The Joe Rogan Experience - #1479 - David Pakman

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

David Pakman is a television & radio host, political commentator, and YouTube personality. He is the host of the internationally syndicated political television and talk radio program The David Pakman Show. @David Pakman Show

coming to us live via technology from the other side of the continent, David Pakman, ladies and gentlemen. So good to be back with you. Good to be with you, too, and I love your facial hair, as I was saying before. I say stick with it all the way. Maybe get some kind of a cult leader guru thing happening. I'm actually five days from a man bun, and I want to see what you thought about that. The man bun's the starter kit for a cult leader, right?

The man bun is like I'm trying to get people to listen to me more and take me more seriously. I'm spiritual. I need like a gimmick of some kind. I think your gimmick is just being a nice guy and smart. How about that? That's rare. To a fault. Nice to a fault.

You're nice to a fault? I don't know. I get emails from people who are like you don't have to kowtow to the dumb part of your audience like you don't have to say stuff like listen i want to apologize in advance for using a slightly off color phrase but people are like you just don't you just shouldn't do that it's better for the show for you just to say the thing i love that you listen to those people i think you should be. And if you feel like you need to say that, I feel like you should just say that. It's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't hurt my feelings when you say

things like that. You know, even if I understand what you're doing, it's not, it's no big deal. I feel like there's too many opinions and it sucks for the people with opinions. And I think it's one of the problems with what we do. And one of the reasons why people get so angry at us. So if you and I are having a conversation and we, we maybe perhaps we agree on something, but someone listening is like, fuck that. This is what's wrong with that idea. And they want to say it, but they can't. And so the comments are almost inherently angry because it's really so much of it is just people who want to say something, but there's no forum for them. They only can say it in the comments. They can't.

They feel like they're in on this conversation that they want to jump in on and interject. Well, I got an email today from someone who said, I love everything you've been doing for the last six years. But yesterday you used the word anti-vaxxer and i i just that's it that was it when you used that word that was it for the david kakman show and it's like i you can't win with that you can't win you know but it's the same thing it's like they're angry right and this is the way to get you to listen like oh you're leaving wait a minute they're being completely unreasonable can you imagine if there was a show that you enjoy and the guy said one thing that you disagreed with, especially something like calling someone an anti-vaxxer and you're like, fuck this.

It's over. My relationship with you is over. That purity standard is impossible to achieve, especially when you're doing something like what you and I do. We're basically just talking with a very – I mean I'm'm sure you have some bullet points of things you want to cover, but you're ad-libbing all the time, what we call free-balling all the time. And it's a crazy standard to try to hold, to ask someone to not say anything that you're going to disagree with. Or I say things I disagree with. I'll listen to it a half hour later, or I'll think about it a day later.

I'm like, why did I even say it like that? I don't, I have videos from seven years ago where, you know, it's not that my, like my, my foundational values haven't changed, but I do look at it and I say, you know, if I had known then what was going to happen four months later, I never would have done it that particular way. Yeah. There's a, well, there's a lot of things that happen in the news that force you to sort of shift your opinions and go, oh, that kind of stuff does happen. Oh, I've been naive. I've had this perception of, you know, whether it's the government or the intelligence agencies of being like beyond reproach. And now I find out, oh, all right, now I got to go and revisit a lot of things that I was saying were nonsense. A lot of things that I was dismissing openly. Now I got to go, oh, well, we like to think that when it comes to like governments and intelligence agencies, we'd like to think that there's some level of whether it's government or military, there's some place that you could reach where you're like a super person, where you're not going to make any of the mistakes that we'd

attribute to people based on greed or ego or pettiness or short-sightedness, that when you get to that point, you're a proven commodity and that you are, you're what we're looking for as a leader. And you have to be upheld. You have to uphold these very strict standards at that spot. And we assume that there is an actual thing like that. And I think it's one of the reasons why people get so frustrated at Trump is because he doesn't even try to pretend he's one of those things. He behaves the same way he used to. Well, one of the things that I was kind of in a battle with in with my audience during the primary was I would get emails from people who would say the only person who can beat Trump is Bernie, for example. And then I would get people, people who would say the only person who could beat Trump is Tulsi Gabbard. Everybody else is straight up a bad person.

And my message was always, listen, we shouldn't deify any of these people. These are just people. You've met a lot of them. They've been in your studio. We're just talking about people. You're not going to agree with them on every policy position. You're not going to agree with everything they've done personally. And where I think it gets dicey is where they start movements.

It's a cult of personality, really, where a movement is built around the person as an idea and they can do no wrong. And that's where you're there's no way to talk those folks down about issues or about practical decisions that we have to make. No, I think you're 100 percent right. And I also think that the position itself, the world has grown too large for the position. has grown too large for the position. I feel like if we left from all parts of the land and all parts of the world and found an empty continent, well, obviously the United States wasn't really empty, but if we found a place where we resettled and we tried to restructure government from scratch, we would take that into consideration now. I think our founding fathers, they were just dealing with this archetypal structure of one person that sort of runs things, but in this case, it would be a person that we all agreed to, and it was a much better step moving forward than kings, right? But I think now that we've kind of done that for a while, we realize, well, yeah, that might be great when it's 100,000 people or a million people, but once it gets to 320 million people and complicated things like international business and trade agreements and the environment and nuclear power versus solar and wind, one person is going to be responsible for all these insanely important decisions?

That seems crazy. And to blame one person when any one thing goes wrong seems crazy as well. I don't think we would do it this way i think we would have some sort of a council of wise people or something along those lines you know what's interesting to me about that i mean we're like diving headfirst right into you know a bunch of stuff here but what's interesting about that is when you think about who to vote for for president and i know that that we'll get into this stuff, I'm sure, you're not just voting for the person, you're voting for who are they likely to have working for them, what is likely to happen in courts, what is likely to happen regulation-wise.

And so, of course, you want to think about who it is that the person is, but you also want to think about who do they bring with them. And for me, that's a lot of how I see voting in November at this point. Yeah, most people have made that concession. And it's an interesting concession, right? Because it's not a concession we had to make. If it was Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders or Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg or, you know, go down the line. There's a lot of very credible candidates that would have made like interest, like maybe this person could be the next great president. Maybe this person could be a great leader. But now we're in this position like, oh, God, OK,

so listen, we're voting for the cabinet like Biden is. So he's whether or not he's having moments that are related to cognitive decline, which you could speculate, or whether or not he's having moments that are related to cognitive decline, which you could speculate, or whether or not this is just his reaction to the most extreme amount of pressure he's ever faced in his life. And that does happen with people. We know people lock up. I would imagine that a guy who's been in the spotlight as long as he has for so long probably would be able to handle stuff.

But I think running for president is a whole different ball game i think everything gets turned up by 10 and i think it gets turned up in this society that we're experiencing today it gets turned up even more so because of social media like no president other than trump has had really had to deal with this kind of wave of social viral uh you know feedback online with twitter and Facebook and YouTube and all the stuff that we're experiencing right now. Obama didn't have to deal with that really in his first term, maybe a little bit in his second term, but then Trump's the first guy to tackle it head on. And he's, in a lot of ways, he's showing you what can come at you. And I think that when Biden is running

through these steps to try to become president, he's experiencing a wave of attention and scrutiny that he's never experienced before. And that could also exacerbate, what am I, a doctor here? I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with his head, but that could also exaggerate. Well, I was going to say, have you taken a position on the Biden cognitive stuff that's definitive? Something's wrong. Something's wrong. If he was my friend and he was fighting, I'd ask him to retire. I mean, if I'm looking at it that way.

I have friends that I've seen their cognitive decline from fighting. I'm not saying that Biden's the same because I don't really know him. I don't know him over a long period of time. I don't know him at all personally, but something's wrong. The way. Are any of your friends that, are they close to 80? Any of them? No, no.

The guys who are experiencing cognitive decline are younger guys have been hit in the head. Um, when you get to 80, uh, I, I have known people that have had problems and it's, it's very unfortunate. Um, I don't think he's there where I would he's there, because he could still talk to them. If that was just a guy that you knew, and he said something like, we've all been endowed by, you know, the thing. You wouldn't say, oh, Jesus, what's going on with Ray? You would say, oh, he locked up.

He had a brain fart. He had a mental lapse, which I've had doing podcasts all the time. It can happen. But in that moment in front of those people to do it that way while he's running for president and while he's had a few of those before, you could be dealing with anxiety, too. There's probably a lot of shit going on. But I would be concerned. Yeah. I mean, listen.

There's probably a lot of shit going on, but I would be concerned. Yeah, I mean, listen, so I don't have any, I don't, my view is just based on actual professionals that I've talked to and people that have been in a room with him because I'm not a professional and I've not been in the room with Biden. So Andrew Yang was on with Sam Harris recently. I don't know if you saw it. And this topic came up and Andrew Yang basically said, listen, he's 78 years old. If you compare a video of Biden debating Paul Ryan in 2012 to Biden a month ago, obviously it's different. And to some degree, that's normal when someone's 78 years old. But Andrew Yang's perspective was that he didn't

see anything that he would call dementia or cognitive decline beyond that. So that's like one, it's just one data point. It doesn't tell us anything definitively. You know, the other thing is I've interviewed a few people and I think you and I maybe have even messaged about some of them, uh, uh, neuroscience, uh, neurologists and mental health professionals who are very concerned about Trump, like the oranges of an investigation, the, where he has, he seems to sort of like lock up when his shoulders sort of, you know, this thing that he does where his shoulders kind of, uh, weird way. I haven't seen a few of those. Yeah. I got video of that. You

know, he walks off with this plan. You think it's a neurological thing? I don't know. That's the thing. So it could be neurological, mental health, side-effective medication. There's a whole bunch of stuff it could be. Could it also be an injury? Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. I mean, if he's doing something with his back or shoulder. Well, it's weird because he, when it happens, he has a verbal mistake that he makes and it coincides with this shoulder thing.

And then it's almost like there's a half-second gap and then someone hits reset button, and he'll get back on the teleprompter or whatever. It's weird. There's like 10 or so examples of this. I need to see this. I need to see this while I'm talking to you. So Jamie's going to search for one. So what would he search for? I think if you went to like search.twitter.com and just searched in videos the way you can do and you put like Trump brain glitch, I'm guessing that some of these would come up.

But the gist of what I was getting to was some of these same neurologists and mental health folks, when I asked them privately about Biden and say, are you seeing like the same type of thing? They all say no. So again, it's like, it's not my view. They're hardcore Democrats. I don't know. He's had these moments where for sure something doesn't look good. Right. I agree.

Totally agree. So why would they say any differently? They've got to be Democrats. They've got to be hardcore party loyalists. I think that to assume that absent any evidence is maybe unfair. Yeah, it is. But I'm an unfair guy in some some respects. But here's my thought on this right now.

So like what? Let's imagine that Biden's having a problem. Right. Let's imagine it's absolutely for real. I'm still voting for him over Trump. Right. I mean, like, so I think last time we talked, you mentioned you were pro-choice. Do I remember that right?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I am. But I feel like it's a it's a controversial subject for a reason. Fair, fair. Yeah. If Donald Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice, it will be someone who would love to overturn Roe v. Wade.

I mean, there's not even a chance. He said it right. This is what Trump has said that he is that he is pro-life and that he would pick someone that would – or it's just by virtue of picking conservative. It's actually – there's two parts to it. One is Donald Trump was pro-choice almost his entire life. He became pro-life when he was I think 68 because he met a kid he liked and he imagined if that kid wasn't born. No, I'm serious. I believe you. It's just hilarious. It's crazy. It's like an ABC after school special. Let's imagine that that's true, that he had an awakening at age 68 after being pro-life his whole life. He said he would pick justices that were recommended to him by, I forget which

conservative group. You're only going to get so-called pro-life justices from these groups. On the other hand, Joe Biden will absolutely pick a pro-choice justice. So if I was pro-choice like you are, how do I justify voting for the guy who's going to replace potentially Ruth Bader Ginsburg with someone who would want Roe v. Wade overturned? I couldn't do it in good conscience That's that's a good point Well, I'm gonna get into it in a second But Jamie just pulled up this video of Trump and I'm gonna get a watch him have this weird twitch for the first time Okay, hit me with it Jamie

Okay, so he's talking I'm watching it. Is that it? That little move that he made? Oh, this is hilariously silly. Trump neurologically malfunctions with a full spasm. No, he's talking and he just went like this. People do that.

That's silly. Maybe that video is silly. There's a dozen of them. Yeah, I don't know. I couldn't hear that. I think a better thing is something that you showed me on your show, a better example, when there was real problems with him enunciating words. And, you know, there was speculation like, was he falling? Was he sick?

Was he on a sedative? Was something going wrong? It almost seemed like his tongue wasn't working correctly right yeah like he was wrestling with with a paralyzed tongue your perspective matches mine but i think i really for me it's like this stuff we're not probably ever going to really get an answer to this and i don't know that it's imperative to know the answers for me to know who it is I'm going to vote for, I guess is the point I'm trying to make. It's fascinating that pro-choice is such a hard line issue on left-wing people and right-wing people. It really is that it's

this line in the sand and people are willing to make concessions in favor of going in that direction because they recognize the slippery slope of limiting people's rights and the dangers of going in the other direction. You're not going to stop abortions. You're just going to stop legal abortions. It's going to be very dangerous for the women. It's almost a black and white issue in that regard. But what's not a black and white issue is abortion itself, right? Like there's a time in the baby's life or the fetus when it's inside the woman where everyone gets uncomfortable. Whether it's five months in, four months in, three, whatever it is for you, where you're like, oh Jesus, that's a baby now. And to deny that I think is, is very odd. That's

a weird thing that we do because it's so uncomfortable. What it is, is so uncomfortable. It bothers us so much that we, we just draw these lines and we've got this opinion in a box and it's this and this, here we go. We've got this bullet in a box and it's this and this here we go we got this bulletproof right wing box and you can never have an abortion okay what if your daughter gets raped by uh some robber you think that your daughter should have to carry this man's child like if they know about it immediately when it's a bundle of cells really you think that like that to me is insane right now if you knew that it was conceivable that trump would put someone on the court who has that view that'd be pretty scary wouldn't well it's scary in a lot of ways it's scary in

a lot of ways um i think the more control government has over your body and the more it can dictate what you can and can't do, the scary things get. And then it gets scary in that this is a subject that, you know, it's so polarizing. And if you move in the direction of limiting it, you run the risk, I always feel, of shifting even like the consciousness of the public, shifting the way people approach things like this, accepting control that the government has control of your body as like one of the like the idea that they can come and decide what you what you have to do for the rest of your life now based on maybe something that wasn't even your choice that to me is crazy but that's not the

only thing that's going on there There's so many other issues. It's one of the reasons why picking a president and picking a party, it's so crazy that we let one person and then his group that he gets with him shift the consciousness of the public or shift the direction of the country one way or the other. It's a really weird choice that we make in even making a president and in doing it every four years and having all these checks and balances that you have to follow. I mean, I think it's a great system for the time when they invented it. I mean, it's amazing how well it holds up from 1776 to today. It's incredible. It shows you how

amazingly wise they were. But just think about what we know now in 2020 about just the nature of communication like what you and I are doing. I mean, this is going to affect millions of people and their opinions. If you knew that today in 2020 and someone asked you to make rules based on what was going to be in place 300 years from now, you would be like, I'm not qualified to do that. It's really, it's incredible how well they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights back then. I mean, it's really, it's one of the most amazing things ever. If you really think about like all the different times that it's come up, and then you think about how long it's been that it was created. I mean, it's really an astounding piece of human work. It is. Your argument, though, is really one for having to update

the infrastructure that we, right? So like, as you're saying, if in order to change the way that we govern the country, as you're saying, you know, one person making all these decisions with all of these different areas that they're responsible for. If you want to better. We don't have a Windows 10 of government. We're still working with 95. We still have the older versions of Apple's software. We don't have OS X 10, whatever the latest version of it is. We are in this weird place where we have this system that's better than anything that we could see anywhere else. But yet it really it doesn't necessarily work perfectly for the complicated issues that exist in managing just the 330 million people and all their problems. Like, is there a particular issue where when you think of Trump and Biden, you're on the Trump side in terms of the political position? Hmm. Like what political positions? See, my opinions on political positions, especially like the really scary ones, right? Like the possibility of war, the environment, things along those lines. I wish I was more informed i wish i knew exactly

you know like when when there's some negotiations in these trade war deals with china for instance like i wish i understood that better i wish i really knew what was at stake and what china's actually trying to do and whether or not uh like in particular like when you think about china china and the military and their their engagement with the companies the reason why like i was i never understood why they were trying to keep huawei out i was like why they keep that doesn't make any sense to me like shouldn't they show that they've done something bad and but it's a company that they feel is inexorably connected to the to the chinese government so that's like negotiating with them and that kind of like,

for me to say that I think that this person's doing a better job or I like the way Biden would handle it better. Like, do I really know what the fuck I'm talking about? I don't, you know, I really don't. And that's the case with a lot of issues.

I mean, social issues, I think. That's what I was going to say. I feel like there's low hanging fruit. We're just from listening to you. It's like, when you said that you were mostly sort of a Bernie guy, that in the primary, you seem to, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but that Bernie would be your primary,

the person in the primary that you would lean towards or support. If you pick environment, just for one example, Bernie's big on Green New Deal and we could debate how practical is it? Is it just a framework? Is it something that could literally be made law or whatever the case? Trump thinks climate change was a hoax created by China, whereas Biden supports the Green New Deal as

a framework. It's like, if you're coming from, if we start with Bernie, you can see that there's a Grand Canyon size gap between the two options. And so that's where I'm kind of interested in. Because I don't know if you see them or not, but there's all these articles about Joe Rogan is left, right, center, whatever. You and I have spoken enough now where you've made it clear that your actual positions on social issues environment, they're pretty left. And you even said, Bernie is really who aligns with me. Okay. Biden is not Bernie for sure, but it's, it's, it's closer.

And so that's where I'm interested in whether there's really anything you can identify where you're like, I just don't agree with Biden on this. Um, well, when you talk about Bernie and why I was interested in Bernie, what Bernie represented to me was someone who wanted change at a societal level, wanted to help people in a way that wasn't going to make anybody any money. It wasn't something where he was clearly doing this because of the special interest groups. It put him in a position, thinking this would ultimately be more profitable. When he's talking about things like eliminating student loans and making school free for everyone. When you say that, I go, first of all, that's not making anybody any money, right?

That's one of those things you're only doing because you think it would be better for humans, better for our culture, better for our civilization. I'm all for that. Those are the things. Eliminating these catastrophic health care bills that people get when they get sick and they go bankrupt. That to me is crazy that we have this community. That's what it's supposed to be, right? The United States is supposed to be like almost like a giant team. And we would let others just by simple misfortune, we would let their life completely fall apart

because they got injured and they come up with this bill that literally changes the whole course of their life. thousands of dollars, you're fucked. Like your, your life, you don't have enough time to make that up unless you do something significantly different in terms of earning more money. So you're stuck and you're in a bed. That's to me crazy. And that doesn't make any sense. Like as a person who values community, as a person who values, like we can help and it makes everybody feel good. If you can help someone who came upon some bad fortune, they feel better. They feel protected and loved. You feel better for being able to use your, you know, your privilege or your fortune to help these people. That's what we need more of.

That is what stood out for me about Bernie Sanders. Now, the argument against that is the pro-business argument, right? Now, the argument against that is the other there. I mean, I don't think that this is a, these are mutually exclusive that you can't, you can have capitalism, but you could also have compassion and we could, we could work together as a community and, and, and try to take all these problems that we have that, that are really clear, right? Like these inner cities that never get any better. They never show any improvement unless they get gentrified. Everything stays fucked, right? Why is that? That's not an insurmountable problem. Like if we can fly across the planet and try to fix countries that we've

blown up in war, why can't we try to fix the inner cities that our kids go to school in? Like that doesn't make any sense to me that people were forced to live in. Like, that doesn't make any sense to me, that people are forced to live in. That's why I was interested in Bernie Sanders. That's what he means to me. The healthcare example is an interesting one because it really comes down to what is the main point of the healthcare apparatus, right? If the main point is to get people as healthy as possible

so that they can live the longest, most fulfilling lives that they want or are able to. That gets you one set of policies. If the perspective is healthcare is just an industry like any other where the participants just are there to make money, that's a totally different policy prescription and regulatory infrastructure. It's night and day. Yeah, it really is. It really is night and day. And it's one of those things that I think people are probably going to be more interested in hearing about now after this pandemic. And they realize, hey, through no fault of your own, you could be broke. Through no fault of your own,

you can lose your business. Through no fault of your own. So all these ideas that, like, I know people that are pretty right-wing that would give me a hard time about calling me a socialist and a commie because I'm really into Bernie Sanders. A lot of those very same people are now wanting to get that stimulus check. A lot of those very same people are now understanding why I supported Andrew Yang and his concept of universal basic income, because his concept is based on his understanding of technology and his knowledge of AI and the potential possibility to just take millions of people out of the market, out of the workplace, like that. Almost like this, like a virus of technology that removes diseases, excuse me, like a virus of technology that removes diseases, excuse me, removes jobs instead of removes your health. And I think that more people probably would be better off

if we shifted our ideas about what socialism means and what democratic socialism means. I think the word is so toxic. Maybe we should just call it community support, you know, that we should think of these really key things, like student loans. I think we both agree about this. It is insane to start your life at 21

years, 22 years old, just getting out of school, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. That's insane. And if you go on to get a PhD, ah! It keeps going. It keeps going. And you get to this point where you're just, you have this weight over you. Everywhere you go, there's this big ass weight and you're carrying it around.

And you're carrying around this debt that even if you go bankrupt, you have to pay. How did that happen? How are businesses able to pollute the environment, make terrible mistakes, go under, go bankrupt, and they're absolved of their debt. But a kid who wanted to learn something goes to a school and winds up, you know, you're 22. You're not even a fully formed human yet. And you're in debt. You're fucked. You're starting out of the gate. Crazy, crazy behind the line. Well, you're completely right, of course, about the toxic nature of the word socialism. Yeah.

Just to go back to that for a second. I think that that hurt Bernie. In 2015, I was saying Bernie may well have been a socialist in the 1970s. He may still be one, but he's really running on social democracy, which is what they have in Northern Europe. It's a type of capitalism. And this is what I think Andrew Yang actually did well. I don't know if it was people-centered capitalism that he called what he was doing or what phrase he used.

But I do think in my postmortems about what happened with Bernie, because it wasn't by a little bit that Bernie lost. I mean, even before he dropped out, he was down like 1.8 or 2 million votes to Joe Biden. This was really not close. I do think that the continued use of that word socialism was not helpful. And I know people will hear me say this and they'll say, David, either way, they were going to call him a socialist. What difference does it make if he embraces the term or says it's not the right term or whatever? Sure, that applies to some people, but I fail to see what the advantage was to using a term that didn't really describe what his campaign was. He's talking about capitalism,

where you say, like you're pointing out, we can't let people drop too low. We need to ensure some basic level things happen that aren't people's fault. It's not just about you're going to do as well as you want to do. There are circumstances people are born into, injuries, pandemics, all this stuff. Yes. So I do think that whatever your opinion is about socialism, quote unquote, there was really no advantage to Bernie Sanders from using or at least to some degree allowing that term to continue being used. Well, he wanted to redefine it. And when he came onto my show, he actually did try to define it and describe the difference between the concept of socialism, which a lot of people connect to communism,

and what he calls democratic socialism. And he was showing a more tamed-down version of this concept. A lot of real young lefties, like my friend, uh, my friend, uh, Bridget was on the podcast the other day, Bridget Phetasy. She's a hilarious writer, very funny comedian. And she was talking about how she found some stuff that she wrote when she was in her early twenties and she read it and she's, she's more center today. I would say maybe left on many many issues politically, socially, rather.

But she was like AOC, she said. She said she's reading this stuff, and she was like a radical when she was young. And I think that happens to people. I'm sure Bernie was probably a full-on socialist at one point in his life. But what did that mean back then versus what does it mean now? And even the term socialist, like the term, like when you, when you look at the term conservative or the term socialist, you're talking about a spectrum. You're not talking about a one or a zero. It's not, it's not, you can't have a, no one has the same number

factor of conservatism. There's a lot of people that are conservative that, you know, they're very liberal on a lot of social issues, but yet they still vote red. And I think there's a lot of people that consider themselves like a socialist, but what does that, at what level? And if you're pro fire department, I think you embrace some socialist values, right? If you're pro a lot of the services that we use that are a part of your tax dollars, like we're combining our money so that the world is better for all of us. It's not just a dog-eat-dog fight. We recognize value in community and society and a civilization where we all work together. We just don't want to work together too much. We don't want people leeching off of it. And'm on that side as well because i know that although there are more and we're seeing these

more than we've ever seen in our life that multiple circumstances beyond your comprehension totally out of your control that fucks up your life but yet we also see people who are lazy and who keep fucking up their life and you keep enabling them and helping them it doesn't help anybody either both those things are true. It does. Just because you agree with one thing that we need to help each other doesn't mean you deny the fact that there's a real problem psychologically to giving people free money and to giving people free room and board and taking away incentive for them to survive. There's something for whatever reason that a lot of us need this sort of like inner drive this

Knowledge that you're you're responsible for your own destiny and you have to go out there and you have to put in the work You have to get out of bed when the alarm goes off You have to do the things you're supposed to do and there's people that don't do that and yet they still want to be rewarded They still want money. They still want their check. They still want the thing they feel society or government owes them. That's not good either. See, both of those things are not good. It's not good to let people who are sick rot and live their life in a compromised position because they don't have enough money for the medical care. That's sick too. It's not a good person. It's not a good society. It's not a good model to have people starve. That's not good. If there's money and food and we could distribute it more evenly, especially to people that are unfortunate. But it's also not good to let people just camp out on the sidewalk where you can't walk through it.

Los Angeles is filled with tents now. Especially now because of all this craziness and the pandemic. It's gotten way worse. There's areas where you can't go anywhere. You literally can't walk under underpasses. There are these campgrounds. That's not good either. Now we're dealing with mental health problems, I'm sure, and a lot of other issues. You mentioned the areas where even right-wingers tend to be okay with socializing certain services. So fire departments, an easy one. Who does the road? Those are all really easy. But I think that there's some more pernicious ones that the right is less eager to own. Like for example, it's all about free market

capitalism for profits, make a business, build up the business, et cetera. Even when that business is built on law enforcement that's socialized to protect your offices, law infrastructure that you count on to protect your intellectual property. So put that aside for a second. But then they're okay socializing the cleanup or the fixing in many cases. So with drilling and fracking companies, for example. Great, great examples. Capitalism for the profits. Look at me, capitalist. I figured out how to do this drilling, how to extract this energy from the earth. I bought the land. I bought the equipment. I'm hiring employees. Look at me pulling myself up by the bootstraps. Something goes wrong. People downwind, get sick, whatever. Now, they're going to say, let's socialize that cleanup cost though,

right? Because we should do this through taxation. Let's make sure that we're cleaning this up at the state level. We want state funds to get this all cleaned up. So that is an area of hypocrisy that's more difficult than just like, we mostly all agree the fire department should be socialized. A few people will say, no, if you call and there's not really a fire, you should owe money. That's like a tiny percentage. It's an easy one. The ones I'm talking about are a little bit tougher and you're going to get a lot more pushback, I think, if you were to focus on those. Well, I think you got a really good point with the environmental cleanup, like something like the BP oil spill. That's a really good point, and that's a weird one.

It's like you don't want to – it's almost like it's such a catastrophic event, you don't want to leave it in the hands of someone who is so – I mean, they fucked up in the first place to make this happen. I don't trust them. I don't trust the way they do business. I mean, maybe it's just something that happens when you drill under the ocean and you pull oil out. Occasionally things go wrong, but I don't want to trust them to fix that. I want to have some sort of environmental cleanup crew that's in place and maybe give them the bill. I mean, I don't know what did it cost? How much

did it cost BP to have that? And isn't it still leaking? Hasn't it been proven that it's still polluting the ocean? I don't know. Over the last year, I honestly don't know what's going on. Did you ever see the videos of when it was coming out of the ground? Oh, yeah. It's crazy. Like the world's ending. It's a high pressure. It's just open for days, right? I mean, months. I don't even remember how long it was just open. But that's the point. So this is where it starts to get tricky because it sounds like you might trust them to monetize it. But then if it gets

messed up, hey, we shouldn't trust them to clean it up. Someone else should do it, which maybe I agree with. And you're right, we should give them the bill. But that's the role of regulation to begin with. If they were better supervised, we could have prevented this from the start. I mean, with the BP oil spill, I'm going back like 10 years now, but there was some $500,000 valve, I believe, that was not required. I'm going from memory, so I hope I'm getting this 90% right. There was some regulation that was removed where they were no longer required to have this $500,000 safety on these rigs, which would have prevented it. And obviously the 500 grand, they didn't want to spend up front, but it would have been way cheaper than what ultimately happened.

Jesus. You know, when I see those rigs outside, like there's a place that I love to go to in Santa Barbara that they have these offshore little oil rigs. I always look at them like that. One day in the future, we're going to look back and go, why the fuck did we ever let them put those there? That is so crazy. Any other business, like, first of all, that's not even our land, right? No one even owns that. It's like if you're an oil company and you're in Texas, you have to have either a lease

on the land or you have to have rights to the land. It has to be yours in order to dig into the ground and get oil. But out there in the ocean, you're just kind of doing it on public area. You're doing it in the world. I mean, once you get a certain amount of miles, I forget how many miles it is offshore. It's international waters, right? So you just, we're making agreements. We're letting these companies go into the ground and we're not profiting from it at all.

All the money goes to them, and they're sucking it out of the ocean. And at any moment, it could go wrong. It could be an explosion, and the beaches are ruined for the rest of your generation. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I don't know if it's going to be like in 50 years or 200 years or however many years. At some point, we're going to look back, and the books will say, we used to pull this stuff out of the ground, and then refine it, and then burn it.

And then people would say, you guys did what? How did that work? How did you even get away with that? Do you drive an electric car? I don't currently, but I plan to get one. I have a lease, which is up in three months. And the next car will be electric.

Yeah. Once you get one, other cars feel stupid. I mean, not just stupid because of the environmental risk. Like, I have a Tesla Model S. It's the craziest thing I've ever driven. It literally doesn't make sense. They're so fast. It's like it's violating physics.

It's so strange. It's like you see this physics. It's so strange. It's like you see this enormous screen where the navigation is on. You're like, why did anybody ever have a little screen when you can have one of these things? It's like having a map open in front of you. They're incredible. Now, if you do a long trip. I don't bring it on a long trip.

I don't trust it. I was going to say, are you planning ahead of time where you're stopping to charge it? I have friends that have driven many many across the country even with Teslas there's a little supercharger map that's built in to the software, it's amazing you can do it, but I don't want to wait around in some town for 20 minutes while my car charges to 80%

and look around for weirdos what if some shit's going down man what if you're in 14 miles left on your charge and all of a sudden a building explodes half a block away? You've got to get out of there. If I'm taking a road trip and I'm going across the country, I want options. Maybe if they have a little engine they could get you by,

just a little tank of gas, a little engine to get you by in case you run out of batteries. It's going to be solar eventually. You could also just always not go below 50%, right? And then you would know if the shit hits the fan, you've got 50% at least. Yeah, you could do that. Yeah, you could do that. But that would be annoying. You know, you drive, you know, the 50% is like 150 miles.

If you're on a long trip you go to 150 miles and pull over and then you gotta wait there for whatever amount of time they're getting better at it though they're getting faster but the point is like it's such a clear leap in the evolution of technology that once you you drive one of those you're like oh it's game over like he told me that when elon was here he told me that and I was like oh you're just saying that because it's your product and we're joking around about it but then when I drove one I'm like oh okay yeah I mean it's like it doesn't even make sense there's so much better than regular cars because it's instant acceleration there's no no gears it's one gear it's instant torque and it also is so quiet like like oh I don't I think. I can just drive around this thing and think.

In total peace and quiet. The quiet part is really appealing to me. And I'm looking. In a few weeks, I think right now the Model 3s are like 10 weeks out. So I'm probably going to put in an order in four or five weeks so I get it right when I need it. But as far as the Elon Musk Tesla stuff. So I bought Tesla stock a long time ago. Years, years ago. I don't remember exactly

when. And obviously, it did really well for a really long time. And I don't remember when it was, if it was a year and a half ago or two years ago. But when Elon smoked pot on your show and the shit hit the fan, I panic sold half my stock. No! And the thing is, I always say, I don't know anything about stocks. I invest in mutual funds. You just let it ride long-term, reinvest the dividends. Don't think about it. But I have like five or six stocks that I actually chose to buy. And this is exactly why I don't invest in stocks because I was convinced that after that incident, horrible things were going to happen. And I was like, I'm selling half. And obviously

I regret having done that at this point. Do you smoke pot, Dave? I don't. I don't smoke anything. Inhaling any smoke, I just don't think is good. And so I've not done it. Well, there's definitely better ways to do it than inhaling smoke, but inhaling smoke is very effective. But eating sugar is not good either. I'm sure you do that. I try to limit it, certainly. Worrying that much about what would happen in the market, I get it if you don't smoke pot.

If you smoke pot, you're like, oh, just relax, everybody. Because it seems like a drug, but we were drinking whiskey. I want to be clear. It wasn't the smoking pot that worried me. It was the reaction to it? It was what happened with, I think it was around the same time where he said, I might have found someone to take the company private. Yes.

And SEC got involved. And I just panicked. And I was like, I'm up so much, I'll just sell half. So it's not the end of the world. I'm hedging my bets here. He has two qualities that I would never bet against. And the first one is an insane work ethic. His work ethic is insane.

It's insane. I mean, that guy will work 16 hours a day, seven days a week. He just keeps going. He was, when he was trying to get the model three production out, he was sleeping on the floor of the factory.

I mean, he's a maniac and he's weirdly intelligent, like weirdly some, like when you, when i'm talking to him i feel like i'm talking to someone in the future like this is what you know if i if i had to go back in time and uh have dinner with uh a neanderthal you know uh i i feel like it'd be real similar to when i sit down and hang out with elon how he feels. Because I think he's like another level of human being. I think that that is a natural course of progression for evolution, that we are going to eventually find people that are getting smarter.

We're not going to stay in a static state forever, right? Just like we didn't stay as an Australopithecus. We became human beings over, you know, natural selection and evolution, all that good stuff. That's going to keep going. And if it's going to keep going, you're, especially when it's integrated with this insane access to technology that kids have today and insane access to information, you're going to have smarter people. It's going to be a different thing. And they're, you know, maybe they're going to, I mean, he's a, he's a human being so he does make mistakes just like human beings make like

when he called that guy a pedo guy and that kind of shit but when it comes to his ability to allocate resources and do things and get things done like he's so smart they just let him drill tunnels under la they're like okay go ahead they like, how many people would be able to go to the, you know, the, the city of Los Angeles and go, I've got an idea. I want to put a tunnel, go all the way to Vegas. They'd be like, this guy's on Coke, get him out of here. But with Elon, they let him try. It's a, I think he's a really important person for our culture. Really important. Like probably one of the most important people. Where are on i mean i guess at some point coronavirus is a topic where are you on what's going on with him reopening the factory

and saying arrest me and i mean i like i've been following it to some degree it's really complicated right it's like who should be able to decide when you can or can't go back to work. It's not straightforward. It's not cut and dry. Because if you say the people should be allowed to make their own decision, you run into the very real possibility that especially if you have to go to work at that factory, and you can't not work, and you do get sick, and you do go home, and you do spread it to your family, a loved one could die. That's real. On the other hand, the government doesn't really seem to have any sort of straightforward plan as to how people can economically bounce back from this. I mean, there was one of the weirdest quotes, I think it

was Trump that said this, was talking about businesses and restaurants that they'll be open, maybe not with the same owners, but they'll be open maybe not with the same owners but they'll be open again did you did you see that quote no i don't i don't i didn't see that but it's like what does that really mean does that just mean like a different business will be created that's exactly what it means it means that he's just being pragmatic and maybe cold whoever made that quote that is probably how it's going to go down. Is it Trump says restaurants will make comeback just maybe with new owners. Yeah. That's what he said. I mean, that does not make me feel good, Ben, if I'm a restaurant owner, you know, and there's a few restaurants that I'm always

shouting out on the podcast that like are owned by friends of mine that are, these businesses are hurting so bad. They've went like that to no customers or a very small percentage of customers who order takeout when they were, you know, they had dine in every night and they have these bills and they had their business set up in a way that, you know, you have to make X amount of money in order to stay open. And they were successful and they're doing well. And one of the toughest businesses to be successful in. And then all of a sudden the rug gets pulled out. So what's the solution? Should people just be able to go to restaurants and everybody works there as a waiter or a cook, or they just maybe get sick and then more people die? Boy, that doesn't sound good to anybody

either. So what is the solution? I don't know, but I don't think that in our particular case, I don't think our governor has the answers. One of the things he's been criticized for is he's decided to open up production for television and films, but not churches. You know, there's another thing they've done that's really nuts that my friend Adam Curry turned me on to. They closed Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but liquor stores were an essential business. That is just not good government. That's not good thinking. There's so many things where they've put into place these lists of what's approved and not approved. And I just don't think that it's an – first of all, I think the information is constantly changing.

And I think that they're going off this old information. They haven't made adjustments. And then on top of it, I don't think they're qualified to. I don't think they're qualified. Just like we were talking about a president, like one person who's involved in the economy and the environment and all these different things, I don't think one governor can really be smart enough to know,

A, what kind of impact it's going to have economically to close all these businesses down, and B, which ones get to open up and what is essential and why. And it's just, it's very frustrating for all involved. And it highlights one of the reasons why, you know, the way we do government is, you know, it's not perfect. It's definitely better than a lot of ways, a lot of places in the world, but still, there's a lot of holes in it. than a lot of ways in a lot of places in the world, but still, there's a lot of holes in it. Yeah, I share your frustration with constantly changing messages. What is essential in one state versus in another state? The issue of churches is a big one. I mean, on the other hand,

in Massachusetts, churches were included in the first phase of reopening, and a lot of public health officials say that doesn't make any sense. And the suspicion is that it's there because of a lot of pressure and that it probably should have been in phase two or maybe even phase three. But I think it's hard to really talk about the state by state without acknowledging the disastrous response from the federal government. And I don't know where you stand on it. You may totally disagree with me on that. And I think that there's a lot of straw men that are being put in place to argue that Trump handled it beautifully, to use his term. But I think if you start with the idea of the coordinated federal response we could have had, a lot of these other issues that we're having now just wouldn't be issues. And I'm glad to get into it more if you want.

I don't know if you've talked about that a lot. Yeah, I think it'd be really interesting to talk about this because what do you think they could have done differently? Like, what do you think the government should have done differently? The federal government. Got it. So here's the narrative has been a lot of two sides that are arguing. People who just vaguely say Trump failed, he didn't do enough and he was slow without really giving specifics, which I will give. And then on the other hand, you've got a lot of people who are just reflexively defending,

hey, he shut down travel from China really early and he took it seriously and we've done the most tests, which is a whole other fiasco talking point that we can get into. But for the most part, I think that the critiques and the praise is just not tied to real dates. So in January, we had our first case, January 20th, I think it was. And South Korea had their first case, January 20th. We then often skip over February. So a lot of people will defend Trump by saying, you're not going to shut down a country when you've got one case. And I totally agree. You're not going to shut down a country over one case. We're not going to shut down a country over 15 cases. There was this point where we had 15 and Trump said, we've got 15 and soon it's going to

be zero. I don't think that it was logical at that point to say shut it all down, but just to pick a date and then we can work around it. March 5th, okay? March 5th, China had 80,000 cases, so we already had proof that this was going to be big. So we already had proof that it'll travel really far and it'll get bad far from China. And we had 221 cases on March 5. It would be very reasonable on March 5th for Trump to say, this is a problem. FDR-like delivery. I know, hard to imagine Trump doing that, but we've got to work together. This is going to be difficult. We're going to do a 30-day. I need all 50 governors to help me on this. Let's do 30 days of stay at home. He probably would have then on April 5th have had to ask for another 30.

So we would have done like 60 days, March 5 to May 5. And where would we be right now? We'd be in really, really good shape. So it's really easy to just say, dude, you're not going to shut down a country with five cases. I agree. But we had the information on March 5th, March 10th, March, well, right at any one of these points, if we did a real shutdown, we'd be in such good shape. First of all, I think that the support for a shutdown that early would have been almost zero. I think you would have a really hard time convincing people that this was going to be that big of a deal and that there wouldn't be something they could do to stop. I think a lot of this is Monday morning quarterbacking, right? We're looking at what happened factually. We're looking at it in the

past. There was this amount of cases. When it was happening live, there was a lot of confusion. First of all, the World Health Organization, as recently as January, was saying that, according to China, this is what they wrote on a tweet, it doesn't get transmitted from person to person. So this is in January, right? In March, they were saying you don't need a mask. There's been a lot of confusion. It's not like there was real, straightforward, clear advice. It's hard for us. It's so easy for us to sit back. Here we are in late May and say, oh, he should have done this. And if he'd done that, everything would have been great. The support for shutting down the whole country for 30 days at the beginning of March was zero. I don't think anybody would have agreed with that. There's no question. And I also, I think, I do think we want to be careful though. If we, if we write any retrospective analysis off as Monday morning quarterbacking, it's all, then it's not even worth discussing, right? Because we could just say, throw it out. It's Monday morning quarterbacking. I mean,

you're right. You're right. Yeah. No, it's, it's definitely, look, it clearly wasn't perfect. So there's always going to be room for critique but like what the idea that we could have shut everything down boy that is a that is such a hard sell remember when cuomo was saying that they're not going to shut down new york it'd be too hard i think cuomo and de blasio share i mean that they're they're not you know they're democrats and trump's a republican i don't care about that I mean, certainly there's no doubt that Cuomo and de Blasio are deserving of some blame here as well. I mean, one other example, there was a period, we'd have to look at covidtracking.org to get the exact numbers, but there was a period in either late March or early April where South Korea, remember,

South Korea had their first case the same day we did, within like six or eight hours. It might have been January 1920 or vice versa. But there was a point in late March or early April where South Korea had as many positive tests in a day as we did tests total. So this is really important to understand the discrepancy here. There was a day where we like tested 800 people in the United States. And they did so many tests that they had 800 positive cases. And so the slow testing response is a disaster. And the proof is, we can say it's Monday morning quarterbacking,

but South Korea got it right, Taiwan got it right. In terms of places in Europe, Greece did really well. New Zealand did really well. So we may be looking at it retrospectively, but there were examples of countries that were on the ball with testing and it made a huge difference. Yeah, it did. There's no doubt about that. And David, maybe you would know the answer to this. Wasn't there, there was some sort of a pandemic department that was, people were moved out of that department and it sort of was absorbed? Yes. So there's so so there's video of this. It's so funny because Trump was asked about this at a press briefing a couple months ago. This is when Anthony Fauci was still allowed in public.

And when the question when the question was asked, why did you shut down the pandemic response team? Trump turned the videos out there. Trump turned and said, I don't know anything. And Tony, do you know anything about that? There's video of Trump from 2018 bragging about shutting that down. So to get back to our cognitive decline thing, is it possible Trump literally had no memory of that when he was asked about it a couple months ago? Maybe. Yes, there is.

Here's why. Here's why I think that my brain my memory's going to shit and i think one of the reason why my memory's going to shit is i do too many things i have too many podcasts going there's too many subjects i'm researching too many different topics for future guests and and i i really feel like you can only have so much data in your head i i really you know what that um what dunbar's number is yeah it's it's related to it's some number of items right that you can keep simultaneously humans that you can have some sort of a by name relationship recognize their face people that you know are going to be

in your circle of humans you interact with it's dunbar's number and it's somewhere around 150 and they think it's based on how we evolved in these small tribes. And we, you know, we've evolved to know the people that are around us and that's all the database you needed. You didn't need a full terabyte for people's names and addresses. You just needed 150 of them. I think that's the case with everything. And I think when you see a guy like Trump and he's got fucking towers all over the place with his name on it and how many different businesses is he juggling and all these different deals going on and he's cheating at golf and all this different crazy shit i mean there's so much data and then on top of that he's supposedly not doing it like as far as they've told us he hasn't

been involved in his businesses for three and a half years you're saying he's still got he must have something to do with it there's i mean i believe that like this has been something that people say to me like hey i'd love you to get involved in this business and i would say i don't have any time they well you wouldn't need the time well it doesn't matter i would need the time because i'd have to think about it if i give you money now i have to think like oh what's that money what's happening over there that's one more. It's one more unit of the mental bandwidth that you have. This fucking guy's taxed out. He's taxed out with just the arguments that he's getting with the press.

Just think about how much real estate that's taking up in his head, right? And then you think about the disease. You think about restarting the economy. He very well might not remember bragging about disbanding the pandemic team. It's very possible. Maybe he doesn't. To your question, there was this pandemic response team. He disbanded it in 2018, and he sort of bragged that, hey, you know, we're not going to do stuff where we don't need these people.

They're not really doing much, so we don't really need them. So he did do that. Whoops. This thing about the press though um you know and he's busy with between the press and the virus and reopening and all this different stuff i don't know if you saw the reports that he often gets into what we would call work like at noon or later after watching like five or even more hours of tv and tweeting it doesn't strike me that he's that busy with actual work i think he is and he isn't i think he it's still

taking up bandwidth in his head but look it is so american that he does that you know what i'm saying i mean in not the best way possible but it's so we're so comical in so many ways that our president he's eating junk food and watching tv and tweeting angry tweeting at people while he's watching fox news it's so so okay here's the point i want to make about that okay one of the things that scares me about the way that this president is sometimes covered by um sometimes it's people who call themselves centrists or sometimes it's people who say, I'm just reporting facts and not giving an opinion or whatever. One of the things that really scares me is that this is being treated like a normal presidency.

When as you're pointing out, it's really not a normal presidency. And the analogy that I would sort of apply to it would be, imagine that you're doing UFC commentary. And this is me going out on a limb because this is not my area of expertise, but let's see if the analogy will work. Imagine that one of the fighters comes in and he at one point tries to light his opponent on fire. And you as a commentator say, this is an unusual strategy that's very aggressive. or say, this is an unusual strategy that's very aggressive. You're treating it like it's within the realm of normality. This is a destruction of the system, right? It's not an aggressive strategy. This is crazy, right? And that's what scares me. It scares me because I see, you know, I like to use the term enlightened centrist, and it's a little bit pejorative,

but it's someone who believes themselves to be above the fray of the bias of the left-right stuff. Where they'll say, you know, listen, yeah, Trump kind of has a different way of talking about politics, but I think he's pretty good on trade. It's like, what are you talking about? And that really scares me because there's like a normalization going on that's crazy to me. Well, there's also a thing that we desire as humans that's for our leaders to exhibit virtue and dignity. There's like a thing, we expect them to be a statesman or a stateswoman, right? You expect them to, like Tulsi Gabbard's an excellent example of that to me, of someone who speaks like someone

that I would appreciate addressing the nation in some sort of a disastrous state. Like if something was going wrong, I would want someone who speaks the way she speaks talking about it. You know, there's, there's a certain, Cuomo has it. There's a certain characteristic that you would want from someone who is in a position of leadership. Like I get a certain amount of calm out of listening to him break down the current situations and what they're doing to remedy and

mitigate all the problems in New York. And when you think about it, New York got hit harder than anywhere on the planet, excuse me, anywhere, I guess anywhere on the planet, right? It turns to a city. I mean, yeah, I think so. Yeah. So at this point it's anywhere on the planet. I mean, he's done a remarkable job of exhibiting all the characteristics, whether or not you think his decisions were correct or not, because there's some real arguments, especially with the early days of letting old people go back to nursing homes when they had tested, and that's obviously horrible. But the way he communicates, he communicates like a guy that you would feel comfortable. He's going to make good decisions. That guy, he seems like a president. Yeah. And I think that this is why, you know, a lot of mistakes have been made during this.

And a lot of it came from, like you're pointing out, we had incomplete information, masks are good. Then they don't work. It's transmitted through droplet versus how much is happening via surfaces. And it's dangerous for this group versus it. A lot of mistakes were made because of lack of information, but not everybody was saying stuff like 15 cases will soon be zero. Anybody who wants a test can get a test. It'll wash through by April and we're not going to

have cases by the... That stuff has a very particular effect on people who basically want a license to go out and act however they want to act, regardless of what the facts are. And that's why it's been so dangerous to see that stuff. Well, it also is dangerous because people dismiss some of the things that he said when he was talking about like using UV inside the body as a disinfectant or using Lysol as maybe a cleaning, he was saying. One of the problems that came out of this, I don't know if you're aware of this, there was a publicly traded biotech company that had a concept for UV light that would go in through, when someone

was intubated, you would go in through the same tube, and they would use that UV light, and it would kill the virus from inside. That is something that UV light actually does work to kill bacteria and viruses. In fact, at my house, I have a cell phone cleaner. You put it in there, you close it, and it uses UV light to kill all those things. I mean, this is something that they've had forever. In SteriPens, a SteriPen is something that backpackers and hikers use. You can take water out of a creek, and you take this light bulb.

It's like a long wand, and you wave it for a certain amount of time in the water, and that UV light kills all the bacteria. Yeah. So this company had this product that was going to use that UV light through the tube and they got pulled off of Twitter. They got their their account got banned because it looked like something that was aligning with what Trump said, even though it's legitimate science. And OK, it was real. That was a real issue. Okay. It was real.

That was a real issue. So, so let's, uh, there's a bunch there and I, and I, I want to get to the Twitter stuff because I, I know about, I saw the, when you talked to Bridget over the weekend about the regulation of social media and I want to talk about, I don't know the, this one, so I can't say too much about it. But so, so Trump mentioned in that wondering aloud, he said, what if you hit the body with heater light and what if you hit the body with heater light? And what if you put the disinfectants that were up on the TV behind him inside the body? So we got like four things, four things that he mentioned, right?

So UV light, heat, and I think isopropyl and bleach were the four elements, so to speak, to use his term, that were up on the screen behind him. speak to use his term that were up on the screen behind him. After the fact, there were these couple papers about this UV technology. And a couple people on Twitter started saying, this is the stuff Trump was referring to. And it's like, no, he wasn't. Trump said, I don't know anything about this. I'm asking you, is this something we might look at? He was winging it. He was winging it. He was completely winging it. So that's number one. After the fact, that's Monday morning quarterbacking, going through PubMed and saying, here's something I found with UV light. I'm sure it was what Trump meant when he said hit the body or whatever, right? So that's number one. But in terms, this is kind of an example of like, that a wacky statement that was an out of control

statement that i can't imagine almost any other politician wondering aloud about but there is nothing that this guy's defenders uh supporters won't defend like he right it doesn't matter you know that's the scary thing that is a scary thing and that was that was one of the weirdest ones to try to justify yes i think the correct response was he was winging it he obviously didn't know what he was talking about and he he was like asking questions he was throwing some questions around they just weren't good ones right and like say if you or i like i don't know much about um you know internal combustion engines i don't really understand them that much.

I kind of know there's spark plugs and there's fuel injection, but I don't really know what the fuck's going on. If I had to explain it to somebody, like how the gas gets converted into energy and how the pistons go up and something fires and what's regular, I would be doing, so I go, it's probably you got to get the gas in there and the fire and then it's exploding and, you know,

it would be similar to the way he was describing using disinfectants on people but one of the things that i think he did say was something about getting light in the body i think he did say something about getting light in the body um yeah he listed it and said is that something you can look into yeah he got stuck he got stuck rambling and he just kept going and and it's probably pretty safe to assume he enjoys some kind of stimulant. And I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's legal or illegal. And I think if he was taking all that ephedrine that he had in his, remember in that famous picture where he was eating the taco bowl? where he was eating the taco bowl. So someone wrote to me and said that it is true. There's this picture where Trump tweeted he loves Hispanics.

I don't know if you remember that tweet. That was after he had said crazy shit about Mexicans possibly coming over here to rape and murder. Exactly, exactly. And there's a picture where there's an open drawer over his left shoulder and there's a bunch of uh pseudofed packs in yeah exactly come on if i was gonna like get people to like i would hold on let me open up this drawer real quick all right now take the picture like just like just to fuck with people just to like let's let's put a needle and a baggie and a spoon in there just don't say

someone wrote to me though and said that that version of Sudafed, which is, I guess the UK version doesn't contain the same stimulant that the American version has. I don't know the truth, but I want to make sure we're careful about what we say. I like talking shit though. So let's keep going. I wonder if the UK version is stronger. Do we even know? Jamie, is that possible for you to look right now? I thought it was the opposite of that. I thought it was the opposite as well. I thought the UK version was stronger.

Interesting. Yeah, that's what I had heard, but I've done zero research. No, listen, I mean, you and I have talked about the tongue thing where it looks like he's essentially, like his tongue is attacking him. It was like his tongue was weak in a Bernie's, and he was moving that fucker around in his mouth trying to keep talking um there's the stuff where he's like or he seems to struggle with s's where it's like a sound yeah and there was speculation that it's dentures but rich guys don't have dentures you know they they and they they have uh dental implants unless you're super old school. Yeah, I guess.

I don't know. And then there's pictures of him having really dilated pupils, even under TV lighting, which is weird because TV lighting is really, really bright. I don't know. Really? But are those real pictures? That's the problem. I've seen some pictures. Well, I don't know. I guess we have to look at them one by one.

Well, dilated pupils is usually a response to some sort of drug, right? So people get that with MDMA. They get that with certain amphetamines, you know. To be fair, I think that the most sort of like innocuous explanation would be sometimes it's like the very high key Trump, very agitated Trump talking fast and sweating. Yes. And then sometimes there's this like depressed Trump where he's talking really, really slowly and he has a totally different delivery. He looks depressed and sad. It's possible that for either some medication that he's actually prescribed or just like his energy cycle during the day. I mean, we all to some degree have it. Maybe there's times a day where he's up and sometimes when he's down,

like it's not necessarily stimulants, I guess. Maybe, but he's also a guy who's willing to take hydroxychloroquine in preventative doses. Yeah. You think he's taking it. Yes. I know. I know many doctors who are taking it and have asked me if I want it prescribed to me to take. Yeah. Because they're taking it in very small doses. And I said, but my friend had it when he was my friend. Michael Yo was hospitalized with COVID-19 and he was in a terrible place. And he said when they gave him hydroxychloroquine, it had a terrible effect on his body. So it was devastating. hydroxychloroquine and it had a terrible effect on his body. He said it was devastating. And my doctor said there's a giant difference between the dosage and the response to the dosage of a dose that you would get if you are sick with a disease versus a preventative dose. And he said there's many, many doctors that are taking preventative doses of this hydroxychloroquine and that this stuff has been around for a long time as a malaria medication. Of course. And Dr. Drew did a whole video segment that I watched recently about that as well,

saying basically the same thing. I think that anyone, though, who's willing to just start taking hydroxychloroquine, I mean, maybe take stuff. You know what I'm saying? As long as your doctor prescribes you stuff. Do you remember that article? I think you and I had discussed this. prescribes you something. Do you remember that article?

I think you and I had discussed this. There was a journalist that claimed they found the right pharmacy that prescribed Trump speed that where Trump would pick up this stuff that he would get, this amphetamine, for a metabolic condition. Do you remember that? I don't remember that one. Okay. But

if your doctor prescribes you something, like I have friends that take Adderall and they take Adderall, the doctor prescribes them Adderall and they take it and they don't think there's anything wrong with it because the doctor prescribes you something, like I have friends that take Adderall and they take Adderall, the doctor prescribes them Adderall and they take it and they don't think there's anything wrong with it because the doctor prescribes it. They don't even think that they do drugs. I'm like, you're on a hardcore stimulant all the time. And it's really, really, really common. So if he's a guy that's willing to take hydroxychloroquine, which I mean, maybe it's a good thing to take.

I mean, he's around a lot of people and it is possible that it has some sort of a preventative effect obviously i don't know but if you're if you're the guy who takes things you probably take things to go to bed you take things to wake up i need a little pick me up i need it you know there's a lot of people out there that take stuff there's a type of person who's just into trying stuff and seeing what it does for them. Yeah, that's me. I'm into stuff. But I don't take medication, though, like that. That seems to me like, ooh, what about the immune system? How much do you trust your immune system?

Is there things you could do to boost your immune system? So I like to talk to legitimate clinical researchers and nutritionists that understand the body's effect and what nutrients you're putting in and heat shock proteins from sauna and things like all kinds of different stuff that you can do. I mean, making sure you get enough sleep and making, that's a giant factor. All these factors that we're not getting discussed in the news when we're hearing all these things about social distancing and covering your face. It would be really nice if the exact same amount of effort was put to let's all use this time to make healthy choices

and to understand that there's a real benefit to having a healthy body and a healthy immune system. And this is the best example of it we could ever possibly face is a pandemic that with some people, they brush it off like it's nothing. And I know many people that have had it like that. And then I know other people that got it and they got it really bad. I've had two friends that were hospitalized. One who was on a respirator. He was there for over a month. He's an older guy, but the situation for them was terrible. But there's a bunch of factors, nutrition, body being run down, being exhausted, too much travel alcohol there's there's all these different things like we need more education about that like there are preventative measures that we can take it's not just as simple as put a band-aid on it cover your face use hand

sanitizer that's that's good advice too but better advice is both of those things together yeah so on hydroxychloroquine, my understanding of the randomized controlled trials right now is that it's essentially been tested as a treatment when someone is already sick and it doesn't seem particularly effective and there can be serious side effects. There is a study going on, I think in the UK, looking at the low dose prophylactically. I have no, you know, I get emails from people who are like, you're against hydroxychloroquine because Trump's for it. I've been talking about hydroxychloroquine longer than Trump. I talked about it 10 days before Trump ever mentioned it, along with seven other things

that we're looking at. I don't care. I want what works. That's my only priority. The reasons I doubted whether Trump was really taking it were that he seemed confused about how long he had been on it and what kind of dose he was getting like at one point it wasn't clear whether he was getting the weekly dose which is how it's taken for malaria or a small daily dose he seemed confused and then the letter that his doctor put out didn't actually say he was taking it it was one of the weirdest letters i don't know if you saw it where there's one paragraph which just says we talked about this drug and determined the the potential benefits outweigh the risks or something like that maybe

the doctor did that because it's off-label because it is an off-label drug so if he is prescribing it to trump it's not fda approved who's gonna get in trouble it's the president i mean i think that's why they would write the letter was weird is the point it didn't it said everything other than trump is taking it which is if it's a letter to prove Trump's taking it, you would think it would mention that. Well, maybe the doctor hesitated and said it's controversial. Maybe Trump asked for it. We're going way out on the speculation limb here. These are thin branches.

Maybe maybe he said, I want to take it. The doctor's like, wow, that's I mean, there's some downsides. He's like, look, I'm going to get it either way. And so he gets it from another doctor. It could be that. I know a guy. Don't worry about it. I'll call a guy.

I'll have it tomorrow. Ask for the letter. The point is, after he mentioned it and people said, is he really taking it? Clearly the White House directed the doctor, put out a letter proving I'm taking it. And the doctor writes a letter, doesn't say Trump's on it. Well, maybe the doctor was like, hey hey man why the fuck did you say that I mean I don't know I don't know it's uh there's a lot of speculation I don't think you would outright lie about that because the reason being is that I do know people are taking it and I do know doctors and I've just

discussed it with doctors and I've even been offered it. And I just, I think people are willing to, if they really think there's a possibility of getting ahead of this thing and some sort of a preventative measure, they'll take it. And especially if you're a type of person who takes things. So do you think that there's going to be a period where wealthier folks with connections will be able to buy a vaccine before it's available. I think that's a possibility for sure, right? Don't you think if there's a small quantity, that's always going to be the case. I mean, one thing that people were getting upset at me in the early days of the pandemic was that I was testing everybody

that came into the podcast studio. And like, where are you getting these tests? Well, I'm just buying them. I'm paying for them. There's a concierge service in Los Angeles. They come to you. And the doctor will administer these tests. You just have to pay for it. And I understand that people don't have that money, that that sucks, but I'm not going to not do it if I can. So this is a similar situation. Like I can understand what people would be upset, but if you had money and someone came up to you and said, David, we have this perfect vaccine. It's absolutely been proven.

However, only 1% of the population is going to be able to get it. But if you get it and you and your family can have it and we'll make sure you're safe, would you not take it because you wanted other people to have access to it? I think a lot of people who have access to it would probably say, listen, I have to do the right thing for my family. I'm going to try to help people get it. I'm going to try to spread the word, and hopefully they'll be okay,

but I have to take care of myself right now. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I don't disagree with that. It's unfortunate that anybody would ever have to choose that. Yeah, and how it'll go down, I guess, is a question mark. How will people in the know be made aware that this is now something they'd potentially be able to buy? Are you aware of, I mean, look, there's a bunch of different trials going on right now where they're trying to figure out how to make a vaccine. But so far, no coronavirus vaccine has ever been successful, right?

There's not one that they can use as a model. Is that correct? There is. So there's a SARS. There's coronavirus vaccines that have worked in poultry, from my understanding, which can be modified potentially. So I think at least one or two of the vaccine candidates are modified poultry coronavirus vaccines that could potentially be used in humans. And the other unique thing about this vaccine, potentially, as I understand it, is that this would be, if I understand correctly,

it would be the first vaccine of its type that instead of having like a weakened version of the virus, instead it would be a compound that triggers the body to create certain proteins if i'm understanding that correctly it would be innovated in that sense as well yeah that was explained to me by alex jones i had a long conversation with him about it last night where he was it's an mrna virus uh vaccine mrna vaccine it's a but there's never been one of those successfully been used on humans right this is a new thing um well i don't. But there's never been one of those that's successfully been used on humans, right? This is a new thing? Well, I don't know that there's been. Now all of a sudden we're both biologists. So yeah, from what I've read, there's not been an opportunity like this where the technology would be near enough where we would try to make that type of vaccine versus

the traditional kind, is my understanding. Dude, that one sounds scary i'm gonna wait i don't want to be an early adopter of that one especially if there's something yeah especially if this is something that for a giant percentage of the population in terms of the virus itself uh it's not deadly um i would want to wouldn't you want to know if there's a new thing that's never been tried on people before wouldn Wouldn't you want to know what the long-term ramifications of taking you even start testing it to see whether it generates immunity, it's safety tested. And by the time it's available, even to like buy it as, as, as a wealthy person, I think that the safety piece of it will be widely established. And it might just be a question of like, does it give you six months or 12 months of immunity? That doesn't really scare me. It seems like six months is still better than zero. Yeah. If it works. Yeah. And if it, if it is

really safe for sure. Look, if it works and it's safe, we'd all want to take it real simple, right? The real question is if this is a totally new thing, and obviously I'm grossly unqualified to be talking about this, but if it is a new kind of vaccine, like what, what are the possibilities of this going wrong and what could that mean to people that do have an adverse reaction to it? So I want to be really careful not to say things I'm not sure of, but also not to allow false fears about the vaccine to be perpetuated. That this would be the first widely used mRNA vaccine for a human virus does not mean that it would be the beginning of the research into using these types of vaccines in humans. And my understanding is that it's been decades that this has been researched and that it's been under development, generally speaking, and now it's

being used specifically for coronavirus. So I want to make sure that I'm not in any way implying that I have any broader concerns about the type of vaccine, because I don't. And I'm not like in any way implying that I have any broader concerns about the type of vaccine because I don't. And I'm not saying that somebody might not present one of those concerns, but I'm not aware of any of those concerns. But that's a well-worded way of describing it. Yeah. I mean, obviously, we're all hoping that it works.

We're all hoping that everyone's going to benefit from this and that we'll have a cure so we can go back to as normal as possible. But, you know, again, like I said, I think we really, more than anything, we're underappreciating the value of the immune system. And I think that's something that is really driving me crazy about the short-sightedness of this response, is that it's all about sanitation and avoidance and all these different factors. And very little of it is about strengthening the immune system and keeping the body healthy. And very little of it is about strengthening the immune system and keeping the body healthy and making a shift of recognizing that,

you know, hey, we're all very vulnerable here. We're all very vulnerable, and we've had a wonderful Goldilocks sort of time between World War II and now where things haven't really been nearly as bad as they've been all throughout human history. And we kind of have to recalibrate what's possible in terms of things could go wrong. And when things go wrong and we're grossly unprepared, we find ourselves in the situation that we're in right now. Yeah. For the, I've seen some really scary numbers about for the younger serious cases, like under, under 50, maybe even under 60, obesity is extremely prevalent. That's really scary. There's some correlation studies about vitamin D, but there's really a lot of question

marks about whether it's a causal thing and whether the infection itself can reduce your vitamin D. It would be delightful to learn that if you have low vitamin D, you supplement it and it protects you. But there's a correlation and it's really not clear what the deal is with that because vitamin D is so cheap. I mean, it's free from the sun and it's one of the cheapest supplements around. Do you know that 70% of the United States is deficient in vitamin C? It's a giant- C or D? D. Did I say C?

You said C, yeah. I meant D. It's some enormous number of people do not have sufficient vitamin D. And as many as, I think it's, I had Dr. Rhonda Patrick on the podcast a couple of days ago to discuss this. It's more than 20% have insufficient vitamin D to the point where it's dangerous. Where they can, you know, it's, vitamin D apparently is a hormone as well as a vitamin. And the best way to get it is out in the sun, but you can supplement it. And in supplementing it, it changes so many things about your body, about your body's ability to recover. It's for muscle development. It's for a lot of different, there's a lot of different factors that vitamin D benefits

you in. And most of us don't have enough of it. It's really, it's kind of a crazy thing. Zinc has also been connected to recovery from COVID. And then one of the things they were speculating about with hydrochloroquine and zinc, that they would use the two of them together. And there's been some speculation that maybe it wasn't in fact the hydrochloroquine that was really benefiting these people. It was possibly the zinc. And that zinc in combination with hydrochloroquine was what was helping people. Yeah, I mean, we're just spitballing here. But on the zinc thing, what I saw was it seems to only be useful for recovery from viruses and colds if you are deficient.

But that if you have a normal level of zinc, that it doesn't really seem to do that much. So the best, well, it's probably just like vitamin D. The best move is to keep your body at a good state. And so few of us ever do get your vitamin levels checked. It's really an important thing. And supplementing, I feel very, very strongly about this. It's been dismissed by some people as being not necessary if you have a balanced diet. The reality is most people don't have a balanced diet.

And particularly when it comes to getting a wide range of nutrients that we know are beneficial. I mean, you really should kind of vary what you eat to try to get as much of that stuff in as you can from natural sources. But man, especially in times like this, it's just very important to keep your B12 high, C, D, zinc, all those things. Keep your body in a great state, drink a lot of water, you know, and we're not hearing, again, I mean, I'm beating a dead horse, but we're just not hearing enough about this. Yeah, I got a vitamin D and B12 at home test a month ago because I was just curious, what are my levels? I live in Boston. You don't go outside that much in the winter and it's only starting to be spring now. And they were both fine, but had my D been low, I would have supplemented it so cheap and why not? Yeah, we're very fortunate. I mean, it's really easy to get some vitamin D and it can make a giant difference in your body.

Are you changing anything about your lifestyle or obviously you're stuck at home, but are you changing anything in terms of like going, okay okay i need to make some corrections to make myself healthier or corrections to get better sleep or not really because i mean i felt pretty good about what i was doing before obviously my gym's closed so i'm running outside and riding my bike and working out at home um do you feel weird when you run past people and you're real close to them? Okay, so I'm wearing a mask anytime I go anywhere inside. Like I go to the grocery store, I'm wearing a mask. If I have to go to the post office, although I'm trying to avoid it, I wear a mask. From what I've read, 90% of the contagion is in four places, home, offices, public transit, and large gatherings.

The other 10% is happening mostly indoors in other situations. The outdoor contagion from what I'm reading is like almost zero unless you're doing something really stupid. So I don't feel like if I go running, I need to wear a mask, but I do it to avoid dirty looks, to be totally honest with you. It's terrible breathing through that thing, isn't it? While you're running? It's terrible. Your bad breath coming back at you? One day, I went out on my bike and I thought, I'm outdoors. Nobody's really getting this outdoors if you're not in a group of people. And I didn't wear my mask and three bikers coming the opposite way were swearing at me. So I was like, all right, just to avoid that situation, I guess I'll wear the mask even when I'm just walking around.

I think there's a lot of unhappy people that are looking to yell at people. And this is their new way to do it. They see you with no mask on running. I don't know why, though, it wouldn't be spread through the air outside. That logic doesn't make sense. If it's spread through the air inside, why, if you're passing someone and you're breathing out heavy because you're running it would make it seem to me that that would be a better way you walk right into it if it's in the air but it's particulate matter it's in the air and you're breathing it out well this is why i'm wearing the mask but from the studies i've seen

there were these really scary looking images where it was like black where the particles were different colors i saw that yeah and it was like black, where the particles were different colors. I saw that. Yeah. And it was like, you know, you could be 20 feet in front of someone on a bike and you could sneeze and the wind could bring the droplets directly back and they could breathe in at that exact moment. I don't deny it all that it's physically possible, but every single study that's coming out where it's possible to sort of figure out like, where are people getting this? study that's coming out where it's possible to sort of figure out like where are people getting this i'm just not aware of it being a real risk on a six foot wide bike path to run past two people like it's got to be one in 10 million right um no i don't think so really nah why if you're

breathing it out if you're running right if you're if you're breathing out you got spit there's stuff that comes out of your mouth. And then someone's going this way. It just makes sense. Yeah, all right. I mean, listen, I'm wearing the mask. I just am unsure how much of the contagion is happening out there. Yeah.

Oh, right now, Jamie just pulled this up. Joe Biden asked Amy Klobuchar to undergo vetting to be running mate. Wow. Breaking news, David Pakman. How you feel? Is that the only person who's being vetted? I don't know, but she's one of them. Democrat of Minnesota has been asked by Joe Biden to undergo a formal vetting to be considered

vice president of running mate. One of several potential candidates now being scrutinized by his aides. Right. Okay. So she's just been announced as being one of them. Senator Jean Shaheen. Oh, they said something about gene shaheen there as well did it where's that yeah gene shaheen democrat of new hampshire who's running for re-election this year declined biden's invitation she said no son uh senator maggie hassan other new hampshire senator has agreed to be vetted

so he's deaf it's interesting that he's definitely like he wants to have a woman yep like that's uh do you think that's a political ploy or do you think that uh it just it makes sense like why do you think he would do that I think that the timing of when he made that call was calculated to be advantageous. I don't remember exactly what was going on right when he said it, but I think that it was a calculated move at the time. I think, honestly, unless you pick someone who's going to actively damage your campaign, I don't think it matters that much. You need someone who's essentially going to stay out of the way, not cause any kind of new scandal, like Tim Kaine with Hillary Clinton. I don't think he did anything for her one way or the other. He was just kind of out of the way. I forgot him. So you just brought his name up. I forgot.

Right, right. And I think that really what you just want to avoid someone who's going to cause a problem like Palin for McCain was such a little bit of a problem. It was a problem. Exactly. So you just want to avoid a problem, I think. And I think Elizabeth Warren is probably up there. Kamala Harris is probably up there. Amy Klobuchar, now we know for sure. It's just funny when you say I'm going to have a specific kind of person like uh what one

of the big speculations was i'm going to have a woman of color like that he needs to have a woman of color very specific i wish i wish he had like it would be hilarious if someone said i want a chinese lady period mainland chinese lady that's gonna be my running mate i'm gonna i'm gonna like heal this nation and China together. Just only Chinese ladies. I don't care how good you are. If you're some white guy, you can fuck off. It's kind of hilarious.

Yeah. I would want the best person that he could possibly get, especially when you consider his physical state and mental state's been questioned. He doesn't look that great. I would want someone who I really feel like could make the cut. been questioned. He doesn't look that great. I would want someone who I really feel like could make the cut. Yeah, I don't, I'm not big on this type of, of identity politics where, I mean, listen, last time I was on, we talked about that time where, uh, that the, this, uh, we won't even say her name, but where this woman tried to get me fired from my teaching gig, because I said,

saying you will not consider a white or male candidate is that's, that's not okay. saying you will not consider a white or male candidate is that's not okay. But I do think that when you think about all of the people that have been president, so it's like almost all white men, and then Obama, who was half black, there would be something pretty powerful for a lot of young women and women of all ages to see that, oh, okay, there's a woman in this position, vice president, or president. I don't want to minimize that. But, okay, there's a woman in this position, vice president, president. Like, I don't want to minimize that. But you, I mean, you and I have talked before, for me, categorizing people in these ways is not like my first instinct.

Yes. But it's also, we're recognizing that there is racism and sexism in the world. Like, it's not a fake thing. It's a real thing. We would love it if there was none. If there was none, there would be no consideration whatsoever towards image because no one would care. No one would care. How good would it look to have a woman in there? No one would care if there was zero sexism and no one would care if it's a woman of color, if there's zero racism, but there is some. So we go, well, there'll be a great thing. I get it. It would. If there was a woman president, like, so one of the reasons why I thought Tulsi Gabbard would be amazing. If she ran for president, became president, and you're talking about a woman who's a veteran, who's served overseas twice, who's been a congresswoman for six years, I mean, that would be great for everybody. Like, a really qualified woman who's the president. That would be great for everybody. It just happens to be a woman. If your kids, maybe they have asked you, but if they said, how come there's never been a woman president?

Like, how would you answer that question? That's a good question. It would depend on which kid. And, yeah, I would probably say that our society up until, first of all, until the beginning of the 20th century, women weren't even allowed to vote. And so there's a lot of catching up to do. And then women weren't really even in the business place in terms of working alongside men in offices and in industry. When did that start? Well, there was a big push towards that in the period during and after World War II in trying to stimulate a lot of new industry and get, you know, just get more

people working and producing stuff. Yeah. So what I would say is that men in terms of public positions of leadership have had this massive head start and that we're changing the way we look at what a leader is. And that we used to look at a leader as being like the alpha chimp that leads us to battle. I mean, you go back in time 10,000 years ago, that's essentially what a leader was. And now we look at a leader as someone who can navigate the treacherous waters of the environment and industry and unions and all the different things that the president has to deal with. And it's not, it doesn't require someone who's male or female. It requires someone who, again, I hate to keep bringing up Tulsi Gabbard, but I think she's great. She seems like a leader, right? That's

what you're looking for. You're looking for someone who's going to make good decisions, someone with good ethics and good morals that's going to sort of guide you in a way that the country will be better off with them doing that job, it would be a long discussion. And I think you would really have to go back to how different human beings are now than they were even in, you know, I've talked to my kids about my grandparents. My grandparents came over from Italy during the early days of the 20th century and they had a hard life. And when my grandfather used to talk to me about living on a farm and coming over here from Italy and how hard it was to struggle and what their life was like, it's almost unimaginable to my kids today when I describe it to them. And when I tried to describe what life is like today versus life was like for them in 1920, a hundred years ago, you're talking

about a totally different world. And I think that that's what we're dealing with, too, when it comes to the reason why there has been no woman president. It's not just that there's never been a woman president because society is weird, but it's moving in a better direction. It's just been humans are changing. We're changing what we find acceptable. We're changing what we find to make sense and what doesn't make sense. And we're readjusting things all the time. But I think one of the things that you said that is an important point was that if a woman becomes

president, it does send a message that this is possible and it gives people hope. And I think in a lot of ways, Barack Obama did that. And when Barack Obama was in office, we're like, hey, if people, even if people are racist, even if there are racists, there's such a small amount that you can get this guy to win the popular vote and become the president of the United States while he's black. This is amazing. It's amazing for everybody that it shows that a guy who's the son of a single mom can make it as far as the highest office on the planet Earth, the elected office, the commander in chief of the greatest army the world has ever known.

So there's great value in image. And this is where I think a lot of people are correct in their anger about Trump, even people who are Trump supporters. about Trump, even people who are Trump supporters, the value of the way a person conducts themselves in that highest of high offices, it's important for the morale of all of us. And when someone says ridiculous shit or attacks some reporter and the way he kind of goes about it, it's so petty. It's so unbecoming of what we would hope for in terms of like someone who gets to that spot. We want that person to be better than us. We don't want you to do things that we would also do. We want you to be better. Well, that's what really scares me about when I see the people who for 20 years or for however long they've been following politics talk about what Matt, Republicans I'm talking about now, what matters is that you've got to be religious and you've got to

pray and be God-fearing and you've got to, divorce is bad and you've got to speak a certain way and all of these different things. It was all kind of a ruse, right? They never really cared about that stuff. It was just that those were the people that were being presented to them for a very long time. And then now it's Trump and he's the opposite of all of it. And they never really cared about that stuff. Well, he represents them in some ways. You know, you just have to make concessions to be on their side. And it's one of the real problems with having two parties, right? It's like, if you're not in the other party, you must be in my party. If you're not with those people, you must be with – if you're saying Hillary Clinton is – she's a problem and you've got to drain the swamp and these career politicians, oh, well, then you must be over here. If you're against corruption, oh, well, then you must be on my side because I'm against corruption too.

And if we had 10 different parties to choose from, it would be way better. We would have a way better understanding of the subtleties of human characteristics and what we enjoy and what we don't enjoy, what we believe, what we don't believe. I think a big part of what you're saying when you join a team, whether it's the Republicans or the Democrats, you're sort of adopting a predetermined group of opinions. Like you know how to fall in line. Like you can almost, to a person, you ask someone, are you conservative? Yes.

You can almost guess how they're going to feel about the environment or how they're going to feel about climate change, particularly freedom of choice. That's a big one, right? Like pro-choice. If you ask someone if they're a Republican, boy, what percentage are you going to say that they're pro-life? It's going to be a high percentage. It's going to be a high percentage. What percentage are you going to be in support of the Second Amendment? It's going to be a very high percentage. Now, if you ask someone who's on the left what do you think about gun control it's going to be a high percentage that are in favor of gun control a favor of maybe doing something different about the second amendment but a high percentage that

would you know there's but that would be pro-choice and these lines in the sand you got to wonder uh how much of these are just adopted like how Like how much of these are people who have really analyzed all these issues and come to this objective conclusion based on information and based on their own discussions with other intelligent people and how many people just adopt these positions. And I think that's... Yeah, you're signing on to the package to the orthodoxy in a certain way. And one of the crazy things is I get emails from viewers,

particularly in Northern Europe, who say, you say, one of the craziest things about American politics when you're in Europe is compared to the diversity of parties that they have in many of those countries, the standard Democrat and the standard Republican are really, really close. Like what are they even really arguing about? It's a lot of social issues. On economic stuff, it's, you know, is it 39.7% top tax rate or 36% top tax rate? I mean, of course, there are Democrats who want a much higher top tax. There are Republicans who want to do away or really drop it. But in a lot of cases, a lot of this stuff is created as i don't want to say as theater but it's the creative a package people can sign on to yeah for sure and i think that's one thing that

trump has done well ingratiating himself with religious folks because it's never really been his thing and now all of a sudden you know he kind of goes through the motions does all the the god stuff he says all the things when you know you don't believe it for a second, right? What, Santa Claus? What do you mean? What do you mean? No, no, no. If I believe he's become religion?

Yeah. Religious, rather? One of my favorite interviews was this one guy who was a preacher. He's one of those televangelists, and he was talking about Trump and someone trying to bring up Trump's past. He goes, that was before he was born again. Can I get an amen? And everybody was cheering, yes, that was before he was born. And their concept is completely absolve someone.

That would be nice if you could just – how many times can you be born again? Can you fuck up a gang of times and just be reborn every time with a fresh slate? That would be very beneficial. Yeah, I don't know what the answer is to that. As a concept, that's a great idea. Like I would love if I, you know, like, man, I feel real haunted by my mistakes. Son, just raise your hand and we're going to take those mistakes away. You have done them, but you're free.

Do you know who General Butt Naked is? Do you know who General Butt Naked is? No. This is the best example that you're ever going to hear. General Butt Naked was, he was in the Civil War in Liberia. And he was known for getting buck naked, taking off all his clothes, and going to war. So he would go to war. And, you know, he's killed many, many, many people.

And on video, video on vice back when they had the vice guide to travel on video he was talking about what they would do if they captured children from the opposing army that they would cut their heart out and eat pieces of their heart he was talking about this murdering children and eating their heart then he found jesus and they absolved him of everything. And now he's a preacher. So General Butt Naked is now a preacher. And he runs around and, you know, he's killed who knows how many thousands of people

and eaten kids' hearts. And they're like, but that was before. Now he's a man of Jesus. Pretty amazing. It's a great clause if you want someone to join up. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. amazing it's a great it's a great clause if you want someone to join up oh my goodness yeah have you seen the um the the preachers and the televangelists selling the coronavirus stuff either like you send them money and they'll pray it away or like the silver stuff and all of these

different things yeah we were watching that one guy who was blowing was it what's his name again kenneth copeland that same guy you know he's the same guy that that lady came up to him and asked him about flying public and he was like you know saying that there's demons on those planes are you calling poor people demon i never said that and he got crazy with her whoo that just that video alone of him and his wild eyes pointing at her is so goddamn terrifying whoo yeah it's it's dark all that stuff is dark it's uh but again it's what you talked about where it's lack of information combined with a desire for some general better health yeah but instead of going out and exercising and getting some sunlight it's maybe you know a silver toothpaste is going to prevent the virus or something like that. It's crazy. It is crazy. Well, there's also, uh, obviously these are the

same people. Jim Baker was one of them, right? Who was selling survival slop. He was selling these buckets of survival food that you could actually use as a, the base of your table. Like you don't know where to put this stuff. And he had tables where he had like the tabletop of sitting on these survival buckets and he's selling this shit and he's even eating it on the show like very good like it is one of the televangelists are one of the very weirdest uh elements of society where we we're allowing people to just lie like clearly lie but we feel like the lie is so obvious that you have to be so dumb to believe them. I can't help you. And this is, I made this analogy recently because I was talking about YouTube censorship and how YouTube has decided that they're going to pull down videos from

doctors who have different opinions on how to handle the coronavirus and criticisms of how things are. And I'm like, it's really interesting that they make that line, that that's the line that doctors, practicing physicians, they'll pull their video down. But people talk about the flat earth. They'll leave that up. Because it's like, it's so dumb. It's like, ah, you can leave that up. That one's so dumb. You have to be a moron to think the earth's hollow and that there's aliens living inside it traveling around on laser beams. There's videos that say that. They'll leave those up. And they'll leave televangelists

up. But then it gets to these doctors that are saying we're looking at statistics this is the deaths in terms of age groups and this is why it's not nearly as dangerous as we thought it was and these quarantines are not the best way to handle it we think there's better ways. They'll take that video down. Even if it's not nearly as dangerous as we thought it was. And these quarantines are not the best way to handle it.

We think there's better way. They'll take that video down, even if it's someone who's saying rational things. And I don't think that's smart. I don't think that's a healthy way to handle things. I don't think it's good for the debate. I think, in fact, it strengthens the resolve of the people on the other side that watch those videos. And some of those points resonate with those people. I think that's not the way to handle it. I don't think removing those

videos is the way to handle it. I think the way to handle it is let other people with opposing points of view put their videos up and let people discuss and debate and see which one makes more sense to you. And usually the weight of the information overwhelms the bullshit and at least with most people i don't understand why it's okay to leave some obviously full of shit videos up but take down things that are very very controversial but debatable okay so this this now gets into that part of your episode with Bridget from over the weekend that I saw where you basically accurately characterized the view that I had last time I was on with you about the regulation of social media. Yeah. So first, just to play devil's advocate just for a second on why do you leave up Flat Earth but take down the coronavirus videos that YouTube or whoever disagrees with.

The, you know, coronavirus videos that YouTube or whoever disagrees with. One can make an argument that there is no real action someone would take because they believe the earth is flat that would endanger others. I mean, I guess you might try to go to the edge and see if you fall off or something, right? Like, but there's no actionable thing for the most part that flat earth belief could cause. That's a good point. for the most part, that flat earth belief could cause. That's a good point. Whereas if this disinformation about, so like, I'll give you one,

there was a video I saw about coronavirus where there was a doctor saying, you know, these quarantines are dangerous because if you're not exposed to bacteria, your immune system will be out of practice essentially and it's gonna shut down. It's not gonna work as well. And then another doctor, a guy who has a YouTube channel, did a counterpoint where he said, he's talking about the hygienic theory, but he has it backwards. It is true that if you are never exposed to dirt and bacteria and whatever, it will impact your immune system.

But it's actually the opposite is what happens. It's that because you're not regularly exposed to things, your immune system will overreact and it'll start attacking things that aren't really a threat. Okay. So what's the harm, I guess, right? Like there was a video where these doctors identified what they think is the problem with the quarantine. And then another doctor- Can I pause you for a second there? I think it's both things though. I think it's actually been proven that yeah, that does happen where your immune system overreacts to people that don't get exposed to enough. But I think there's also it's also been proven that people that are around a lot of different people and constantly exposed to people have stronger immune systems because of that.

That it does get practiced and it does get strengthened by exposure. Oh yeah, I think that's what the sort of fact check was saying, which is that it does get practiced and it does get strengthened by exposure. Oh, yeah. I think that's what the sort of fact check was saying, which is it's completely true that exposing kids to the world out there is good, but that what is being asserted will happen from staying home for two months is both wrong and it wouldn't happen in two months anyway. That it weakens it, like the idea that it weakens immunity. Yeah, I was wondering about that, whether or not it was like a cardiovascular system, like that it only responds to the level of, you know, work that it needs to do. Like your cardiovascular system, you know, if you run, if you take some time off, boy, it slacks off really

quickly. It would be a real shame if that was the case with the immune system. I don't think it is, but I mean... I guess the point i was trying to make was if you there are a lot of people who are understandably frustrated by what's going on and they're looking for any excuse to just let it rip so to speak and go and do whatever and so i think that the play devil's advocate there is a different level of risk from allowing some of this disinformation to be propagated that doesn't exist with leaving flat earth up. That's a very good point. Very good point.

But that being said, last time we talked, we had this conversation about like, okay, if a platform gets to a certain size, does it not kind of enter some new space where you need someone to establish some guidelines. Can I pause you real quick? One of the problems with this argument, though, is that particularly like those doctors in Bakersfield, they weren't spreading disinformation. They were basically spreading the actual facts of fatalities and age groups. And, you know, they just had a different perspective. Well, not even the different interpretation, because they're basically just going over the statistics, but they had a different viewpoint of how they should move forward. And they were also discussing things like furloughed doctors and nurses because hospitals are no longer doing elective surgery, and then many hospitals are on the verge of bankruptcy, which apparently is true. The problem is that's not disinformation. And so if you're saying that

if giving people disinformation makes them make poor choices and they could be putting themselves at risk or putting loved ones at risk because of that, yes. Okay. I'm with you. Yeah, I agree. But this isn't disinformation. This is actual information. It's just information with a different perspective other than the than what we're getting which is only one point of view from the world health organization and people who subscribe to those ideas so it's not it's not a lie but i think your point of if someone believes in the flat earth there's no harm in that that's true so if someone believes in pizzagate and they think that there's kids being held in a basement somewhere and they go and shoot up the store then it is a problem

right and though that kind of a video, I could understand where someone would say, hey, you know, that shouldn't be up there because this is bullshit, and this is what gets caused from that. I don't think it's the same argument when we're all trying to figure out what's going on with a medical situation, and two practicing physicians, two actual medical doctors, are talking about their perspective on this virus. So I don't think they're really on the same line. Yeah, I totally agree that these are not all equivalent

situations. Yeah. For the purposes of, you know, our conversation about like, who, what regulation should be in place, right? Who gets to regulate or this sort of thing? The point that I had made last time we talked about this was not necessarily that I'm in favor or against having some kind of infrastructure that says, here's how a social network has to operate, YouTube, Twitter, whatever. We could talk about that and I'm glad to. My argument last time we talked was, I don't know what the legal case is. How do you define legally what it is that is supposed to happen? What would be the legal framework for that? And there's also a double standard element of it because there's a lot of really, really loud right-wingers who are saying the left is being propped up on social media and the right is being suppressed, to put it very simply. Right. And they're calling for regulation.

They're against new regulation on gun safety. They're against business regulation. They're against stay at home or etc. Now they wanna regulate tweets, like that's where now they want regulation. That seems extremely cynical and hypocritical to me. But we don't even necessarily have to dig into that to think about like, okay, if we regulate it, how do we regulate it? Who gets to decide? I think we're dealing with a thing that's very similar to what we talked about earlier. The founding fathers who set up this country in the 1700s had no idea what 2020 was going to be like. And I think when you're talking about freedom of speech, it's like, do you still have freedom of speech if you could just talk and you can't tweet? Well, I guess you

do, right? Do you still have freedom to get the word out? Well, you do, but you don't have freedom like you or I do, where you could tweet or you can make a YouTube video. And who gets to have that? And is that an essential service? Is that a thing like the post office or a thing like the electricity and the utilities? Is it an essential thing? I think one could make the argument that in 2020, it's used by so many people to convey so much information and it's so significant that I believe it is an essential thing. And I think that just banning someone because you don't like what they say or you don't like how they say it,

I don't think that's a solution, nor do I think there's a clear solution. Because I think that if you have someone who is hateful and is doxing people and insulting people and stalking people online and saying horrible things, that's not good either, right? There's laws about that in person. You can't harass people in person.

Why can you harass people online? Why can you put up your address and have a bunch of people send terrible things to your house? Why is that okay? Well, it shouldn't be okay either. We need to figure out what's okay and what's not okay. And I think one of the problems with isolating – like if tech, I think tech people and people that – whether it's Google or Apple, and you've made a really good argument that they may appear left socially, but they absolutely operate right when it comes to finance, when it comes to discuss things. And you might say that your perspective is the one that you want to hear because you're a left-wing person and these are your beliefs, but you're isolating the whole other team from being a part of that conversation. And maybe they have something you want to hear,

and maybe they don't have anything you want to hear, but to not allow them to communicate, you are alienating a giant chunk of the population. And if someone gets to a prominent level where they're communicating a certain way and you just decide that that certain way is unacceptable and you kick them off, you don't just kick them off. You also silence all the other people that are along or aligned with them because they have similar ideas and they don't want to speak out either. When you ban James Woods, you don't just ban James Woods. You ban a lot of other people from saying something. They might be furious about the Russia investigation or whatever.

They want to express themselves and they panic. They get scared. They worry that they're going to get... That's censorship. That's a form of censorship. And I think these companies, I don't blame them because I don't think they had any idea what they were going to become. And I think they're all adjusting along the way. I think when Twitter was first come when Twitter first came out, do you remember that? Like you would write at David Pakman is going

to the move me's you like, you like, you know, at Joe Rogan just had a great pizza. That's what you did. I mean, it wasn't this thing where you got to express yourself in 240 whatever characters. And we're in a different world now. And I think this different world needs some different examination about what the ability to communicate online is. And this is an important point because Alex Jones made some crazy video after our conversation that I had with him yesterday where he was saying that I'm going to war against censorship and a war against YouTube. I'm not doing any of those things. I made this deal with Spotify. Oh, you mean Spotify.

Yeah. I made the deal with Spotify because it's a great company and it's a great deal. And I'm excited to be in a partnership with a company as opposed to like a company that I just put my stuff up on their platform, whether it's Apple or YouTube. I don't like that YouTube censors things. I don't like that they do that, like with those doctors in Bakersfield. But I'm not at war with them. I'm not at war with anybody. And I'm not, I don't envy them, their position. I don't think it's smart to censor practicing doctors when they have differing opinions. I think we need to find out who's right. And I think the way you find out who's right is you get people who are experts and they disagree. There's Nobel laureates out there. And I've watched several videos

that are talking about this lockdown and that it's not a good idea. There's people that believe in herd mentality versus immunizations and or vaccines. And I don't know who's right. And I would like them to all be able to discuss it equally and openly That said I don't envy Twitter. I don't envy YouTube I don't envy any of these people the idea of trying to manage this in real time while it explodes and takes over The way human beings communicate over a period of a decade just like that that's so instantaneous and mistakes have been made. And in my opinion, when it comes to the way things are censored,

and the way it's, these mistakes, particularly on Twitter, far favor the left. And they're not balanced. Some horrible things that people on the left say about people on the right, and it's nothing. It just gets washed away. But when the people do it who are on the right about people on the left, they get banned. It's not fair. And when things aren't fair, one side has a better argument that they're being censored and that there's some sort of a conspiracy. And it divides people even more. It strengthens the hate. I think most people,

the vast majority, 70, 80% are reasonable people that you could have a conversation with if you were in front of them one-on-one. When they don't feel like they're a part of the conversation or when they speak their side and their stuff gets deleted or removed or put into some shadow ban category, it's fucking infuriating for people. And it's not good for all of us as a community. And I think that is the burden that these places like YouTube or Twitter, they have to shoulder this burden. And I don't know how to do it. I don't know. I mean, Republicans have one perspective. There's many people like yourself that have the perspective, like, listen, it's their company. Should not they be able to make their own rules? I think they're too big. I think they're too big for that now. And I think that it's in this position where it literally is a part of who we are as human beings. The ability

to express ideas and communicate is so critical right now. And as we're evolving and as we're evolving our culture and our civilization, discourse is so important. It's a giant part of being a human being in 2020. And I don't think it should be just flippantly removed from people. So my personal view is very similar to yours in terms of, you know, short of like illegal content and really very specific things. My instinct is leave it up and let the sort of let people evaluate it, let people publish counterpoints. That's my personal view. Now, the conservative view on this is, you know, if you if this cake baker doesn't want to bake a cake because of who you want to marry,

you don't do anything to the baker. You just go and, you know, the market will if there's a demand for those types of cakes, for those types of weddings, bakers will enter the market and that's it. If you apply that here, and we'll get to the differences in a second. If you apply that here, if the James Woodses want to say stuff

and a whole bunch of people want to hear that stuff, why don't they just go and make their platform and bring everybody over? It sounds like a great business, right? Yeah, it a great business it's way harder to do way harder to do than just do it i mean to say why don't you make another twitter well there would be a thousand twitters it's obviously very difficult no one's ever been able to do it it's not something that's it's you're talking about something that takes an enormous amount of resources it's it's not that yes it's not that simple It's not that simple.

It's not that simple. But everybody already does use Twitter. So I think the question really is, does Twitter have a responsibility for fair and even treatment? I'm sure you've seen some of those James O'Keefe or other Project Veritas videos where they have secret cameras filming executives talking about how to censor conservative people. I've seen a little bit of it. What I do remember is from the Planned Parenthood era where what they published was pretty dramatically dishonest from what I recall. But I've not seen the one you're referring to specifically. That was a long time ago, was it?

How long ago was that? The Planned Parenthood stuff? Was it five years? Oh, are you talking about the acorn stuff? The, uh, the stuff where the, they brought in a pimp to try to get money, uh, for opening up a brothel. It's been so long that the details escape me, but I remember that there, I remember that incident. I've not really seen anything recently that they've done. Whenever you have deceptive editing, the problem is even if in the future you don't do that anymore, it's like everyone's always going to remember that you did do something. Yes.

You did do something that wasn't straightforward, cut and dry, no emotion journalism. Just here are the facts. Planned Parenthood awarded $2 million in lawsuit over secret videos. Interesting. That's not good. Yeah, that was that was that's that's my big memory when you mentioned that that organization. But so I think that let's say we agree about something needs to be done. Once you're at a certain level, you enter a new category and some kind of regulation has to be done. Who does the regulation? When you look at redistricting, for example, this has been like a multi-decade thing where when Republicans are in power, they draw the districts in a way that's favorable to them. Democrats are in power,

they take the opportunity to redraw districts that are favorable to them. You have these ideas of, okay, we'll have a commission with three Democrats and three Republicans, and together they'll figure out how the districts could be drawn fairly. How do you apply that? The lesson from that, how do you apply it to – does the Trump administration decide what kind of content must be left up versus what can be removed? But then that administration gets replaced. Now the next administration says, here's how Twitter is supposed to operate. How do you do it? It's a really good question, and it's a really hard question. gets replaced. Now the next administration says, here's how Twitter is supposed to operate. Like,

how do you do it? It's a really good question. It's a really hard question. That's what I'm saying. I don't envy those people. You know, I really like Jack Dorsey as a person. I really enjoy talking to him. I think he's a very thoughtful guy. And in discussing this with him, both on the show and off the show, you know, they don't really know exactly how to handle these things. They don't really know what the perfect solution is. And he's even proposed a Wild West Twitter and then a Twitter that's under some sort of moderation. And I don't know where they stand on that right now, but that was something that he were, he was actively bringing up, like, let's have a Twitter where anything goes. You could like Reddit in the early days, you could do whatever the fuck you wanted versus

what they're, what they have now. But here's another example. When you, when a person gets so big, like Trump, you can get away, you could do shit on Twitter that there's no way you could do. Right? Like, have you seen the recent thing where he's accusing Joe Scarborough of uh possibly being a part of a murder or something like that I saw that he's bringing up I mean apparently totally I don't know the exact details of the

story but it's been investigated it had nothing to do with it it was just somebody worked with and and Trump is he's putting out this thing particularly just to try to target joe scarborough get his fans to go nutty and fuck with him you know and that's a weird way of that that's a right-wing guy who is literally the top right-wing guy right so yeah right-wing bias doesn't seem to apply totally uh you know, negative bias when it comes to the president. And the president, when you get to a certain level, like you could just do shit like that? Like you could just threaten North Korea? Like you could say, we have the best missiles, we'll fuck you up?

Like he could tweet that. He could tweet, hey, hey, buddy, I'm glad you fake your death. And I know you're still alive, but I just want you to know we got the best missiles and we'll fuck you up. Have he tweeted that? Like, whoa. death and i know you're still alive but i just want you know we got the best missiles and we'll fuck you up have he tweeted that like whoa but this is not really uh unique to twitter in the sense that if you look at our justice system there's sort of like the justice system for the elites and then for other people to focus on street crime instead of white collar crime i mean this exists in a lot of different places what can a really big business get away with versus what can a small business sometimes get away with sure so I don't think that's different. One of the things I'm thinking

about is what's the main point of Twitter? Twitter is a publicly traded corporation. So at this point, is it fair to say that the main point of Twitter is to be profitable and deliver a return to shareholders? Because if it is, all the stuff we're talking about, about how we would like to see it operate, is sort of irrelevant because they now have this fiduciary responsibility to just make money. Right. What do you think Twitter's worth? Like, if someone wanted to come over and buy it, what if the government bought Twitter and just applied the First Amendment to Twitter? What if the government said, listen, you guys are kicking ass, great job.

However, you're basically a public utility for communication of ideas and it's imperative that for liberty and for the ability for people to have free speech everyone has to have access to this and so when you go to maybe it's like one of those things you go to jail for a horrible felony you lose your ability to vote maybe you go to jail for something and you lose your ability to tweet. I mean, could it be $300 billion? I have no idea. I wonder how much it is. I mean, how much are they spending on these goddamn stimulus packages? I wonder if they...

You could probably buy it cheap right now, too. I don't think Twitter really makes money, either. I don't think it makes money. I think Twitter is one of those weird situations where it's worth something, but I don't know if it actually does. I don't think it's in the profitable area, right? I don't think it's making.

Is it? Didn't you? Jamie and I talked about this fairly recently. Yeah, it's complicated. You know, some things make sense. Like Google makes sense, right? They use Google ads. They make a shitload of money.

YouTube makes sense. It's profitable. It all makes sense. Twitter's like use Google ads. They make a shitload of money. YouTube makes sense. It's profitable. It all makes sense. Twitter is like, where's the money coming from? Like it's so valuable, but, and it's such a useful tool, but how does, how do they make money? I mean, so literally there are ads on Twitter as well, right? Boosted posts, promote advertisements, et cetera.

I have no idea how much money they're making from that versus what is the value of the user base. Wasn't there a point recently where a very conservative investor bought a giant chunk of Twitter and was thinking about kicking out Jack Dorsey? Wasn't that something that was brought up really recently? You know, I don't know about that. You remember that, Jamie? That was a situation, right? I don't know if that's how it went down.

Like fairly recently, someone just bought a controlling stake or a large stake. Look, man, I just think – Is there anyone you would trust to regulate Twitter and YouTube and Facebook? Like who would do it? Ooh, that's a good question. I don't think it should be one person either. I think it's also like president. Like being president, I don't think she should be the president of Twitter.

I really think it might be wise for all of us to consider it like a public utility. You would socialize Twitter. Yeah, I'd give it to Bernie. Wow, that's incredible. I think something that has that kind of power when it comes to expression, it's valuable for human beings. I would never want to take it away from the people that own it, obviously. But I just think as a concept that we should consider that what we have here with something like Twitter or even maybe there's a good argument for YouTube as well. That what these new abilities to express yourself are, they're incredibly important in terms of the process of our culture, the process of going over ideas and evolving those ideas. There's no better way to do that than open communication. There's no better open communication than Twitter and YouTube.

Like in terms of regular people, you can start a YouTube video right now on your phone. I could just set the phone up here, press record and start talking and then upload it and bam, my thoughts could be available to anybody. And I think that's so valuable. It's so, it's so important in terms of our ability to go back and forth with ideas. And we're changing those ideas. Like obviously the way we thought about life in 1960 is very different than the way we think about life today. And a lot of that comes from discourse. A lot of that comes from discussion and the evolution of these ideas. Jamie has something. Hold on a second.

Yeah, I think there was a potential corporate takeover that tried to maybe happen, but they made an agreement. Ah, Twitter reaches deal with activist fund that wanted Jack Dorsey out. They made a deal. They met on Fuck Island and they all, uh, no. Well, listen, I mean, i couldn't agree more strongly with you about the importance of these platforms my entire business is built on them i mean i'd have no business if it weren't for this i think i think the difficulties are what what are what are the standards that are applied and i also like i don't want to sound like one of these free market right

wingers but what's the legal bit you would have to first establish a legal basis. You would have to establish law that says once you have this number of users or this number of page views or whatever, you now are bound by this new set of laws. And that is complex to say the least. It's very complex. It's very complex. And I don't, I don't, I have no idea how one would even begin and how long the process of figuring out what the rules should be, how long it would take before we all perspectives, perspectives from people that have been harmed by social media and, you know, and Twitter mobs and shit like that. And what should be done about that? And the same thing could be said about YouTube as well. I think, but one thing that no one can deny is how significant these, these tools are, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or, you know, any new one that comes out, whether it's TikTok or whatever, they're, they're really powerful. There's, there's something to them that's unprecedented in the history of humanity, you know, and we can't just apply the old rules to them. It just doesn't make sense. I don't think it's good for us. When, when I have talked to conservative people about this, they're, I mean, if you're not accustomed to it, if you're not accustomed to feeling like you're censored and you're angry,

you don't know what it's like until you're around these people. And then you see their frustration and their anger and their fury at Twitter for doing that and for censoring voices that are similar to their perspectives. Instead of just letting the process take place like it's always has been it's just in a different form the process of being able to talk through ideas one of the risks of this is that once you assert a right to a platform to exist on a platform that supersedes twitter or youtube's ability to say for whatever reason because they're a company they can have

terms and conditions and they say, we just don't want this. If YouTube was determined that they don't want gardening content on YouTube, I can't think of a legal reason why they can't say no gardening content. I mean, as long as they're not by virtue of banning gardening content, banning people on the basis of membership in some protected class or something like that, right? Like if all gardeners were of a certain race, you could make the case that by proxy, by banning gardening content, they're banning people of a certain race. I don't know how you prevent that from then being applied elsewhere. Like what other platforms would people have a right to? And this gets to speakers who say

I was censored because a certain school wouldn't have me to speak there. It's like, well, hold on. You don't have a right to speak at any particular school. Schools can make decisions about what they want and what they don't want as long as you're not being discriminated against based on your identity. Is it not sort of the same thing with YouTube? Like what, what is the legal basis for saying they can no longer make these decisions? Well, it's a big, there's a big difference. First of all, a school is a single destination. That's a physical place, right? So you can decide, you know, this is a conservative school. We don't want people coming over here and talking about this, or this is a very progressive school.

We don't want to have someone from the KKK come here and tell us how all races are not equal. That's a very different thing. When you're doing something like YouTube, the real question is, is it just a business? Is it just a business that's owned by people and they have the right to do whatever they want? Or is at least, I mean, you know, you're on YouTube, you're called a partner, right? They refer to you as a partner. David Pakman is a YouTube partner, right? But you, you know, and in some ways you are, right? Because you put out a lot of content.

You're huge. You put out a lot of content and that content is an integral part of, like, look, they have a progressive news sort of empire, really, when you really stop and look about, and homemade shows like yours, you know, like there's many, many of them that you could watch. Kyle Kalinsky and Jimmy Dore and all these folks are doing these shows

basically from scratch, right? There's no large production company behind it or any of the things that, so they've got this whole empire of you're a part of it you're part of this whole news empire and there's many categories but what they are is not as simple as just a business they are a business but what they all are as well with you, you know, all the executives, all the people that YouTube as an entity is one of the most powerful tools for expression the world's ever

known. So if you have this incredibly powerful tool for expression, at what point in time, or when are you able to deny people the use of that thing and why, you know, and what is freedom of expression if it doesn't apply to these new, and what is freedom of expression if it doesn't apply to these new tools? What is the First Amendment if it doesn't apply to these new tools? If someone can come along and say, hey, I know you're a doctor and a practicing physician, but I'm 28 and I live in Palo Alto and I say, fuck you because I believe in the WHO and I don't believe in you and I'm just going to delete your video. And it seems to me that I followed the rules that YouTube has set forth about, you know, if you don't agree with the WHO and you're giving some sort of contrary

coronavirus information, delete. And I don't think that's wise. I don't think that's wise. I think there's a very, very complicated issue that should be debated publicly and discussed publicly whether or not these people have the right to be heard. And this is just one example that we keep bringing up, but there's many different kinds of things that fit along those lines. You know, when you just want to ban all conspiracy theories, air quotes, the problem with conspiracy theories is, first of all, the word as a pejorative was created to try to steer people away from the Kennedy assassination, which is like one of the greatest conspiracies of all time. Some people did that, whether it was Lee Harvey Oswald by himself,

I highly doubt it. I think there's probably other people involved. I think it was a conspiracy. So call that a conspiracy. I don't know enough about this. I know too much about it. I know too much about it. We could spend the rest of the day discussing that.

Let's not. But my point is— When you mention the First Amendment, though, I don't think the First Amendment is in play here because you're not talking about the government when you talk about youtube well i think we should revise the first amendment this is what i'm saying i think okay freedom of expression used to be you i can't infringe upon your right to express yourself but that was like yelling on a fucking apple box you know like what you didn't when when that was created created, other than writing something in print or yelling something in a public square, there weren't a lot of ways to express yourself.

Now, the most powerful way the world has ever known has come along to express yourself. And that's social media. That's YouTube and Twitter. What are those things and how much of a responsibility do the people who own those things have to adhere to the fundamental ideas that got us to this republic in the first place? And I think there's a real good argument that they're more powerful than simply just a company. That they have this amazing ability to get information out and that this is, I mean, it should certainly be profitable. I don't deny them their profitability. I mean, they've made an amazing thing. They've created something that we all benefit from.

They should make a shitload of money. But I think we should really be careful about who gets to use this and who doesn't get to use this. Just because someone says something that you disagree with that get other people to also agree with them doesn't mean they should be shut down. If you don't agree with what they're saying, if you don't like what they're saying, you probably shouldn't view it or listen to it or read it.

You should probably find something else or examine why you don't like it. And this is where thinking comes in. This is where critical thinking and discussion comes in. And this is a huge part of managing a community of managing a civilization so the one of the biggest parts of managing this civilization this kind of discourse is limited and it's limited and censored and people can arbitrarily decide to just remove you from it do you know uh the zoobie story do you know what happened with zoobie uh i only vaguely zoobie Zuby is an entertainer, a rapper out of the UK. Great guy.

Wonderful guy. He doesn't even swear. Very religious guy. He was in a discussion with someone on Twitter. Didn't know if that was a male or a female or what they prefer to be mentioned as, what their pronouns are, but they said, I bet I have sex with more women

than you. And he writes, okay, dude, that's all he writes. And he gets suspended from Twitter for any, he asked them to review it. They reviewed it and upheld it. They're like, yes, this is a good suspension. You can't just say, okay, dude, to someone that kind of stuff is crazy. Right. You know, the, I'm sure, you know, the Megan Murphy story where, uh, she, she said she's in an argument with someone over trans rights versus radical feminist rights.

And she's what you call a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. And she says a man is never a woman. This is what she said. She doesn't believe that transgender people should be able to have a say in traditional women's issues. And so she gets banned for life for that. She basically said an opinion on something. A man is never a woman, though. traditional women's issues. And so she gets banned for life for that. She, she basically said an opinion on something. A man is never a woman though. They asked her to take it down. She took a screenshot of it and then put the screenshot up. She took it down and she's

obviously being rebellious, but should that keep her from being able to use that platform? No, no, you should be able to debate that statement. You should be able to refute that. If you want to be angry at her, tell her what you think. Tell her what's wrong with it. Tell her what's hurtful about it. But banning someone for that, it sends a ripple of self-censorship that changes the discourse and makes you feel like you're oppressed. Makes you feel like the overlords who watch over the social media platforms, they have

the final say in power and it might not align with my ideas and there's nothing I can do about it. Yeah. My, my, again, my view personally essentially lines up with yours in terms of my tolerance of, of speech. I still think that there's a huge issue and hypocrisy here where you have large swaths of people that are only in favor of this type of regulation because Oh, you're right. Because they believe that it benefits them based on their biases. And they don't want the regulation when it comes to, like I said, guns, business, everything else. There's another hypocrisy, which I think is important. When you talk about net neutrality, there's this debate,

is the internet so necessary and ubiquitous now that it should be like the phone and like electricity? Just a straight up utility. If you believe YouTube, which is a piece of the internet, should warrant this degree of additional regulation, how can you not say that the infrastructure that carries it obviously should be democratized and treated like a public utility? carries it obviously should be democratized and treated like a public utility. And yet you have a ton of people who want to regulate tweets, but they don't think that at this point, the internet is so important that it should be a public utility. How do you square that? That's a really good question. You know, I think there, there's a way to balance it out where, uh, everyone has access to it, but if you want really hardcore, high bandwidth access,

it's very expensive, you pay for it differently. Sort of like how in places that have public health care, they have the option for a private specialist that's really good at certain surgeries, something along those lines. You could pay for it as long as everybody has access to it, but you don't have access to it the way that maybe, say, a business

would need, like a really fat pipe with a lot of bandwidth. It's a good question, though. But I think what you nailed earlier about discussions for regulation is so important because it does highlight the hypocrisy that people have with ideas that are controversial. And one of the things that they feel when it comes to, whether it's the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, whatever it is, they want it, this is what's written down, it's in, we're not changing it, it's that way forever.

Whether it's the 14th Amendment, whatever the fuck it is, pick an amendment. They just, nope, nope, nope, written down, that's it, that's what it is. And you're right, that when it comes to something like social media where there isn't really a precedent, now they want regulation. They want the government to come in and step in because it doesn't favor what their ideas are. I see that there's some hypocrisy in that. But I also favor regulation. So I favor, in that regard, I favor regulation.

I favor regulation in a lot of ways. I think this whole, I mean, I've had these discussions with many people where they let the market decide. I'm like, that's okay. A lot of people get fucked over when you just let the market decide that eventually things even out. And sometimes maybe not even. Well, it's almost a cliche. It's almost a cliche at this point, because even a lot of times that people say that they don't really want a free market. They want a free market until who could have seen the pandemic coming. Let's give cash to all of these 10 types of businesses all of a sudden and i'm not saying i'm against that but i'm saying let's

instead of pretending to be for one thing until you clearly need a different one let's recognize these systems are more fragile than we believe them to be yes and let's set that up all along to prevent something so acute from going wrong. Yes, yes, yes. Very good point. And I think this is what we talked about earlier that we hope happens out of this pandemic. And so we have a greater understanding of some things are out of our control and we should be prepared as a community, as a large community. We should be prepared to help each other. And I think that can be done. I really do.

And I think we could shift in that direction. And that's what I really enjoyed about some of the concepts that Andrew Yang had about universal basic income, like saying like, look, we need to take into consideration that this change is probably going to hit us and it's going to hit us hard and we got to be prepared. And, you know, the way he called it, I believe he referred to it as a freedom dividend. And so he gave it a different spin you know this is you this is something you earned by being a part of this country like we're going to have to adjust uh some of these hard line values that we have in terms of what people are responsible for and what people aren't my argument has always been you can't i hate that pull yourself up by your bootstraps shit. I hate it. It drives me crazy.

Because not everybody is in the same situation from the start. You don't come out. You're not born into the same family. You're not born into the same community. You're not born into the same stresses and troubles and crime and gangs and this and that and abuse and sexual abuse and physical abuse. It's not an even playing field. It's just not. So all this, you need to get your shit together.

No, we need to help people get their shit together. And we need to figure out how do we, if we looked at the number one problem, and this is again going back to Bernie Sanders, the number one problem with people that are young that are coming up is having opportunity, having healthcare, having safety, having a place where you could actually have a fighting chance to thrive. And my perspective is if you're a person that thinks

America as a team, that we are America and I'm proud to be an American, well, what's the best way to strengthen in America? Less losers, less people that have a shitty hand of cards from the jump. That's what we should be concentrating on more than anything. You know, there's a number that a corresponding number as unemployment rises. There's more people dying because of heart attacks, suicide, depression, all these different factors. You can apply that to poverty. You can apply that to poverty. You can apply that to despair. You can apply that to growing up in an environment where it seems like there's no hope. You know,

you can only ask someone to hold their breath and swim for so long before they just want to give up. And that's what you see with a lot of people in our culture today, in our society, in these inner cities. That's not addressed. One after the other, people run for office and they don't address those things, especially run for the top office. Bernie was the only one who was. He was the only one who was addressing it. So that was why I was for Bernie Sanders. He, to me, represented some revolutionary change in our perception of what our society is and what our obligations are as good citizens. Yeah, deaths of despair, I think it's a category that encompasses all of that stuff.

So I was just reminded of this because we went back to Bernie. So are you voting Biden or are you voting Trump or do you know what you're doing? I don't know what I'm doing, man. I think I'm probably going to vote independent. Really? I think California is going to go. It's going to go Democrat no matter what. You know, who knows if he if Biden has some lady who's badass and tells him sit down, shut the fuck up. I got this. Maybe maybe I'll be more inclined to vote for him based on his vice president choice. I don't know. You know, I feel that like, from my perspective, 70% of, of what you seem to be highlighting with Bernie, maybe 60, 60, 70%, you would get with Biden. I'm very cynical. I'm very cynical. Yeah. I'm very cynical about that. I think so

many of these choices, like even just having a female president, they're done for perceptions and are done to he's's he's appealing to the people that want him in power in the first place those old guard democrats you know and the the the business of the the democratic party it's a it's a giant business the whole thing is getting control and you know there's some social carrots that are dangling out there at the end of the stick that we would like to think that, you know, having someone in there that's going to vote left in terms of Supreme Court justices and things along those lines would help us all tremendously. But I don't know. I'm cynical. The way this whole Bernie Sanders thing went down, I'm cynical about that, how they all

dropped out right before Super Tuesday and it was Bernie versus Biden. And, you know, there's so much of it that I felt like there's so much coordinated shit that he had to endure from the DNC in 2016 that he's enduring. He was enduring similar shit running into the 2020 election. I don't have a lot of faith in the same standard institutions changing things for the better i just i just don't have a lot of faith i think isn't that um i mean i guess i don't know i'm thinking like i don't have kids but if if thinking if i did all like frustrations with the dnc the coordinated dropouts all of that stuff it's just for me so simple where like if if Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice, that could affect your kids' kids in horrible ways. Whereas if Biden gets to pick the next

Supreme Court judge, like that alone, and these other 250 judges that Trump selected that we don't really hear about, but that make way more decisions. Like climate aside, I think Biden, you would agree with more on tax policy. I think you'd be more with all these different issues. Just the judges part would impact society for 20, 30 years, and that just seems so huge. It would be huge. Yeah. I mean, and we should probably consider whether or not that makes sense, whether or not Supreme Court justices should be lifetime appointees.

Agree. Does that make sense? And should it be so significant that you're willing to ignore everything else just because you want someone in the Supreme Court that aligns with your politics because they're not going to be there for a couple of years? They're going to be there until essentially they either retire or die. That's a weird thing to have. It's a weird amount of – it's almost like there's something that happens to professors when they get tenure where they can kind of get away with wacky shit and do whatever they want. It gets real weird. And I think that whenever you get people in a position where they don't ever

have to worry about getting fired, I mean, obviously a scandal, they murder somebody or something, but they're, they're appointed for life, you know, I think, and they have immense power. It's just, I don't know. I'm not a, obviously I'm not a law student or a lawyer, but is that really the best way to do it? It doesn't. Yeah. I mean, I tend to favor term limits for Supreme Court justices.

The counterpoint, which is not a crazy counterpoint, is if they know that eventually on the tail end of this thing, they've got to go and get a job, it could influence their rulings in cases, right? You will very often see cases where it could be dealing with an industry that would be the likely industry you would work at after you leave the Supreme Court. That would be something you would want to eliminate, but I see both sides of it. I see both sides of it, too. It seems to me, also, to have a president that gets to choose the supreme court judges it's like all the other shit he has to do too that that should be the only job he does if he was just going to pick supreme court judges he should mull over that

for years he should have stacks of paperwork in his office going over he should first of all he should be a lawyer like obama would be uniquely qualified for that gig. You know, Hillary would be uniquely called. You should be a fucking lawyer that understands what you're actually going to vote on and what you're actually, what, what the implications of giving this person, this gig is going to be. And also wouldn't it be logical if we're just assuming that there's a, this is probably a terrible idea because it would result in like big stalemates but wouldn't it be great if we're assuming we're admitting that there's only two parties we kind of are there's a third there's independent and green and all that but really

there's really there's two parties right there's conservative and liberal wouldn't it be great if there's half and half five of each or four of each or you know pick a number if you're going to have a supreme court wouldn't it be great if it was equally representative of well by definition that cannot happen because in order to avoid stalemates you got to have an odd number right yeah but maybe just one that one is what happens the president gets to pick that one so if you're a Republican, you get one. You have like one that tips it towards your side. One. But like, I mean, it's a terrible idea.

I'm a moron and don't listen to me. But wouldn't it make more sense to have equal representation of both sides when it comes to complex issues that's going to affect the entire country? I mean, it shouldn't just be a simple matter of this one guy as the president, he gets to just appoint all these right-wing Jesus bangers, and they come in and burn all abortion clinics. It shouldn't be that simple. Now, that's interesting because, so you're pro-choice. Do you really want it to be mandated that half the court is against abortion? Why would that be good?

mandated that half the court is against abortion? Like, why would that be good? Again, whenever it comes to abortion, there's one thing that you keep bringing up, and that you keep bringing up pro-choice. You keep bringing it up. Oh, no, I brought it up because you mentioned abortion. Right, right, right. But you brought it up earlier, too. Yes, yes, yes. It's one of those, when it comes to picking a Supreme Court, that's like the number one thing. Should you, I mean, I hate to say it this way, should you be able to abort a baby?

That's what it is, right? Or a fetus or, you know, the bundle of tissue before it's ever really anything. Should you be able to do that? And it's so crazy that that is like one of our number one considerations. Should someone be able to infringe on your rights as a human being to tell you you have to carry this baby and then you have to either put it up for adoption or raise it like what a uniquely human

conundrum that is and a conversation that is because as we discussed earlier it does get everybody gets very disturbed when it gets older. When you're dealing with five and six months, everybody has a problem with it. Almost everybody. But when it's early on, it's less and less. It's one of those uniquely human things where we're all just like,

whoa, that's a messy discussion. It's a messy problem. It's not unique to abortion though. I mean, if you think about, think about a speed limit, right? I mean, you, you get engineers and they say the speed limit here is going to be 35. Does that mean when it's dry, 40 is unsafe? No. Does that mean if it's icy, 35 is safe? You've probably got the fact that there is an arbitrary nature to it often gets you into a philosophical black hole where people end up saying you just can't have it because it's not clear in the way we would like it to be clear. And I think we don't want to fall into that kind of philosophical black hole because it's not unique to abortion that that exists. Yeah, you could make a good argument about being something you could apply to a lot of different things. But abortion is so emotional because when you talk to the pro-life people and they're screaming that you're killing a baby, there's nothing else like that that sort of has the consequences of on one side people looking at a woman's right to choose.

And then the other side looks at it, you're killing a baby. Like, whoa, that is a really polarizing and complex issue. But I agree with you about the speed limit thing. And the other problem with the speed limit thing is you're turning cops into glorified revenue collectors. Because they're out running around giving people tickets and collecting money for going too fast. Like, that's not what they're supposed to be there for. I mean, for sure, if someone's driving unsafe, they should do that, but they shouldn't be waiting to catch people going three miles an hour over the 45 limit. And also like, what kind of a car do you have?

Because if you have a, you know, a 1965 Buick and it doesn't stop at all, like you hit the brakes and it skids for like 15 feet before it even starts to brake. Your car is dangerous. Your car is dangerous probably even going 35 miles an hour. If you had an old tank of a car with shitty brakes and, you know, those cars, they're not designed to go fast like in comparison to today's cars at all. Like maybe you shouldn't even be allowed to drive those. When you see someone with like one of them classic cars like Jay Leno drives all around Bur Burbank, like, hey man, you can't even, those brakes barely work on that fucking piece of shit.

But if you have a Tesla, like my God, man, those things are super fast. They're super comfortable and safe. The brakes are amazing. Like there's modern cars today that you can make the argument that 55 miles an hour is preposterous. Like I know all around Massachusetts, I used to live there, the speed limit was crazy. 55 miles an hour is preposterous. I know all around Massachusetts, I used to live there, the speed limit was crazy. 55 miles an hour is maddening.

You just want to eat your steering wheel. You're like, this is going to take so long. When was that? I don't even remember when the speed limit was 55. Sammy Hagar, bro. I can't drive 55. Don't you remember? Do you remember that? Maybe I'm too young.

I remember 65. I remember 65. How old are you, David? 36. Yeah, I'm ancient. I'm 52. And when I was a kid, Sammy Hagar, before he was even in Van Halen, he had this song, I Can't Drive 55. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I know this song. I know this song. I just thought, I don't know when it was that slow in Massachusetts. Oh, man. Well, when I lived in there, I moved out of Massachusetts in probably 92, 91, 92, and it was still 55 then. When I used to drive to Connecticut for gigs, you'd get busted all the time. These fucking guys would be hiding behind bushes with radar. We'd have radar detectors.

You'd hang from your steering wheel or your rearview mirror. Remember those things? Oh, yeah. I used to have one. It didn't work at all, but I had one. But, yeah, there's – I know montana had no speed limits montana was like fuck you until the federal government said listen you know you gotta if you want money from us you gotta do something you gotta have speed limits so they came up with some wacky like 85 mile an

hour speed limit up there but that's uh also you know it's it's a place where there's just not that many folks it's big wide open stretches of land it's a place where there's just not that many folks. It's big, wide-open stretches of land. It's not like driving 85 miles an hour through downtown Boston. No. Are you, like, out and about a lot right now with what's going on with the virus? I mean, not really. I went to Florida for the UFC. That was really weird.

That was last weekend or the weekend before last. That was very strange, you know, wearing a mask everywhere and everyone else has a mask on. Once we got to the actual event, it was just strange because there was no audience. The fight had no crowd. Then I came back home and mostly I've been just coming here to the studio and going home. Aside from being freaked out and all the anxiety and being sad that people are suffering, I myself have enjoyed the time off and enjoyed the ability to reflect and to just think about, like, what is important in life?

And what is important in terms of how I spend my time? And how critical health is, that it's not just a luxury or a vanity, that health and exercise, it's imperative. And I may not beat people over the head with that, maybe too much, but I think it's so goddamn important. And that to me, that's really been hammered home to me about this pandemic. love, friendship, how important my friendships are, how I value them so much. Um, my obligation in doing this thing, you know, in this thing, it's like, I want, I want to express a beneficial idea. I want to express ideas in a way that maybe people could get something out of it. I want, I want to, I want, I want it to be entertaining,

but I want people to get something out of it, you know? And I think that that's all been highlighted and what a unique position I'm in and how fortunate I am and what, what obligation comes with that fortune. You know, that's all been really highlighted by this, uh, this pandemic. Yeah. I just feel so lucky that my job doesn't depend on me driving somewhere on some boss,information. The feeling of that responsibility has, I've always had it, but it feels particularly acute right now because of what's going on. Yeah. And it should. And you know, David, it's interesting. We were talking about this earlier, but your show couldn't exist in any other time and nor could mine. And we're very, very very very similar in that way if you had someone standing over you telling you what to do or hey david here's the data we've got from the polls they

don't like it when you talk about this or they say not to talk about that and the sponsor wants you to change the way you're dressed and that kind of shit you would never become you and i think one of the reasons why shows like yours resonate with people is because it's very obvious that no one is telling you what to do. You're just a guy who has your perspectives and you're a brilliant guy and you have very interesting thoughts on things. But these are home brewed thoughts. Like you've thought about these.

These are not things that are being handed to you on a printed sheet by the network executives. handed to you on a printed sheet by the network executives. And that's what makes what you do and what I do so interesting is that it resonates. People can clearly see I'm a moron. So if this moron is to be able to talk to all these people and have these intense conversations, there's not really a barrier of entry that we once thought it was. To be a person who has that kind of an audience, you used to have to be vetted and you used to go through a long process. There was a lot of other people in consideration. You had to play games and politicking and you had to be chosen. You don't have to be chosen anymore.

You just have to do it and get better at it. And I feel so fortunate to be in the situation that I'm in where this is happening and to to have uh this ability to just do a show to not have to talk to anybody to be able to just just go and have conversations with whoever I want whether it's you or whoever anyone yeah I think it's yeah my hope is like when we look back at this, whenever it's, it's done, you know, that I can just feel good about the work that happened during this time. Right. Because I think it's going to be a phase where we'll kind of remember the beginning, middle and end of it. And I don't know when the end of it is going to be, but I don't want to feel like the time was squandered in any way. No, I don't think it is, man. I think

perspective wise, I think we're all going to benefit from this. The real problem is people with businesses. The real problem is people that didn't do anything wrong and everything's taken away from them. And I feel fucking terrible for them. And if there's any way we could save them and do something, I mean, I just don't know what the answers are. I don't know what the answers are medically. I don't know what the answers are. I mean, in terms of managing our economy from here out, I don't know what the answers are medically i don't know what the answers are i mean in terms of managing our economy from here out i don't but man it's it's a fucking weird time it's one of the weirdest times like sometimes i'll just be driving down the street and i'll have forgotten that we're in the middle of a pandemic and i'll see some person with a mask on like oh yeah oh yeah the world's fucking haywire right now i forgot we're

all afraid to touch each other and everyone's far apart and you get hand sanitized you're squirting every five minutes on yourself it's it's just the weirdest time of my life yeah my my my biggest concern is that all the stuff that we figured out we weren't ready for we learn nothing from it and then just the next one of these happens and we're just as unprepared and things go just as haywire. That would be like the biggest waste. And I fear that that is a good possibility. That's a big fear. And it's also like how, what, when in terms of money to allocate, what's left, like after the stimulus packages, after all this stuff that we're doing, what is going to be left?

How much money is there going to be to try to restart everything? Do they have enough money to really put together another pandemic response team and do a better job with it to really fund research on the flu and various viruses and to find out what's going on? I know there's talk about these things, about picking up these programs and really stepping up. There is absolutely, I mean, listen, $6 trillion already. Prevention is so much cheaper than emergencies. It's a fraction of the cost. Obviously, pandemic response team never should have been disbanded. It would cost pennies on the dollar to what is being spent right now, no doubt. It's crazy when you go back and listen to Bill Gates' TED Talk in 2015 talking about the possibility of a pandemic and wiping everybody out. And then five years later, you see it happen, and you're like, nobody listened. Nobody listened.

But how crazy is it that people are – now Bill Gates is the bad guy. I've got people I went to high school – I have people I went to high school with hosting insane conspiracies about bill gates is the problem now to a lot of people how did that happen let's help me there help me there with that one because that one's weird i was watching this video from newport beach or huntington beach where all these people are protesting free california they're running around and this guy's got a megaphone he's like bill gates is the devil. How did that happen? It's one of the weirdest memes. It's one of the weirdest cultural memes that this thing has happened, that Bill Gates, this philanthropic billionaire,

who's literally made toilets in Africa and spent millions of dollars to try to get people education and millions of dollars on all sorts of great social good all of a sudden he's a bad guy it's inconceivable and the number of people i've just muted or unfriended that i personally know i mean it's like it's not just random people on twitter but it's people i went to high school with who say he wants to profit from the vaccine or he wants to use a vaccine to control the population or i mean it's like you know this nanotech yeah it's weaponized disinformation is what i call it well it's it's

very prevalent it's really interesting too because like what here's the problem there is profit in vaccines that's a problem so like when look, when someone looks for a conspiracy and they say something like Bill Gates, he just wants a profit on the vaccine. You can't say no one ever profits on vaccines. So that's a stupid idea. You go, well, how much is a vaccine worth and how much profit is there in vaccines? Then you look into it and you go, whoa, there's a lot of profit in vaccines. Shit. I wish there was none. I wish i wish you know they're making them just for the greater good of mankind and it's not like people are buying private jets and ferraris off that money but look everything where people do it and do it well seems to require incentive you know

and it's funny to me critique of the system right that's a critique of us because it's not just vaccines but it's funny to me that people don't have a problem with that with capitalism but the same people that would vote right and don't have a problem with capitalism, maybe be anti-regulation, are angry that people make money off of vaccines. But they're also angry because we're cynical and we wonder, okay, if they're making money off vaccines, would it be possible for them to incentivize doctors to vaccinate people more? Or if they got more people involved, they would make more money.

Like that is a problem in just human nature. When you can make more money. Okay, give me the reality. The not vaccinating and having way more people to treat for stuff is way more profitable. That's a good point. And it's also devastating to civilization, right? I mean, if they never came up with a fucking polio vaccine, how many people would be just a mess because of that and die because of that? Smallpox. You've seen those

images of, I mean, I probably never saw them until the internet or the images of what people look like when they were devastated by smallpox. It's horrifying. Vaccines are important. My cynical nature comes up whenever there's anything where people can make a lot of money. It's not just vaccines. It's like anything, whether it's fracking. When I hear people talk about how safe fracking is, and then I remember Gasland, the documentary where they're lighting water on fire. I'm like, tap water's not supposed to be flammable. Something's going on here, man.

I mean, this place is in Pennsylvania where people can't live. They have to get out of their fucking house. They can't live. They can't wash themselves with the water. They can't drink it. They can't. They're worried about breathing in the fumes near their houses. I mean, it's devastating. It's a tragedy. It's a tragedy. And that's a clear area where profit and not enough regulation are the recipe for disaster. And oddly enough, an area where the right wing tends to poo-poo it. Oh, come on. Fracking has made this country an oil stronghold. You know, there's that argument, which I guess it kind of has, right? I mean, that's, again, a problem with humans.

We're so – life is so complicated. Being a human is so fucking complicated. There's so much to us. How long do you think this will go? I don't know. I'm worried about a second wave. The second wave concerns me. And I'm worried that that could lead to shutdowns that people are not going to be able to make it through.

That made it through this one. Or able to make it through that made it through this one, or they barely made it through this one with their business. And then the second lockdown comes and, you know, and they lose everything. I'm also worried that people are going to lose their health and their life. I mean, I'm worried about both things. I'm worried about the second wave coming and people being ignorant to the possibility of it hitting and then it does hit and it's devastating both those things are terrible you know but again my uh my thinking is if we're going to quarantine people we really should make more of an effort to quarantine people who are sick and old that seems to me to be a better way of handling it from here forward

than quarantining all of us. I don't think that's tenable. I think maybe we could pull that off for a month or so. But I think after a while, the fucking wheels fall off. And I feel like that's where we are right now. So I think, as I said before, much more emphasis on health and your immune system and taking care of your body and being smart. Those things are underappreciated and critical. But I don't know how long it's going to last. I think the best scenario is a widespread

vaccine by March, April 21, right? I mean, it seems like... But would you jump right in with one of those mRNA vaccines? Well, by the time, unless I go out and buy one, by the time I get it, millions of people will have had it already. It's going to be healthcare workers first and then the most vulnerable. By the time there's one available for me, unless I just figure out who I can buy it from, millions of people will have had it already. At this point in the movie, the screen would go black and we'd open to David Pakman covered in dirt, carrying a club filled with spikes, running down the street with his friend trying to avoid the zombies. Because by the time it got to you, they had already turned to zombies and you couldn't afford it. And lucky you, now there's millions of zombies running through the streets of Boston trying to eat people.

We don't have to go into this, but I am doing some prepping now and I have no clue what I'm doing. What are you doing? I looked up, you know the 80, 20 idea, right? So like, I just tried to figure out what's the, what's the stuff that will cover 80% of the scenario. So it's like three days of water. I don't need a month of water, some additional first aid supplies. But then I got into really weird stuff where I got convinced that I need a flat tire repair kit. And so I bought this thing and then I looked at it and I was like, wait a second,

I still need to pump up the wheel at the tire after I use this thing. And then I realized like, I've got AAA and a flat. Why did I buy a flat or a spare? Why did I buy a flat tire repair kit? So like some of the stuff I bought made no sense at all. That's actually wrong. That makes plenty of sense. First of all, you can get

one that plugs in your cigarette lighter. It's an air compressor. Very easy. I got one of those. It's awesome. You're covered there. Second of all, AAA, if a lot of shit goes down, they're going to be busy, man, and they might not be answering their phone, and you might be stuck in the middle of nowhere. No. A tire repair kit is good. Um, knowing how to, uh, feed yourself. That's good. Like

having rice and beans, things that are easy to store and that lasts forever. That's really good. All that stuff's very important, but I got real super preppery, uh, at the beginning of this, I was real worried the first couple of weeks I was scared out of my fucking mind. I was like, this could just be, you know, 10% of us are dead. People just dropping dead in the street left and right. I was really worried about it. Because, you know, you hear the stories, the salacious, crazy, horrible stories are the ones that get the most press, whether it's any, whatever subject the subject is. And of course, when it comes to a pandemic, the ones that people want to hear about is there's a 28 year old guy you know he was a fitness instructor now

he's in a coma like holy shit those ones that really scare the fuck out of you though those were what you kept hearing so you know i'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking is my breath feel short and you know and i if and then also the anxiety kind of was keeping me from sleeping well so then i was look i have a whoop strap that measures my sleep and I check the app and I would look at my recovery and it was like 13%. I was like, what the fuck? It's because I'm freaking out because I'm up all night worrying about whether or not society is going to fall apart and everyone's going to die. So it took a while for me to relax. I guess like probably a couple weeks before I was getting like real consistent sleep and, and, and feeling much better. Um, but I'm still very, very worried about what,

what it's going to be like once things restart. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree with you. I, I, I thought four different times I had Corona virus first of all. So that, that whole thing went on, but there's some stuff that is going to take a while to get back to just like human interaction type things right i mean i don't think we there's not going to be a day where we say we're back to hugging and handshaking and and sharing drinks and and that type of stuff like some of the stuff will persevere for a long time maybe yeah maybe i don't know when i was at the ufc i was shaking a lot of people's hands and hugging people but they were all tested everyone was tested so everyone had to walk around with

a bracelet on that showed that they had been tested and tested that week and so everyone was cleared right before we got there so i was pretty sure everyone was fine it just seemed so normal all the friends that i've been working with for years so i was shaking their hands and hugging them and and some people were critical of that. They were like, you got to stay away and social distance and all this. And I was like, when everyone's clear,

like if it's, if we're, we're all tested and everyone's testing negative, like why can't we act like normal again? Is it magically going to sneak into the building? Somebody could be incubating it right where, you know, imagine if three of those people tested negative because they're,

they're incubating it. They got it on the flight there or something like that. I don't know. Again, the horror movie. I think they, they didn't get on the flight there because everyone was tested once they arrived. Um, but either way. Yeah. I know what you're saying. But I mean like you could, it could be in your system from the flight. You get a test two hours later, but the test is negative. But if you just wait 24 more hours, then that test would be positive. All right, Dr. Packman, you got me. I don't know. I don't know either, man. But I hope we go back to normal. I think people need touch and we need hugs. And it weirds me out already when I see how scared people are of each other, walking down the same sidewalk

and people cross the street so they don't go near you. It gives you a weird feeling. It's not optimal. Dystopian. Yeah. Listen, David, we just did three hours, if you can believe it or not. Incredible. I appreciate you, man. You're a very intelligent guy. I really enjoy your show. I like watching your clips. I love your well thought out perspective. And I think you're very valuable, especially in this crazy time we're living in I so appreciate it three hours went by in an instant and really just really appreciate talking to you again having uh having me back next time let's do it in person I'm gonna hug you we're gonna hug each other we're gonna do we're gonna get over our fears I hope so I think we will all right brother will you take care of yourself man thank you again take care bye bye bye everybody Will you take care of yourself, man? Thank you again. You too. Take care. Bye-bye. See you. Bye, everybody. Bye.