The Joe Rogan Experience - #1454 - Dan Crenshaw

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

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. His new book "Fortitude: American Resilience in the Outrage Era" is now available everywhere. https://amzn.to/3b0jyxL

congressman how are you sir i am doing well joe good to see you again you look official bro you look very official you have an american flag in the background you got books have you read those books be honest me yeah that's a good question um some of them i mean this one's like a congressional cookbook like i'm not going to read that so obviously uh some of these i have or at least i dabble in books like i'll i'll look over a book mostly. I've definitely read my book. That one's up there. I've read that way too many times. I hate reading it now.

And that's the one that's out right now. Yeah, I wrote it. That's the one that's out right now. Yeah, that comes out, I don't know when we're posting this, but Tuesday, April 7th. That's tomorrow. Yeah, that's exactly when this will come out. So perfect. Fortitude.

We need that right now. And we do we do now the rest of this i just kind of set up for this uh i found that weird ass painting right there it's some like flea market in san diego back when i was stationed there it's like a it's like a it's a bunch of ships it looks like a horrible idea for a tattoo. You know, sometimes people have those really bad old ship tattoos. Yeah, I feel like there's worse tattoos you could get. Oh, yeah, I've got them. What about the typewriter? Do you use the typewriter?

Is that legit? No, that is a legit typewriter. That was my granddad's old typewriter. So I saved that. They kept it in pretty good shape. I didn't really have to do much restoring but you can still buy the ink for that and actually we would uh we used to have it set up in the house so when guests came over they could like typewrite a message

and so it's like a guest log it's kind of cool that is cool little thing so what's your take on what we're going through right now dan for everybody in the future this is a day it's basically a month into like extreme coronavirus lockdown for the country it all started sort of in the beginning of march now here we are in the first week of april and uh everybody's stir crazy and weirded out by this including me and i'm sure you as well what What is your take on this? Wow. Generally speaking, I remember the weekend where everything all of a sudden shifted. It was the March 14th weekend. I remember that weekend because it was my birthday. And I remember how everybody was basically still going out to bars and restaurants. And then all of a sudden, everything changed. The entire paradigm changed. And I could go through a long timeline of how we

got there. There's a lot of finger pointing right now, a lot of opportunism. The reality is a lot of us didn't, pretty much everybody didn't know a whole lot. And then we ended up in this situation where, and now my general take on it, we are in a, what I would call a tactical retreat. So I'm going to use a military term there to describe what we are doing we all of a sudden ran into a hail of gunfire okay like and i think about this in military terms we're on a patrol we run into a hail of gunfire we're not really sure what hit us we have a basic idea we know who they are we know generally what the enemy is but we weren't quite sure how to combat it so we took a a retreat, tactically speaking. That retreat looks a lot like a lockdown. Okay, don't talk to anybody, don't touch anybody, maintain that social distancing, lock things down, we have to slow the spread and allow our backup, our public health system to catch up. out of that tactical pause. We have to come out of that retreat and start engaging in the enemy a little bit. Now we do that slowly and we do it carefully. And so I think that's the, I like to

look at it that way as the conversation about how to reopen society. At a certain point, we have to move away from risk containment and move into a risk mitigation strategy. And we're ramping up our production of things like ventilators, of PPE, of testing capability in order to do that. Now, there's some talk of when this is going to end. And I don't know how you even make that distinction. How does one make a decision? And it seems like one of those things where once it starts, once you lock a country down and tell people, stay away, stay home, don't go to work, don't do anything unless it's very essential, like grocery

stores, hospitals, media, there's certain things that are allowed to be done right now. When does that end? And how does one decide when that ends? Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to think about that. From the public health perspective, I hear them say certain things like, after 14 days of a downward trend in cases, then we can start reopening. reopening. So R being less than one means for every contagious person, they infect less than one other person. Right now that number's around just over two. Okay. So there's an obvious spread that occurs. I think those are valid assumptions. I definitely question using those as our standards. I would like to see us use other standards as well, such as are we at a point where we're testing it up and we have enough ventilators and hospital bed space and PPE to actually fight the virus alongside reopening our society? Because I think we have to come to terms with a very certain truth, which is

we cannot indefinitely lock down. Those costs are enormous. And they're not just costs to our 401ks and our jobs. I mean, there's a public health cost there too. I speak with doctors here in Houston. We don't have a huge case number in Houston. Our hospitals are like 50% empty right now. And they can't do much needed surgeries, procedures, because what's called an elective surgery is going to be kind of a gray area. So a lot of stuff isn't getting done from a public health side. Also, there's, I think, the obvious public health crisis when people don't have jobs, there's divorce rates, there's suicides. We have to really take all of this into account as we talk about when to reopen society. Yeah, you and I privately had this conversation through text messages about the way reporters are using this moment to criticize Trump with in ridiculous ways. should describe these drugs that have some promise, which many doctors are describing.

Hydroxychloroquine with Z-Pak and zinc, apparently, is a combination that keeps getting brought up. And there's a doctor that has been using this to some reported success in New York City. But what drives me crazy is that these are rare opportunities that someone has to talk to the president, and they're using it to chastise him for bringing up drugs that do show promise and hope. He's not telling people to go take it. He's not advocating it. He's not pretending that he's some sort of a medical professional.

He's just talking about some things that show promise in the medical community. What is your take on all this? Because it's a weird situation that he finds himself in with medical community. You know, what is your take on all this? Because it's a weird situation that he finds himself in with the press, this very strange and antagonistic position. Yeah, you know, the press needs to figure out who they want to be. And it's actually like chapter two in my book, it's who is your hero and that in that conversation is about who we think we should be like what kind of people do we think we should be what does it mean to be a good american a good citizen the press believes it is their duty

to only be adversarial to to politicians mostly conservative politicians they don't treat democrats the same way but and that is their job. I wish they would treat all politicians the same. And to an extent, that is their job, to be adversarial, to question what is coming out of government. But I would argue that their main purpose is to simply educate the public, educate the public with full facts, full context, full understanding of what's going on. I think on that point, they're utterly failing to a huge extent. I think they've been failing for a long time. But in a time of crisis where it's so important that they actually do that, that more important thing of informing the public, they're really failing.

And they do. They completely waste time. I mean, how many reporters actually get access to the president? I bet there's hundreds of thousands of reporters out there, good ones, who would love to be able to be in that press briefing room and actually ask legitimate questions that would inform the American public. But they don't. They play these gotcha games. You know, they'll ask questions like, what do you want to say to people who are upset with you right now? It's like, how is that a good question? How is that news? Right. In the middle of a pandemic.

I mean, it's so utterly absurd and unnecessary. I actually have a whole list of questions. I don't want to read them all. But they're a complete waste of time. And I think they're failing us miserably. And then there's the opportunism that occurs. Like, listen, if you're writing an op-ed, if you're a journalist writing an op-ed,

let's say an opinion journalist, especially, I fully understand why you might say, you might write in your report, okay, the president said this today, but three weeks ago they said this. So there's been a change. That's fine. That makes total sense. That provides

context to the reader, even. It might be biased and that, whatever. But to only do that indirect questioning with the president just to try and play this gotcha game, it's not helpful. It's not helpful at all, and it's not informing anybody in the least least you know you mentioned the uh the president talking favorably about um the chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine and you remember the the couple that ingested that out in arizona um because that i something something similar to i think it's a chloroquine phosphate or something like that it might be misspeaking it's poison but that's an yeah it's an ingredient on fishbowl cleaner yeah fish tank cleaner and so they saw it and they ingested it which was obviously a terrible idea nobody would nobody told them to do that um and then the media

the media instead of saying wow this is a shame that they that they did this they blame the president and they blame the president for talking about what is a at least anecdotally a proven way to to combat this disease we don't know through clinical trials whether in mass it'll actually work but but to express optimism over it um it doesn't seem to be a uh a punishable offense but the outrage mob is is was fully invested in this kind of outrage reasoning to to tear down the president over this and it just it just feels so unnecessary i mean oh that's right that's why i wrote this book the book the book is about outrage culture um and our and our like this sort of weird new cultural need to just go after each other in the worst of ways

well there's a there's a new ability to do that. I mean, this is what it is with these new tools that people have through social media and through making these viral video clips, which is what each reporter is hoping they're going to accomplish by being combative with the president and trying to catch him on something. They're hoping that they're going to create this viral video that's going to accelerate their career. It's very self-aggrandizing. this viral video that's going to accelerate their career. It's very self-aggrandizing. And it's disturbing that there's not someone who stands out that does these sort of press junkets that doesn't do that. Yeah. And I actually write about that exact point in my book. Like

this, what we've begun to do is reward this sort of i would say overly passionate emotional behavior so we we've replaced sophisticated reasoning with outrage you know we we started to change who we actually view as heroes this is how i describe it we all have hero archetypes okay and like and we grew up this way and there's there's like fictional characters like the jed. Like it's that's like a hero archetype or Superman. We kind of look up to this person or or like or like real characters like Rosa Parks or Jesus. Like there's there's people that we actually look up to and we identify with and there's certain attributes that we use and we say, I want to be like that. And so when I act in public, I'm going to access that attribute and I'm going to be better according to that archetype. And we've sort of turned that on its head in our current outrage mob culture. Like we see somebody who plays the victim and we cheer them on.

When in reality, what we used to do is see somebody who overcame adversity, who was a true hero, and then we cheered them on. We've totally reversed that. came adversity who was a true hero and then we cheered them on we've totally reversed that yeah and like so and so and so you actually get more points if you're more snarky if you're meaner if you're if you're if you're playing this kind of cheap shot game and like in my book i use this example of like these these this group of veterans they they were waiting for me outside of my office i was going to vote and um i knew something was off because veterans my age they we never wear the like the ball cap you know like with the gold letters that say veteran on it we never wear that but these guys were wearing that so that was that was my first sign that

something was different about these guys but they just asked for a picture and i figured that was it and i would keep going but uh the second thing that was off was like they they weren't um they weren't looking at the camera they were fiddling as as i was like posing for this camera for this photo and i thought that was strange and it turns out they were just getting their own video camera ready to record and then they start following me and like just go nuts like they lose their minds um talking about trump and you know uh betraying the country and just all this nonsense and so they were just trying to have a gotcha moment with you yeah yeah yeah they this is what they do they're uh they're an activist group and they'll corner people like me and try and get like a viral video going

and and then you know it's up to me at that point to just like understand what's happening and just kind of walk silently and i kind of engage with them in some funny ways but they were they were becoming extremely emotional i mean their voices started to crack it was which was you know and what were they saying about you or to you oh how could you how could you let how could you betray the country by supporting the president i mean things like that mostly sloganeering like this wasn't a like a deep conversation by any means but but that's the point the point is is that they're rewarded for that like overly emotional um in motion like you know filming while while walking type of type of scenario and then they like and then there's this whole deal where i have to get in the elevator because that's

how i get to the votes like i i leave my my office on the fourth floor in canon i take the elevator down in the basement i walk across like that's just my route and so but what they do is as i get into the elevator they're like no he's hiding from us he's running away from us and the newsweek like writes up the same story like there's this there's this entire culture behind this notion that you that you that you have to use as much emotion as possible and as and express your anger in in the most exceptional of ways otherwise it's it's not worth listening to but we haven't stopped as a culture and we have to stop rewarding it and that's what i talk about we have to stop

rewarding that kind of behavior so that it actually ceases to control us that way well they accomplished what they wanted to do we're talking about them right now although you didn't give up their name good for you no but you but you you talked about them and that's what they wanted i mean there's so many groups out there that are i don't even know if they have an end game the the end game seems to be just get attention and you know and shine the light on these atrocities or whatever the whatever they feel like is an atrocity it is attention it happens on both sides i'm pretty careful in my book to actually uh criticize both sides on this one because because i do see it in the conservative circles it's it's different the the kind of outrage culture that happens in conservatism is certainly different and less widespread

than than happens on the left um It is more about attention seeking. And I always tell people that if you're going to, if your main goal is getting more followers and more clicks, then, you know, you have to reevaluate what your priorities are. And I worry about the activist community as well, which is activists sometimes don't want to win. They don't actually want to win the argument. And that should concern us because at least politically speaking, my goal is to win the argument and to win the argument. I have to actually persuade people.

And like that, that should be the goal. Those lengthier conversations. Again, it's why these kinds of podcasts are so prevalent. Why I do my own podcast, because I want to dive deep into some of these issues on a substantive level. Well, I do appreciate your reasonable and balanced perspective because

you are one of the rare guys that's on the right that does criticize the right and you do it fairly and objectively, which I think is very important in this day and age. I'm on the left, but I find myself more and more getting confused, like a man without a country, or a man without a side, rather, without a team. There's so many people on the left now that want to silence people. Freedom of speech was always a core tenet of what this country is based on,

the ability to express yourself. But there's so many people that want people de-platformed for having views that they disagree with or ideas that they disagree with and this is an enormous problem obviously in social media well bringing it back to coronavirus there there was there was certain messages that were being taken down by Twitter. If they were, and I think these, the type of messages or articles that were being promoted along the lines of, hey, there's too much economic cost, we need to reopen the economy and get people back to work. If it was things like that, Twitter was taking them down. I don't know if they're still doing that, but I heard reports of it.

They're still doing that, but I heard reports of it. And on a broader scale, yeah, the attack against freedom of speech is by far one of the most concerning elements. That concerns, I think, classical liberals. And if that's how you would describe yourself, I don't know. To all of us in the political world, Joe Rogan's political leanings are like the great mystery. And frankly, we kind of like it that way. It makes you, it keeps you out of the fray it's more of a mystery now because i said that i wouldn't vote for biden that that i said i would vote for trump over biden all these people went crazy but let me let me be clear you know what i'd also vote for whoopi goldberg over joe biden

i'd vote for mike tyson over joe biden i just don't think it's a good idea to take someone who's struggling with dementia and put him in one of the most stressful positions the world has ever known. That's what I'm saying. It's not an endorsement of Trump. It is me saying, you shouldn't have a man who's clearly,

clearly in the throes of dementia. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but when you can't form sentences in public and you forget what you're talking about and you wander off into these conversations, if you're not smoking pot, you're not high, if you're not on pills, like what's going on? Well, there's cognitive decline. He's an older man that has mental issues. And, you know, not to be cruel to him he's he's suffering medically this is a real issue and the democrats want to sweep that under the rug and trump is already chewing him apart he's already dismissing him i mean there is a recent thing that kyle kolinsky posted a

video on his twitter talking about this is what happens when you don't discuss the elephant in the room and it's trump saying he, he used to do a press conference, and they asked him a question about something that Biden wrote. He goes, Biden didn't write that. He's like, that's a Democratic operative. He didn't read it. He probably doesn't even know what's going on right now. And he's going to continue to do that.

And it's such a vulnerable point. And I don't know why the Democrats thought it would be a good idea to take someone who's clearly got a problem. I mean, I don't want to be mean to the guy, but we've all seen it. That's not normal. It's not normal to forget, like, when he's talking about the creator, and he literally loses what he's saying. He's like, the you know the thing like the misquoted the declaration of independence twice now i mean that's a very simple document i don't understand well there's a bunch of those things like when he was talking about the cure

and losing what he's saying that you have to take care of the cure and he he's he's struggling the guy's struggling he's tired this is an extremely stressful process to run for president and the idea that he's going to be able to get through this and be okay on the other side to run the country for four potentially eight years is crazy yeah and and on a more from a policy perspective if we're looking at the coronavirus in particular and the handling of it you know this is and the handling of it, you know, this is obviously the subject of hot debate. You know, there's plenty of bad faith journalists out there who continue, and politicians, including Pelosi, who continue to repeat that Trump has

the deaths of thousands on his hands. I think that's a horrible, horrible overstatement. I mean, to say the least, it's just fundamentally not true. But we need to remember, Joe Biden just recently acknowledged that he now agrees with Trump's decision to close down travel from China in January. And I go through a long, I recorded a podcast. I almost have as many subscribers as you do now, I'm sure. No, I don't. Where I go through a timeline of what actually happened. Right. Like, let's let's actually look into this debate in an objective way of who knew what and when. Because you can criticize people for sure, because hindsight's 20-20. But it's important to put yourself in the moment and what we all knew at certain times, certain decisions were made.

And I have to point out that back when we did this travel restriction from China in late January, at that same time, the World Health Organization was saying that, was repeating Chinese claims in mid-January that this virus couldn't even be transmitted in human-to-human contact. And Trump was ripped apart for that. Biden ripped him apart for that. Biden continued to rip him apart for that up until a couple of weeks ago. So these decisions saved countless lives. And it's pretty obvious that Biden, I mean, he said it, so of course it's obvious that he would have made a different decision. And we would be in a much different place right now. And to put aside all of the issues that you pointed out, those are certainly issues. And i don't i don't need to repeat them i don't need to go into it but it's um well i feel like we do need to repeat them it is obvious but that's crazy that this is the guy that's running for president you know and and then when people got upset at saying that you know me saying that i would vote i'd probably vote for trump before i'd vote for biden i'm literally saying I'd vote for anybody that can talk. I mean, anyone who's not in severe cognitive decline. I mean, pick a person. Shit, I'd vote for Hillary before I'd vote

for him. Literally. I mean, I just think the poor guy shouldn't be in the position he's in. I don't understand why they're doing that. I mean, anyone else could have been Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg. Pick a person. They all would have been a better choice. I mean, anyone else could have been Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, pick a person, they all would have been a better choice. I mean, this is crazy. And I don't know what their strategy is. I don't know why they decided to do this. It makes no sense to me. It's very, very confusing. Yeah, well, there was a, there was a couple days where it all happened, where, you know, behind the scenes, all of these different candidates basically basically said, OK, we're all going to quit because we they're so afraid of Bernie winning. They don't think Bernie can win the Democrat nominee or to win the general election.

I tend to agree with that. And I'm I'm very much against Bernie winning the general election. But that's not the point. The point is point is that the DNC didn't want that, and they made moves to make that happen. And the Democratic Party as a whole is trying to find out who they are. You know, I look back in time, and the Democratic Party to me seems more like a labor party and that changed over time into a highly progressive activist party where the labor side of that is is really just an afterthought um and and and it has really become this sort of well a democratic socialist party when do you think that happened? Very recently.

Because I wouldn't even describe President Obama as, I mean, he definitely paved the way for it. He's definitely way more progressive than Clinton. But it appears to me that it happened very recently. I'm not curious how this happened. I think the kind of language that is often used by a lot of well-meaning Democrats over time in this sort of Labor Party era, let's call it the Bill Clinton era and before that, the language they used was still rather radical and revolutionary and kind of coming up from the children of the 60s and that kind of revolutionary feel um this this idea that a progressive utopia can solve more and more of your problems uh if you just expand government control that we put enough experts at the top we can figure all this out and we can make your problems go away i think for a long time though they had the republican party to always just be against that and and say hold on wait a second there's there's there's other consequences to doing that and it was almost like there was

this sort of um this sort of unspoken balance the thing and i'm not even sure that they believed it themselves but over time their young people did believe it and so now you have aoc who i think truly believes these things he truly believes in the virtues of socialism. I think Bernie believes in the virtues of socialism. I think he's dead wrong on this, but he believes it. And I think a new generation of progressives are true believers in a way that I'm not so sure they were before. And they're much louder because of their platforms on social media. And they're able to change the direction of their party in a much more powerful way than i think they they had been able to in the past and we see that in congress um to an extraordinary degree where where somebody like me now views pelosi as sort of in the middle between moderates and extremists uh and and you

know 10 years ago we would have we would have described Nancy Pelosi as an extremist. But now I view her as sort of center left and the extremists are even to her left. And she's deeply afraid of those those that that progressive squad because of their power on social media and media in general. So it's an interesting battle. Do you think that this shift is because it seems like nothing works perfectly and this hasn't really been tried or implemented on a large scale in the United States, democratic socialism. They don't think of it as socialism the way Bernie describes it. When you talk to him in person, it sounds very reasonable. It sounds like he's looking out for the rights of the workers and the way he described finding this money, just taking a small tax on speculation, gambles that Wall Street does. Do you think it's because nothing has worked ideally and that this hasn't been tried before?

So they look at this as this could be the solution that solves all this for us and sort of balances out the economic playing field. Yeah. Well, I mean, I would, of course, if he was making that argument, and he does, I would simply say, of course, it's been tried before. That's the same kind of rhetoric that was used to move into the socialist policies of the 20th century, where tens of millions of people died. And I would also put it into this other way of thinking about it yeah you can you can put forward these these seemingly innocuous ideas okay we're gonna tax a little bit here and on that specific policy by the way that that's not what people think it is you tax a little bit there um that has wide-ranging effects on every single transaction that you would

make in the stock market i think this is the war, and I think Bernie Sanders has the same policy that you're describing. But I remember analyzing Elizabeth Warren's policy, which is, again, the same. It would have drastic effects on everybody's 401ks, on pensions. And these are working class people that own these things. This isn't just the wealthy that they describe it as. So on one hand, there's always a lot more, there's a lot more layers to the policy that they put out than they're really letting on. And there's a lot more second, third order consequences than they're letting on. On the other hand, as far as it not being tried, what they're describing is a fast path to the nationalization of production, owning the means of production, setting price controls. And they talk about setting price controls.

Okay, setting wages is price controls. Setting prices is price controls. I mean, we passed a bill out of the House, H.R. 3, which they claim lowers people's drug prices. And these evil Republicans like us, we're all against it because we just don't want claim lowers people's drug prices. And these evil Republicans like us, we're all against it because we just don't want people to have low drug prices. Of course, that's not true. The reality is that when you analyze what it means to implement price controls, you lose supply. That's just economics 101. That has to be true. It always is true. That's why people starved in Maoist China and the Soviet Union, because they put price controls on food and they did production quotas.

And they believed, they truly believed that the government could figure out how much to produce and what price to sell it at and that they would be a perfect utopia after that. Well, of course, it doesn't work even for something as simple as farming and food production. It doesn't work at all. doesn't work, even for something as simple as farming and food production. It doesn't work at all. People starved as a result. And so it's even more unlikely that it would work for more complicated parts of the economy, like wages and drug prices, because the reality is, and the Congressional Budget Office confirmed this, many other studies confirmed this, we would have up to 30 less new drugs over the next couple decades if you implement that kind of legislation. And so they forget to tell you that you're actually making a choice between these price controls and actually having the cure in the first place.

And what I tell people is affordability is definitely important and we should continue to tackle that problem. And there are ways to do that. But the thing has to exist before you can afford it. It has to actually exist. Can I pause you for a second there how how do you implement that without making putting a cap on the amount that a drug can cost i mean how do you make it more affordable well so like well there's other bills that we're in

favor of that do that so one way is is improve the way that generic drugs get to market. So just like any innovation, there's a patent on it. But once that patent ends, what happens is some pharmaceutical companies do take advantage of the system. Maybe they continue to put out different drugs that are slightly different than the last one. It extends their patent, or they'll actually pay off generic manufacturers to not produce it. So there's a lot of these little loopholes that we can actually tackle surgically and make sure that doesn't happen. We also have to remember a lot of these stories are anecdotal. They are about a few different drugs.

They are about a few different drugs. And instead of wide price controls on everything that a pharmaceutical company actually creates, we should be looking at some of these life-saving drugs that we want people to have, but we also don't want to destroy the foundation of innovation and research and development that it took to make that drug in the first place. And so how do we do that? Well, I mean, there's ways. There's ways to reinsure it at a certain cap. When insurance companies don't want to pay the exorbitant amounts that it would cost, you know, there's other options for reinsurance.

But you have to tackle it one at a time. There's more complicated ways to do it with the way that pharmacy companies do rebates with the insurance companies. That gets into a really complicated discussion. But there's ways to do that, for instance, for insulin. That was a Republican bill that we tried to pass in E&C that got shot down. But it would have driven down prices for something like insulin. Was there anything else attached to that? I mean, why did it get shot down? $15. We'll just make it that way. And everything will be fine. There'll be no consequences to that, no second and third order effects. But there are second and third order effects. And when we ignore those second and third order effects, we ignore them at our peril. And in the case of the $15

minimum wage, well, you can't ignore the fact that companies are just going to hire less people. You know, their budget doesn't change just because you change the minimum wage. With respect to drug innovation, they just won't invest in something. And it takes billions and billions of dollars to invest in these drugs for the massive amounts of costs that it takes to do the clinical trials that take years. I can't remember the average on top of my head, but it's enormous and an enormous amount of time. And so you're not going to get somebody to take that risk if there's not any payoff at the end. And I think that's what we forget. We have to balance that quite a bit. I would also remind everybody of this with respect to the drug price discussion.

That bill, that H.R. 3 bill, it won't become law because the Senate won't take it up and the president won't sign it. But if it did, it wouldn't hurt big pharma. I think Democrats would like to believe that it would hurt big pharmaceutical companies. It wouldn't. It would put all of the smaller startup biotech companies totally out of business because they're the ones who actually they start that innovation. Just just just like happens in Silicon Valley. These startups start it and then they get bought out by the bigger companies. That's sort of how the system works.

And it's a very dynamic system. It's why we are by far the number one innovator in the world. No other country innovates like we do. They don't do the research like we do. If we implemented the price controls that are inherent in Medicare for All or HR3, there wouldn't be anybody else in the world doing what we do. hr3 there wouldn't be anybody else in the world doing what we do um i can i can relate that back to the coronavirus discussion too on because there's the there's like a there's a big discussion about you know should we have medicare for all doesn't coronavirus uh prove that everybody should have uh free health care and again what i what i have to remind everybody is that if we had Medicare for all, what we're basically talking about are price controls because Medicare already pays below average payment for anything, for whatever service, for whatever doctor visit.

It's about 60%, 70% on the dollar. Can I stop you right there? Medicare is available for who right now? Seniors. Medicare is a senior who right now? Seniors. Medicare is a senior program. So what age does it kick in? Is it 65? I believe so.

Yeah, I don't want to confuse it with Social Security. So the idea is that for older folks, we should give them health care and make sure that their basic needs are covered in terms of sickness, illness, injury, and such? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the entire, you know, we could argue that we could even debate the merits of Medicare on its face. But Medicare for all would be available for everybody now if medicare for for all was available for everybody what you're saying is it was essentially you you would fix prices on on everything in terms of medical treatments and and that would be a problem because of what well so okay so once you fight once you fix prices um well imagine this imagine if if if the government said that your podcast could only take $100 per ad, and that was just the price fix from now on. What incentive would you have to really expand your audience? What incentive would you have to keep going or expand the business? You wouldn't be able to. It's similar under any industry. Once you fix that price, you're going to reduce the supply that goes into it.

Can I stop you on that analogy? Here's the problem with that. The difference is, there would have to be a reason why they would say that I could only get $100 per ad. The reason why you would say that things shouldn't cost too much for someone who's injured or sick is because we want to take care of each other as a community. And the idea is that health care should be something that we provide so many services to people that we are united, right? We're the United States of America. We're supposed to be a gigantic community. And one of the great things that we could do for each other is to make sure that if someone's sick or injured and something's wrong, that we can take care of that. We would like everybody to do their share,

and we would like everybody to chip in so that this is possible. But there's a big difference between that and fixing the price on an ad. Well, no, but economically there's no difference. Morally there is, and I agree with you morally. We have the same goal of getting everybody adequate care. Right. But from an economic standpoint but from an economic standpoint my my point still stands and you can apply that to any industry i see what you're saying but i think we're looking at medical care as a basic human right instead of just an economic

issue the reason i don't describe it as a it's not in your right it is both a moral and an economic issue but for for my argument that you will reduce supply, that is fundamentally true. It is fundamentally true. We see it in other countries. It's why, as we compare ourselves to other countries right now, all these places with socialized medicine, it's important to look at some stats. And actually, I have them here. I could take the time to pick them up.

But I'll give you the bottom line up front. pick them up, but I'll give you the bottom line up front. We have overwhelmingly per capita more ICU beds in this country than any other Western country. Overwhelmingly per capita, we have more ventilators than any of these other people. We're all freaking out right now because we're worried about our ventilators and our ICU beds. On a per capita basis, system has way way more than the uk than italy than spain than germany all of them like like orders of magnitude more okay so okay also we're the ones who innovate i mean the vast majority of research and development new drugs that come out that comes from this country so these are these are facts that we can't escape if we do price controls and medicare for all is fundamentally a system of price controls. If we do that, economically speaking, we absolutely will reduce supply.

do that in a way that doesn't undercut the foundations of the good parts of our healthcare system, which is quality and innovation. If we undercut those things, we're the last country doing this. We're the last country in the world truly doing innovation. The world is left out to dry. Can I pause you there? What you're saying makes a lot of sense. Is there a way to do both? Is there a way to provide healthcare to everyone, but also encourage this innovation, encourage profit? So you encourage these companies to do all these great things that you're describing and maintain this incredibly high level of health care that we have right now. That's certainly the goal, right?

And that should be the goal. And this is why I think there's got to be room for compromise on the health care debate, because you can't compromise with the other party if the goals aren't the same. Like, I've come to believe that our goals on immigration are actually not the same. So it's hard to compromise on health care. They should be the same, because we want everybody to have access to quality health care. Now, they have a very different way of getting to that point. We have probably a much more complicated.

We recognize how difficult it is to get to that point, while also ensuring that we maintain quality and innovation. And so what I'm working on personally is the primary care side of things. Okay, so primary care doctor, that's your first point of contact in healthcare. And the system that I think works best for that is direct primary care. So direct primary care basically means that you, Joe, you're a doctor. You can handle about 250, 300 patients at a time. They all pay you a subscription fee of about $75 a month, and they have full access to you. So it's like less than a cell phone bill.

This already exists. This model is prevalent. It's growing. I would like to see it grow much faster. Okay, how do you do that? Well, we can't subsidize lower income people in order to do that. Now, how we do that is very complicated. That's what I'm working out within our complicated system. But that's an idea to make that free market model actually take off so that people who don't need help with their healthcare costs, like you and me me we can still afford that just like we afford any other monthly cost and you have access

to preventive medicine you have access to telemedicine you actually have a doctor patient relationship that makes it a lot easier to start solving the rest of the problem making our insurance market more competitive making putting more choice in it, directly subsidizing those who need it, but in a way that looks a lot more like Medicare Advantage. So Medicare Advantage is a part of Medicare that basically forces competition and choice between insurance companies. It came out to be a lot cheaper than we originally thought it would in the early 2000s when this thing was created. This was a Republican plan because there's certain foundations that I think we have to adhere to

anytime we want to problem solve choice and competition are among them you you can't escape those things and i think when we talk about medicare for all it it tries to it tries to move past these essential foundations of whether of a free society that we have to adhere to and and because the, the, the other thing I, I pushed back on a little bit is, is the healthcare is a right statement.

And I pushed back against that because what that, when you're calling something a right, what you're effectively saying is that somebody else has a obligation to serve you. And it's hard to call something a right when that right requires the service of somebody else. Don't we already do that with the firemen? Don't we do that with the police department? Don't we do that with public schools? Not exactly. No. I mean, we have public services that I would distinguish those public services from something like a direct

point of care. And i would distinguish them to an enormous extent like and here's why you can add a few hundred thousand more people to a you know to to the nation's population and it doesn't change the mission of the military right like it doesn't it doesn't take anything away from them but these but because of the sort of non-rival um this is like an economics term but the sort of non-rival attribute of these things it is different right because there's only select number of doctors and we've already said that once you put price controls in there's going to be less doctors because doctors will be paid less they'll get burned out more um they'll then hospitals will be able to i actually never finished that point um the reason price controls reduce supply and the reason we see supply

reductions in other countries is because well hospitals don't get the same amount of money they're not going to invest in that extra icu bed they're not going to buy those extra ventilators they're not going to hire those other doctors a doctor doesn't want to be a doctor because they don't make the amount of money that they thought they would make. They're doing extra work because there's more people who now have access to them, but there's less of them. So weight lines are huge, and they're seeing multiple more patients a day. Doctor burnout increases quite a bit. That's the quick answer as to why that happens. But does that kind of answer your question?

That does. Yeah, the human right issue. We kind of moved around with that. The idea that it's different than the fire department or the police department. Well, it's not a right either, actually. The fire department's not necessarily a right as we would. But it's a public service that's provided to everyone. It is, but understand, so let's call it a public service then, and let's call doctor

healthcare a public service as well, if we were to do Medicare for all. But wouldn't the result be the same if it's provided for everyone? Not from a practical standpoint, just because it's much easier. Again, you could add 100,000 people more to your city, and the fire department would have marginally more work to do, compared to a doctor, for instance. Does that make sense? I think if we're trying to compare them in that sense, that non-rival attribute matters quite a bit, if I'm describing that correctly. So what you're saying is because competition is necessary with medical innovation, and also doctors profit off of being exceptional.

So they have incentive to be exceptional. No, no. What I'm saying is if you have 10 doctors that are serving a community, every time that doctor is serving somebody, it means somebody else can't see them well isn't that just a signal that we need more doctors and more hospitals they're understaffed uh it would be yes but i'm saying that's how it's different from a fire department which is sort of lying in wait for a fire to occur well if there was more fires yeah but which is unlikely most of the time i'm just i'm trying i'm trying to distinguish why those why those aren't very comparable things like what why one is more of a public service that

that we see to work while while the other wouldn't necessarily be and for and and you kind of just said it yourself it would be a signal for there to be more doctors, which is why the free market price points are so important, because the only way to signal that is to actually, that demand raises prices. When the government tries to do that, now there's this theory as a socialist that that they would say the government can just figure that out um i i would say that they've tried that in the past it never works it never it just it never ever works the government can't possibly be so omniscient as to know every single price signal and and anticipate every single piece of demand and production that is therefore required and so you know it's not just health care that this is a problem. It's every aspect of society.

So if I can go back to what you were saying earlier, so what you're essentially saying about socialism, that socialism looks at this problem and says, hey, let's make the government take care of everything. Let's take money from the wealthy people and pour it into the government, that the government will then have resources to take care of these issues and you you're just looking at the first step of the problem you're not looking at the secondary or tertiary instances or things that are going to go sideways once you do implement that first step is that what you're saying it's 100 what i'm saying i i would i would add the social leaves out some very important things like like human nature, for instance, and this notion that we need incentives. There's this utopian belief amongst the hardcore socialists that humans will act in this kind of philanthropic manner no matter what.

Like we're going to do the most amount of work even if that reward is overwhelmingly taken away from us and redistributed. But of course that's not how it would actually function in reality. Yeah, I agree. It just wouldn't right and so you're now maybe for a few people a few altruistic people would be the ones you know doing all the work while everybody else is like pretending to work which is what happened in the soviet union you pretend to pay us we'll pretend to work right like that that was the saying from the soviet union that's i think we intuitively understand that and and when that happened again the same thing with medicare for all if if you, if you have price

controls, your incentives change. And if we're not really serious about understanding that aspect of these policies, then we're not thinking through them correctly. And I understand a lot of Democrats would say, well, it's Medicare for all, it's not socialism. And I'm like, yeah, but it has very socialistic tendencies. and it has these qualities that i've described of not taking into account the second third order effects of removing human incentive of of of forcing somebody's services and because you're calling it a right which means that you now have a right to somebody else's services like these are these are things that have been proven not to work. And I think we have to

understand that as we try to move towards the mutual goal of getting everybody access to healthcare. Well, it doesn't work with everything, but doesn't that work with the fire department? Isn't the fire department in a lot of ways a socialist institution? No, no. Again, I still say it is not because it is not under any obligation to serve everybody um that that demands its service right it's there for specific emergency service as a as a public good but it's there for fire if there's a fire they they come in and help you there's not a financial incentive for them to do so right but i mean but but on a practical level on a practical level though imagine the scaling that has to occur if you're if you're

doing that with medic with medical care and i and i think that's and i think that's the difference both from an economic point and a practical standpoint so we're talking about over what you're talking about socialism overall, not just overall, not just involving medicine. You're talking about socialism in general, and I'm saying, isn't the fire department an example of socialism that works? Well, it's definitely not an example of socialism. I think it's an example of a public good, the way the military is an example of a public

good, the way the highways are examples of public goods, the way parks are examples of public goods. Right, but they're funded by the people. It's funded by people overall. It doesn't cost people money to use them, and the people have these as a basic part of our society and our civilization. No, I understand that, and I have no problem with that. I just would not call them socialists. Well, what would you call the fire department?

How does it get funded? It's a public good. How does it get funded? It's a public good. It's funded by the public. Right. But it's not relying on the tenets of socialism to function. And so now we're kind of having a discussion of definitions, and this is an important discussion to have because oftentimes even democrats aren't really talking about socialism well even during

bernie sanders doesn't call it socialism he's talking about democratic socialism and he makes some very clear distinctions between the two of them which i think you could apply to things like the fire department or the police department yeah um there's a lot in that so i i think bernie yes he does say democratic socialism i think he does mean much something much much closer to socialism and that's just me gleaning from his policies um because he does talk about putting you know government control on corporate boards elizabeth warren talked about the same things now we really are talking about nationalizing things um when you're talking about mass price controls across all industries and wage controls, you really are talking about more of an actual socialism. Again, going back to whether a fire

department or a park or a public highway or the military is a socialist institution, again, I would really push back against that. That is a public good. In our culture, in our economics, we've never defined these things as socialist institutions. A socialist institution effectively means you're seizing the means of production and you're forcing everybody into a centralized planning state. um you're you're you're telling people what they will earn and and what you will pay them how much they can sell you know you start to take more control over the economy a lot of the policies set out by bernie sanders are movements in that direction uh the fire department is is really not that again that is that is a public service it has a defined you know it has a defined budget it has a defined role um it doesn't it doesn't meet any of those other attributes or elements that i that i describe when i describe what a socialist is and so this gets into another question like what will what maybe bernie just means the nordic countries right and you know i remember the foreign minister from denmark came to harvard i think he gave a

speech this was a few years ago and he he said, stop calling us socialists. We're not socialists. We're probably, and I would agree with him, all these Nordic countries have, frankly, more of a free market than we do in many ways. When we look at their regulatory standards, they're quite liberal. When we look at their corporate tax rates, it's very low. They don't have a minimum wage in many cases. And so, you know, they're not socialist countries. What they do have is a very generous welfare state. And that's different. And even that is different than

socialism. It's a giant welfare state. Now, I'm still against that in many ways. I think there's consequences to that giant welfare state that they now have to suffer with as a result. And if you've noticed, too, that they actually used to be very socialist countries, but their economies crashed as a result. And over time, they became much more free market. We see the same thing out of Israel. We see the same thing out of India. It used to be much more deeply socialist countries. A lot of them have just maintained their big welfare states, which they are having trouble paying for, just like we're having trouble paying for our big welfare state, which is mostly based in Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. good, right? This is what you feel that the fire department is. It's a public good, right? Do you think that it's possible to implement something like that in regards to

medical care? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so this is a discussion. If we get our definition straight, we're just saying, okay, we just want another public good, and it's medical care. So it's a more accurate way of describing it. I think people don't care what it's called, right? We just want healthcare. Right, but then we get back to the discussion we had before okay what if we

did that well there's a cost to it and it's a hell of a lot more than the fire department and police department um the cost by by most estimates is in the mid 30 something trillion dollars that's a cost on for over 10 years. So about about three and a half trillion per year. So that's basically doubling our budget just every year. That's in addition to what we already spend. Okay, so that's additional federal spending. Some some some people try to massage those numbers and say, Oh, but but that's actually cheaper than what we have now. If you add it all together, that is false. That is that is completely false. Again, I have a whole podcast where I actually interviewed the guy who made that study. The economist who did that study. And that's not

a controversial study. Everybody basically agrees Elizabeth Warren's plan was 50 something trillion dollars. That's adding what we already spend to the new spending that would have to occur. So what does that mean in practice? It means doubling or tripling your taxes, unless we try to deficit spend it, which I think would be crazy. So it means doubling or tripling your taxes. And so then the question is, okay, fine, well, I do want to double or triple my taxes. I mean, some people will say that. I don't actually believe them. I bet once they got their taxes, they would totally change their mind. But let's say they're totally into it, okay? Let's say they actually want to do that. Then you have the second and third order consequences, which is, okay, what are you getting for this? What is what is this new utopia that we really live in where

healthcare is free? And then I go back to, okay, in order to meet that price point of the three and a half trillion a year, that's, that's, by the way, assuming that we continue using Medicare prices, which is what all the plans do assume, by the way. So if we're doing that, we're drastically cutting prices that we pay doctors and hospitals. If we do that, we drastically cut our supply of doctors and hospitals, and we cut off and choke off the innovative capacity that we do have. So we're losing those quality points. Again, so how do you get people care? Well, the main problem we have with health care in this country is that it costs too much. That's fundamentally the problem.

It is too costly. And so from the Republican side, what we'd rather do is actually target the source of the problem, make it easier to get insurance. Because right now, I mean, it's for so many Americans, that insurance is just too expensive. If you have it through your employer, it's usually pretty good. People are pretty happy with that. But for the most part, it's too expensive, which is why I go back to my direct primary care idea. Because once you solve the primary care issue issue you make solving insurance much easier you can talk then you can still protect people for existing conditions uh we like things like either high

risk pools at the state level or reinsurance programs uh you you can make this uh you you can continue to make improvements to the system that make it affordable for people and give people access that they need. Well, also better to that. Sorry, broke up there for a second. This whole connection of doing things remotely sucks.

What did you, can you say that last statement statement again, just the last few words that you said? Um, I, I, I, well,

you were talking about insurance. Here's my question about the whole thing like insurance still has to pay for it then it's you're still paying someone's still paying for all this health care if the insurance companies aren't making any profit because they're paying for all the health care then what happens then do we fund the insurance companies i mean how does all this stuff get evened out are you referring to cases where you know the cost of somebody's care is so astronomically expensive that even the insurance company can't afford it well look here's the problem right people can't afford health care so we get them insurance insurance

takes care of health care how does the insurance companies make any money then well i mean they make a profit just like just like anybody else but but they're also they're they're also what we've found is especially with our experiments with medicare advantages when you pit insurance companies against each other in a in a free market um they lower costs you know they they are a natural there's different there's different elements of the health care system um on one side is driving up costs, you know, because a doctor wants to keep doing more tests or whatever it is, or a patient wants to do more things. The insurance company's job is to say, hold on a second. Why are you doing this?

What is the reason for this? What's the outcome that we expect from this? So that naturally drives, that's a natural, you know, bulwark against higher costs. The government would, in a Medicare for all scheme, the government would simply replace that insurance company. We should be very careful when assuming that the government will somehow be better at that than insurance companies. I'm not saying insurance companies are great at all. Everybody doesn't seem to like them. But I also don't want the government doing it. I don't want to be in a case like in Great Britain where the government will say, you know what? Your granddad's not on the ventilator anymore.

We're done with that. Or your baby can't get that care. I mean, we've all seen these stories. And we don't have that issue in America. But can I pause you? Don't we have a problem with insurance companies not want to pay for certain things? They might, but the care still happens. The hospital has to eat that care a lot, and there's different funding mechanisms that reimburse them.

I'm not defending our health care system. I want to be clear about that. It's definitely not perfect. It's a huge patchwork. But no, that's not the way it happens over there. Because over there, like in Great Britain, if you actually nationalize the health that not the way it happens over there because over there like in great britain if you actually nationalize the health care system the way they do it's when they say you're not going to be on the ventilator anymore there's no choice like that's that that is that is the decision and then that's what they have to deal with and so it's it is different but don't they have some private health care over there as well?

I think they might have elements of it. Same with Canada, but not for basic care. Like I said, for other kinds of health care that aren't necessarily... Surgeries. Yeah, like elective stuff. Orthopedic surgeries. Yeah, and I'd have to really get some details for you on what each country does, but it's limited. They limit what they can actually do. I don't want to get bogged down too much in socialism but one of the things

that you said you said socialism has been implemented before but it's never really been implemented here right thank god but this is but this is what i was saying before that i think that when people look at it as an attractive notion one of the things that attracts them to it is that our system doesn't work that great. And that maybe this would be a system that does serve people. And there's a bunch of buzzwords that people use, you know, wealth disparity, economically disadvantaged, you know, the working class, all these different. These are words that they use that this is maybe socialism would benefit those people people and there's more of them than there are the elite. What do you say to that? I would say that there has been times in this country where we had astronomical tax rates and higher government control on some things.

And we ended up with skyrocketing inflation and uh downward growth so i'm talking about the 70s and the when reagan came to power we reversed a lot of that and we've been in a pretty good good trend ever since i i i know that what i know what people are saying and you repeated it which is our system doesn't work well i Well, I actually want to push back against the premise that our system doesn't work. The evidence for that is not great. I mean, I think there's a lot more evidence to suggest that we live in the best time in history, in modern times. It's hard to argue otherwise. I would agree. There are certain, I mean, there are certain problems that people point to, especially millennials, my people my age.

Housing is more expensive. Our purchasing power isn't as good with, say, things like housing and health care. These are true statements. It also depends on where you live. The problem, Joe, is people are identifying issues. They're not putting them into context and perspective. But even if they're right about the issues, like, hey, our purchasing power is lower with respect to housing and health care, two very important things. People are misunderstanding why that is.

People forgot to ask the question, why is it that I can't afford this? People are instead jumping to a solution that is frankly very shallow and simple, which is make housing cheaper, make healthcare cheaper. How? Write a law, say it's cheaper. Well, no, that's not how it works. We can't just do that. We have to first ask the question, like, why did this happen? So in California, let's talk about housing for a second. California and Texas don't have the same problems. And housing in Texas is much easier to come by than it is in California. Why is that? Well, as it turns out, we don't have zoning here in Houston. You can build where you want to build. It's a much easier, I talked to developers who develop here and develop sometimes in California. It's like four times more expensive to develop because of all the

regulations in California, which means the housing itself is going to be more expensive. in California, which means the housing itself is going to be more expensive. So what is it? Government, too much government control, frankly. In San Francisco, you can't build anything else. They don't allow building high rises full of apartment buildings. So it's no surprise that supply is too constricted and prices have to go up for the intense amount of demand that's out there. We don't have those same problems in Texas. Okay. So again, it's like, why is this happening? there. We don't have those same problems in Texas. Okay. So again, it's like, why is this happening? Same with healthcare. Healthcare is not a free market. Hasn't been, um, and basically forever and prices have gone up as a result. Now healthcare is a lot more complicated than housing. And we've spent a lot of time talking about it already, but we really have to ask ourselves why something is,

is so expensive, what we're getting from that. And and then and then we intelligently look at what are the solutions to to solve it california is a mess in a lot of ways there's a lot of problems but you really feel like the the reason why san francisco's housing i mean it's gone up radically with the tech boom i mean i think a lot of it is supply and demand. A lot of it is just people. Yeah, that's what I mean. But it's also people that just have ridiculous amounts of money. And so the wealth in San Francisco is so off the charts that people are willing to buy a stupid house for $3 million that really should be $300,000 in taxes. Yeah, no, I agree with you. It is a supply and demand issue, and the supply hasn't caught up with the demand that that's not that's what i'm saying is like the the government won't allow more supply

to be built well they're trying not to ruin the city too though yeah and that's fair like that but that but that's a and that's totally fair and and as a as a city people in san francisco might just decide we don't want anybody else living here and we don't want to build anything else. But what's weird is they have no problem with homeless people. I mean, the homeless people. When was the last time you've been to San Francisco? It's been a while, but I have been there quite a number of times. And I was going to say, I spent 10 years in San Diego.

San Diego doesn't have these problems. Well, it's a far more conservative place. And they let big buildings get built. I used to live in downtown San Diego. And when I was there, it was one way. And now there's like 15 more high-rises. And the rent has basically stayed the same, which is good for renters. It's bad for owners and developers.

basically stay the same so which is good for renters it's bad for owners and developers but you know but the irony is like the populist kind of left and right like are really mad at the owners and developers the owners of capital right like kind of marxist screaming and yelling is all about but the irony is that the policies they want to implement help those people and if we let more deregulation occur you're helping the renters whose rent hasn't changed in years and i know this like i follow the market in san diego very carefully um because we still have property there and so i rent out to people i haven't been able to i have not changed the rent in years years and that's because of upward supply and so again so i guess my you're completely right it's a supply demand issue in san francisco i the thing is it's like you have to choose one or the

other if you want prices to go down you have to allow more supply if you're comfortable with prices the way they are and you don't want more people moving into san francisco well then fine but you have to be comfortable with the prices the way they are and then deal with the homeless population on top of the homeless population's insane i mean you've never seen anything like it los angeles as well go to downtown la and drive around and it doesn't even seem like it's real it does it seems like it's a movie it's it's it's really sad um and there's no solution there's no solution that's on the table there's nothing that anybody's like said that okay this is what we're going to do and this is our 10-year plan and we're going okay, this is what we're going to do, and this is our 10-year plan, and we're going to clean this up, and we're going to do X, Y, and Z, and we're going to take care of this. Because there didn't

used to be 70,000 homeless people in the city, and there is now. So obviously, something went wrong, and over a period of 10 years, 70 million people, or 70,000 people, and how many... I'm throwing out a bunch of numbers here that don't make sense. How many million people live in LA? It's like 20 million people, and there's 70,000 homeless. And how many, I'm throwing out a bunch of numbers here that don't make sense. How many million people live in LA? It's like 20 million people. And there's 70,000 homeless people, right? Isn't it something like that?

That is a crazy number. 70,000 is a, it's a good size town. It is. And I wouldn't say there's no solutions. Although there's no solutions being proposed in California. I mean, you're correct about that.

They should propose solutions and they could look to houston um for some ideas but what have they done well we we took it seriously um one one thing we do is a housing first type of policy so you you offer services but after you've gotten them somewhere and maybe that place is a warehouse but you actually you also have to have a forcing function. So there's also a degree of allowing this, what is basically a crime to take place in California. Whereas in Texas, we don't allow it. We're saying, no, you can't do that. You can't just camp on the street.

Yeah. Right. So that's the first thing. You have to actually make it illegal. But then put systems in place to actually help them. But it but it does have to go in that order in in California. Their main problem is that they they allow it. And in Austin, we have this problem because Austin is a very liberal city.

And so their instinct was to do the same thing that they're doing in San Francisco and L.A. The governor stepped in and said, OK, you know what? No, we're're actually just going to solve this we're going to put everybody somewhere else we're going to take them away from you know because people are camping out right outside businesses right and so we took them out and but but made sure that there was some kind of access to hygiene to porta potties and then and then access to you know social services that get you know get people back on their feet there's also a good private like there's a real um like non-profit sector in houston that works together very well with the city um over time a lot of private investors i mean i went toward this like this shelter it's mostly they try to maintain it mostly for families but this shelter what looks i man you go into this thing it looks like a like a

new college campus how nice it is and this is 95 privately funded they take some hud money to to fund some of their more longer term like apartments that they have there for people but this is how people get access to new job training you know and so this has to be a public private relationship and you have to have some leadership that says we're just gonna we're actually gonna try and solve this problem is there anything on the table like that for california i don't know man i'm a i'm a texas guy i there should be i i don't know i don't i don't i i could guess but i i'd be speaking out of turn i really i don't know what I could guess, but I'd be speaking out of turn. I don't know what the deal is. I just know you guys are sheltered in place. It's growing like barnacles here. It's really strange. I mean, I've been here since 94, and I've never seen anything like the current situation. And like you said, it's a crime they're allowing to take place. You can't litter. So how come you could just leave your shit under the underpass i mean you can't walk under

underpasses in a lot of los angeles and i mean i'm not exaggerating there's needles and cans and garbage and cardboard and tents and bikes it's nuts i mean it's really really strange almost every underpass in in certain parts of la you'll find homeless encampments. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's a, it's a stain on, what are they doing right now during coronavirus lockdown? That's a very good question. I don't know. We're locked down. So I don't mean I go here, I go to the grocery store, I go home. That's basically all I've been doing for a month. And it's most people that are following the regulations.

It's all they're doing as well. so i don't know what they're doing i haven't seen any talk about it i've seen the fact they had to shut down beaches because people were just getting silly and they're using it like a day off and going to the beaches and being on top of each other so they had to shut down parking at the beaches and they've slowly tried to close the loopholes for knuckleheads, basically. Yeah. Is there an end date to California's lockdown? I believe they're talking about having it the end of April, but I think there was some talk about it now being the end of May. Find that out, Jamie.

Jamie doesn't have a laptop in front of me because we're doing this. I don't know. I mean, I think it's flexible, too, because if the cases keep rising or they stop falling, I mean, who knows? There's, you know, health care, and this is a health care issue, obviously, is so complicated, and there's so many levels to it. But, I mean, I think one of them that we really have to address is diet and obesity. There's a giant problem with diet and obesity in this country, healthy food, eating the proper food. And, you know, I had a friend who said they were talking about people who do drugs and people who drink. And maybe they shouldn't get access to the same health care.

And maybe that's a good incentive to stop people from drinking and doing drugs. And I said, yeah, what about people who do fat? What about people who are fat? You're going to use the same logic with them? Because you can't fat shame. So can you tell, hey, fatso, you can't get the same health care them because you can't fat shame so can you tell hey hey fatso you can't get the same health care that a healthy person does well if you got a healthy person who likes to drink and they they run and they they jog but they do like to drink and they occasionally smoke

a cigarette what are they healthier than someone who's morbidly obese yes they are so what we have a problem is people who don't self-care. We have a giant problem with that. People who don't take the necessary steps personally. Now, is this because of education? Is it because of ignorance? Is it because of a lack of awareness of the consequences of a non-healthy diet or eating poor foods or consuming large amounts of alcohol or tobacco products. I don't know what it is, but that is a massive part of our healthcare system is people who are not doing the proper things to their own body in terms of eating nutritious foods, hopefully that they can afford in terms of exercise, which is free for everybody.

You know, there's a lot of things you can do that are free to take care of your body yeah i agree well i think it's indicative of of a problem in our culture where we've started to sideline this notion of personal responsibility um i chapter seven in my book i forgot i gotta talk about my book fortitude available now we're able now order from your local bookstore. Did you read? They need more help than Amazon. Did you read the audiobook version of it? Yeah.

Good. Thank you. 14 hours. Very important. I enjoyed that. If some other dork was reading for you, I'd be very upset. Yeah. No, I was very much against that.

And so, yeah, we got it done. Chapter 7 is called A Sense of Duty. And, you know, part of the deal, when our founders wrote out the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and built the framework for this free society that we live in, where government's role is to protect your rights. That's fundamentally the government's role is to protect your rights. That's fundamentally the government's role. You have God-given rights, and these are life, liberty, property. Effectively speaking, life, liberty, and property. In the Declaration, Jefferson wrote the pursuit of happiness. And they choose these words really carefully. Now, part of the exchange there is a necessity for citizens to live with a sense of duty

and to live as a citizen, this idea of citizenship and to do what is right, to do what is good. It's hard for me to imagine that people are just so uneducated that they don't know that they're unhealthy. You know, I think they know it, right? The problem is that they don't care. That's a problem. And you're getting at that problem. I don't know if that's true.

I don't think it's that they don't care. I think they have no discipline. I don't think it's that they don't care. What's the difference? Well, there's a difference. They've never been taught to push themselves. It's just so easy to get by. That's one of the reasons why I love the title

of your book. Fortitude is what people need. And also, they need to understand that there's a great value in doing difficult things. And this society... What chapter is that? Chapter 8. The name of the chapter is called

Do Something Hard. good for you well listen man that's true look you're a navy seal man you you know it you get it you live it this is what we need we need more people who understand that i know it's hard to get up i know it's hard to do things i know it it's hard for me too but i still do them and you should do them too i mean it should be something that we encourage everyone to do and that we all talk about and that we all praise each other for and we all get excited about accomplishing

these things and taking care of your physical body, taking care of your meat vehicle. If everybody just did that, we would have... Healthcare costs in this country would be radically decreased. That's a fact. It's a fact. That's a fact.

That's an absolute fact. If more people had discipline and more people just went out and took care of themselves and then had discipline to not overeat and had discipline to try to choose the right foods and to make a meal plan, write things down, it can be done. We're not talking about breathing underwater. We're talking about things that can be done this we're not talking about breathing underwater we're talking about things that can be done by the average person well i i don't think the the notion of personal responsibility is talked about enough as it's almost conservatives talk about it all the time that's one of the things i appreciate

about conservatives but it's it's kind of used against us a lot right it's almost like we're accused of being immoral and unfeeling and uncaring when we say you know in this whole like oh just tell everybody to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and whatever and like not that we even use that term but but the point is is that it's actually important and i don't think conservatives have done a good enough job over time explaining why it's so important and personal responsibility as a as a foundation of our culture it's important because it leads to empowerment it gives us the agency to control our own destiny it's if if you're constantly in victimhood if you're constantly being told that that you can't control your own

destiny, well, that's fundamentally disempowering. And that's a terrible psychological state to be in. And the other thing I tell people is that is a fundamental American attribute. There's some interesting polling out there. I forget the numbers, right? But I always have them in a speech that I give. And when you ask people, what's the exact question? It's like, do you have, or do things that happen to you, are they within your control or outside your control? It's something like that. In Germany, the answer was overwhelmingly things are happening to them outside of their control right like like you understand what i'm saying in america when the same question was asked it was like you know 30 or 40 percent of people said yes versus in germany

it was like 50 or 60 percent so it's a pretty marked difference. And that's a uniquely American thing that we believe we are in control of our own destiny. We tend to overwhelmingly say more than European countries, that if we work hard and play by the rules and do what's right, that we will get ahead, that we will find that opportunity. And I think the world recognizes that too. When you go around the world and you ask people, where would you rather be if you could immigrate right now? What's your number one destination? Well, it's the U.S. of A, overwhelmingly. The second place is Canada and Germany at 6% of respondents. The U.S. of A is 21% of respondents. So second place isn't even close and so for all of the left-wing like anger and always saying how bad it is and how how nothing works here and everybody's just in in crisis all the

time obviously we're in a crisis technically right now of course but this this rhetoric was was was prevalent before all this for all of that commentary it's it just it just isn't true and so and then the reason they use crisis language, okay, the reason they tell you you're going to die in 10 years, climate change, the reason they're always telling you that corporations are taking advantage of you, and the 1% has just got you under their boot, and all of this, it's very victimizing language. And there's a reason behind it because they want very they want very very extreme policies put into place and you can't justify you can't justify revolutionizing the whole system unless you convince people that the system is so bad and so corrupt that it needs to

be revolutionized and and what's that's created is a real undermining of this notion of personal responsibility because you have to tell people they're victims if you're going to convince them And what that's created is a real undermining of this notion of personal responsibility. Because you have to tell people they're victims if you're going to convince them that they need you to save them. And when you undermine personal responsibility, you disempower people. And fundamentally, to me, that's what socialism does. Because you're telling people each to their need, each to their ability. What you're telling people is that they don't have to work that hard, that they deserve, they have rights to all of these other services from other people.

It's their right, and we should distribute that accordingly. Everybody's perfectly equal. What that does is it removes agency from people, and it's truly a disempowering thing. And we've seen this throughout history. I just talked to Venezuelans and Cubans, and they're so happy when they get here. They're so happy because they just want to work hard and move up. And they're just so excited about this meritocracy that we've built into our culture. Well, Cubans are such a great example that my friend Andrew Schultz, who's a hilarious comedian, has a great bit about how communist Cubans come to America, and the moment they step foot on soil, they become Republicans. It's really hilarious. And it's true. And they do appreciate that, that aspect of this country. I think one of the things

that you said earlier is that we live in the best time ever in history. And I agree with that. The consequences of it being such a great time are it's far easier to get by. Because it's far easier to get by, people look for things to be more difficult than they actually are. They look for things to be more stacked against them than they actually are. They look for more of a woe is me standpoint. When you find people that actually have a real difficult life, they don't look for things to be hard. They find hard things everywhere they look. And oftentimes you find that those people that have a real struggle, that it's, there's a great documentary called Happy People by Werner Herzog, and it's about people who live in Siberia. And it is a brutal, difficult existence in extreme cold.

But these people are overwhelmingly happy. I mean, it is a really crazy documentary because their physical and their struggle just for existence, just to survive, is so difficult that they've found this sort of perfect vibration of existence where they're in the wilderness, they're out there trapping and hunting and fishing and farming and gathering up enough food to survive in the extreme winters. And it really shows you that human beings need difficult tasks. We need things to be tough to do, and we need to actually go out there and do them to have a feeling of satisfaction and have a feeling of personal responsibility and

the fact that you've actually done the things that you needed to do in order to survive. It's built into us. Yeah, it really is. This is why I wrote a whole chapter on this. Do something hard is a real deep dive into the benefits of suffering. And I distinguish between just going through something hard, like getting blown up in the face, like, yeah, that's suffering, but it's not self-imposed. I wouldn't wish that upon anybody. I'm not saying you need to get blown up in the face and lose an eye to have this sort of spiritual awakening and how good it feels to go through something hard but you should you should habitually move into a a self-imposed suffering you were about to say something no i wasn't no okay but you but you just by virtue like you're a seal and seals people that are special operators, people that have gone through, just whether it's military or first responders, really difficult physical tasks to get to where you are.

Just that alone creates character, creates a different kind of person. And the type of people that gravitate towards those endeavors, they're special people. They are. But, you you know i didn't write this book for them and i wrote it for everybody and and what i what i point out is is is listen seals have our hard thing and it's buds um you know which is which is an acronym it stands for basic underwater demolition slash seal training it's six months of hell and And it, it is, it pushes you beyond limits. You, you ever thought you had hell week, especially. Um, and, and, and when you're done with that, when you, when you come away from hell week, there really is this sort of spiritual awakening. It's that you have higher

confidence. You feel prepared for anything, even in the, in the, some of the worst situations, uh, you can think to yourself, well, it's not quite hell week, is it? And so you're able to have a much more perspective. We're lacking in perspective quite a bit also. Chapter two is called Perspective from Darkness. And I point this fact out that too many of us have gotten so comfortable. We've removed suffering from our life to such an extraordinary degree. And that's not a bad thing. That, that's, that's, that's, that's a, that's a, that's an element of the modern times that we live in. And I'm happy we live there. But the reality is, is that my ancestors were like struggling through Texas trying to find water on a daily basis. And, and in my life, I'm complaining because when I'm at 30,000 feet

flying through the air, the Wi Fi isn't as fast as I'd like it to be. So we have very different complaints. And it's good to every once in a while just think, you know what, I have it pretty damn good. And to remind yourself of that, again, the Do Something Hard chapter is, one, it's a deep dive into the psychological literature, which I just enjoy doing. There's a lot to back this up, whether it's modern psychology, the history of Stoicism, or the Bible. All of these texts, these ancient pieces of wisdom that have been around for a very long time, they all talk about this. They'll talk about the value of suffering, the value of enduring and hardship, and how this builds character and and how this actually quite literally makes you stronger in both both a metaphysical sense and a psychological sense

and a physical sense actually actually going to the um to the science of it as well and like how the the changes in your brain what exercise does what hardship actually does both physically and metaphysically like there's real there's real to this, but you have to do it. And it doesn't have to be Joe Rogan's life. I wonder if a lot of people look at your life and they're like, that guy is too productive for me. And it's just too intimidating.

And maybe that's so, but don't compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. And I think that was, is that a Jordan Peterson? That might be a Jordan Peterson. I think I just quoted that, but, but, but the point is, is like, these things are true because they're true. Like, that's why Jordan Peterson says that because it's true. Like, you know, I don't pretend like I'm the first one to come up with these ideas. I'm just trying to put them into language that people can

understand and, and use my life experiences to bolster those lessons. But it just has to be harder than what you did yesterday. And maybe it's physical, but not everybody can do physical things. Maybe it's hard for you to finish a project at home. Just do that. Maybe take a cold shower. You feel tougher the rest of the day because you're like, you know what? I just sat in 10 minutes of icy cold water. I didn't do that the day before, but I did it today. And now I feel a little bit more like a badass. Like, you know, and I feel like more like a badass than I did yesterday. It's small things. It's the self-imposed suffering is so important for our lives. Like me, I, for me, it's usually physical, right? Like I want to do this challenge of a workout, you know, like that kind of keeps me sharp. Um, or maybe

it's like running for Congress or something like, I't know like we all have something and i'm just saying you have to find that and make it habitual it can't just be once either because seals can get soft too yes we all know that you know we know who those guys are and um it's because they stopped they stopped listening from to the lessons from buds and to this value of self-imposed suffering. Yeah, I feel that resilience is almost like a muscle. It's something that you can build, and it's also something that can get soft. And I think that, look, I love comfort, don't get me wrong, but I don't appreciate it unless

I've done something difficult. You know, if you look at all the different things I do and say, oh, you're real productive and that's nice. Dude, I also like to watch TV. I like to put my feet up. I like to kick back. I like to have a beer. I like to relax.

But I don't like to relax if I'm not doing shit. I know me and I get mad at me if I'm not doing anything. I don't like me when I'm not productive. But when I am productive, I also can enjoy to relax. I enjoy relaxation, and I don't enjoy it unless I've earned it. And I think that's what people need to do. They need to earn their comfort. You have a proper sense of shame, which is what you're describing.

That's chapter six. You're describing this stuff because you already know this like if you read my book like you'll be like i already know all this but because it's true all right now i'm trying to give these lessons out in a clear and coherent kind of fun way but these things are just true you feel bad when you don't act the way you envision yourself to be like you you have this hero archetype and I've talked about hero archetypes before. You have this idea of what you think is the right way to be, and you're trying to live up to that at all times. We often fail, and you've built that archetype over time. Maybe looking to

others as the right kind of hero. Maybe you've seen how successful people are, and you're like, I want to be like that. I'm sure maybe you do it in comedy or fighting or whatever it is. You're like, they have a way of doing something that maybe i should mimic and so you've built this over time and you know when you you know only you know really when you when you don't meet that standard when you don't meet that standard there should be a degree of shame that you feel and and i and i again this is a problem i viewed in society where I don't know that people are feeling that shame anymore. It's almost the opposite. And when you don't feel that shame, you can't feel a sense of duty to be that citizen that we talked about earlier. And I find this to be a big problem, even with the small stuff. examples in the book, like you should feel shame when you're that person who doesn't put the shopping cart in the little shopping cart section in a parking lot and instead leaves it in the

parking space. Absolutely. No, it's easy. And you're like, ah, somebody will do it. They have people, they have people who take care of this. Well, but like, why, why don't you just, why don't you just put it away? And worse, like, and if you don't put it away because you're in a rush, you know, because your kid is screaming and maybe you have a good reason not just put it away? And worse, if you don't put it away because you're in a rush, because your kid is screaming, and maybe you have a good reason not to put it away. But the question to ask yourself is, did you feel bad about it? Right. Did you feel bad about it?

And if you didn't feel bad about it, what the hell is wrong with you? Yes. These are very simple lessons. We have to start small. You have to start small. The shopping cart one is a great example that's such a good one it's such a classic it's so good just makes you mad that's like uh i've found the greatest parking spot and that damn cart's like right so easy to do just just put it back bitch

just walk it over there put it in the little stall, and you feel better. You're like, look, I did it. You know what I do? I bring it all the way the fuck back to the supermarket. Accomplish something. I put it back in the thing right in front. Yes. I don't even put it in the stall. I walk those extra steps.

And it doesn't take much time. But I feel like I did something. Even if it's just a trick. The grocery store doesn't even have to put those little sections out in the parking lot they could just tell you to put it walk it all the way back walk it back bitch but the reason why i like the little stalls is because of people that do have kids if there's a mom and she's got her baby with her great give her an a way out or hire some kid to gather those things up while people are walking out with them fine Fine. But if you're just a guy and you're shopping for yourself and you don't put your cart back, fuck you.

And that sense of shame that you're talking about, that really is important. People need to feel shame if you've come up short like that because you can do better. You can do better and you should want to do better. The way to get ahead in life is to do everything that way the way you do everything is the way you do anything the way you do anything is the way you do everything i mean that's really what it is if you just do the right thing do it the way you're supposed to do it you can do it and you'll feel better if you're supposed to get a workout in today, like, oh fuck, I'd rather just sleep in. No, just fucking get your ass up and do it and you'll feel better. When it's

done, you're like, damn, I did it. I can do this tomorrow too. You can, and it's momentum and just developing that momentum. It's a skill. It's like everything else. It's like learning how to be polite. It's like learning how to be cordial, learning how to be a nice a nice person these are learned things you can't just accept that you're a piece of shit and this is just the way you are no just look at yourself as if you were another person judging you like as if you are a person who's like a life coach judging you what would you tell you to do that's exactly right and the the reason i the reason i wrote about this was because you know throughout this book i'm identifying a problem and then trying to come up with a solution so the solution is effectively saying what you're saying and i write i write a lot about it i write

about the psychology behind it but the problem is is like we've i i feel like we've removed shame in our culture to to a huge extent to where to where it's almost celebrated to you know to like do these wrong things we've started to change the definition of what's right and wrong then this sort of kind of post post-modern society um and we think of some examples of what i mean by that well in in one part i do bring up the example of of how we view you know assistance like government assistance and there's the the movie cinderella man where russell crowe uh plays the the whatever the name is the boxer yeah that's it and um you know he gets a welfare check at the beginning of the movie by the end of the movie he's pulled himself back up and he

returns it and that's sort of like our our classic heroic thing to do like you know what like we believe in helping people who need it uh but we also believe that you shouldn't take it if you don't need it it seems like a pretty pretty good piece of civic duty to live by. And then I went to my own experience leaving the Navy, where we were actually encouraged to get on social security disability insurance as I was leaving the Navy. And so I was in a classroom full of fellow Navy service members, none of which were SEALs, none of which had been in combat, none of which appeared injured in any way. I was the only one with a visible injury where it's obvious as to why I'm being medically retired. And so we're all getting medically retired.

And by nature of getting medically retired from the military, it's guaranteed that we have some kind of benefit on the back end of that. And what I would call a very generous benefit, you know, people would disagree with me on that. But I think it's a I think we get a generous benefit. And to on to say on top of that, that we should also take money out of the Social Security Trust Fund for disability insurance, even though every single person in there walked right out of that classroom, is perfectly capable of working, was so frightening to me that it was that it is so ingrained in our new culture that that it was actually in the curriculum at a government classroom um and and this kind of stuff is cheered on you know and i see this a lot people will tell

a story of victimhood and be cheered but we're not supposed to cheer for that we might feel compassion for them but to cheer for them and this and this explains why we're not supposed to cheer for that we might feel compassion for them but to cheer for them and this and this explains why we're seeing these sort of hoaxes that we've seen like why did jesse smallett feel that he had to say that two maga guys in chicago beat him up like why did what was we we we didn't ask enough what the underlying psychology behind that was like why do that and i think the reason is because we started to elevate victimhood we started to elevate this sort of shameful behavior and this is what i mean by we sort of changed the definitions of what it even means to feel ashamed and what it means to feel like

you're doing the wrong thing because we've changed the definitions of right and wrong and i and i see a need to get us back to some traditional definitions before we all just lose our freaking minds. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. I think what you're saying is absolutely correct. I think victimhood should be – look, if you are an actual victim, I mean, I feel for you. It's terrible. But if you're not a victim and you're playing up victimhood, it's disgusting. It's one of the grossest things that you see in our culture, especially when we're talking about

how easy society is. And now when you have a person who is affluent and successful and famous, like Jussie Smollett, who does that, and you're like, Jesus Christ, man. Like, boy, did you miss the point. That's why it's so foul for us. When we see someone who's just trying to, for their own personal gain, they're trying to game the system and make it out like they're a victim. It's one of the grossest things that you could see in a successful culture. I mean, there's people out there that really are injured like yourself from combat. There's people out there that really are sick. There's people out there that are really victimized by violent crime.

And to fake it, it's such a disgusting insult to people that actually are injured. Yeah, and that's like the most extreme, I think, that's the extreme consequence of this victimhood culture, because there's definitely a difference between real victims and victimhood culture. You have to distinguish between those two things. And we have to respect somebody who's actually a victim. Yes. is that if I had taken it, and if I had gone on and said, and sort of proudly exclaimed that I got this, and I needed it, like, shouldn't somebody call me out for that? You know, and the reality is, is that I don't think people would, I don't think I would be called out for that, even though I'm a perfectly capable of work. Yes, I'm kind of blind. And like,

I can't see even out of my good eye. But I can work. I mean, I've shown that I can work. Why would I take that? That's that wouldn't wouldn't be just. I think that would go against our classical definition of what is fair and just. And yet, in our current culture, I don't believe that anybody would call me out for that. And I should be called out if I had taken that money. I really believe that. Just because I was already getting benefits, right? I'm not saying it shouldn't get anything. I was blown up and then had to get out of the Navy as a result. But, but I, but I feel our culture is a little bit backwards on this and it worries me a great deal.

We've changed, we've changed a few definitions, like what it means to be a victim. I think we've changed that definition overwhelmingly. And we've changed the definition of justice also and injustice and what an injustice actually is. We've forgotten how to distinguish between discrimination and disparities. Like just because you don't have the same thing, does that effectively mean there was some injustice that occurred there? We're not asking those analytical questions. And I think that's a real problem. And it's made debate very difficult. It's made debate with my colleagues in the Democratic Party very difficult. Yes. it's ill-begotten money and that there was some kind of injustice that occurred you know when we were when we were voting on this giant stimulus package not really a stimulus package more of a

rescue package remember how this happened there was you know we were negotiating through this thing it was actually looking pretty good nancy pelosi comes in says hell no we're blowing up the whole thing and uh we're going to protect workers and damn you know not these damn corporations okay so you know you fast forward a few, you ended up passing basically the same bill anyway. That's a long story. I'm happy to go into the details of that politically if you'd like me to. But the point is this. There was this outrage from the populist right and the populist left against anything that had the name corporation attached to it.

And we've forgotten how to ask ourselves like why is that did they do something evil what what exactly is evil about these entities you know they employ lots of people they create lots of wealth in this particular case they're not being bailed out they didn't do anything wrong but we're really mad at them for some reason we really hate them because there's this sort of cultural movement towards towards feeling that anytime something is successful like our reaction should be to punish it. And that cultural movement worries me a great deal. It worries me a great deal. I think that's what leads to these sort of topics of socialism.

Well, I think that that is one of the bad aspects of the ideals of socialism, one of the bad aspects of the ideals of socialism is this inclination to think that when there is an inequality that then inequality is because of either corrupt corruption or greed there's also inequality of effort people do not put in the same effort and when you put in more effort you're more focused you're more disciplined you do more work you should be rewarded and there's people that don't like that idea and they don't like that idea because they're fucking lazy, you're more disciplined, you do more work, you should be rewarded. And there's people that don't like that idea. And they don't like that idea because they're fucking lazy. And they're weak. And that's a fact. And there's people in this world that are weak. And it's an unpopular thing to say. Because we want to say that, no, they're economically disenfranchised. And some people are. Yes, some people are. And there's also some people that work like a motherfucker.

And those people get by. And they get ahead. And those people should be rewarded for their effort. One of the problems that I have with people that espouse socialist ideals is that they don't want this competition aspect of our culture and our society to exist, where you put in more work, you get more reward. That's my whole life. That is my whole life. I mean, everything that I've ever done, I've realized,

oh, all you have to do is work harder than everybody else. All you have to do is put in more time. All you have to do is be more obsessed, more focused, and you can get by. You can get ahead. Well, the people that don't like that are the people that don't like competition. They don't understand it. It makes you feel bad when you lose. Everyone should get a trophy.

Everyone should get a participation trophy. That is a giant problem with our culture. And this inequality, yeah, there is income inequality. Some of it is corruption. Some of it is bad. Some of it is inequality of effort. And that needs to be addressed as well. And you can't have this blanket thing that all the people that run corporations are greedy

and all the money that they have acquired is because of ill-gotten gains it's just not true it's not true and it's it's anti-american frankly yeah i i list a few um tenets of a culture that make it a sustainable successful culture the first one is personal responsibility i went went into detail on that. The second one is mental toughness, which I wrote a whole book about. So, and it's important for the, you said it exactly how I describe it when I give speeches on this, which is we need mental toughness because otherwise, how do we survive in a free society where we have to compete? Because the only alternative to a bunch of mentally weak people is that we do live in a society where competition is not necessary, because the government will just give you everything. But I don't want to live in that society. And frankly, that society can't

function very well, because nobody would actually do anything. And you have to be mentally tough to deal with that. And I think the American spirit and our history as a culture is a really, really tough bunch of people. And I just want to remind bunch of people and i just want to remind people of that and i want to remind people that it's something to aspire to like this is a good thing like it's cool to be tougher it's not cool to be a victim right right but we have so many like post-modernists who actually again it's going back to this victimhood culture they want you to be that victim and then they'll celebrate you for it yes People tell their victimhood stories, they're cheered. But it's like, wait a second, where's the part where you overcame it?

I thought that was the story we're supposed to cheer. Well, they also connect competition with cruelty. And I think that's foolish as well. Yeah, it feels bad to lose. But that's just because it feels great to win. It's a peak in a valley thing. And you have to understand that. Look, every competition that I've ever had, anything where I've ever competed and lost,

has fueled me beyond measure. It is what gets you by. It's what makes you better. I mean, one of the reasons why I understand this is because of martial arts. In martial arts, you have to train with the best people you can. And it fucking sucks. You get your ass kicked. But that's what makes you better. You need those people. You love those people. They become your brothers. It's very, very, very important. The bonds that are formed in jujitsu gyms and kickboxing gyms and martial arts gyms with the

people that you train, the men and women that you train with, there's an intensity to those bonds that's almost indescribable to anybody that hasn't experienced it. I mean, I'm sure it's not as tight as people that have gone through combat together, but there's something in those people, they fuel you, they help you, and they help you by trying to kick your ass. They help you by trying to be better than you. They help you by trying to kick your ass. They help you by trying to be better than you. They help you by trying to be the man. They want to be the best they can be.

And you think about those motherfuckers when you go to the gym. You go, God damn it, Mike is here. Shit. And you get fired up for that person that you know is going to kick your ass. And they provide you with fuel. People that are better than you provide you with fuel. Competition provides you with fuel. It doesn't better than you provide you with fuel. Competition provides you with fuel. It doesn't mean you have to be mean. It doesn't mean it's cruel.

It doesn't mean it's insensitive. It doesn't mean that. It just means that competition is good. Competition is good for you. It's good. It shows you your better abilities. It shows you that you can aspire to greatness. You can aspire to be better than you are. You can do this. And you can do this by looking at people who also do it. They are your fuel. Inspiration is fuel. Nobody gets inspired by Jesse Smollett putting a fucking fake noose around his neck and walking into a hotel still holding a Subway sandwich. Nobody's inspired by that. Maybe you're inspired to never be that guy, but it's a weak inspiration sandwich nobody's inspired by that maybe you're inspired to never be that guy and that but it's a weak inspiration you're inspired by greatness you're inspired by

great people's stories great people's autobiographies and documentaries and stories of them putting in that work and i mean that that's why there's so many people that you know their their instagram existence is essentially just all they're doing is just providing inspiration to people. Like David Goggins. That fucking guy. Every day. I mean, that guy's fueling millions of people just by being a badass. Just life is hard, motherfucker.

Stay hard. And just getting out and running every day just by doing that. Okay. I don't know him. I love him. Who is filming these his wife like his wife she run is she in a car or something she's in a car no but but there's been other instances where he's like climbing a mountain i don't know it's a very it's a very

smooth like maybe she has a stabilizer i guess oh yeah that's one of those there's there's been some instances where i'm like okay this seems like a car but this seems impossible to film and without like some some better equipment than just like a selfie video you know well he's got a lot of money i mean he sold the shit out of that book um so it's a fantastic book and i can't recommend it enough and you can't hurt me it's called and the audio version is even better because the audio version, he actually gets somebody else to read it. But then he comes in between and discusses each and every chapter. So it's like the audio book and a podcast together. fuel for people, but is an amazing source of fuel because of his own competition with himself. And he's a guy that's talked really openly about being weak at certain points in his life and being fat and lazy and that he got through that. He wasn't born this fucking warrior that

came out of the womb running a hundred miles. He became that person. He became that person from being a slob and he's real open about it and he's he's even open about his own weakness currently he's like sometimes i'll stare at my fucking shoes for a half hour before i run my shit i don't want to do this fuck but then he'll go out and do it and while he's doing it he'll yell you know like that people like that are fuel and there's certain people that don't like people like that because they make them feel bad. They look at themselves and they go, God damn it.

I don't work as hard as that guy. I don't have that kind of mental toughness. And then they'll try to find something wrong with it. But it's, it's because they're, they're not willing to look at themselves objectively. They're not willing to try to be the best person that they can be. Yeah, I agree with that. i want to introduce you to him yeah yeah where does he live he's in vegas now vegas yeah when do you guys um do you want to bring it back to coronavirus i've got some uh i would love to um because this is i mean i i think there's the

thing i wanted to to maybe discuss is is the balance that that needs to be talked about and and we this is where i would have taken the conversation from earlier about the media what how do you feel about sweden the way sw's handling it? Because we're talking about balance. Sweden has got a very different approach to it. Their approach is essentially, listen, old people, vulnerable people, please take care of yourself. Stay home. They'll provide assistance. They'll get you food. They'll do whatever they can them to go out and live their lives they don't want the restaurants to shut down the pubs to shut down this is a disease that you know it's ravaged people of all nationalities and all age and demographic groups but their their idea is take care of your health be careful but let's get society back on its feet again and they're widely criticized by that i would love to hear what you think well i think the jury's still out on whether that's a good strategy or not um there's three different strategies okay and there's a harvard white

paper that that delineates these pretty well um i spoke with one of the professors from the center of ethics that that was an author of this. And you can describe these three strategies in the following way. One they call freeze in place, which is basically what we're doing right now. It's what most countries are doing, a hardcore quarantine. Of course, that's different depending on what part of the country you're in. The second, well, let me jump to the third one. The third one would just be surrender. Okay, let it happen. We'll deal with it as we go. But we're not keeping anybody at home. That's effectively what Sweden is doing. The second option would be sort of a mix of the two, which I think will end up being the American option or better.

Well, should be where we have a defined period where we remain in place, but then we we confront the enemy. And like I said, we're in a tactical retreat right now but a certain point we actually have to come back out swinging and we need to be prepared to do it sweden took on the third approach which is like basically they they think they can deal with it and we're going to see now their cases are jumping up pretty dramatically i don't know how much they'll continue jumping up the swedes are also very good at culturally following the rules you know like americans don't like a lot of rules so sweet the swedes will will will stop at a red light at 2 a.m even though there's like nobody around okay uh same with people in switzerland okay this is this is we have deeper cultural differences i think their social cohesion and their ability to follow rules kind of like the koreans um is is different than our culture where we are we are just way more

individualistic and we're going to do whatever the hell we want we want a flamethrower in our office we're gonna have a flamethrower in our office and like don't tell me i can't have it right i mean you can relate to that i have a flamethrower right behind me it's a good solid flamethrower i'm jealous like i i don't have a flamethrower but I have a lot of guns they're better it depends on the situation they're always better

unless you want to start a fire that's the only situation sometimes the situation is you just want to start a fire unless you're in the movie Alien the situation is you just want to start a fire. Unless you're in the movie Alien. Yeah. The point is you need a diversity of weaponry. That's the truth.

Right. And so, okay, so those are the three options. I think the jury's still out on if it works for Sweden or not. I think it can work, and I would like to see us move to that rather quickly. see us move to that rather quickly. Now, we need to be careful about how we do it, but I'm very concerned about these indefinite extension of the timelines of stay in place. I think we have to start having reasonable conversations about the costs of that. And the costs are a lot more than just dollar signs. The costs are a hell of a lot more than just people's 401ks tanking. The costs are actually people's lives

also whether it's mental health or suicides or divorces or putting off all of these um all of these procedures that we're just putting a freeze on so like and it's and i have a lot of problem with this i mean in places like houston our hospitals are not overwhelmed they're like 50 capacity still because we're not just not getting that many more cases but why do you think that is why do you think texas is less prone to this well i guess i'll answer that question by stating why i think new york is the way it is and and new orleans is the way it is um new york is the way it is because it's a it's a giant city with enormous density uh the most it's the densest uh uh city in the country by far it's also the most likely place that a lot of international travelers were coming in and out of and so i think there was i think it's safe to say there was multiple hot spots that occurred

within new york city and then it spread wildly because people ride subways and elevators i mean it's not like los angeles it's not like Houston, where we take a car everywhere, no matter what. There's natural social distancing that already occurs. In New Orleans, well, they had Mardi Gras. I mean, they had Mardi Gras. There's explanations behind these things. And I do worry sometimes that our modeling is using these numbers in the wrong ways and not taking enough into account into the fact that we have very different lifestyles in different parts of the country

and also take into account that we can target certain solutions. And so, regarding that Harvard white paper that says the second solution is mobilize and transition, once you've slowed the spread by doing what we're doing, and again, I'm not against doing what we're doing. I just think we need to stick to the timelines and maybe make those timelines sooner once you've slowed the spread by doing what we're doing again i'm not against doing what we're doing i just think we need to stick to the timelines and maybe make those timelines sooner than later and then come out and fight and what does fighting mean well while we're in weights we're basically we're ramping up production of protective gear we're ramping up production of ventilators again our system is is amazing um we are producing we're going to be producing by I think next week or so, up to 7,000 new ventilators a week.

We haven't run out of ventilators. I went through the numbers before when we were talking about socialized medicine. One of the benefits of our system is we are actually way better prepared than people realize. Now, we have a big lack of PPE. There's a lot of reasons for that, and I can go into it. eat there's a lot of reasons for that and i can go into one reason is that china was stopping export from 3m from going to china to the rest of the world back in january and february all right this just came out and um in an article that was written it was confirmed by you know 3m and a lot of people in government they were preventing the export because 3m produces a lot of it in china

they were preventing those exports because they wanted to hoard the supplies. Then they act like the good guy and go around the world giving it out. I mean, China has to, we're going to have to really look at our supply chains and our relationship with China after this. But that's one of the reasons we didn't have the proper amount of PPE. It also depends on the hospital. Again, like there is some accountability that has to take place with specific hospitals and specific cities and why they didn't prepare. What I've noticed as of late is this strange belief that the president is everybody's micromanaging boss. And that's just not how our system works, nor should it. And there has to be some level of accountability at the local and state level, too.

Again, I just got off the phone with some of the doctors here at the Texas Medical Center. And I'm like, how are you guys on PPE? And they're like, we have so much PPE, because we're used to disasters here and we prepare. And so they're just not worried about it. We've set up the supply chains in advance. Like there has to be, we have to work together. There's what I've noticed in all the finger pointing and a lot of it's just political opportunism. I don't know if you if you like if you if you put these people up to a lie detector test, I wonder if they really think it would be the president's fault that this happened. Like, I don't I don't think they could pass a lie detector test. You know, I think it's I think it's a lot of political theatrics. But in any case, it's it gets us away from the right way

to look at our system, which is local and state government are our managers. They manage on those smaller levels. Like, if California wants to try a single-payer health care system, let's see it work in California or a smaller state, and then let's scale it. Hell, let's see if it works in a city, and then let's scale it. There's a's see if it works in a city and then let's scale it you know like there's a reason federalism is the way it is and it's hard to compare us to different countries in so many ways because these countries are like the size of our city you know like la is bigger than most so many countries around the world like it's it's it's a matter the scale matters to a huge extent and um it's like socialism works if

you've got maybe like 50 or 60 people because you can hold each other accountable there's a little bit easier maintenance as you scale it out you just can't right that's why co-ops exist and you know in this country like bernie sanders lip-bog you can make it work if you can literally see everybody all the time a family unit is a socialist unit teach their own teach their needs teach their ability when you scale things out it dramatically changes things and we have to remember that as it pertains to dealing with the pandemic and dealing with public policy as well um the point i was making about the media a second ago one of the problems it's not

just that they're not informing people correctly, which we discussed earlier. The other problem is that they're preventing us from having the right discussions because we do have to have this discussion that we're talking about right now, which is how do we, how do we responsibly move into a, into a system where we're simultaneously combating the pandemic, but also reopening our economy. And we have to have that. And the natural reaction from disingenuous people is, oh, well, how many lives is it worth to save a job? And I'm like, okay, that's not the right question. It's a very dishonest question. And, you know, first of all, it assumes that somebody going

back to work will actually cost a life. You can't prove that. I mean, if we're going to play this dishonest game of counterfactuals. But also, it misses the point. You know, we live in a world where we take risks, and we have to take those risks and then mitigate those risks accordingly. And we can better mitigate risk, and we better understand what we're dealing with and when we're better prepared prepared and those are the two things we have to do over the next month is get better prepared and that's and the answer there is test more people especially test people with antibodies so that we can see who's actually immune and we can give them like a certificate or something they can do go do whatever they want getting more icu beds where they might be needed getting

more ventilators getting more ppe so that's the preparedness side. And on the other side, we risk mitigate. It's just like, you know, like you explained in Sweden, let's keep sick and vulnerable people away. Let's target our efforts a little bit better. Let's take a more vertical approach as opposed to a horizontal approach. We can do this. We can do this if we give each other the grace and the space to do it instead of like this bad faith finger pointing of like oh you're just going to kill people you don't even care well it's like that's that's a terrible way to think about it i mean i i could moralize this situation say well i could i'll save 30 000 lives this year because i'm not going to let anybody drive and i am a better person than you because you have the blood of 30 000 people on your hands

because you want people driving. That's a great example. I'm the moral one. That is a great example. I'm the moral one. Yeah, and that's – I'm worried about that. It seems like a cheap analogy, but it's not. It's not at all.

No, you're absolutely right, and I'm worried about that when we do go back. I'm worried about that finger pointing. I really am because I think it's just going to muddy the waters, and I'm also worried about it being used as political opportunism and it's going to scare people already yes it's already happening i have i have a bunch of quotes i could read you please read some okay yeah i will because i wrote an op-ed on this it hasn't been published yet but um you know i note some of them there but i well nancy pelosi last week said you know the responsible for the deaths of people um the where is it it's this is why i said maybe i won't because then i have to actually look for it here um

i wrote all this stuff down but there's a lot of quotes out there from media and from oh here from um from pundits from twitter users but i well i only quote people who are well known either they're well-known journalists or they're politicians but it usually goes along the lines of exactly what you just said you were worried about, which is Trump is more concerned about the stock market than people's lives. That's kind of the typical one you hear. And it's certainly been said quite a bit. And my fear is that it continues to be said. And it prevents us from having a reasonable debate because we truly need to have that reasonable debate.

The other thing that frustrates me about these kind of bad faith arguments is that the people saying them made the same claims themselves. Like February 1st, Washington Post, here's a headline. Get a grip, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than the coronavirus. Okay. February 1st, USA Today. Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is dead much bigger threat than the coronavirus okay february 1st usa today coronavirus is scary but the flu is deadlier and more widespread okay february 3rd washington post why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus and so these same papers

are now destroying the president oh you didn't act early enough you didn't do anything it's you have the blood you have blood of people on your hands but like that's amazing reality is yeah the hypocrisy is insane and like i have so many more february just those quotes go ahead new york times who says it's not safe to travel to china so this is following president trump's extremely at time, a very bold move to restrict travel from China. And, you know, and of course, all of these papers and prominent people are now saying something different. I go through a timeline, too, where I look at, because again, my Democrat colleagues are very quick to continue to accuse this administration of just dropping the ball, doing all these bad things. But I have to everybody how this is this is a good one on the same day that that um trump implemented

the restriction on travel this was it's the february january January 27th. Okay. And then they announced the ban on travel as well as the task force. January 31st, oh, sorry, the 31st, the Trump administration implemented

the restriction on travel. January 31st. And also declared it a public health emergency. On that same day, Nancy Pelosi talked about a bill, promoted a bill called the No Ban Act, which would limit the president's ability to impose travel restrictions. So, like, you just can't say, you just can't say that this guy wasn't acting in the public's best interest and then have facts like this. I do remember this too, and I pointed this out at the time because a lot of people were not talking about coronavirus in February. on February 28th, which is a few days before February 28th, the Trump, the 24th, the Trump administration asked for two and a half billion dollars from Congress to combat the spread. So

that was money that had already been spent by HHS, by CDC that needed to be reimbursed. So the Trump administration has already been dealing with this and they're like, hey, Congress, we need more money. We need more supplemental funding. He got slammed. I don't know if everybody remembers this, but he got destroyed. He got told he wasn't taking it seriously. Why isn't he asking for more money? That week, you know, we voted on the House floor. We didn't vote on more money. They had days to give more money because this was earlier in the week. We actually voted on that week was 2339, which is reversing the Youth like is now illegal now it never got into law of course because it never went through the senate but i want people to understand like i'm not i'm not blaming democrats either because there was a lot that we all just didn't know and i i just want i just want to point these things out because it's important to give each other to grace to be like hey not everybody knew what was happening.

It wasn't until early March that it was exploding as a virus in Iran and Italy and South Korea. These things happened and it wasn't clear that there should be massive, massive lockdowns of society. Those are very bold moves. And it's so easy to to have this 2020 hindsight and um and and act you know holier than thou and point fingers but it's it's highly disingenuous and i and i built this whole timeline out to show it um and i also point out that the timeline can end you know but from here on out we could just we could just give each other some grace and and solve these problems together because it will be very easy to blame each other for the deaths of Americans, no matter what the decision is. It will be easy, because the counterfactual is impossible to prove.

And the fact that it's so easy, that political opportunism is so easy, is what worries me the most. And we have to have those conversations, though though about reopening society and when to do it and we have to have the conversations about this political opportunism and and shaming it and and calling it for what it is and and really being honest with those quotes from the washington post the new york times usa today and letting people know no we didn't know what this was we didn't see it coming and when it was coming we were real confused as to what the consequences were going to be and we're also not getting honest data out of china right china china is just they are not honest about the body count they're not honest about any of it we don't really know what happened over there the version that we're getting is got holes in it oh yeah let's

talk about that i did find the quotes that i told you i had if you want to hear those sure they're from people like jen rubin like cnn so jen rubin trump death toll equals trump dead lives that would have been spared had he acted on warnings the rest of victims the rest are victims of trump's stupidity and narcissism this is from a prominent washington post columnist again i'm not choosing random twitter users you know uh from new york times president trump was so focused on fabricating threats involving central american caravans that he was oblivious to the real threats so again i could keep reading i have a bunch but let's talk about china um yeah so i i just mentioned that one that story that just came

out which is that they actually prevented ppe from being delivered outside of china so that you know we are our companies 3m they produce it there should have been exported out they prevented that there was a study that showed that if they had if they had actually been honest and given us given the world three weeks extra notice 95 of the spread could have been contained okay five million people left wuhan um they allowed travel out of wuhan five million people right traveling all over china all over the world the reason this this became so bad in italy and iran is because of the belt and road initiative these are major hot spots for china's economic development and um the belt and road initiative so then let's get into the world health organization uh there's got to be a come-to-Jesus moment on the World Health Organization.

Again, mid-January, World Health Organization says that, or they repeat the claims made by China that it can't even be transmitted human-to-human contact. On January 30th, World Health Organization said something along the lines of there's no reason to be shutting down travel or limiting travel. So they are directly controlled by the Chinese government, the World Health Organization. It should also be worth noting, I forget the guy's name who runs it, the director of the WHO, but he's, I believe he's from Ethiopia. And Ethiopia is one of these countries that is a huge, has a huge investments from the Belt and Road Initiative. And so, I mean, we need to be calling for a complete change out in leadership of the WHO. Well, we've seen that video where they refused to acknowledge, he refuses to acknowledge

the existence of Taiwan. He wouldn't even say it. The woman keeps questioning him and he shuts his camera off. Yeah, it was like when you asked me about marijuana use and i pretended i couldn't hear you you were joking though we were right in front of each other joking that's different i mean that guy yeah he shut his connection off and then he said china's doing a great job let's move on and you know like what very weird it's so deeply corrupt it's so deeply corrupt and i mean you know i don't i don't think that who will ever have the standing that it did before not without an immediate and serious leadership change um because they've lost all credibility

and then move on you know fast forward the chinese were perpetuating it's unclear whether they started this room this this talking point or whether it was the progressive left and the chinese just repeated it and latched on to it but this whole notion that it's racist to call the virus the chinese virus was it was such an utterly absurd thing that we were focused on as a country when it just doesn't matter it just didn't no matter no matter what your opinion on whether it's actually racist or not i mean i i personally don't think it is. There's a history of calling a virus some kind of geographic name based on where it's from. That's fine.

The point is that Chinese authorities were spreading that quite a bit in February. So they're doing things like that. Then they claim that perhaps it was the U.S. Army that had started the virus in Wuhan. They haven't let international inspectors go in and investigate the origins of this virus so that we can better understand it. There already is quite a few things that we're looking at is what we can do to, one, rebalance our supply chains. As a country, we need a better industrial policy on bringing a lot of important manufacturing back home and being more competitive in that sense is there can i ask you this is there any evidence that this was a man-made virus you know this is the big conspiracy theory that there was some sort of a level four

bioweapons lab in wuhan yeah and i just don't know i mean i i could pontificate but it is true that there was a bioweapons lab in wuhan yeah i don't know i don't know if it's meant for uh weapons but there's certainly a lab there that would have housed viruses like this and yeah we just we just don't know the answers um and i don't you know especially in my position i don't want to of course of course i don't want to i don't want to assume. Do you think that this, because of the consequences of this virus and all this, that this awakens people to the need to manufacture things in America, particularly medical supplies, so many things that we rely on China for? A hundred percent.

And this is something Trump has been talking about forever. And I think both, I think he's received skepticism from both the left and the right on that for different reasons, mostly from the right, because, you know, we have, and Republicans need to come to terms with this, is we have really adhered very closely to a more libertarian mindset of free trade, where, where the more free trade, the better, um, where, where if somebody else can make it cheaper, then, then we should just have them make it all right. This comparative advantage theory. And that's true in theory. It is true, but, but we, we, we can't ignore the consequences. And I, I think we have ignored those consequences for a little too long. Like what happens when you close down that factory? Yeah, like your T-shirts are three cents cheaper per unit, which is a really big deal for the margins of your company. And yeah, that company can hire more people and you get a cheaper T-shirt.

But we kind of miss those manufacturing jobs. But we kind of miss those manufacturing jobs. Like there's also like a moral, not a moral, but like a psychological benefit to these manufacturing jobs as well. You're creating something. People like that. People like to feel like they're producing something and that they have meaningful work that pays pretty decent. And so there's consequences. And there's consequences to the efficiency that has occurred. And then there's national security consequences. And we're learning about those right now.

And it's not just medical supplies that we need to take a look at. I'm from Houston. So our oil and gas industry is in is in a big, big dire straits right now. We risk we risk the possibility that we lose energy between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Now, hopefully, I think the administration has been able to use some diplomatic pressure and figure that out to an extent. But we have to decide whether we think there's value in doing things ourselves. That's the ultimate question. And I would answer that, yes, there is. Now, do we take it to an extreme?

No. But are we out of balance right now maybe yes and maybe we do need to look at changing our supply chains maybe that means some things are just slightly more expensive maybe that's what it means um but but for for a lot of element for a lot of items we have to be looking at that we have to be thinking that way well i think i think also when you look at what are the consequences of allowing us to have things manufactured over there, what kind of karma do we take on for when you look at Foxconn, those buildings where they manufacture iPhones, they have nets around them to keep people from jumping off. How many people have to jump before you put nets up? How many people have to jump before you put nets up? And what has to happen there where your life sucks so hard to make an iPhone?

I mean, how much would it cost to make those here? Is it worth it for us? And is there some real value in the label that we used to love to look for, Made in America? That's not really discussed that much anymore. But I think it would be wise for all of us to invest in that idea again. Yeah, and the problem is we hold ourselves to those standards of good labor conditions and good environmental standards, but we punish ourselves almost out of business completely. but we punish ourselves almost out of business completely. And so we punish ourselves out of business, usually through these specific regulations, whether it's labor or environmental,

but then we also engage in free trade. So it almost guarantees that we lose out our own manufacturing base or sometimes the energy sector, whatever it is, because we simultaneously make ourselves less competitive while also forcing our people to compete against people who work their employees so hard that they have to build nets around their office as they throw themselves off of it. That's such a good question, by the way. How many people actually jump before they put the nets?

What is the number? That is just a crazy reality. And it's also one that we just accept because we want an iphone and i mean apple's one of the most profitable countries the i mean companies rather the world's ever known i mean it's a spectacularly profitable company and like and and there's there's a whole of government policy and a whole society society. I'm not going to say government. It's really society that we all have to kind of collectively look at this. And it's going to take the private sector as well. Because Apple would tell you, okay, I'd love to open up a plant here. And they do.

But they'd like to do more. The reason they don't is because when they put out that job application, nobody will show up. Or at least not enough people. And so and so what does that tell you? It tells you that we're not educating people in the skills that are necessary to engage in these jobs. There's a lot of technical skills that we are not teaching because so this gets to education policy. Why aren't we promoting more STEM? Why aren't we promoting via the federal

loan program, student loans, why aren't we promoting things and majors that actually get us to a higher paying job? Why should the taxpayer be on the hook for a major that is guaranteed not to pay anything once you graduate? What are you going to do with that degree and it's whatever who knows like you can name but you know what i'm talking about you can name a bunch right gender studies whatever it's these are not high paying things and they're not useful for the economy that that we want and so what kind of incentives need to shift is my is my point to encourage more of that so that apple when they do look at a place to build a new factory they can be they can be confident that people will actually show up to work there one more question dan before we go when you're running for president

i know you're gonna i'm in i'm in my 30s come on i got i got so much time um four years well yeah i mean technically yeah but um but how old are you now how old are you i'm really not i'm really not planning on that come on stop lying 36 you're 36 when you're 40 that'll be perfect that's that's the time i don't know perfect i mean i i do like being in politics. I like having a voice. It's, it's, it's a place I never thought I would be. Um, the day before I decided to run for Congress, I was about to take a job working at the department of defense. Um, just kind of moving along my same trajectory and like the national security space. But, uh, I, I, I like this. I, I I've always loved policy policy i've always loved thinking through

these things and kind of the foundations of what makes this country great and um you know i think we've got great years ahead but uh yeah i'm not i'm just answer your question super honestly i'm just not not thinking about it there's so much changes in politics right now. So much, so much changes from year to year. Like so much. It's crazy how, how it's not like a, there's no pipeline in politics. It doesn't work that way. Um,

you know, whether you're running for the first time or whether you're trying to move up to a different position, it's just like, you just got to do what feels right. And when the people want it and the people will let you know when they want it, that's a very good diplomatic answer.

And I think you're uniquely qualified for politics. I appreciate you. I appreciate how reasonable you are and how honest and objective you are. And I always enjoy talking to you. So thank you very much, Dan. And good luck with your book. It's called Fortitude. It's out right now.

Go get it, folks. And I'll put it up on my Instagram and all that good stuff, too. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you, man. Really appreciate you, Joe. Stay safe out there. You, too. All right.

Bye, everybody. Thanks, Joe.