close. Not even close. Like, it's not even... Yeah, but it's this convenient label that once you decide that someone is the other, you dehumanize them,

their perspective becomes intolerable, and you can label them as being this target. Right, right. And they do it to Trump, too. I mean, Trump, you know, this continues to be said by basically everybody running for president that Trump is a white supremacist. And white supremacists and a Nazi are practically, I think, the same thing. I think we have an understandably deep objection to anything white supremacist, as we should. It should be condemned totally.

And when you're calling the president that, I think you're also there for – and they often call his supporters that too. So you're calling 60-something million people who voted for him the same thing. I just can't imagine a worse way to engage in dialogue and a quicker way to escalate things to to just the worst possible scenario but it's new this is not something that existed 10 years ago people didn't run around calling everyone a nazi like what happened how did it how did the word nazi just get tossed around like a beach ball at a concert because it's so free to use now and people on the left are the ones who are using it it's not people on the right who are labeling left-wing people nazis but fascists and nazi that word just gets thrown

out without any real comprehension or any real responsibility for the actual definition of it yeah and i don't know where the origin is um it's within like 10 years right it is it's what and they found the word and they liked it they just they found something effective i think um you know there's there's herbert marcus is sort of the one of the the original thinkers from the new left who said that like the new way of progressivism needs to be dividing people up into that other okay and then and then not only that but but labeling them and then suppressing their speech so this started in the 60s okay this this is a policy this is like a left-wing thinker right but his his ideas yeah yeah this was a strategy that he was right

right an actual strategy of suppression because the goal was to take the previously oppressed and suppress the previous oppressors this is how this is how they talked about it so that's enslaved the slave owners right so this so in a sense this isn't new like this this is the kind of radicalism we're seeing it started in the 60s it was imbued into our universities and now we're seeing it manifest again and amplified i think by social media and you know labeling somebody a nazi is just really an old tactic. They're just using a different word.

And I don't know. I think if we were I think if we looked into history, there's probably other cases where they continue to call us Nazis. But it's obviously extremely prevalent now. I mean, never to this extent. Right. And and I just I don't know why that. Well, it's the rise of identity politics. Yes.

Fundamentally. that well it's it's the rise of identity politics yes fundamentally and so and then there were and then i think there's it's fair because the left would say well there was a there was kind of a white identity politics rise and they were given some kind of voice by donald trump right this is what they would say and i i think that there's probably some truth to that and then that's terrible but i think that i think that was a reaction you know uh it should always point out that like when you do surveys of what race race relations are like in America, they were much better before than they are now. And do we really think we've gotten more racist? You know, like what happened?

And this is under President Obama's presidency. And I think that identity politics just came to the forefront in the last decade in a really terrible way. And again, I think identity politics is one of the worst things we could do to each other. When you divide people up into different groups and talk about intersectional hierarchies of victimhood, I just think it's just dividing people. Because fundamentally what it is, is you're dividing people up and you're saying your group is oppressed by that group. And if you vote for me, I'll give you power over that group yeah and you can trace a lot of of policies to that and this all stems from marxist ideology where it was more socioeconomic division of groups but that is but that has become uh an ideology of intersectionality uh ironically put forth by a woman named crenshaw really yeah kip really

crenshaw and i think she came at it from a much more academic standpoint i think it's i think whatever her original theory of intersectionality was uh has been transformed quite a bit but yeah i find that interesting so i'm so opposed to that yeah you know now that i'm thinking about i don't even think it's 10 years i think the nazi thing is only about four or five years old to the extent we're seeing it sure yeah you know and so strange and people use it so freely i look at people on twitter use it so freely and they use it in regards to my guests and you know it's uh they use it say that i've had nazis on the show i'm like this is crazy you know you're calling a jewish man a nazi you can an

orthodox jewish guy wears a yarmulke you're calling him a nazi right the fucking bananas it just doesn't make any sense yeah and we just and they were shameless about it the shameless about these accusations i don't understand it here's something we're probably going to disagree about uh recreational marijuana you you're apparently not in favor i really thought we're gonna do a whole show with joe rogan and you weren't gonna bring up marijuana like what are the chances you're not in favor of recreational marijuana no i i can i could be convinced but i'm not there yet you're right now well spark one up i i don't like it what do you like i just i just don't like it i like i like scotch okay i like that too we got some like it. I like scotch. Okay. I like that, too. We got some of that.

We've had scotch this whole time. Well, you gave me this amazing coffee. That's Laird Hamilton's superfood coffee. It's pretty damn good, right? It's made me so coherent. I love it. The clarity. It's super good.

Well, it's got turmeric. It reduces inflammation. It gives you yellow lips, though. So I'm definitely more open to just the federal legalization of medical marijuana and all the benefits that come with that. I think the science backs that up pretty well. Sure. On the recreational side, I'm happy to leave that to the states. Okay.

And then there's the argument of, well, the states are having trouble with some things, the banking laws, et cetera, because the federal government still makes it illegal. My issue with recreational marijuana still is, and again, this is not a strong opinion I have. This is not a hill I'm dying on by any means. But if we're going to change it, I want to understand what the point is and what the benefits are of it recreationally. I understand the benefits medically very well. But I want to understand the recreational benefits. And I want to see how this data plays out in places like California and Colorado you know I want to see if there's an increased use among

young people because there's there's there's very good science that says if you use marijuana a lot under the age of 26 you're going to have cognitive issues for the rest of your life along with a lot yes yeah but it is legal and people compare those things but I and my counter isn't that my counter is simply this. The alcohol issue is out of the bag. Like, it just is. You know, we're never going to put that back in. Do you think they're going to put pot back in the bag?

Well, not necessarily. My point is this. There's a normalization that occurs when you legalize something. Okay, so let's say you make the age 21. What is it in California? I think it's 21. Is it? I think it's the same as alcohol. So let's say you make the age 21 or not what is it in california um i think it's 21 is it so let's say i want to think it's the same as alcohol so let's say you make it 21 what you've done though is you've

normalized it for teenagers because you said well yeah it's 21 but it's legal so there's nothing there's no issues with it okay that's what you're i think that's what you're telling people and there's a lot of people who can just live their lives extremely productively and smoke pot a lot there's a lot of people who can't okay and there's a lot of people who can just live their lives extremely productively and smoke pot a lot. There's a lot of people who can't. Okay. And there's a lot of people who don't. Those people are lazy bitches. Well, yeah.

Let me help you out. You can live your life. You just listen. Pot's not for everybody. And I have a lot of friends who don't smoke pot. But pot is a tool just like a hammer. You can build a house with a hammer or you can hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy. Like scotch.

You can drink scotch recreationally. You can have a couple of glasses with some friends and have a great conversation and it's a social lubricant and people enjoy it and i enjoy it that's why we got a bunch of bottles of it over there uh look but don't you have to drink way more scotch to get even close to the to the basically cognitive incoherence that you'd be with just one bite of a brownie you you would but not me i smoke pot all the time i could smoke pot i could have smoked pot before this podcast and the exact same podcast i could have had several hits if i gave you several hits you'd be obliterated and you'd be so paranoid you'd be freaking out you think the government's coming

to get you and they're going to close down Congress and oh my God, the Chinese are listening to my phone. A lot of it is based on our own ideas and perceptions. And I had a lot of these misconceptions in my own head. I smoked pot maybe six times or so, seven times before I was 30 years old. And then when I was 30, I started hanging around with a guy who smoked a lot, my friend Eddie Bravo. We started smoking pot together. And I realized like, oh, this is an incredible tool for creativity, like if you use it correctly.

And yeah, it makes you paranoid. But I think a lot of what that paranoia is, is you being acutely aware of your vulnerability and your actual real place in the cosmos and your real place in society and the real dangers of driving cars and the real dangers of being in crowds of people yeah it's not it's a weird uncomfortable feeling but ultimately you get through that and you're going to be okay it's in a culture that i just don't really have a problem with what you're saying you know like it's i'm just i'm not cultural i guess on a personal level i'm just not opposed to what you're saying at all.

From a policy level, though, I just look at things differently. Like when I extract myself from the personal situations I've had with pot and I look at it from a policy perspective. What personal situations? I've tried it, you know, and it's like paranoid. I don't like it. I just, I really don't freak out. I don't know. No, I'm not a freak out. I'm not a freak out kind of person.

What happened? What didn't you like? It's just the sensation. Just in general, I just really didn't like it. I don't know. How much did you smoke? Too much? What?

Sorry? I think there's something going on with my headphones. Okay. We can gloss over this. But here's the problem with keeping it illegal criminals sell it i mean this is the same problem we had during prohibition this is what propped up the mom right we all know this this is uh this is the number one problem we have with the mexican drug cartels the number one problem is that there's a goddamn customer base in the united

states and they're making billions and billions of dollars selling illegal drugs and what's the solution to that? I don't know. I mean, look, I have kids. I don't want fucking heroin to be something you could buy at 7-Eleven. I don't want you to be able to go to a store and buy meth. That gets into a whole other conversation about all drugs, right? Drugs, all drugs.

Yeah, but those are the real dangerous ones. Pot's not that. And when you lie to kids and tell them that pot's the real danger and you shouldn't do it, then they start going, well, maybe you're lying about heroin maybe you're lying about meth maybe you're just square maybe just some loser just wants to be stuck in a cubicle all day and you want me to be living like like you but it does reduce i mean it does reduce in like productivity i think more than alcohol does when kids entirely dependent upon the person i get paranoid and i want to do more things because i don't want to be a loser. That's what happens to me when I smoke pot.

I think it accentuates many aspects of people that are already lazy. If you are already lazy and you have a problem with discipline, which I don't, if you have a problem with discipline and you smoke pot, yeah, you're going to just want to veg out, lie in the grass and stare at the clouds. I want to get going. I smoke pot and go to the gym. I mean, I do it all the time. And again, as a policymaker, though, I have to look at the whole situation. So I see people like you, and you're like, yeah, you'd be fine.

Why not? But I do have to take into account the entirety of the situation and ask myself, well, what is the benefit to society doing this? It makes people nicer. It enhances the sense of community. It makes people more aware of their surroundings, more kinder to people. I actually don't – I mean, I don't know. I think alcohol is much more of a social lubricant. It definitely makes it meaner too.

But, I mean, as far as getting along with people and going out and interacting with human beings. It's different. It's definitely different. Yes. It inhibits your inhibitions. It lowers your inhibitions. So it allows you to talk more freely with people. Definitely encourages more sex and more terrible decision-making driving too but the thing about marijuana is another policy

problem yeah because like how do you test for it you know we have a very kind of clear standards on alcohol it's just those again it's like again i'm not i'm not just i'm not dying on this hill um i just i have questions and those questions are unanswered i understand but these questions oftentimes are coming from a place of propaganda like people have this idea of what it is versus what it really is i don't know i like i have personal experience with this i know i'm 35 so like i've grown up around this my entire life this isn't so it's you know i'm not i'm not some i'm not some what again did you do it right but here's the thing it's the same thing with alcohol though you could have driven drunk and crashed your car and go alcohol's bad look i drove my car

into a fucking tree and i go well hey man i just had a couple beers with my friends we had a great old time we laughed it up and nobody got hurt the difference is again again the way to to measure how much too alcohol too much alcohol is is well defined and we also have just hundreds of years of experience with like as a culture with how to figure out alcohol and how to deal with it used to have thousands of years of experience of how to use cannabis but it was suppressed in the 1930s by william randolph hurst and harry anslinger and it's more of an economic decision than it was a public health decision yeah and i think i've heard your podcast on that it's interesting yeah there's many many documentaries and books written on it but i think that the real problem is when you make drugs illegal only outlaw sell

drugs you prop up illegal enterprises it's a guy coming in next next month or next week rather john norris who uh is uh a guy who uh works for the state he's one of those guys that has to go around and find these illegal grow ops on public land and it's fucking extremely dangerous yeah i mean bottom line is my my position is that's a state decision you know it's a state decision why not federally why wouldn't it be federally legal if alcohol is federally legal if we know that no one's dying from it no one can't overdose i just want to see what the data comes out is from colorado it's mixed right now frankly i think we need a strong education program to let people know, first of all, if you have a problem with reality, if you have schizophrenia in your family, if reality is already slippery, marijuana is not for you.

And I've personally seen people that have struggled that do have an adverse reaction to marijuana and they go off the fucking rails. It does happen. Yeah. Particularly with edibles. Edibles particular to knocks people for a loop but then there's other people that doesn't do that too and i think we the way to study that is to have actual funding and make it legal where you could you could look at things across the board and figure out why yeah i think i think as far as the battles we should fight in the federal level we got to start with the medical side i think this I think the science is clear there.

So, you know, let's start. I mean, I just – CBD is the gateway, right? CBD is non-psychoactive and helps so many old people with arthritis and so many people with anxiety. It's fantastic. Exactly. And just, again, another reason I'm a Republican is because I believe in somewhat slower policymaking, too. i'm a republican is because i believe in somewhat slower policy making too like these these conversations have to play out in society and they we don't always need to to solve the problem

right away like there's a reason for that things must happen so so i think i think the medical conversation is the one we should be fighting for i think the recreational side is is a few steps beyond that and then we get to that and we'll have more. And for something that's been used by human beings for thousands of years and doesn't show any real problems. I don't think young people should drink, but I drank when I was young. I mean, I didn't drink a lot, but I did occasionally. I don't think young people should smoke pot. I definitely don't encourage it. As a matter of fact, I deeply discourage it. And I tell people, look, there's a reason, one of the reasons why I enjoy it is I didn't start smoking really until I was 30.

And I tell people, look, there's a reason, one of the reasons why I enjoy it is I didn't start smoking really until I was 30. And, you know, I take time off all the time. It's not an addictive substance to me. It's psychologically addictive to some people. And there might be some evidence that a very small percentage of people, it's physically addictive. But not like alcohol is or not like a lot of the things that we can just buy anywhere are. Yeah. Those are all fair arguments.

It's a good discussion to have. We sort of disagree on it, but only because I just think more due diligence needs to be done. This is not something I'm vehemently opposed to. Well, I think anything for young kids can be a real problem, especially for young kids where their brain is still developing and they're trying to find their way through life and you give them something that severely distorts reality, whatever it is. I wish we had that same due diligence the way they prescribe psychotropic drugs to kids because we don't.

We should. It's up to parents' discretion. So many parents are putting their kids on Ritalin and Prozac and Adderall and you're making kids speed freaks. As opposed to relying on cognitive behavioral therapy, which has proven to work much better. Because you're getting at the problem. You're questioning the untruths that you're telling yourself. That's effectively what CBT is. And it's good practice.

Kids have exorbitant amounts of energy. And you can call that hyperactive. Or you could just say, well, that kid's got a fucking great engine. Got a lot of gas. Just figure out a way to get this kid engaged in what they like. I guarantee you, take that kid, put him in front of a video game. He doesn't have any problem focusing. What he has a problem with is shitty classes

with boring subjects. And teachers that are uninterested. And so many people are being labeled as being problems because of this. We want to blame something else besides reality. And that's problematic. And you talk about looking into certain drugs.

I mean, you know, the opioid epidemic is an issue too. Huge, huge. And that's a bipartisan issue. It's just, again, it's not exactly clear. How do you solve this? Right. How do you solve this? I have a ton of experience with opioids because I've been injured so many times.

Did you ever have a problem getting off of them once you? Oh,. It's devastating. It's absolutely devastating. And I didn't, I never knew this was in 2012. So I didn't know how devastating it would be. Cause I just stopped taking them. I don't think I'm in pain anymore. I should probably just not take these. And then I was in, in, in worse pain. I didn't know I was sick. I didn't know what was wrong with me. What was the experience like? Uh, it's, it's a nosh. You just, you can't move. You're pain. I didn't know I was sick. I didn't know what was wrong with me. What was the experience like? You can't move. You're sick. I don't know how to describe it. You're just really sick. And is your body craving the pills? Yeah, but I didn't know that, I think. So you're just feeling the sickness? I'm just feeling the sickness. I didn't quite know

where it was coming from. And then you tell your doctor, and they're like, oh yeah, you've got to wean off of that. We didn't tell you that? No, you didn't tell me that. I was 28 when this happened, so my body can get over it. You're also 28 with a strong mind who's a seal. Right, but the age matters, just like it matters with pot, just like it matters with addiction. When teenagers are hooked on opioids,

when that one dealer gets into the system like you you change that person's brain forever and they're always addicted to it really bad ways and like it's different the way the way i always remember it like it's ingrained in my brain too but it's different because i was older like if you got an injury today would you be res would you be reluctant to take them no no i have faith in my ability to just act responsibly. Like, yeah, you know, and so that requires a lot of things. But when you, and this is, this gets, this a little bit gets to the war on drugs philosophy.

Like, do you just not do it because we're losing all the time? And I actually disagree with that pretty strongly because, yeah, you might feel like you're losing all the time, but you are mitigating it. And supply does create demand, especially with something like opioids. If that one dealer gets into that one high school and gets those kids addicted at one party, and those kids die 10, 12 years later, and I've watched this happen, I've been to the funerals and uh it's it's devastating and that supply that that demand was created by supply so like again no there's no there's never a black and white to anything and so when we say i wore on drugs is stupid or it's not stupid like no it's complicated it's complicated and the opioid epidemic is i think a good indication of

that what could be done to mitigate that other than sawing Florida off and selling it to the Russians? What did Florida do? Florida was the problem. You know the whole deal with the pill mills? There's a great documentary called the Oxycontin Express. It detailed how they had pain management centers in Florida set up right next to, the doctor

was next door to the pharmacy that only sold opioids. I didn't realize that was a Florida specific. And they didn't have a database. They didn't have a database. So there's no computer database. So if you were a doctor, I could go to you. I could get my opioids.

Then I'd go over to Jamie. He's a doctor. He could hook me up. And then I'd go down the street and get more. And then people started selling them. Yeah. And there was an express from Florida that went up into Kentucky and Ohio and all these different states that were having giant problems. And they found out the pills were all coming from this one area it was a vanguard

documentary and that stuff's been slammed down pretty hard yes ever since and so and the pendulum maybe has swung a little too far because now pain patients are having trouble getting the opioids they want like here's two pills for your surgery and you're like really right um so some people legitimately need this stuff and so we've got to find that correct balance and again you've always got to know why there's a problem um and there's a general policy approach we should always really question why the problem exists in the first place and what the characteristics of that problem are so a lot of people are dying not necessarily they're not like they're not overdosing on

oxycontin they're overdosing from illegal forms of it or heroin that is laced with fentanyl uh so like how do you tackle that well fentanyl is coming through the southern border that's where it's coming from um you know we could talk about immigration too but what happens a lot is you know these massive waves of immigrants who are turning themselves in to border patrol they're allowed to cross because the drug cartels say they can cross okay that. That's why they come across in organized groups. And then they turn themselves into border patrol and they claim asylum. They always bring a kid with them so that they know they can stay. But what's also happening is just down the road, the drug cartels are moving the fentanyl and other drugs across, especially the bulky drugs, mostly like marijuana, things like

that. Fentanyl is so small, they can just bring it through trucks, through ports of entry. So, and so we need sensors to actually detect that, and we're getting those, getting those put in place more. And we need to secure the border, because this is where it's coming from, and we need to deal with where it's coming from south of the border, which is China. So the administration actually did that, and we got the Chinese to say, at least, that they'll do it. You never know how much they're enforcing that, so we'll see.

It's so interesting when you play people clips of obama talking about the importance of securing the border i like to play those clips they and sounds just like trump play the statistics of how many people they sent back and telling people to not come over with their children they'll be separated from their children it's uh it's one of those things where people like don't like that they don't like to see that it really is deeply disturbing to them that obama campaigned on this idea of protecting our border because we all used to agree on it yeah you know it became a racial issue with trump yeah i mean he's definitely said some things where you can trip yeah yeah for sure someone's raping someone's murdering not gonna defend not gonna defend trump's rhetoric on

your show or on any show um they contributed to it sure but again as a pretty unemotional person i tend to look at what is the policy right so i i have tried my hardest to move the debate towards when it comes to immigration towards a matter of sustainability a matter of sovereignty in a matter of rule of law like do we have standards or do we not, you know, do we believe in this idea Of a managed border or do we not And you know And Trump has made the Democrats so crazy That they've moved radically to the left

And it's interesting to watch People always say, like both sides have gotten so extreme I always find that interesting And I say there's two ways to manage To measure extremism, one is our voting record Like how often do you really vote With the other side, and you can measure that pretty carefully interesting. And I say there's two ways to manage to measure extremism. One is our voting record. Like how often do you really vote with the other side? And you can measure that pretty carefully, actually. And you look, you've probably seen a YouTube video, maybe, where you watch all over time, all the red dots and the blue dots, and they sort of mingle together in their voting records.

And then they slowly over time move to the sides. So both sides are responsible for that, like a lack of actual compromise, a lack of dealmaking, where we say, okay, I'll vote for your stuff, you vote for my stuff, that doesn't happen anymore. And there's reasons for that, like a lack of actual compromise, a lack of dealmaking, where we say, okay, I'll vote for your stuff, you vote for my stuff, that doesn't happen anymore. And there's reasons for that we could get into. But there's another way to measure extremism, and it's the actual policy changes. And so that we can observe that. And I think, and in that respect, I don't think the right and conservatives have really changed our policies. I don't think we've gotten more extreme. I think the left has gotten vastly more extreme. They've changed their policies radically. Medicare for all, open borders. I mean, effectively open borders. They don't like to use

the word, but when you're saying decriminalize it, when you're saying no infrastructure at all on the border, when you're saying no more ICE detention beds, you're effectively saying open borders because you don't want to enforce it and you don want to stop it so i don't i don't know what else to call it um you know and those are just some example the green new deal i mean socialism is a good word now so like i think there's i think that on that on that measure uh only one side has really moved to an extreme as far as policy positions go and to your point you look at barack obama and he's not the only one you can look at chuck schumer's old comments on this stuff i mean it's you trump could have written those statements for them yeah and um what can be done the real issue is not people coming over here uh seeking

work good people that just want to do better for their life the real issue is drugs and crime what can be done to mitigate the effect of the mexican drug cartels because that seems to be our biggest worry our biggest worry is that cartels and cartel violence no our well our biggest worry that is a worry but but there's a there's a again i go back to a matter of sustainability and sovereignty in terms of the amount of people that yeah yeah i i don't i i never i actually never when i talk about the immigration issue, I actually never talk about the drugs and the crime because I don't want to label these good people as criminals, drug dealers, you know, that's the wrong, and most of the vast majority are. But that just because you're a good person and you want nice things doesn't mean you get to move to the front of the line on immigration policy. It's also an important point to note for people that don't know,

and it's kind of a shocking statistic, we let in more legal immigrants than any other country. Yeah, over a million a year, I think, become citizens, and much more than that, granted visas. So, and there's a perfectly reasonable debate to have

about how many work visas should we have? Should we increase it or should we decrease it? But how does someone get over here and how do we know that they don't have a history of violent crime? Sure. And I advocate for a merit-based system. What the president proposed, I think, is absolutely right. We have the opportunity to choose the best people from the world to come here. And if you're a refugee, we have a system for that. And if you're an actual asylum seeker,

we have a system for that. But what we should be totally opposed to is this idea that just because you made it to walk across the border, that all of a sudden you get to cut to the front of the line. And that's exactly what's happening right now because of the loopholes we have. If you bring a child with you, our laws are written so that we basically can't enforce it. We cannot enforce these laws. And this is for a couple of reasons. One, the Flores settlement. You might have heard that a lot. What it means is you can't detain a child past 20 days.

So if a family comes across, or it's usually just a part of a family because what they actually do is they split up. They split their own families up because they don't want to deport one of the parents. Does that make sense? Okay, so the Flores settlement says you can't detain children children which effectively means we can never adjudicate these claims in time whether it's an illegal crossing issue like a criminal act of 13 20 you know u.s code 1325 illegal crossing or just they're claiming asylum either one we can't we can't adjudicate it in time so what ends up happening is a catch and release when they say okay show up for a court date and then what incentive do they have to show up for that court date?

And they just don't. And we're talking, geez, in the earlier part of this year, we had over 100,000 a month. So it gets to a question of sustainability. Let's say all 100,000 people are perfectly good people. But it's a sustainability question, and it's also a fairness question. Why do they get to cut in front of the legal immigrants? Why do they get so much more priority over all of the other people who want to be in our country around the world? I mean, they don't have that opportunity to just walk across the border.

So it's just utterly unsustainable. And if we value a sense of sovereignty and rule of law, which I think we should, and we value the idea of having a managed system, then we have to put a stop to that. And then have a good conversation about, well, maybe we need more workers. Okay, well, then let's increase worker visas, if that's true. Well, I think we show sympathy on them because they're poor people that are trying to do better for their life. Whereas we look at people that are coming over from Canada, and if we had 100,000 people from Canada illegally immigrating into our country every year, we would go, hey, fucks, get back over where you are. Like you guys have a great country already. You don't have the problem of a lack of opportunity in Canada the way people do in Mexico.

There's a giant disparity between North America in terms of like United States of America and Mexico, the economic possibilities, the drug violence. But our laws have to be written blind to those subjective terminologies. Sure. That's really important because otherwise why have them? Why even have a system at all if you just if it's enforced based on feelings? The best case scenario would be

Mexico becomes like Canada. Wouldn't that be the best case scenario? Mexicans are not the ones that are actually, we're having an issue. You know, it's vastly Central Americans. So again, this stems from loopholes in our laws, okay? So, because a Mexican, because they're actually border us,

our laws work where we can actually just put them right back for the most part. Single adults too, our system works okay with that the problem is if you bring a child and so every so everybody tends to bring a child and what this also causes is human trafficking a lot of these children don't belong to these parents okay so now we have to look at dna testing to try and to try and thwart this and that is what's happening now and we find that a good amount of kids don't belong to these parents so they bring over a kid in order for them to stay and what will happen is then they bring over a kid in order for them to stay

and what will happen is then they'll recycle that kid so border patrol often sees the same kid coming through with different adults you know and it's it's terrible and what other kind i mean if it's not mexico what are the the main countries where these people are coming guatemala honduras el salvador and again it seems like the only way that anyone could really truly fix that is if those countries could rise up to the level of Canada so they could be commensurate with the United States. And this is what the left says we need to do, and I don't disagree with it at all. The problem with what the left is suggesting is that's the only thing we need to do, and that's just not true. We also have to enforce our actual laws. But it is a bipartisan, I think, agreement that we

want to develop the countries closest to us. I'm a co-sponsor on a bill that does just that. It's a bipartisan bill. And I think it encourages a more creative look at development in Central America. The Bush Institute talks about this a lot. And I think it's a really good idea, which is basically economic empowerment through digital infrastructure. So here in America, I mean, we make a lot of money just based on the gig economy. Every individual can empower themselves and work towards that. And that's really cool. They don't have that opportunity down there. And it's a lack of digital infrastructure, whether it's broadband or whatever. So working towards investing in the right things, as opposed to just, hey, here's some aid that your corrupt politicians can line their pockets with.

And we can feel good about ourselves and pat ourselves on the back and think like we're doing good for other countries, but we're really not. Again, feel good or do good. It's always a good question to ask. And so I think we're working towards those solutions in Congress now. Well, Dan, we got to get you on your flight. So I'm going to let you go. So it's already 3.20 here. Oh, that's sad. That's sad. It's been fun. It was a great conversation.

I really appreciate it, and thank you very much for your time, man. Thank you. Thank you. Dan Crenshaw, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you.