The Joe Rogan Experience - #1573 - Matthew Yglesias

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Journalist Matthew Yglesias writes about politics and economic policy at Vox.com, a site he co-founded, and also co-hosts The Weeds: a regular podcast devoted to current events. Yglesias is also the author of two books, the most recent of which is One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day since we don't we don't have we don't record an intro for spotify anymore so tell me who you are and what you do i'm matthew glacius i'm the host of the weeds podcast the vox media podcast network i'm'm the host of the Weeds podcast, the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm also the author of the Slow Boring newsletter and a book, One Billion Americans. And that's what I want to talk to you about. Pull the sucker up so it's like one fist away from your face. All right. Perfect. One billion Americans. It's a lot. So explain, if you could, give us the cliff notes of what the concept of one billion Americans is.

Okay. So the concept is that there should be a billion Americans. I like to keep it simple. So here's the idea, right? So we've got China. It's growing out there. There's a lot of concern, you know, internationally about America's role in the world. We've also got a lot of polarization in our politics, a lot of sort of

gridlock, deadlock, kind of stagnation and infighting. And I'm a politics guy, I live in DC, cover Congress. I wanted to write a book that kind of elevates beyond that, thinks about America's role in the world and says, the way we are going to meet this challenge of rising international competition is the way we became such a great power historically. And that's by growing our population with more openness to immigrants, doing more to support parents and young families, and then everything that comes downstream from that, you know, where are people going to live, how are we going to get around, how are we going to solve those problems? How much pushback have you gotten from this idea? Because it seems like a lot of people think that overpopulation is a giant problem.

And then when you say we should triple plus the amount of people in the United States we want to compete with the rest of the world, I would imagine a lot of people are like, what are you smoking, Matthew Euclidius? No, I mean, the book's really good. So everyone who reads it is just like, oh, you convinced me. At least you're humble. There's no pushback at all. No, yes, there is concern about overpopulation. That's something that, you know, so there's people from the right. They don't like immigrants.

They don't like immigration. Why is that? They see it through that lens. Let's start with that. Why? Because this is a country of immigrants. It's a very strange thing to have a country that is entirely comprised of people who came from somewhere else other than native americans right entirely comprised and yet

there's a giant population that doesn't like immigrants yeah i mean look some of it's a question of taste you know people like different places people like different kinds of things i think the best parts of america are places that have a lot of people from different places. To me, whether that's Austin, where we are, New York, where I'm from, it's cool. That's America at its best. Some people don't like it. There's also the legality question, though. Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, we built up a substantial group of people who were living here illegally.

I'm for, you know what? It started in the 80s? Is that when it really started? Yeah, I mean, that's when it really took off. Was it because the regulations were made more stringent? Well, so what happened was in 1996, they changed the law. IRERA is the acronym for it. And they made it a lot harder for people who had come here without papers to, quote unquote, get legal. So even if you put roots down, even if you were married to an American citizen, there was no way to obtain legal status. They also made it harder to cross

the border. So it used to be people would come over, they'd pick vegetables in California for a season, and then they'd just go back, right? They'd go back to Mexico, take their money with them, get a nice house. They made it harder to cross the border so people would stay. And people who stayed had no way to get a legal status here. So unauthorized population, it built up, it built up, it built up. There's a movement on one side to say, well, we should create a path to citizenship for those people. Most of them, they're living here peacefully. They're working hard. They're not doing anything. That's where I stand. But there's people who say, look, you know, they broke the rules.

We've got to be harsh. So we've been arguing about that unauthorized immigration so viciously. And I think we've lost sight of the fact that, you know, we can just create legal pathways for people to come. You know, some people will say, well, my grandparents, my parents, whoever, they came the right way. They did it when it was legal. But it was easy then. Exactly. And it's totally true.

So my great-grandparents, they came to this country at a time when there was no restriction on people. Yeah, my grandparents as well. They just came over from Italy. Yeah. It was not that hard. So good for them, right? And so, like, yes, like, we should have a legal process for people to come. We can have rules, you know, try to make sure you're like,

say, you should be working age, right? You should come here, get a job, pay taxes. You can't just like come across and collect Social Security. Fair enough. But obviously, you're okay with children coming across as well. Yeah. Like, whether they're adopted once they get here, or whether they come here with their parents, or I mean, we should make it possible, right? Yes, we should make it possible. That? Yes, we should make it possible. That's a great way of putting it. And that's how you could not have people breaking the rules. That's to me.

But, you know, a lot of people on the right don't see it that way. Now, on the left, there's some folks, you know, people are concerned about the environment. Yeah. I mean, I'm concerned, too. I don't want to breathe polluted air. I don't want, like, cities underwater. But there's a strain of sort of eco-apocalyptic thinking, you know, where people say, oh, like we can't handle it. Like only degrowth is going to

save us. And I just don't think that's right. You know, I am bullish on technology, right? We've got more and more clean energy sources. We've got better and better electric cars. There's more stuff we can do with electrification. We need to take those steps, but we can have a prosperous, sustainable society that has plenty of people in it, that has high living standards, things like that. So we don't need to worry about that. A lot of Americans also just overestimate how many people are here. So a billion sounds like a lot. It's about triple our current population. But that would give us the population density of France.

It would give us about half the density of Germany, way less than half the density of the United Kingdom. And you know, if you've ever been to the UK, it's like, it's a nice country. They got London, big city. They got countryside. They got rolling hills. They got sheep. You go up to Scotland, like there's fucking nobody there. So like we could have all kinds of places with a billion Americans, countryside, suburbs, cities, all kinds of stuff. What's the benefit of having all those people though?

So two benefits, right? So one, I think internationally, you know, the United States has been like the number one country for 100 years, give or take, right? We're the biggest dog out there. You know, everybody knows better than to mess with us. And we're losing that status. You know, we're losing that status economically to China. They're doing more stuff like, you know, telling NBA coaches like what they can tweet, what they can't tweet. They're censoring Hollywood movies because they've got the number one market out there.

You can get into scarier stuff eventually, you know, South China Sea, naval battles. I'm not like a war guy, but you don't want that. I think we want to stay number one. And growth has been important to that historically, right? Like why is the United States a big deal country and Canada is like, you know, like our cute little brother? And it's because a lot of people live here. You know, Canada's nice, but there's no people, no real strength there.

Second, I think it'll make us a more prosperous country. What we do as modern day Americans is we do stuff for each other, right? Whether that's we make show, we write books, we teach in schools, we run restaurants, we're doing services to each other. And you get more prosperity when you have more people and more ability to sort of have those interactions. When you're talking about China and the NBA and Hollywood movies, a lot of people think of those things, those interactions that hollywood has that and the nba has with china as being insidious they don't think it's a good thing at all that

china has that kind of an influence and they also think it's embarrassing like a lot of people think that it's embarrassing for the nba to when the negative tweets uh when they're in support of hong kong and then uh all of a sudden there was some pushback and the NBA was removed from viewership and China. And there was a lot of sponsorships being pulled and it became a giant issue. And then all of a sudden you saw the NBA kind of backtrack and kind of kowtow. And a lot of people found that to be pretty disgusting. We don't want the United States to ever be a country that's doing that to China. Right. If China has a lot of people found that to be pretty disgusting. We don't want the United States to ever be a country

that's doing that to China, right? If China has a bunch of, I don't know what they're really into over there, ping pong players, what's their primary sport? I don't know. They have a lot of basketball over there. Basketball, they like basketball.

So imagine if Chinese basketball becomes super popular in the United States and then the Chinese basketball players in the United States start talking shit about how Apple uses slave labor. And we go, hey, hey, watch your fucking mouth, bro. We won't pay for your Chinese basketball anymore. And then all of a sudden China backs off.

We would think of that as being pretty gross by the United States of ignoring some human rights violations or trying to whitewash them and trying to economically attack another country so like the saying that it's a positive that china has all these people and using as an example the fact they strong arm hollywood and they strong arm the nba a lot of people think that's moving in the wrong direction me included like i don't want well no i i don't think it's positive i'm saying we need to be in a position to level the playing field but is that

leveling the playing field or will we just look we're corporations have a giant problem with infinite growth right yep this is a thing that seems completely totally preposterous but it's the norm and the standard in the business world. You want your growth to increase every year, no matter what, and God knows where that goes. I'm not a mathematician or an economist, but if you extrapolate and keep going with that, it leads to preposterous outcomes, right? That's what people would be worried about tenfold

if there's a billion people here. They'd be like, oh my God, we'd be even more ruthless and more cutthroat and maybe more competitive with the rest of the world but in what way well so here let's talk about the china thing right so the nba is under china's thumb because they need access to that market do hollywood well they think they do aren't they rich as fuck so we could say right maybe we need to have a rule that says like well you know you you can't let the chinese censor your shit right yeah but this the relative size of the markets is going to matter right so we're we're on spotify here right so that's a swedish swedish company i think um so you know they make great meatballs i hear

absolutely it's a lovely country right but so But so Sweden's a little country, right? All their companies, you know, you're talking Volvo, Scania, Spotify. They're dependent on a global marketplace. They need access. If China is the biggest market in the world, ultimately, they're going to find themselves playing by China's rules. If America stays the biggest market in the world, then we can play by our rules. And not that we should use the way China does, right? We shouldn't say like,

no, nobody can say bad stuff about America. America, we've got a great tradition of free speech here. Despite some tensions, it's a world of difference from China. And we carry so many other countries, smaller countries from Europe, Canada, Australia, on our backs in that regard as creating a sort of cornerstone of openness as a leading market in the world. That's how it's been for so long that people don't even think about it. But if we go into a world where China is the number one economy, where that's the number one market, where that's what every company cares most about China's rules, then we're going to be in trouble. We're going to be in trouble here. The Swedes are

going to be in trouble. And I don't think that's a world we should look forward to. Why do you think that increasing the population threefold is the way or by three times? Is that the only way that we can be competitive in the world? Is that the only way? Or what? the only way that we can be competitive in the world? Is that the only way? When you came to that conclusion by ramping it up to a billion people, what led you to that? Did you know you're being provocative?

Was that part of what you were doing? Like, this is going to fucking piss people off a little bit. I like to provoke. I think you may be familiar with that as an approach. Yeah, I mean, look, I wanted to grab people's attention. You know, I didn't want to be boring. I don't like being boring. It's a nice round number, obviously. Also, science delivered it. Science delivered it? What science? When I realized that a billion is triple, it's also, it sets, if the U.S. population were to grow as fast as Canada's is growing for the next 80 years, then we hit a billion at the end of the century.

That's the official math. That's really? Yeah. The reality is. Canada's growing that quickly? They're fast. Wow. It's a lot of people coming in.

How do we do that? Be so polite. How would be as nice as them? Yeah, I don't know. Isn't that, is that a goal we should work towards? Being as nice as Canadians? Yeah, I don't know. So, you know is that a goal we should work towards? Being as nice as Canadians? Yeah, I don't know. So, you know, I'm from, I'm from New York.

We're a little brusque there. But you're nice. Kind of. You seem like a nice guy so far. Well, because we're here in the South now. Oh. So we've got to be nice. Tighten it up.

We've got to ask, we've got to ask Southerners how to be more polite like Canadians. Southerners how to be more polite Like Canadians Well one of the things that I think And one of the things that I've said About Austin in particular Is that I love the fact that there's friendly people And I think one of the reasons why they're friendly Is there's not that many of them

They value people more I think people get devalued when you get high population densities I'm not saying that It has to be like Los Angeles In order to reach 3 billion or a billion people in this country rather I don't think it does right It's not like you're trying to turn the whole country into Los Angeles But there's a problem with Los Angeles

And I think one of the problems with Los Angeles is There's an insane amount of people Jammed into one area And when you're on the highway Like if you drive and you have to go to Orange County And you're on the 405 You just want Godzilla to come out of the ocean and just start eating cars. You're like, this is fucking ridiculous.

There's so many people and it never ends. It's like every time you want to go, if you want to go to Orange County, say if you want to go to, I want to go to Disneyland or something like that and take your family, you got to leave hours earlier, hours earlier than you think you need to. You want to be there by 5 p.m.? Oh Christ. You got to leave at like 2. You got to leave maybe at 1.30 if you want to be there by 5 p.m.? Oh, Christ. You've got to leave at like 2. You've got to leave maybe at 1.30 if you want to be safe.

Leave at 1.30, and you'll be stuck in fucking insane traffic and never-ending road construction, and it never ends. And a lot of people get real testy when there's that many people. And this has been recreated in rat population density studies. I'm sure you've probably gotten into some of this when you started looking at population. Well, the rats don't really drive, though. They don't. But it does when they have these rat population density studies, it does mimic

what happens in big cities in terms of violence, in terms of mental illness. Like when you have a certain amount of rats in a large containment. You know about all this, right? Yeah, I got it. Rats, yeah. Yeah, but have you ever... I have, yeah, yeah. Read, read, read, read it, rather, any of this stuff?

Yeah. So, okay, so let's distinguish a couple things, right? Okay. So, I'm not so sure about the friendliness, right? Because you've been to, like, I don't want to cast aspersions, but you've been to, like, New Hampshire. Yes. Like, small towns up there.

People there, they're kind of assholes. We kind of keep to ourselves up here. Yeah, so people are friendly here. But, you know, there's some small town weirdos up in New England. I have a theory about that as well. Los Angeles, now the traffic right on. You know, every time I go to Southern California, I think, oh, man, this weather's nice. People here must be happy all the time.

And then I try to meet up with somebody and I get on the road. It's a fucking nightmare. It's a fucking nightmare. It's a fucking nightmare. So, you know, that's going to make people mad. Now, the rats, right? So what they're studying there, I think, is crowding, you know, which is not exactly the same as density. Because we, you know, like we build buildings, right? So people in New York have small houses by American standards, but big houses by European standards or Japanese standards, right?

We're still taking up space because we're sort of building structures. So I think we have to look at what we're doing with our housing laws, with our land use laws. One of the reasons Texas has been such a center of growth, so many people are coming here, is that the Texas legal framework actually lets you come here, right? You want to throw up some houses in the Austin area, Houston, Dallas, you can do it. So you can get affordable space, and more and more people are coming in. And it's an asset for the state, right? People like you, all kinds of folks come in here. The governor brags about it all the time. I think Hewlett Packard is coming

to Houston or something. And it's really good. It's a big kind of success story. And in California, they got terrible, terrible problem where a lot of people want to go there because it's nice. California is nice, right? But they can't find a place to live. They can't get space and they can't sort out their transportation infrastructure. Los Angeles poured all this money into building out the LA Metro, but then they didn't align their zoning, you know, so people don't live near the stations. So nobody rides the thing. Well, it's also there's a culture of driving your own vehicle that's been firmly established in Los Angeles. And it's very difficult to get people to deviate from their habits.

But also, I mean, you can't take a train if it doesn't go where you're going. Right. If you don't live by it. Right. So, you know, my cousin, she was living, she was taking the Metro to work for a while. And, you know, good for her. But it was like very unusual out there. I live in D.C. now.

A lot of people ride the Metro there. Right. And, you know, it's people from all over. People are used to cars. But when you have a well-designed system where people live near the stations, where the jobs are near, where they come together, you know, people do it. It's convenient. You can, you know, read a book, something like that.

Well, we don't want to encourage people to read on their commutes. Stick to the podcast. Well, listen, if you can, but whatever you want, I mean, you can make a great argument for it being far more relaxing. All you do is just sit down you don't have to think about traffic you zone out you zone out you can read a book like you said you could read the paper and want to kill yourself you could watch on your phone you know whatever it is he got there's plenty of things you can do and it's it can be really i have friends that uh live in westchester and they uh

they they take take that metro north down yeah and it's great i used to do it when i lived in new rochelle did it all the time yeah yeah i used to live in new rochelle well there you go yeah nice place so you know so i i think that there's ways to create those kind of like you know low-key virtues people have nice size houses people have nice commutes while also having growth and having some sustainability. But the other thing is that like we as a country need to get along with each other. Yes. More than we have been doing lately.

For sure. And I do think that focusing on what brings us together versus some of the other governments out there, and on the possibilities of growth, like actually helps do that. Like, I'm a liberal person, a left of center person. But I get pushback from people, you know, quote, unquote, on my side, just about the idea of patriotism in the book, the idea of national greatness, the idea that America should want to be number one. But I think that's something that's important to a lot of people, moderate people, conservative people. I don't think it's a bad thing. It's not. And I don't think it has to be xenophobic either. Well, and I think it's part of inclusiveness, right? Like what holds this country together, people with different religions, people, different ethnic backgrounds, people with different ideas is loyalty to, you know, certain concepts, right?

Like high level political concepts. And it's not bad to be a little corny and, you know, wave the flag a little bit if that's how like we can all be Americans together. Right. And to me, that's that's important, you know. And I was surprised doing some of the virtual touring on this at how much conservative people were like, wow, I can't believe you wrote this book. And how much some people on the left were just skeptical of not like the specific ideas, but the general concept of like wanting america to be awesome of a positive feeling about nationalism yeah yeah nationalism when you say even the word something's happened over the last decade where you say the word nationalism and somehow it gets

even like it gets equated at least peripherally or in the neighborhood of white nationalism it's like it's one of those weird words you know like if you say uh you know i'm a texas chauvinist like what do you mean do you hate women like no no no i just think texas is the best right like people get mad at you because it's too close to male chauvinist like male chauvinist is a common phrase if you say you're a patriot people go oh great you're stockpiling food and guns and you're ready to take over and you only like white people right that's no and it should be the opposite right that if you think about you know the history of what white nationalism in america right it It's an anti-American movement.

This is the Abraham Lincoln is an American nationalist, right? And, you know, in civil rights, Martin Luther King is appealing to the values of the Declaration of Independence. This is a country, e pluribus unum. Obviously, obviously, America, like bad things have happened.

We have not lived up to those ideals. But those are the ideals of America. What it is to be an American nationalist is to believe in that kind of human equality. And not abandon universal rights. Right. And it's antithetical to the sort of racist and exclusionary visions that people have. But it's important to hold to that, right? To that notion of an inclusive nation that has a national identity, I think rather than sort of surrender the idea to the most right wing people.

Yeah. I think the idea of America should be like the greatest house party ever. Like everybody can come over. That's, that's what it should be. White nationalism is just fucking stupid. I mean, you're just fools. Like the idea that only melanin, that's what counts, and only European heritage, that's what counts.

Everything else, it's nonsense. It's one of the dumbest ideas ever. And then it's also, it's a scared person's version of america and the problem with the concept of nationalism being equated to white nationalism like you you're giving that word up right for to cowards like white nationalists you're a coward you're afraid of what are you afraid of you're afraid of brown people black people yellow people you only like white people i only like people who look similar to me that's one of the dumbest ideas of all time and the fact that that idea is still it's so prevalent that you have to argue against it that it's it's one of those things like you know it's really until charlottesville happened

when you see those guys walking with their tiki torches going they will not replace us like i was like that's never going to happen again. If that hadn't happened, I would have said, there's no way after the civil rights movement, after all we've been through, particularly today with the internet and the way people can exchange ideas, there's no fucking chance you're going to have a bunch of assholes that only think that America is supposed to be about white people. And they're walking down the street with Home Depot torches. It's like one of the dumbest things I've ever seen in my life well you know the whole the whole replace us thing right like it's so insecure you know because you go to like you go to France exactly and they're paranoid that our like McDonald's and our fucking movies are going to take over and like replace their culture. But nobody is replacing us. American culture is awesome.

It dominates everywhere. But they will not replace us. Well, they will if you suck. Are you saying you should be allowed to suck and be white? We're going to replace those guys. That's really the irony, right? If you think like that, bitch, you're going to get replaced. But people who come here, right?

People come from Latin America. People come from Africa. Historically, people come from Europe. Now more and more people come from Asia. They don't replace anybody when they come in, right? It's an additive thing. You know, there's like cool stuff. I went to, in the suburbs of D.C., there's a lot of Vietnamese people, a lot of Vietnamese restaurants out there.

The last time I went out to get a banh mi place, there was a Cajun, Viet Cajun crawfish broil thing, comes from houston because vietnamese people came there louisiana people came to houston they got this fusion cuisine now they exported it to other vietnamese enclaves around america god damn it you made me hungry that sounds fucking great someday someone's going to open one of those places in ho chi minh city you know like it's gonna it's gonna come back out like there's i mean i went to uh shanghai and i met somebody there whose idea was they were starting a business that had fortune cookies uh because that's that shit's american right you know but it's cool so fortune cookies came from america they added it to american chinese food yeah no okay that

makes sense it's a uh friend of mine, Jenny Eight Lee, she wrote a book called Fortune Cookie Chronicles. You want to talk about... It's about Chinese food. It's really the only... I wish I could write a book about Chinese food. But it's a fascinating subject. Fortune cookies, 100% American.

It seems like an American thing. But you want to talk about an industry that clearly has had no growth. The fortune cookie industry is stagnated. The English is so bad. Still, the fortunes aren't even fortunes. Like my fucking 10-year-old read a fortune cookie the other day. She goes, how is this a fortune?

Well, if you made the English good, people would realize it's not Chinese. You got to fake it. So it's on purpose? I don't know. Maybe you're right. I'm just bullshitting. You might. No.

I think I agree with you. You might have a point. That might't know. Maybe you're right. I'm just bullshit. You might. No, I think I agree with you. You might have a point. That might really be why they made it bad. I think it's why. I mean, you could hire somebody to write a fortune in English. That's not hard. Yeah, I'll do it. But it's also they're not fucking fortunes, man.

Like a lot of times they're like, you know, a stitch in time saves nine. What the fuck? I got robbed. Well, they got lottery numbers, though. You play those lotto numbers, and you get rich. That's my tip to you out there. God, it's so dumb. And it's also not a delicious cookie.

I'm going to say it. If fortune cookies were for sale, and they didn't have a fortune inside of them, they would never survive. Right? That's true. It's like Chick-fil-A is everywhere. You know what you don't see turkey filet turkey can't survive without thanksgiving if it wasn't for thanksgiving the turkey industry would

be fucked they rely on one day a year well but also sandwiches people get like a turkey sandwich at the deli boring people yeah boring people that are afraid of like salami you ever been so i went years ago i went to uh i was in southern Mexico, in Oaxaca, and I went to a restaurant there, and there was just turkey on the menu. Just turkey? No, no, no. I mean, it's not only turkey,

but there was turkey dish on the menu, right? And it threw me for a fucking loop, because who eats turkey outside of Thanksgiving, right? But apparently, in Mexico and Central America, it's like a thing. That's where turkeys are from. It's a turkey with a mole poblano. Oh, okay.

It's pretty good. That does sound good. But it goes to show it's a kind of flavorless meat. Right, but they use the strong Mexican spices. Yeah, you get that big sauce on it. That's what makes it work. So sometime next year, maybe I'll get my mole Thanksgiving. Well, what I do is with leftovers, I take leftover Thanksgiving turkey,

and I'll just take a plate and dunk some habanero sauce all over the plate and then dip the pieces of turkey in that habanero sauce, and whoo! There you go. Now you've got a party. It's all happening. Yeah, but with mole sauce, that sounds good. Now I'm seeing the flavors come together. I made a turkey this year, and I brined it for the first time.

I've never brined a turkey. That's what the experts say. It was sensational. It was so good. Turkey's a thing, though, that's really best served right after you get it out of the oven. It's really best served while it's still really hot. But while it was hot, it was so juicy. It was the juiciest turkey I've ever...

I cooked it on a Traeger grill, which is like a pellet grill. I was going to say, my friend's got a smoker. It makes smoked turkeys. Those are good. They're juicy. They're fucking great.

It was so good. And then you get some turkey out of your oven. Yeah, it's kind of dry. It's a different kind of heat. And it's also... There's something about cooking with that indirect heat from the smoke. It's not like cooking over a regular grill,

because the smoke is really doing all the cooking for you. It's almost like they seal so good that you're not losing moisture, and you've got this amazing retention of heat, so the temperature stays at a good... But having the turkey brined first man that made such a big difference it was so juicy and delicious it made me think like okay so hey assholes if you just do this with all turkeys then people would be ordering turkey all over the place just brine it and they would say how great this turkey is just but if you if

you're a restaurant and you have turkey on the menu and you have turkey right next to like a t-bone steak people can like going to be like, hmm. He's going to make steak every time. Yeah, I'm not going with the turkey. I agree. I'm not a turkey guy. I don't know how we got on this. But chicken is delicious.

Chicken is like – here's a weird thing about chicken. It used to be expensive. There's one of the – I think it was – which president that was running for office and one of his promises was a chicken in every pot that was hoover right was gonna give us a chicken in every pot and then we got the depression yeah uh but yeah chicken was high end now i saw unfortunately my uh my knowledgeable friends say that the chickens are in horrifically cruel conditions many are that's how they got so cheap so that's true i don't know but you can buy free-range chickens. Yeah.

You just have to make sure that you're ethical in your pursuit of where your chickens are grown. Find the good ones. Yeah. But even then. Be a backyard chicken person. Being a backyard chicken person. Like the weirdos in Portland. Yeah.

I was a backyard chicken person. Oh, yeah. It turned into a coyote apocalypse. Those motherfuckers. They killed all my chickens slowly. It took a long time, but they eventually got them all. We also went through a fire, and the fire actually burned down our chicken coops, but the chickens got out while the fire was burning their chicken coop.

It created a hole, and they got out, and they were wandering around the yard. And so we saved them from that and then put them into a smaller chicken coop. But the area that we lived in, there was so much fire that i think the amount of animals was greatly reduced and um the coyotes they got very clever and they literally pulled the chicken wire off of the chicken coop and created a small hole big enough for them to get inside and then it was a slaughter fest just why i stay in big cities i'm afraid of the coyotes oh that's the problem is coyotes are everywhere now they're in every city in the country wait really yeah coyotes are a fascinating animal

if you want to really get into what happens when uh animals get pressured and like different methods of adaptation there's a great book by dan Flores called Coyote America. And it's all about the coyote and how the reason why they one of the reasons why they spread across the country they were persecuted first by wolves. Like when wolves would encounter coyotes they would kill the coyotes. The wolves are bullying them?

They killed them because they were competing for food. So the coyotes learned how to spread their range. And they also developed this method of roll call like wolves do it as well they howl and they find out where everybody is when coyotes do it when the female coyotes recognize that coyotes are missing all of a sudden her egg production ramps up and she gives birth to more pups. So when more coyotes are missing, they don't just come into estrus. They actually produce more puppies.

And so then they expand their range. So they were originally persecuted in the West. That's where they really existed, in the Southwest and the West. Now they're in New York City. Shit. They're everywhere. That's going to be the cheap one.

One billion coyotes. Dude, there's a fat one living on my block he is fucking fat my friend showed me a picture of it i was like oh my god look at the size of this coyote he's like a well-fed dog there's so many deer out here yeah i guess they're just eating fawns and you know and whatever else they can find because there's a lot of wildlife in texas but yeah coyotes are uh they coyotes are literally in every city. San Francisco has coyotes everywhere. Now I'm scared.

Houston, coyotes. Now I'm scared. Scared to leave the house. Don't be scared. Scared of anything. Don't be scared. Scared to come on here, I think. Will you?

I'm going to get canceled. You think so? Yeah, again. Are you really worried about that? Well, people are mad about you. Me too. I don't know. People are mad. Yeah, people are mad about you me too i don't know people are mad

yeah people are mad they're mad about everything they're not necessarily mad about actual content they're mad about perceptions they're mad about what they want you to be versus what you actually are sometimes you know and then they're also you're dealing with it's not a large number of people that are mad it's a small number of very aggressive people that want to affect the way you do things and want to change the way you talk and change who you talk to and change what you do. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. You know, I was – so I've been promoting the book for a while, doing different shows, going on different things.

Mostly, you know, liberal people read me, I guess. Then I went on Ben Shap i'm ben shapiro show and you get canceled for that well i mean you know it's just like a lot of people yelling at me they're like why'd you go on that guy's show and said well it's a big show yeah and you want to a lot of people listen to it you want to have a debate with this guy about some of these ideas i just like you want to introduce yourself yeah to as many people as you can like you don't get to be like i i want to sell books yeah i want people to listen to my to as many people as you can like you don't get to be like i want to sell books yeah i want people to listen to my podcast i want people to read my website you know

i want to i want to talk to different people i want to reach different audiences and that just seems to me 10 years ago everybody would think that was obvious yes right not that like everyone agrees with everybody but then of course but you want to go on the biggest shows you can get booked on. Most people today still think that's obvious. It's just a small percentage of people that have got into this idea of platforming and deplatforming and going on someone's platform and amplifying someone's broadcast. There's all these terms that people are using now that is really just it's separatism in a weird way it's ideological separatism and what we're doing is we're taking these echo chambers and putting walls up around them and you know enforcing it by yelling at people and being angry

at people for having like my friend tim dylan uh had a podcast recently with candace owen and uh he's like holy shit dude the blowback was like stunning so many people were angry with him talking to her and maybe some of it was angry that he didn't push back on some of the things that she said that they they believe are untrue or or biased or distorted or you know what have you but i think conversations with people that have fundamentally different values are important for us. It's interesting to watch how a person's thought process expands. Like, how do you think about things? Why do you think about this?

Well, and there's a fantasy that you can sort of make disagreement go away if you, you know, try to shut down certain cultural avenues. I mean, I think you saw that a lot in the election that just happened, and you continue to see it in politics, that it's frustrating to people that they can't just win everything and have all their ideas go through. And shut you up. Right. But, you know, in the electoral arena as well as in place else,

but it's just true that, like, this is a big country. There's a lot of people in it. People have some different ideas, different values. You don't need to agree with them. And of course, in an election like it's vote, you try to win. Right. You try to get more votes than the other guy. But conservatives aren't going to go away. Progressive people aren't going to go away. We're going to continue to exist as an ethnically diverse society. We're going to continue to exist as a society with some very traditionalistically minded people. And we have to find stuff that we can make headway on. And the only way to have that kind of headway is to be communicating, only way to have that kind of headway is to be communicating because you don't actually know what exactly you agree or disagree about until you kind of have the the dialogue right if you

go hunting around to say okay this thing that this person said is so outrageous that i gotta just write them off well okay you write them off but they're still just right over there. Right. Well, they're not, though, in some cases. And you can blind yourself. No, no, no. That's not what I mean. I mean, one of the reasons why people have this perception that it's a good idea to not go on someone's platform and not talk to people. Whoa, good

save. Good reflexes, buddy. Is because some people have been deplatformed. People like Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McGinnis and Alex Jones. And there's people that have been removed from these significant portals, whether it's YouTube or Twitter. And so people, they understand that that's effective. And now they want to expand that.

And once they learn how to do that, then they want to do it to others. I mean, I've seen people argue for people being deplatformed for just having dumb ideas. Like, you should deplatformform him I've literally seen that in podcasts and it's so frustrating it's like god that's not how to handle things like we're supposed to have debates supposed to have discussions and I think because we've accepted this idea of censorship and de-platforming as a viable alternative to listening to things that upset you. Just get rid of them. Shut them off. And also, that reinforces the echo chamber.

It's people with a very limited understanding of history in terms of what happens when you do that to people, and also a very limited understanding of just general human nature. The best way to get people to listen to your point of view is to express it eloquently and accurately. And in a way that resonates, you say something to the people that are listening that they might be on one side or another.

I mean, there's a lot of people that are kind of left and kind of right and something can come along and they go, and they like doing this. They're like, well, fuck this. I'm Trump now,

or fuck this. Biden's my man. Now Trump's got to go. And it going, well, fuck this, I'm Trump now. Or fuck this, Biden's my man now. Trump's got to go. And it could be one thing. There's a lot of people that don't have nuanced perspectives. They don't have an educated, long-term idea of what people are and how to communicate. And I watched a podcast, not a podcast, a debate yesterday

with William F. Buckley and Noam Chomsky. And it's from 1970 or something. I don't know when it's from. And it's an amazing conversation. It's amazing. Because you have two completely opposing viewpoints. You have William F. Buckley who's this kind of pompous right-wing guy. And you have Noam Chomsky who was young and vital Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky, who was young and vital, Noam Chomsky, and it was amazing watching Noam Chomsky shut down William F. Buckley's ideas and have him challenge the points where Buckley was wrong on. And it's a great fucking conversation. And there's a lot of people today that would not want that conversation

because Noam Chomsky would be Ben Shapiro or whoever, and you'd be like, oh my God, why is Noam Chomsky, or excuse me, William F. Buckley would be Ben Shapiro. Sure, yeah, why are you going on? And Noam Chomsky would be Ben Shapiro or whoever, and you'd be like, oh my God, why is Noam Chomsky, or excuse me, William F. Buckley would be Ben Shapiro. Sure, yeah, why are you going on? And Noam Chomsky would be on that show. People go, why are you doing that? You shouldn't do that.

You shouldn't give them a platform. You shouldn't go on their platform. But God damn it, that's how people learn that your perspective is better, or your perspective resonates more, or your perspective makes more sense. Well, and what I think really ideological people don't understand is that most people like that the technical term the political scientists call it is is there they're cross pressured right

so like you have some ideas that fit one way some ideas that fit another way you have some identities that go one way some that go another way right and so people change over time right and you have voters who voted for Barack Obama, right? And then they vote for Donald Trump four, eight years later. And then people who are really ideological, they say like, well, Trump, like he said all these outrageous racist things. So all these people who vote for them, they must be racist too. And you're like, well, okay. But like they voted for the black guy four years ago like how racist could they be they're like no no no it's racist racist and then four years later well

trump's actually gained some latino support right yeah so okay so they're white supremacists too but like no right and probably they don't agree with what trump said about mexican immigrants right i find it very unlikely that Mexican American Trump supporters agree that Mexico is sending murderers and rapists across the country. But there's a lot of issues in politics. Maybe they agree with Trump about guns. Maybe they agree with Trump about abortion. Maybe they agree with Trump about, I don't know what, right? There's just like a lot of shit happening, right? And so if you can convince people to care about what you're aligned with them on, you know, you win, right? And if you can come across as the kind of friendly coalition that's like, hey, you agree with some of our stuff?

Get on the bandwagon, right? That's good. You win like that. And you're not going to get anywhere by telling everyone about how much you don't want them right participating being like wow you know if you're if you're not with me on everything yeah like you're dead to me that's not like that's not how politics works it's not how persuasion works no and it's not how interesting media works you don't you don't learn anything from shows like that, books like that, things like that.

And it's frustrating to me. There's a tendency to embrace this polarization and to almost solidify it. Even AOC, after the election, wanted everybody to put together a list of people that were supporting Trump and that voted for Trump and donated to Trump. I'm like, Jesus Christ, are you really asking people to make lists?

You know where this goes? How is this possible that a congressman... I don't know what kind of list she wanted. She wanted a list of sycophants. I don't remember. That's what she said. She wanted a list of sycophants. Oh, of Trump sycophants.

So we can kick them out or something. Make sure they don't work. That's what a lot of it is. Make sure those people are polarized. These are the people that aren't on our side. These are the people that we have to shit on. And if you support them, you support all these negative things. You support homophobia, racism, xenophobia.

Go down the list. And then I don't want to support that. So you get bullied into a perspective. You know, I got mixed feelings because I cover politics. So it's good for me when people get more geared up about national politics. Right. Right. The more people care, like that's that's that's gravy for me.

But I do think it's like not healthy. Right. I mean, I want to go back to a time when people felt that the political arena was like for boring nerds. And, you know, so and you could talk about back when so it's like when you're into a ban and then the ban becomes big hipsters but not like that not that i want to be like a like a congress hipster no it's that like um the more people care about politics i mean it's good to be engaged it's good that people vote it's good what you're saying is you want people to actually understand what they're

arguing about, and the people that are going to actually understand what politics are all about are going to be really into it. But also to have limits, right? To just be able to say, all right, now I'm talking about my favorite band. Now I'm talking about my favorite basketball team. And I'm like, not

bringing politics into all of it. And I'm like, not bringing politics into all of it. That it's like, it's not, again, I say, it's like, it's good for me

for people to turn politics into an all-consuming hobby. But I don't think it's healthy for them or for like society. It's one of the greatest things. It's one of the last bastions we have

is that, you know, everybody in a given city usually roots for the football team, you know, black, white, Latino, young, old, religious, secular. So, you know, it's Democrats and Republicans who are in there. They're all rooting for the team. It's fine to me that athletes, you become famous, you want to use your platform, you want to do good. I mean, that's great, but it's good to see people care passionately about hating

the Dallas Cowboys rather than an ideological disagreement. I mean, I'm from D.C., so our team's rivals with the Cowboys. It's cool to see those kind of cross-cutting things exist in society, but we have fewer of them, right? It seems like if you buy a car, and that's going to be a political statement. And I know, so it's like, I drive a Prius, right?

So people see me coming, and it's like, they know who I'm voting for based on that, right? And it's not wrong, but i don't think it's good you know like it would be better to be just more random yeah no i see what you're saying yeah well the more ways that we could separate people the you know the more separating we're gonna have it's like it is true that if you look at a Prius I would like to see like a breakdown Like a pie chart How many Prius owners voted for Trump? It can't be a lot, right?

Right, it's like I wonder what the number is It's probably single digits I mean it can't be a lot If somebody rolled up in a Prius And got out and had a MAGA hat on Like my mind would be fucking blown. That sounds like something that a provocative comedian would do.

But it's weird, right? Like, is that healthy for society that we feel like we can infer so much about somebody? We're selling totally. It's like I wanted a reliable car that got good gas mileage. Yeah. And that fit in my, i've got this tiny ass garage so like most cars won't even fit in there but but my prius does so you know that's good good for me my friend greg has a prius i shit on him all the time for it but it's a good car

bill burr my buddy bill burr had a prius forever it's not they're not the worst cars in the world they're super reliable it's boring it's boring it's it. But it's transportation. If I was looking for something to take me to and from the city and I had to park in small spots and it's ideal. It's better than a smart car. Those things are ridiculous. That's too small.

That's too small. See, even Prius is shit on smart cars. That's the real question. How many smart car owners voted for Trump? It's fucking zero. There's nobody in America. It's fucking zero. They do.

I've seen those. I've seen them, smart cars. Yeah. I was in Germany one time. I was in this little van with some American journalist, German guy driving. And the alley's blocked because there's just a smart car. And it's not parked correctly. So it's stepping our way.

And the German guy's like, well, we're going to have to wait. And the Americans are like, we don't have to wait. He's like, no, no, no, you've got to wait. And this lady, you know, she was like our leader. She was like, no, the young guys, you guys get out of the van, pick the smart car up, and just move it to the side. And the German guy's like, no, it's not possible. It's not possible.

She's like, Matt, go. And so we go up. You know, it's a tiny fucking car. not possible. She's like, Matt, go. And so we go up. You know, it's tiny fucking cars. We just pick it up, move it a few feet over, or like a meter, I guess they would say over there, and go right by. They're like, this is astounding. He's saying it's not possible. And then she says to him, she's like, you know, this is why you guys lost the war. Oh, shit.

It was real ugly American stuff. That's so's so rude it was she's trying to be funny obviously but did he laugh we moved the car he did not germans are not um a bit stoic yeah well also a particular look they're sensitive on that subject and i guess rightly so they've outlawed scientology over there yeah they? I don't know anything about Scientology there's Thetans and Tom Cruise they're not into cults so if anything is

demonstrably a cult if they can look at something and go I see where you're going here that's out I'm pretty sure that's true Google that Germany has outlawed scientology um yeah i found a scientology channel the other day i didn't know it existed flipping through

the channels or maybe i knew and i forgot um a fucking direct tv has a scientology channel i saw this very unhealthy looking lady talking about like like what is possible because of being a scientologist like what is this late who is she talking to and like why is no one disagreeing with her i'm like what is this and then i look at the channel it's like scientology channel so it's all scientology programming i used to walk past a scientology church every day on my commute do they try to grab you and play and no but No, but there's a lot of illegal parking that they're doing there. They're just pulled up on the sidewalk,

and I wonder how they get away with it. I want to spin up all kinds of... Oh, remains legal. Uh-oh. Okay, there's been calls to ban. Oh, it's banned in Russia. We've got fake news. We've got to unplatform you.

Well, I always check my fake news. Court in Russia has banned Moscow's Church of Scientology, saying it does not comply with the federal laws on freedom of religion. According to Russia's TASS news agency, the country's justice ministry brought the case against the church, which is heard in Moscow. So Scientology says, why is Scientology banned in Germany? The German government does not recognize Scientology as a religion.

Rather, it views it as an abusive business masquerading as a religion and believes that it pursues political goals that conflict with the values enshrined in German constitution. This stance has been criticized by the U.S. government. But it says, why is Scientology banned in Germany? Yeah. So it is not banned in Germany, or it is? It's from the same Wikipedia article. It says it's legal and allowed to operate.

Okay. But it's not a religion. It's a religion, so they allow the people a certain amount of freedom of expression. You probably don't get the tax benefits, right? It's good. Do they have the same deal? Scientology is one of those things.

You ever have something that you kind of like never wanted to look into because you're afraid it's going to be bad? Yeah. So it's like I want to just keep liking Tom Cruise's movies. Oh, Tom Cruise is great. So I don't really want to know what's up with Scientology. I always hear bad things. He's crazy as fuck.

And all great actors are crazy as fuck. And that's just his crazy. His crazy is that he believes that if you see a car broke down the side of the road you've got to go over and help them because you're a scientologist and that's what you do like he's fucking super intense and dialed in and he wants to do sit-ups as soon as you're done talking with him like that's that guy like he's fucking he's gonna help me with my car he's like all my friends that have met him like dude the guy looks at you he remembers your name he's got like fucking laser beams shooting out of his eyeballs. Yeah.

What does it say? It's just part of the article. I'm talking about him. He's there. There you go. Okay. Yeah, he's crazy. But so is Daniel Day-Lewis, right? He's crazy in a different way.

I guess. Like, they're all Christian Bale. That guy's fucking crazy. You know, Russell Crowe. He throws cell phones at people that work behind the counter at a hotel if he doesn't like what they're saying there are a lot of crazy people are brilliant actors yeah it's just like he keeps his shit together with this weird thing religion weird religion and have you ever read going clear laurence wright's book oh my god it's amazing

yeah it's amazing the hbo documentary the series i think was more than one thing maybe it was i don't remember um but that's really good too but the book is fantastic going do you have to be crazy like that to be successful in the in the podcast game to get to the rogan level no i need to become crazier no well i just i just started early it's a dirty trick it's a dirty trick i'm an early adopter i just made it through you through. There's probably a lot of people that make better cotton swabs than Q-tips, right? But Q-tip has been the name forever, right? Sure. So I got in in 99 or 2009, rather.

So that's a long-ass time ago. 11 years of doing a podcast is a long fucking time. Absolutely. So that's the key. Ground floor. Yeah, and also just doing a lot of interviews sure yeah just give people a lot of shit shit to listen to i don't know i don't know what the fuck just kill him kill him with quantity i don't know what has made this popular i don't you should find out

someday i don't want to know i'll probably change it then right i mean i think you if you pay attention too much to criticism or praise you're you going to fall victim to it one way or another. No, I mean, that's true. I mean, it's not healthy to worry too much about what other people think. Too much. But you've got to worry a little. You should think a little because you don't want to piss people off. You don't want to be annoying.

And I think on both of those things sometimes. But it's also inevitable when you're just thinking out loud, right? Because you and I, like you could attest to this, we had very little conversation before we got here. Yeah, no, I did ask twice. I was like, what are we going to talk about? And everyone assured me. They're like, no, you just go in. You're just going to talk.

It works. It's real. It's true. Yeah, it really does work, though. That's what I want to hear. I want to hear a conversation between two people. I think interviews are interesting. I think debates are interesting.

But what I genuinely like to do is have conversations with people. I just like to talk to people. It's fun. It's interesting. I want to know why you think the way you think. And especially this subject, because I keep going on about how I think there's something about, you know, let's just go back to this rat population density thing. What they did was they took these rats, they put them in a large container, a large area,

and they only had a couple of rats, and the rats just behaved like rats. And then as they ramped up, it mirrored essentially all of the problems you see in big cities. They started getting more violence. They started getting mentally ill rats that would literally sit in a corner and rock themselves back and forth. Things that just didn't exist when there's small amounts of rats in a containment area. I think people react to the people that are around them in a very tangible way. And one of the things they used to demonstrate this is they've taken, there was a very good radio lab podcast that talked about this, where they took cameras, and they would put a camera on one end of the street and a camera on the other end of the street,

and they would time people walking from one end to the other. So they would track their footsteps. And then through that, when they have have a certain amount of data they could accurately determine how many people lived in the city just by how quickly someone moved from point a to point b and that so a big city is people walk faster they walk faster not only do they walk faster they talk faster so if you listen to someone form so if you listen to a certain amount of people form sentences you can get a very accurate number, like really close, to what the population density or what the population of that area is, which is really interesting. Yeah, so there's a reaction that we have to each other. Too many people makes people walk faster and talk faster, and some people love that.

And my friends that live in New York City that love it, one of the things they say is the city's got so much energy, so much energy. And I agree. You go there, you got so much energy, so much energy. And I agree. You go there, you're like, wow, so much energy. But that's, you're reacting to other biological entities, right? It's like, there's weird things that happen with people when they're around other people. Like women, when they're around other women, get coinciding menstrual cycles, right? We don't really totally understand that. We know it's like pheromones and they're reacting to each other.

I think there's strange things that are happening when people around people. I think it's one of the reasons why podcasts in person are far better than podcasts through Zoom. Like it's great to be able to talk to people that otherwise I couldn't talk to through that. But there's an impersonal sort of disconnected. There's a magic that's missing. Yeah, but so I'm more on that point, right? Like there's great energy in person. I think that the move to doing everything remotely

because of the pandemic, I think has really hurt sort of like morale in a lot of institutions, harder for people to get along, harder for people to relate to each other. I actually think when you look at innovation, right, like big, like, you know, inventions, new ideas, new developments, they tend to come out of urbanized areas, right, where people are bouncing off each other, you know, maybe like drinks after work,

maybe at a party somewhere. People who, you know, work broadly in the same field are just able to see each other and interact randomly. Right. And that kind of energy generates a lot of, you know, where our sort of growth comes from as a kind of a modern society. And there's nothing wrong with, you know, people living in small towns, people living in the countryside. There's a lot of great stuff out there. Obviously, also, we need food. Without farmers, we'd be kind of fucked as a society. But there's a reason why you see a trend toward urbanization over thousands and thousands of years.

People trying to find more ways to have more interactions with each other. Because I think we're not rats, ultimately. You put those rats in the crowded thing, and they don't invent shit. They're still rats. Right, but you understand that the issue is the negative aspects of overpopulation are represented in rat population events. Right. I mean, look, there's definitely more violence in big cities. You see that really clearly.

On the other hand, you do see better health outcomes in the contemporary United States in metro areas than you do in rural ones. I don't know exactly why that is, but it tells us something. Better health outcomes in terms of response to hospitalization or better health outcomes in terms of like the overall quality of life? I mean, just like life expectancy, obesity, that kind of stuff. The life expectancy is higher, like really, in New York City than Boulder, Colorado? Is that real? No, Colorado is actually number one. But in general, I mean, New York. But you know, Boulder only has 100,000 people.

Yeah, but New York and California are some of the highest life expectancy states in the country. You know, the really low ones, West Virginia, places like that. But that's extreme poverty. Well, they're poor, but that's part of the issue, right?

Like, wealth comes out of, now, maybe that'll change, right? Maybe we're going to have the technology that people can and you know we're gonna make some investments in broadband other stuff like that i mean maybe we can have much more prosperity in rural areas and like that would be great uh because i mean a would just be good for people there also you know people like it it'd be cool i have some hope that all this zoom and stuff will do that. But I also have some doubts.

I mean, I'm just not sure that you can fully replicate the sort of value of in-person interaction. And it's just a way that I do think we're different. The only way that's ever going to come about is through virtual reality. Virtual reality, if it gets to a point where you and I can put on goggles and be in a room together almost like this, that's pretty close. Well, I think it's, I'm not quite technical enough

to know what the problem is. But to me, the issue with all kinds of Zoom things, it's not the visual experience. It's the lags. The hardest thing for me as as a professional talker about anything remote you know not just video right you do just latency yeah the latency it's hard it's hard to have a conversation when you're constantly worried about the timing and the interruptions yeah and how that back and forth works. It's very unnatural.

And I don't know if there's going to be a VR solution for that. I think that latency is a killer. The latency is a killer, but the latency is not as bad if you have headphones on, if both of you have headphones on. The problem is oftentimes one person has speakers and the other person is using headphones. And when the one person is talking talking the way zoom works and Skype works It's very difficult for you to hear the other person talking while you're talking it sort of drowns everything out and it fucks up I've had some brutal conversations with people where they literally don't even hear what I'm saying. Like they're saying something wrong

I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you say and they just keep going? I'm like, hold on hold on hold on you on. You can't, that's not real. Like stop. And they're like, oh Jesus. And then you realize like, okay, they could barely hear me while they're talking. I can't really talk. Whereas like if you're talking and I'm like, what? And you hear it.

It's like, we're in the same room. We're also wearing headphones together, which is better than even being in the same room and not having headphones on because your voice in my ears, like there's a couple times I've talked to you earlier where I realized it as I was doing it. I was like, oh, I don't want to do that. It's just the thing of learning the rhythm of people communicating. But when the headphones, your voice is as loud as my voice,

and it's at the same, it's right there in the ears. So it locks you in. Well, and you're Italian? Mostly. Yeah, yeah, and I'm locks you in. Well, and you're Italian? Mostly. Yeah, yeah. I'm Jewish mostly. And New York, New Jersey is a stereotype. But we're always talking over each other at dinner, family.

And my wife, she's a waspy person, a little more reserved. And I think the first time she came home to see my family, she was like, what's going on here? Everybody's just yelling constantly. But to me, it's a very natural way to communicate yeah to have a little overlap right and part of being human is like understanding those cues and when you intersperse the technology right and the latency and the lags in there it it's a very different experience and like professional interviewers figure out how to do it you know because they're pros but it's a very different experience and like professional interviewers figure out how to do it you know because they're pros but it's not normal yeah you you have to work with it and it's

difficult and oftentimes professional interviewers they actually use that to talk over each other if you're watching cnn if there's opposing viewpoints oftentimes these fucking anchors just talk over people and they don't let the person get their point out and they also know that they only have seven minutes and they're also working towards a soundbite as much as they're having a conversation. They're probably more likely setting traps or anticipating outcomes and working towards some sort of gotcha moment. And this is,

it's not a conversation. And they tell you if you get, you know, I've gotten a media training, you know, to do go on cable. Right. And then what they tell you is you get, you know, I've gotten media training, you know, to go on cable, right? And what they tell you is before you go on cable, because you're only going to be on there for a couple minutes, you decide what you want to say, right?

You distill it to a few quick talking points, and you just make sure to say that no matter what question you get asked. Oh, God. And that's training. That's the advice they give to the pundits, the talking heads who go on, to the politicians who come on. You know, and like worst case, you say, well, you know, Wolf, I think the real issue is. And then boom, you just do your talking points. And that's terrible. Like it's a terrible product.

You know, like you watch those shows and you are not learning anything. Right. Because the people are sent on their program to do that. Like that's what the pros tell you you should do as a guest. But why would you want to watch that? I mean you wouldn't want to watch this. I do. I'll watch some clips sometimes on YouTube.

But I never watch it live on television unless I'm at a fucking airport or something. That's the only thing on. I think it's a nonsense way of communicating I think it's a terrible way to express ideas and it's one of the reasons why I don't do any of those shows I won't do it like I just I don't I don't want to do any of those shows where you sit down at a panel and a bunch of people yell over each other like I'm not interested I'm not interested in being right I just want to talk if people have like if I go on a if I go on one of those shows and I have a viewpoint or a perspective that's definitely different than the person who has a perspective, I want to listen to that person.

I don't want to just be right. I might be right and I might think I'm right and I might be really looking forward to telling them that I think I'm right. But I really want to listen to them too. I want to know what the fuck they think and why they think what they think and the only way to really have a good argument against it is to have a real clear understanding of what that person is saying and I want to look at it through their perspective I want like there's a lot of times people have said oh you know you take the side of your your guess a lot of times even if you know you've taken different sides before I'm like that's not what I'm doing it might seem like that's what I'm doing.

What I'm really doing is I want them to fully express what they think. So I want to find out why they think that way. So I want to think the way they're thinking. So if they start saying something like, oh, yeah, so you feel like we should do it this way. You're trying to draw it out. You're trying to explicate what's going on. I'm also trying to learn. I'm trying to get it.

I'm trying to get it from their perspective. Sometimes people will say things, I'm also trying to learn. I'm trying to get it. I'm trying to get it from their perspective. Sometimes people will say things, and I had an idea of what I believed before I started talking to them, and then they start talking, and I go, oh, ooh, that makes sense. I get it now. And maybe I did have a different opinion a week ago,

but I'm not married to my opinions. And when you're on those fucking cable shows, you have to be married to your opinions. You're just over each other and it's so much so many gotcha moments it's just gross if i ever have someone over my house and they talk to me like that i'd be like get the fuck out of here well what i hate about it is you put you on like that right and so you're supposed to be repping your team yeah right and so if you do if you actually are thoughtful right if you ever concede that the other perspective might have some merit or that you don't have all the answers, then you're taking the L for your team and people are going to be disappointed in you. And I don't ever want to be in that position, right? That's not interesting as a thinker, as a writer, as a host to just be out there as a cog in the machine.

I couldn't agree more. Playing the role. It's boring. I mean, the world is a complex place. I change my thinking about things a lot because, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm stupid, but I like to think it's because it's like stuff happens, right? And like you want to live and participate in the world of ideas, not as like a combat sport. You know, I mean, you argue with people. You get passionate about things sometimes.

But the idea is to learn, to persuade, to become smarter smarter to help your audience become smarter and that's not about trying to beat the other guy into submission right but so much i mean really on television of media is constructed that way as this like spectacle and i i'm not above what in other arenas like it's amazing to just like watch two two sports teams go at it and see who's going to win. It's stupid. It's going to score the most points. But for like ideas, it's dumb. Yeah, it's stupid to do that with conversations.

And I do agree. It's fun to watch people do that with sports. It's exciting. But sports are a different animal. It's a different thing. I think conversations are missing from media. We don't have conversations. The only way they have conversations is if it's an echo chamber

and there's two people like Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo agreeing on something and they have some thing and they agree about it and they talk. That's a conversation, sort of. But even that's bullshit because it's pre-planned out and they've gone over what they're going to say in advance. They're not just talking about things. And I also think that most ideas or like an idea that's controversial, like your idea of a billion Americans, like this is an idea that I think should be expressed in a long-form conversation because it's the best way to look at all your perspectives and see why.

And I think, you know, like right away, my perspective was, I don't think that that's a good idea because that's too many people. But I see what you're saying and I listen to what you're saying and I go, oh, okay. How many people do you want? I don't think there's a number. I don't have a number, but I am pro-immigration. You know, I think, listen, I would be incredibly hypocritical if I am pro-immigration you know I think listen I would be incredibly hypocritical if I was anti-immigration I love a lot

of immigrants I know a lot of immigrants because I know a lot of fighters because a lot of people from the UFC a lot of them are immigrants I'm grateful that they're here I'm grateful that my grandparents had an opportunity to come here I think this is an amazing place I'm pro-Americica as an idea

i think the idea of american uh american people the idea of this melting pot the idea of this place that is in quotes the land of opportunity this is what people think when you say the land of opportunity if you're on jeopardy what is america it's not what is china you know it's not right so let me ask you when you decided you wanted to leave Los Angeles, it's traffic, big city, high taxes in California. I don't know exactly what's on your mind. But there's a lot of places you can go. So Austin is interesting.

I mean, this is a place a lot of people have been moving to. Mid-sized city, but it's a city. This is urban. You could of people have been moving to. Mid-sized city, but it's a city. This is urban. You could have been like a solo rat on a mountaintop someplace. I've done that before. The problem is I have a family, and they're not interested in that. If it was me, I would be on a mountain somewhere. Okay.

Yeah, 100%. I'd have a fat internet cable, and I'd hire someone to drill through the ground to whatever the fucking nearest point is, and I'd be on a mountain just not that i don't like people but i really really like nature i mean i like to go but the thing is like outside of the pandemic my job involves enormous groups of people together right i'm a stand-up comedian and i do these giant places where there's thousands of people and then i do the ufc so i do commentary and there's thousands of people that shit's overwhelming sometimes and then there's millions of people that listen to the podcast that shit's overwhelming sometimes too

and the antidote for that for me is nature and so to be in a place where i can see mountains and i can just hear birds and i can see trees that makes me feel good it's a nice i was never a nature person and then because of the pandemic so much stuff not anymore but back in march april so much stuff was closed everything was closed in dc and i got a five-year-old and it was like we had to do something so we started going every Saturday. I'd drive him someplace and we'd go hikes, you know, like easy level ones because I'm fucking out of shape. Kids five, you know, what can we do? But it was like the first time I ever really was like doing that stuff.

And I think it's like the one thing that I will take away from this COVID era is like I finally get it. Right. Oh, that's great. It helps reboot my mind. Oh, yeah. To just kind of walk around some trees and look at a river kind of rolling around. Hey, man, that's how we evolved. Mm-hmm.

There's certain things. Like, you ever caught a fish? You ever go fishing? I have, yeah. evolved there's there's certain like you ever caught a fish you ever go fishing i have yeah when you catch a fish there is a weird thing that's going on in your brain that is ancient it's ancient and even though like fishing tackle is very modern you know using a spin casting reel and you're you got monofilament line and these hooks that have been designed and engineered and you're pulling in this fish. There's something about catching a fish that ignites a primal part of whatever part of you that's left over from back when.

This was the only way you were going to survive is if you caught a fish. And it was probably when you were catching it with a net or with a stick or whatever the fuck they figured out how to use back then or ancient hooks that part gets ignited because it's a part of what we are also part of what we are is we lived in nature like humans always lived in nature until you know x amount of thousands of years ago when agriculture and um and cities and and condensed living and people were tribal and they they they stuck together and they were mostly hunters and gatherers that shit is in our dna and it's very hard to get out and i don't think you can and as a grown adult i think one of the things we should do is recognize that we have some requirements and one of the requirements is to be around nature

like there's a physical requirement and you feel like a better person you feel like a better version of yourself when you can go on a hike in the mountains i can tell you when i went fishing i just felt weird but exactly what you said that's how i feel you know these days uh everybody everybody in dc has got uh fire pits for our backyards you know so we can we can hang out at night. And that's how I feel any time I get a fire together. You know, like I learned as a little kid, like, how to build a campfire, summer camp, that kind of thing. It never comes up, you know, like in real life because who cares? But you do it and you're like, oh, this.

Like this is the real life survival skills. This is like, this is what we're supposed to be doing. And I do get that. Like that's something cool. real life survival skills. This is like, this is what we're supposed to be doing. Um, and I, and I do get that. Like that's, that's something cool. Yeah. That's another fire is in your DNA.

There's something beautiful about starting a fire. I was on a, um, a hunting trip once in Alaska on Prince of Wales Island. And it's the, one of the rainiest parts on earth. It's rains there basically every day. It's the,

the entire trip was just, you're soaked. it doesn't matter if you're in a sleeping bag in a tent the sleeping bag is filled that sounds terrible there's water vapor everywhere okay so like i'm not going there nothing is ever dry there's nothing ever dry but there was one night where it didn't rain for like six or seven hours and we figured out how to start a fire okay and we, actually for the entire evening until like early in the morning, it didn't start raining again,

so we used corn chips, like Fritos corn chips. Those things are like super flammable, and they stay lit for a long time. So we figured out that we can light corn chips on fire and then slowly dry out these sticks and get them to the point where they were flammable and then take some wood from some areas where it doesn't get direct rain on it and like underneath it was kind of dry and we gathered together some wood and then once we got the fire going, then we put the wet stuff on there and it

dried it out and we got a fire going. That's probably not good news about eating Fritos though. I don't know if it's bad news. I mean, there's a lot of things that are flammable that tastes good. It's okay. I mean, it's not good for you anyway,

but the point is this fire was like a drug. Like all of a sudden we had this fire lit and we're like, Oh, it was amazing. And the spirits, everyone's spirits went elevated. Everybody was much happier. And you know, we were warm already.

We had, you know, merino wool and, you know, down puffy coats on. So we stayed warm. Yeah. But there was something about that fire that, like, it let us know. Like, it was hope. Yeah, it's the meaning of, like, warmth and community. Yes. And safety, right?

And fun stories. Like, then you're around the fire and everybody's telling funny stories and everyone's laughing and we had a great time but there's a dna aspect to it there's like there's a part of you that recognizes that this fire is a one of the things that kept human beings alive kept away predators kept away the enemy like we we got a fire going like we're alive now and they're like you're like yes success like a fish you guys are oh here we go we got one we got one we got one there's an exciting thing even if it's a weird thing that people do this catch and release you know there's a lot of fly fishermen all they basically want to do is just go out there and i mean the way people have

described it accurately is you're kind of just fucking with the fish. You know? Because you're not really... Sure. You're not fishing in the sense as you're providing your family with food and sustenance. No, you're just catching it and letting it go. But they want that thrill. Like, ha ha, got him, I got him. That thrill.

And then they're like, I'll let you live. Go ahead. It's true, it's funny. You wouldn't... I mean, I guess the fish are glad not to be dead, but... It's like shooting an animal with a tranquilizer dart. Like, I like i got you bitch take a picture with a moose when it's out cold like you shot him with a dart that's horrible do people do that no no okay well it sounds weird just do that sure yeah yeah no no i understand i understand yeah usually they

don't do that with anything other than predators with other animals they actually net them they drop like if they want to tag a mule deer or something like that, they actually drop a net from a helicopter on them. That's also weird. Well, it's weird because they can fall and break their leg and then you got to kill them. But that's the only way they can actually figure out,

like through that, they've figured out how these things, what their range is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they got to tag them. Yeah, they get data. They're trying to figure out what's going on. But there's something about fishing that ignites these feelings in people.

And there's something about hiking. Like when you're around trees, it's like your body goes, oh, it's like a level of homeostasis occurs. It's like there's sort of a balancing feeling. There's a relaxation. Yeah, you're supposed to be around trees. But I wouldn't discourage people from listening to podcasts on their busy hectic commutes no i wouldn't

you gotta keep the keep the business alive there's nothing wrong with doing a lot of things that are like going to the movies or going to a concert like all these things have nothing to do with nature they're still going to movies i miss that too i miss going to concerts i miss uh concerts again yeah i miss large groups of people getting together and not worried about dying yes you know like even you and i when we saw each other like like how often you've been tested yeah what's up and then we got to test you and then as soon as we know we're clear then then you can hang out don't worry weird i would you know i was on an airplane and it's just the most other people's anxiety is like bouncing off the walls you know it's like i mean i don't believe in like pan psychism or anything like that but but that's what it feels like you know it's like you can tell everybody's on edge everybody's nervous and you know planes

are always like that i mean that's's never the human experience at its finest. How do they eat on planes? They let you take your mask down when you eat? They do. That's nonsense. But then everybody's looking at you. And also, it doesn't make sense. I mean, this could be all on the show.

No, it doesn't make sense. Yeah. I mean, obviously, the snacks don't have magic antiviral properties. obviously the snacks don't have like a magic antiviral properties right like if the mask is important which you know the doctors say it is then also i mean you know it's not that long a flight you can survive without a snack i know but they to ask people to fly for five hours with no food they're like what I need to eat all the time. Well, it's weird though,

because it's like, I mean, this is like the worst thing, but you know, it's so boring being on an airplane. And that's just what people want to do. It's like, yeah, sit there and snack.

I was trying to read a book, be like a smart guy. Well, it was like a Jack Reacher book. So, oh really? So not that smart. That's funny.

Tom Cruise played Jack Reacher. He did. Yes. It all circles back around. I love those books. it was like a jack reacher book so oh really so not that smart that's funny tom cruise played jack reacher he did yes it all circles back around um i love those books uh but it was not that good no the movie was not good the second one is supposed to be even worse um yeah but there's gonna be a new amazon series why are you laughing i love him i love tom the character you know you know jack reacher character yes he's supposed to be a giant guy. Right, exactly. So it can't be fucking Tom Cruise. Right, right. I like Tom Cruise, but- Doesn't work.

But that's like the little guy, and he's scrappy. Exactly. That's an interesting character, too. Yeah, it's, yeah, doesn't work. Yeah, so- The little guy that's scrappy, no, it's supposed to be like the rock. Yeah, that's the dream, just like a giant guy. Yeah.

The book, he's always like, Lee Child's always writing about how huge his hands are. Yeah. And I respect that as a somewhat small-handed person. Yeah. How the fuck do they get Tom Cruise to play a huge-handed guy? He was into it. That's probably why it didn't work, though, right? The new book, the author he handed off, Lee Child handed off to his little brother to

start writing the series. Oh, no. Is that like Gallagher 2? Yeah. Like that kind of situation? There you go. he handed off Lee Child handed off to his little brother to start writing the series oh no is that like Gallagher 2? that kind of situation there you go oh Dwayne Johnson explains losing Jack Reacher role and why he what does he say is he mad? he's supposed to be him though

well that fucking makes sense Dwayne Johnson when you meet him doesn't even seem like a real human you're like oh look at this fucking superhero click on that link what does it say there's another one here that's a large individual could have been timing maybe another role to do you know say it again but go back go back to the top what does it say it's just it says lose out okay loses to tom cruise now there he is on twitter love the character about 10 years ago went for the role, but Cruise got it. It was great motivation for me to always stay hungry. That's a really nice way of saying I would have fucked that movie up.

Huh. Yeah. Who makes the better action star, Cruise or Johnson? That's not a good question. No, that's not the right way to think about it. But it's who's right for the part. Yeah, Cruise is not right for the part. The part doesn't work.

You know, the other thing, you imagine the rock in like top gun yeah and it's like no because you're not gonna be a fighter pilot at that size right like there's a exactly fighter pilots are small yeah it's it's like if you know the rock played the greatest jockey of all time that poor fucking horse i know you'd be like what wait hold on how big's this goddamn horse those big horses don't run that fast this is stupid that would be terrifying the rock sitting on a giant horse yeah there's some guys that are just born for roles like keanu reeves is born for john wick he's the perfect john wick even though keanu Reeves is not a physically imposing guy, I mean, even in the movie, he's got his shirt off and he's showering.

It doesn't look like The Rock's back. It's not like you're like, oh, my God, look at the size of this guy. He's going to kill everybody. But there's something about Keanu's demeanor and the way he plays that role. He fucking nails it. It's perfect. He's got this flat affect but you can tell he loves the dog yeah and and you can believe that he can kill all those people

when he's killing all those people i believe it yeah he's intense he dials in yeah it works it works there's some roles that just don't work i agree so you're listening you're reading jack reacher rather you're reading this book and people are freaking out and you freak out too because you're feeling these people freaking out and so it's hard to concentrate on the book it's just a ton of bad vibes these days i mean it's i don't know i don't know what else to say about it it's like i think my opinion that this pandemic is bad it's like not that interesting but it's i honestly like had not had a chance to really reflect on it until i was there at the airport sitting around because it's like i've been to that airport a million times in normal reality and you recognize things but they're so surreal you know you know like

everybody's acting weird everybody's nervous there's these hand sanitizer stations everywhere and you know who knows like we should all wash our hands more probably going forward just like our kindergarten teachers told us um but it's been such an incredibly stressful time and i will be fascinated to see you know when people start getting vaccinated like how bananas do things get like people people are going to be really excited to like get back out to the club you know to like have fun go to shows have just like huge parties in a couple years i think i think sooner i don't know about that i think things are are going to like, I think 2021 is going to be like the craziest year. Maybe.

That we've ever seen. I think by the end of 2021, things are going to be rocking. I think 2022 is really when things are going to really take off. That's your rocking year. It's not my perspective, really, either. It's Nicholas Christakis, who was a professor at Yale, wrote a book about the pandemic called Apollo's Arrow. And he and I talked about it. And it's one of the things that he thinks is that once the vaccine kicks in and then there'll be this time that'll be like the roaring 20s, which is coincidentally a couple of years after the Spanish flu had ended.

Yep. And it'll be sort of a similar type situation. But that's just interesting. Like, is it coincidentally? Well, coincidentally, sort of, no. No. I mean, with us. Right.

It's not coincidentally. Like, the relationship is very similar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, it's probably the same impetus, the same reason. I mean, people were locked up for a year or so. And it was a far more disturbing pandemic because it was killing really young healthy people with powerful immune systems their immune system is actually attacking them that was a really scary dangerous time for this country and the

bounce back was appropriately wild right the war roaring roaring twenties where that's a wild ass time. And now we got twenties again. Well now, you know, I think when 2021 rolls around and whether it's a vaccine or maybe there will be some therapeutic that makes people not have to take the vaccine. Well, there's something that they figured out where, you know, like if you get syphilis, you get penicillin and wax it out it out like you don't have to take a syphilis vaccine you know whatever it is i don't know i don't know either i like vaccines you know yeah i'm excited um i like vaccines i i am vaccinated um the problem that a lot of people have is that this was fast tracked and they get

nervous about. They do. They do. Possible potential side effects. And we don't know what those are going to be. And then there's a lot of people that are very uncomfortable with the idea of getting very sick after they take the vaccine, which seems to happen with 80% of the people that take it.

And so they're concerned about that. Wait, 80% of people who are taking this vaccine? Yes. That's not what I heard. Well, it's what Bill Gates has said. Bill Gates? Yeah. I don't know.

I mean, I don't know if we can look it up. We'll play it for you. Pull it off of, I know, it's weird. When people say that, people are like, wait, what? It's on my Instagram. There's an interview with Bill Gates where he's talking about, I believe this is the Moderna vaccine. The Pfizer vaccine has a very similar effect because it's the way this mRNA vaccine works.

They've taken the common cold vaccine and added this to it. Your body develops these proteins to fight off. But you get sick. Yeah. I mean, well, I can say, I don't know. but you get sick. Yeah, I mean, well, I can say, I don't know. You know, I mean, I've read the sort of report,

the readout from Pfizer and Moderna, BioNTech, and they said there were very few serious side effects. I mean, I don't know. I don't know serious or not. I mean, I got the flu shot, you know, whenever it was, a couple months ago. And, you know, my arm hurt for a couple days. That's just the shot site.

I wouldn't do it just for fun. That's just the injection site didn't feel bad right but it was fine you know i felt okay this is different than that um this is different than that and there's a there's a consequence to taking this and i'm not saying that i won't take it i will and it's if it's safe i will encourage other people to take it too but there's a reality of taking this particular vaccine that it's going to make a lot of people feel like shit and it'll last a couple days and look you can play play that video oh okay but it's in the

it's in the feed it's in the IGTV but if you just go to my Instagram feed from the last time the Dylan Jones episode it's it's that's just what it is the Dylan Jones episode. That's just what it is. Hold up.

You went way too far. Go way up. Way up. Hold on. Keep going. Wait a minute. Did they remove it? Oh, my God. Did they remove it oh my god did they remove it from my instagram is that real holy shit dude that is crazy hold on let me check because that's kind of crazy if they

removed it from my instagram that's kind of crazy because this was a i believe it was an NBC interview. They removed it. Wow. Okay, well, here, here. I got an article from Science. It says there's fever and aches that are intense in some cases but not dangerous. I found it.

Okay, it hasn't been removed then. Why don't I find it? I don't know. It was a month ago. It says October 28thth right okay play it this video is edited though remember how so no no no no no no no that's a totally different video that's a totally different video that video was the video where people were talking about uh Bill Gates is concerned with the profit margin from vaccines. But that is – we should talk about that too because that's actually important. That's actually important because that's really distorted, and that's not what he was saying at all. He was not talking about profiting.

It's concerning. We looked. After the second dose, at least 80 percent of participants experienced a systemic side effect ranging from severe chills to fevers. So. Are these vaccines safe? Well, the the FDA not being pressured will look hard at that. The FDA is the gold standard of regulators, and their current guidance on this, if they stick with that, is very, very appropriate. And, you know, the side effects were not super severe. That is, it didn't cause permanent health problems for the things that are, they, you know, Moderna did have to go with a

fairly high dose. And so, you know, to get the antibodies, some of the other vaccines are going, able to go with lower doses to get responses that are pretty high, including the J&J and the Pfizer. And so there's a lot of characteristics of these vaccines. It's great that we have multiple of them that are going out there. And yes, I think you know the data better than I do. But the bill, Bill, the data showed that everybody with a high dose had a side effect. Yeah, but some of that is not dramatic where, you know, it's just, you know, super painful. But yes, we need to make sure there's not severe side effects.

The FDA, I think, will do a good job of that despite the pressure. How many doses of the vaccine will we need? Well, none of the vaccines at this point appear like they'll work with a single dose that was the the hope at the very beginning uh maybe one of them particularly in the second generation won't surprise us we hope just two although in the elderly sometimes uh it it takes more and and so making sure we have lots of elderly people in the trial will give us that data. No, so let's be clear.

If that is all it is, it's just you have severe chills and you feel like shit for a couple days, that is way better than getting the coronavirus and risking the potential death and side effects and the long-haul people experiencing blood clots. And if it's better than that, yeah. But it's not a free ride.

So I just want to get the numbers. What I see here from science is that the sort of fatigue, you know, that you were talking about, feel like shit for two days, there's about 10% of people had the side effects that bad. Which, hold on a second. But why is Bill Gates saying 80%? Well, no, she was saying it's some side effect comes in 80 right but like what you were talking about isn't a subset you know of the people get it well but hold on i don't know if that's true because there's many articles about

the the side effects of of this vaccine i've never seen one of them that relegated it to 10 of the population that took the vaccine. Specifically, the second dose. The thing about this is you have to take two. The second dose seems to be the doozy for people. Right. I mean, I guess that's the tough one. So this is something that's interesting.

I have one set of conversations with people, and they're saying, who's going to be able to get the vaccine? How are we going to roll this out? Healthcare workers, essential workers, all this other kind of stuff and then there's another conversation where people are like maybe you're not going to want to get it right and me i'm like i'm really eager you know give it to me tomorrow i don't even care that the fda is not done why is that um you're not worried about side effects a i'm not worried about side effects why are you not worried about side effects because fever for a couple days i mean that's what if that's all we know of now yeah but look long haul covid survivors one of the things they're finding is these people have blood clots like many many months later no i mean i know it's like a serious

serious but that's just like i i would really like to not get covid yeah sure so what if i mean i have a lot of situation with the vaccine? What if the vaccine, and this is not outside the realm of possibility, that the vaccine gives some sort of a side effect that's unintended? I mean, I have a lot of confidence in the basic process here with the vaccine development. But this isn't the basic process. This is a completely new process, much faster than any process that well i mean it's an unusually rapid development i mean it's an unusually rapid development because they have this mnr m rna i don't know what that means i mean it's messenger rna but i don't know what it

means um so it just means that it's trick it's not giving you a like a dormant version right so there's no there's no virus right there's a particle that's specially designed it triggers antibodies we create them um and so i think the basic antibody immune response situation is fairly well understood scientifically it's why we're pretty confident that the people who've recovered you know are immune that you know younger and healthier people in most cases are okay if they they get sick, they get better. So to me, it's a good thing. I'm all for it.

I'll take it. I'll get the fever. But I'm also not – I want to walk the line. I want to encourage people to take vaccines as a responsible person, but also knowing that the supplies will be short. If somebody doesn't want it, like somebody else will take that dose. You know what? One of the best things in terms of outcomes is vitamin D.

Like vitamin D deficiencies are a huge part of negative COVID outcomes. And then in one study. I've seen some people, some studies about that. Yeah. One study, 84% of the people that were in the ICU had deficient levels of vitamin C and only 4% had sufficient levels of vitamin D. Vitamin D is a huge problem and it's not just a vitamin. It's a hormone. You know, when, when Mackey was on the other day, he was trying to say that it's a precursor to hormones. I had to look it up. That's not true. It's a hormone. Vitamin D is actually a hormone. And it's weird because we call it a vitamin, but it regulates so many things in the body and it has a significant impact on the immune system. But you never hear

anybody telling you to supplement with vitamin D. You're not seeing this from any of the leaders, any of these politicians that are shutting things down. Even Fauci has said it recently, that vitamin D does seem to have a pretty significant impact but health experts like people that study like the mechanisms of disease and vitamin supplementation like particularly uh dr ronda patrick had a a thing on her twitter where she published a study that showed uh positive outcomes and covid vitamin d is a huge factor are you supplementing with vitamin d um i am yes i mean i don't want to i don't know just like one of those things but i also the thing vitamin D is a huge factor. Are you supplementing with vitamin D? I am, yes. I mean, I don't want to...

I don't know. It's just like one of those things. But I also... The thing I try to do, I try to make sure I'm going outside like we were talking about before. I mean, I am not super read in on the vitamin D science,

but I have heard this and it also seems like a situation where there's no possible harm. With what? Taking some vitamin D. No, of course. And being precautious. And you do see that the populations where we've had the biggest problems, right?

So if you think about nursing homes or you think about prisons, right, you're talking about populations that, you know, for different reasons, obviously, if you're in prison, you're in prison, but are not having, you know, outside time and exposure to sunlight, right, and the natural vitamin D mechanisms that come that way. Well, they're also prisons are jammed up. They have no way of avoiding each other. Right. Well, yes. And, you know, I mean, I do think that there's concern there. I mean, I've heard a fair amount about vitamin D supplementation, at least from our local public health people in D.C. I don't know. Really? That's interesting.

I don't know if Fauci or whomever else has been vocal on this. Well, Los Angeles, you don't hear a peep about it. I mean, what they don't, they don't have double-blind, you know, what do you call it, clinical trials, which I guess, what are the things that we've seen? I mean, obviously those are

it's important to do those kind of studies but I do think that one thing we've seen throughout this pandemic is doctors are a little too hesitant to draw conclusions based on lower quality studies when that's the best evidence that's available

you know what I mean it's like when you have a problem you want lower quality studies that indicating that vitamin d is good for your immune system what it's saying is that there's no way to do double blind placebo controlled studies on vitamin d with people with covet you'd have to give them covet right it's a real issue right but what they are showing is that people with significant levels of vitamin d people that have sufficient levels of vitamin d have overall they're vitamin D, people that have sufficient levels of vitamin D, have overall, the percentage of people

that have a better outcome is huge. Right. 84% is a big number. Right. When you look at the number of people that have insufficient levels that wind up in COVID units, when you're looking at what vitamin D does, that's well understood.

It's impact on the immune system. It's weird to me that people don't take care of their health and don't actively make conscious decisions to make their body healthier but are relying only on science to come along and give them something give them a medicine give them a vaccine give them a thing when there's so much evidence that shows that you can significantly increase your chances for a good outcome if you do catch this disease and maybe even possibly ward off catching it with a stronger immune system. But yet so many people aren't doing that. Well, and that's something we know about health in general, right, is that we have a... What doctors do, what pharmaceutical companies do,

what hospitals do, we're glad that that exists. Right. But that the biggest levers for population health are in diet and exercise and being healthy, right? But also we can agree vaccines are tremendously important. The reason why we don't have measles or vaccines are great i mean obviously for the childhood illness right one thing that's unusual about covid is that it doesn't attack young children so severely and god bless right

that's what's keep me sane this whole time right um and you know so that's good. That's an unusual situation. You see death rates for children plummet when vaccines come in for these other childhood ailments. Right, sure. And it's a huge favor because you're not going to tell a two-year-old, like, hey, buddy, you got to work out more. My point is, I think we can both agree that vaccines are hugely important for health results. It's hugely important to ward off diseases. I'm a big proponent of vaccines. But there's other things that people can do to benefit their health as well. And it's just weird to me that people put all their faith in these one things but don't do the things that would require some discipline and maybe some changing of the structure of how they live their life.

That, to me, is bizarre. No, I mean, I agree with you. It's hard. It's hard? It's hard to be disciplined. Discipline is hard. But if you don't want to die. No, it's good.

It is important to try to do. Have you done anything differently during this pandemic where you made conscious decisions to try to be healthier? Yeah, I mean, look, I said I started doing outside stuff. I've been trying really hard to take up running because it's something you can do

that's out of the gym, that's healthy. It's bad for your joints when you're running and you're not used to it and your body's heavy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it is. And what can I say? I am one of the many, many, many Americans

who does not do as much as they should to be a healthy person. And it's a big problem in our society. Americans, we have one of the richest, most technologically advanced, you know, societies that exist out there. But our population health is not great, right? Primarily because of what we eat and the amount of physical exercise that we do. And I think in, you know, in our lives and in our politics, it's not the subject of enough emphasis because it's less comfortable than kind of hoping for pharmaceutical breakthroughs.

Although fortunately, we are getting some pharmaceutical breakthroughs, it looks like. Right. I'm not picking on you, but you understand that the way people would criticize this is they would look at you and look at the choices that you've made and say, this is crazy. This guy just wants to get a shot in the arm and doesn't want to do the other things that could significantly impact your health. You don't want, you've decided to, for whatever reason, just say, I'm going to get this shot and then I'm going to be good. Whereas there's a lot of evidence that shows that you could increase your health. Like what would have to happen? Well, you should do both of those things.

Right. But why don't you? Why don't I? Yeah. I don't know. I'm weak. I'm weak. You're not weak.

Don't say that. You can decide you're weak. If you had to, if you knew that your life was in danger, you could do some pretty incredible things. But you're comfortable, you're relaxed, and you're pretty sure that it's going to be taken care of with this vaccine. You know, the hardest thing that I ever did health-wise is I used to be a heavy smoker, which is obviously terrible for you.

How many packs a day? I was smoking like a pack and a half a day. And my mother died of cancer. Lung? No, not lung, but she also smoked and, you know, likely related. When I was young, when I was in my early 20s. Was it pancreatic? She was in her, I think so.

That's a big one with cancer. Yeah. She was in her 50s. And, you know, it was sad, obviously. And, like, it was in her 50s. And you know it was sad, obviously. And it was terrible. And I finally... And they changed the laws about smoking in bars and stuff like that. And it was a little kick in the butt to actually try to get my shit together.

How old were you when you quit? 26, 27. How long ago was that? So it would have been like 12 years ago. And it was like, it was so fucking hard, you know? I mean, I did it, right? And lots of people. Congratulations.

Lots of people have quit smoking over the years. But something that was helpful is that at that time in the history of our society, it was becoming kind of stigmatized. You know, like you couldn't smoke anymore in a bar or restaurant. They were getting rid of like the smoking sections

and the airports and stuff. So already before I quit, it was like I knew I was out there, like on the margins, you know, like standing outside in the cold and the pouring rain, being like, what am I doing? Like this like addict, right? Like I should get it together. And so it was hard.

It was hard to quit. It was hard to stay away from, you know, friends and people who are doing that kind of thing. But society, like it was better. Like my life was worse. Yeah, so you're not a weak person. That's a very difficult thing to do. Well, we do. Quitting smoking is one of the hardest things to do.

It's a really hard thing to quit, and they've engineered it so that those goddamn things are really hard to kick. Have you ever seen that Russell Crowe movie, The Insider? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. I don't know how much of that is accurate because I'm just basing it off that movie, but from the things that I've read the articles about like they researched the actual chemicals they're putting into cigarettes when they were making that movie and it's based on a real scientist who actually was working for the tobacco companies was worried about his life

because he was testifying about these these chemicals that they're putting into these cigarettes that make them even more addictive than just regular cigarettes. If you take American Spirits or one of those home-rolled cigarettes you can make, those are bad, but they're not as bad. Yeah. Well, and you know what was actually the best thing for my health about this pandemic was just working from home. Because I used to work in one of those offices where they would have snacks in the office. And I hated it.

I mean, I loved it, but I hated it. And I always wanted to say, why do we have M&Ms in the office? Now, some people can just walk between the men's room and a stack of M&Ms and their desk all day every day and not stuff their face with M&Ms. I was not succeeding with that. But I never find myself sitting in my basement

Being like what I ought to do right now Is stop working Go walk three blocks to the store Buy a bunch of M&M's And eat a bunch of sugar and gross quality chocolate Like nobody does that What if at your job they had stacks of cigarettes There you go

No that would be terrible right Could you walk past those while you were trying to quit That would be so bad You have a little smoking patio you could see it it's right there i go through those gates freedom and it's like we were talking about on the airplane right even in the middle of the pandemic they're like you got to wear your mask you got to wear your mask oh but here's the snacks yeah and it's like that's not it's not natural there's some cognitive dissonance involved in this whole thing that in la uh you can't do anything but in texas you can go to restaurants you wear a mask until you sit down

and then when you sit down you don't have a mask anymore but we're all breathing the same air yeah i don't know about that i mean i think hepa filters and doing things that they can to prevent people from showing up at work sick. Whether it is a COVID test for all your employers. I have a friend who owns a restaurant. She's implementing that and trying to do COVID tests for everybody that works there. Well, what they should have done was make testing much more available. Much more broad.

Much more widespread. But you don't understand. It's complicated. It's like it's not that they shouldn't have done it. It's like they didn't have a test for it. And then they developed a test. And then implementing that test on a large scale requires an infrastructure that wasn't available. No, no, no.

I know. But they didn't. So the FDA has not been moving aggressively with the testing devices that are out there. They have this. You know, a lot of them aren't accurate. That's one of the reasons. Di're not. Diagnostic mentality. No, I know, I know. But, you know, when some universities,

because they have their own lab infrastructure, you know, have gone really big on testing their students. And it's worked pretty well. And then others haven't. And it's, you know, it's college kids in dorms and they're partying and spreads a lot of disease around. I don't know i mean this

has not been our greatest hour as a country no no it hasn't we weren't prepared um i think one good thing that may come out of this if there is any good thing that would come out of this is that in the future if another pandemic arises we'll be much better prepared for it i think we'll be more accustomed to the idea and people will take precautionary steps quicker than they did back in April or March. And I definitely own more little HEPA air purifying machines than I used to. Yeah, we got one over there.

And it's just masks and stuff. People, they understand they can get them. I mean, one of the more unfortunate things that happened was Fauci told people not to wear masks and the masks aren't going to help you. And the reason why he did that is because he didn't want people buying masks and them not being available for first responders. Obviously, the problem with that is now you know that they're willing to lie if they think it's within everybody's best interest, if they tell you something that's

not true. And the problem with that is, of course, then everybody's like, well, what the fuck? Now, how do I know when to believe you? Like, don't believe me back then, because I only said it back then because I didn't want you to buy them all up. But now that they're available everywhere, yes, you have to wear them. What I really hope they do, and I don't think they'll do it,

but, you know, the military does an after-action report on something. You look back, not to point fingers, not to be mad, but to, like to try to understand what did we do, what worked, what didn't work, what do we do next time? And the public health expert community really needs to do that.

Because some of this stuff, I think that's what happened with the masks, but we don't really know. And there's got to be an inquiry. What do you mean? You think that's what happened with the masks? In what way? I think and there's got to be an inquiry what do you mean like you think that's what happened the mass in what way like i think that they were concerned about shortages oh they were and that that's what she said and that that's why that's why they came up with this but it's like she has literally said yeah no no but but it's like we we need everybody

the surgeon general the cdc like everybody's got to get alignment so like what happened here why did we tell people this right right why Why didn't we listen to the Asian health experts who dealt with a more similar virus and what was going on? And like, how are we going to do better next time? Because you're right. Just coming out and being like, oh, no, no, no. Trust us next time. Right. Like that doesn't work.

That's that's not how anything goes. And you need some real searching self-criticism around some of that and us in the in the media you know there was a lot of credulity about those kind of statements when they didn't really make sense right just like logically i remember a tweet from the the surgeon general and he said like at this in one tweet oh you don't need to go buy masks they're not gonna be helpful to you also we have shortages for health care workers and so when somebody says something like that right it's like us in journalism right you're supposed to be saying hey hey that Hey. That doesn't make sense.

What's going on? And the most reliable source of information at that time was just people living in Asia, people living in Hong Kong, in Taiwan. They had much better information over there. They were broadcasting it. And if you listened at that time, you would know about masks. You would know about the efficacy of quarantines you would know about aerosolization and ventilation and stuff like that and we were just really slow and i've got to be smarter yeah it's not it definitely was not our finest hour like you said one thing that i think we got to really talk about jamie we wanted to talk about this before

there's a thing that's going around that uh that it's a video clip that's been edited. And it's edited to make it seem like Bill Gates is saying that he's pushing this vaccine because it's extremely profitable. And that there's a 20 times, like 20 times the amount you put in, you benefit from it financially. That is not what he's saying. This is really important what he's saying is in vaccinating people and preventing illness the health benefits to the economy overall has a a tremendous impact in a positive manner and is explaining this with with third world countries and with other and he's talking about it purely from a humanitarian perspective he's not talking about it from this profiteering like vulture perspective like a social

profit yes he's saying it you would like and it's really disingenuously edited and it was sent passed around to a lot of people, and I watched the video, and I was like, who would fucking say that? What, is he crazy? Why would he describe it like this publicly? He didn't. It's not what he was saying. It's edited.

What he was saying is, when you vaccinate people and prevent these diseases, let's hear it, just because it's really important, because a lot of people have sent this to me, and they need to hear this. Is it not working? Do you have a Mac? Doesn't it show it in your bar where you can rewind it?

Not this one. Oh, you got a cheap-ass bullshit Mac. I don't have the brand new one with that bar. Just refresh the page. Okay, here we go. Play it up here. Always do. You kind of looked at the problem from a scientific and business perspective on things.

You've invested $10 billion in vaccinations over the last two decades, and you figured out the return on investment for that. And it kind of stunned me. Can you walk us through the math? You see a phenomenal track record. It's been $100 billion overall that the world's put in. Our foundation is a bit more than $10 billion. But we feel there's been over a 20 to 1 return.

So if you just look at the economic benefits, that's a pretty strong number compared to anything else. So, you know, we're here with a pretty strong message that although all these other issues are very important, let's not forget about the great success in global health and maintaining that commitment. I think the numbers that you ran through were if you had put that money into an S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, you'd come up with something like $17 billion, but you think it's $200 billion.

Put something recently. Okay, so this is the distorted version. You can see in there that it's edited. Now, play the actual version, Jamie. In the actual version, you see that he's not talking about pure financial benefit for the people that invest in the actual... So this is very important. This is the real version.

Without the editing. And you figured out the return on investment for that. And it kind of stunned me. Can you walk us through the math? Well, it's pretty impressive that when you take these vaccines, get them to be very inexpensive by making big volume commitments, have that right relationship with the private sector, get the delivery system so they're really getting the coverage out there,

you literally save millions of lives and 20 years ago when we created these new multilateral organizations gobi for the vaccines global fund for hiv tb and malaria we didn't know they'd be successful they've gone through lots of challenges about making sure the money gets there making sure sure the efficiency is right. But as we look at upcoming replenishments for those, and we've got so much distraction politically that the international needs like this could get eclipsed if we're not careful, we see a phenomenal track record. It's been $100 billion overall that the world's put in. Our foundation is a bit more than 10 billion but we feel there's been over a 20 to 1

return. So if you just look at the economic benefits that's a pretty strong number compared to anything else. The human benefit in millions of lives saved. So you know we're here with a pretty strong message that although all these other issues are very important, let's not forget about the great success in global health and maintaining that commitment. I think the numbers that you ran through were if you had put that money into an S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends, you'd come up with something like $17 billion, but you think it's $200 billion.

Here, yeah. Helping young children live, get the right nutrition, contribute to their countries, that has a payback that goes beyond any typical financial return. Right. See, that's what he really said. And people have edited that and they're passing it around

like, oh my God, this guy's a monster. Just wants to give you this vaccine because he wants to make money. Clearly, that's not what he's saying. There's this weird narrative. There's this weird meme. There's this weird conspiracy that Bill Gates is some fucking demon that just wants to make money off of vaccines and he's pushing vaccines. It's bad memories of that Clippy. Clippy?

You remember Microsoft Word? What are you talking about? You remember Microsoft Word, his old... What are you talking about? Sorry, Microsoft Office. It used to have this super annoying little helper guy named Clippy that would pop up and correct everything that you're doing. Oh, that dickhead. I remember him.

Yeah, he sucked. And it's... No, so... Yeah, no, no, no. Look. I just wanted to put that video out there because so many people have sent me the original video, and I got really tired of typing. That's not what he said.

Nope. You've got to listen to what he's talking about is the benefit for society. It's not just financial benefit from the companies that are making these vaccines. It's also the benefit for these children growing up and contributing to society, and that the more we put into this, the better it is for everybody. And what he's talking about is trying to think smarter about philanthropy, right? So, you know, he's a rich guy, like a lot of rich guys, he gives a lot of money away. But traditionally, you get a lot of, you know, put your name on the wing of a museum, just give money to somebody who seems nice. And Gates has really been a leader in trying to think

more analytically about what's a high value. He calls it their investment, right, in making the world a better place. There's an organization, some people I'm friendly with, run called GiveWell, and they do all this kind of analysis. And so they show that giving insecticide-treated bed nets to people in West Africa to keep malaria off them, that's incredibly cost-effective. There's a group called Deworm the World, and they help kids in, I think, Central Africa with these intestinal worms that make it impossible to sort of be well-nourished because you've got parasites living in you. And it's a hard problem, right, to understand not just how can you help people, but what's the best way to help people.

And, you know, what Gates is saying is that childhood vaccinations are really up there. They're high on the list of high-return public health interventions because when you can save a kid's life, that does so much good, broadly speaking. But it's bizarre that someone was willing to edit that clip and make it look like a completely different thing

than he was saying, and that this is one of the things that's going around today is that Bill Gates is somehow or another this evil person that wants to vaccinate everybody because he wants more money. That guy is worth so much fucking money, and he doesn't really work anymore you have to realize like he's not really working at microsoft and he doesn't work in pharmaceutical

companies at all no his whole business model is really around like a giant percentage of his around philanthropy and that's what he's kind of dedicating his time and effort to and the idea that all this positive stuff that that guy does is is all bullshit he really just wants money from you he's he's old he's got so much fucking money like what what do you it's so crazy it's just this is one of the weird things that's being that's being tossed around today one of the weirder conspiracy theories about I don't for a lack of better way to say it unsophisticated people who uh are very attracted to conspiracy theories that this is uh

and i look at the first thing i saw it i was like what is he saying why would he say it like that and then uh jamie said actually that's a very edited clip here's the full one i was like well that fucking makes sense we got to tell people about this because it keeps getting tossed around and just i mean anything you see videos on the internet like before you hit the share button like make sure you see so easy to hit context no i know so he's like fuck this guy said it this happens with all kinds i mean not just gates right all kinds of things people get little video clips and somebody writes it up and they're like

here we go like your bad enemy just did something horrible right and everyone's like oh yeah fuck that guy and you really gotta you gotta see it

in the context it's like nobody wants that anymore it's the dumbest easiest thing they want an abbreviated very simple 100 not even new Twitter

old Twitter 140 characters. They want to boil it down to a couple sentences. That guy, piece of shit. He's a fucking Nazi. Great. Now it's all I need to know. Nazi.

Yeah. I've seen it. No, I mean, it's a terrible habit. I mean, these kind of things, they prey on our worst information instincts and and also they prey on our reinforcement of our echo chambers like that people love that they love when if look if you can solidify your position within an ideology like this ideology accepts me i'm a part of this tribe i'm gonna say some shit that guy's a fucking nazi yes go matthew yeah call him a Nazi. That's what you're supposed to do. But what happens when you meet a real Nazi now?

Now you've called Ben Shapiro a Nazi. He's a Jew. What happens when you run into an actual Nazi? There's real Nazis out there. Now, what do you call that? That's a Nazi Nazi? That's a super Nazi? Yeah, I don't know.

I actually do try to stay away from Nazis. I saw someone who I he's a really smart person called candace owens a nazi okay i'm like okay maybe she's misinformed maybe she says things that don't ring true with you maybe she's uh maybe she's committed to an ideology that uh maybe some financial benefit in doing that maybe she's being paid to promote certain ideas that you don't think are accurate that's not a nazi a difficulty with saying i think this person has like the wrong ideas about health care policy yes like that's okay yeah that's good you disagree yes we we disagree the wrong ideas about race or the wrong i mean whatever right i mean

it's like there's a lot of uh topics to disagree about there's a lot of people being nazis but there's a lot of people that don't want to have those conversations they would just rather categorize people in a very simple and simplistic way because it's more convenient. And there's also this willingness to dismiss people today that is disconcerting. Well, and the extremism. So I was on Twitter and you see somebody saying, oh, well, she's a Nazi. And then I think, oh, that's not really true. But then it's like, well, do I want to butt in?

Right. Because then people get upset. Right. Well, you don't's not really true. But then it's like, well, do I want to butt in? Right. Right? Because then people get upset. Right. Right. Well, you don't want to get involved. Yeah. And then you have this conversation that, look, I don't have the time to go back and forth on Twitter.

I don't have the time to check in five minutes how many people have responded. Do I respond to those people? Well, this guy's just attacking me for no reason. That doesn't make any sense. Well, this person's actually got a good point. Well, how do I respond to this? And do I have to- Yeah, you just give up all your hobbies.

That's the problem. And the emotional commitment that you have to it and the connection. Like Jamie Kilstein is a guy who used to be like a deep social justice warrior. And then he got attacked by them and ostracized for like not even anything that makes a lot of sense. But then was really kind of open about how crazy he was while he was doing it. He was like, I would post something on Twitter and then I'd be incessantly checking it throughout the day and walking down the street, checking it and trying to respond and see who's responding to me.

And then feeling when someone was angry, you're like, ah, and then like getting involved in that. And just the, the anguish and anxiety that I look at so many people that fight on Twitter, and I don't argue with people on Twitter at all anymore. I very rarely even respond to people. But what I do do is I'll follow a few people that are mentally insane.

Like literally genuinely mentally ill. They're intelligent people that have gotten lost in the Twitter web, and they're stuck. I'll go to their timeline just to reinforce that that this is actually what's happening and they'll see that the degrading of their their mental clarity over time the fighting with people that goes on all day long and you'll see 11 hours a day like literally you look at their posts from the beginning when they start to when they end for the day and it's 11 hours of fighting with people on Twitter. And you think about, like, what else could you have done with that time that would have been productive?

Did you learn anything about people during this time? Did you score points? Should you be playing video games instead of this? Like, what do you need to do? Go fucking get a pickup game of basketball going or something. Like, what do you need to do that will give you some sort of a competitive feeling that instead you're you're you're risking your emotions and i think taxing your mental health i think there's a lot of i don't like the term mentally ill but it is an illness it's an illness like you're trapped just the same way a gambling addict is mentally ill

twitter addicts are mentally ill there There's something wrong with that. It's not good for you. And so many people are involved in it. So many people are locked into these really weird, condensed conversations where you're getting what Alan Levinowitz calls processed information. And he's like, it's bad for you the same way processed food is bad for you. It makes sense the way you described that way i'm like oh that is a fantastic way of describing it that is really what it is it's processed information because it's not a person talking to you it's true i will say though you know i feel like twitter okay i have two two

minds about twitter i have see people and I see myself sometimes out there wasting time. It's like, what are you doing these fighting with people on Twitter for? What's the point? I've also learned, honestly, a lot on Twitter. Like I've met virtually or in real life a lot of interesting people out there who know a lot about different things. It's cool. You know, for me, that's why it's dangerous is that it's actually a genuinely powerful tool.

And beneficial occasionally. Right. And hard to just kind of step away from. Like I've come to have dialogue with Nobel Prize winners, with businessmen, with successful politicians, with a lot of interesting writers and thinkers and academics and scholars. But then I've also gotten sucked into being mad. So I think we could look at it like diet.

No bodies are dunking on me. Yeah, that's a problem. No bodies. They're people, Matthew. They're just people. Are they? They're people. I mean, we never know.

They might be Russians. Sure. They might be working for the IRA. I mean, we never know. They might be Russians. Sure. They might be working for the IRA. You know? Internet Research Agency. Internet Research Agency. Yeah. Well, you got to stay away from Russians in general.

What? Russians on the internet. Really? I don't know. They're doing something. I lived in Russia for a couple months a long time ago. Yeah? What were you doing?

I don't know. I was like a high school student. So I was over there, and it was like a high school student um so i was over there and uh it was like some weird exchange thing in 1998 um and we were helping i was helping the advanced english class of nizhny Novgorod school 54 and met a lot of interesting people and at least one of them went on to work in the like russian internet propaganda field really later you stay in touch with them yeah so she has a different perspective on russian internet propaganda what is the perspective well she thinks it's good why uh because look i i don't endorse

this viewpoint i want to be clear but i do think a lot lot of Americans don't understand how Russian nationalists see the world, right? And they feel that there was a bait and switch after the Cold War, that it was supposed to be that communism was bad, that the Soviet dictatorship was bad, and that they liberated themselves from this bad regime, and that they were going to now have a better country. But then it flipped to America, quote unquote, won the Cold War. And then there was an ongoing process of anti-Russian American foreign policy that continued forward. And so that instead of disbanding NATO, because the Cold War was over, it expanded, right, to the Czech Republic, to Estonia. You know, there was war in Yugoslavia

against Russia's traditional ally in Serbia, all these different kinds of things. I don't, I don't really endorse this point of view. I mean, I'm not a Russian nationalist, but it's interesting to hear from Russian patriots how they see this, that they feel that the United States, instead of saying, hey, congratulations, you're not under communism anymore, there's not a Cold War anymore, that we sort of double down on geopolitical rivalry after that and that they are just pushing back. So they're pushing back by undermining democracy and pretending to be various groups and having them meet up and compete against each other and starting conflict. Yeah, that's where you get into the flaws. Yeah.

You say, well, how does it help to be, like, trying to sow, like, racial chaos in the United States? Like, who is the winner here? So that's why I say, like, I don't endorse it. But I do think that Americans benefit from, I mean, not just Russia, but just, like, trying to understand what the world looks like to some of these other countries that are like the bad guys, quote unquote, in our narratives.

Right. Like Iran. Like trying to imagine what it's like to be Iran today when you learn that we assassinated one of their nuclear scientists. Or if we didn't, the Mossad did. Right. Or someone did. We're assassinating people over there. And then like.

or someone did. We were assassinating people over there. And then like... If someone was murdering American nuclear scientists, we'd be quite upset about it. On the flip side, Iranians are murdering Iranian patriots. They murdered one of their Olympic wrestlers. The government, yeah.

The government executed him because he participated in a peaceful protest. So they had him executed. And he's a Russian wrestling star. And apparently he's a national star. And they wanted to let everybody know, we don't give a fuck who you are. We'll kill you. No, I mean.

If you're not on our side, we'll kill you. It has nothing to do with whether or not you've done a heinous crime. Like, you represent the resistance to our totalitarian regime and we'll fucking kill you so for the iranians i mean it's got to be they have to be pretty torn over there i mean i don't know how they how they feel about i mean i'm sure but how the fuck they feel about their own government right i mean it's a question of do they feel that we are actually helping them with their problems with their own government or are we, you know, part of – I mean, you look at some of our, you know, our friends in that region, the Saudis and the Emiratis and stuff. Those governments aren't so hot either. Well, the Saudis, the whole – I i mean i don't know how they feel about wrestlers attending protests but i'm guessing not that good the kashogi thing right fucking insane

i mean have you uh you know um brian fogel the guy who did that documentary icarus you know he has a new documentary coming out called the dissident about the kashogi it's fascinating have you seen it no no i haven't seen it i've seen it it's amazing iident about the kasogi it's fascinating have you seen it no no i haven't seen it i've seen it it's amazing i mean that's just so it's heartbreaking but it's it's amazing and it's it's uh it's deeply disturbing it's like you you watch that documentary and you're like holy shit man is this the clip for it yeah when is that available january 8th he'll be in here. There you go. Talk about that. He's amazing.

The work that he did with Icarus was bananas. It completely blew the lid off of the Russian doping, Olympic doping. The fact that they literally figured out how to break into the piss supply and change the piss bottles out. They literally took out the bad piss and put in the good piss. There you go. Yeah. P-heist.

Yeah. They basically had a state-sponsored pro-doping entity that was disguised as an anti-doping agency. That's crazy. They doped all their athletes. Yeah. Never here. I don't know. Well, I don't know about that.

We'll see. We'll see. Yeah. I'm nervous about this country because I feel like I've never seen us more divided and more willing to be divided. Like what you were talking about, like you going on the Ben Shapiro show, that people would be upset with you. This is not a normal thing for us to be so divided and so willfully divided. And I think social media accentuates that,

particularly the algorithms in social media, they accentuate that. Yeah, I think the difference between what we've often had which is diversity and disagreement and big gaps and what we have now which is alignment right we're like everything is about everything um that kind of totalizing polarization, nationalization of everything, social media, algorithms, it's troubling. It's a hard way to live. It's a hard way to think about problems. It makes it difficult to think about the concrete aspects of governance. Like, are we running a good high school system you know like is this working

it's like people aren't focused on the sort of tangible parts of politics and are very focused on the symbolic ones which are hard because when something's tangible you can work together, right? You can compromise. You can reconcile. You can try it his way. See if it works. On symbolic stuff, you know, what does it mean to be an American? Who are we? That's really challenging. I hope we can, like, turn the dial down a little bit. How do we do that, though?

But I don't know. It has to come from it has to come from people you know everybody complains about what's in the media but the audience drives a lot of what's in the media in what way i mean it depends like what do people subscribe to what gets clicked on what do people watch right but that's that's saying that the media is only going to produce things that get the most amount of views and not produce things of quality not produce things that they think are going to be interesting or intriguing so instead of making their business model let's do the best show we can do they make their business model let's do a show that will

get the most views let's do a show that will get the most views let's do a show that will create the most controversy because that'll be worth the most money that's one thing that i've gone way out of i've had controversial people on this podcast and have controversial subjects but i don't do it because i want more views i do it because i want to have these conversations because i think it's interesting and i like talking to weirdos and i like talking to intelligent people and i like talking to idiots i like talking to a lot of people. They're fun. It's it's interesting but Having something where your business model is entirely based on getting the most amount of views That is a problem in and of itself. Absolutely, but it's not the people's problem

It's the problem of the person creating it because you've decided to create something that it's only designed to get a lot of views i agree it's like an algorithm you're basically a human algorithm your show's an algorithm right well or you're you're just programming for algorithms and it's not good and it's not what anyone like says they want to be doing right but it is what happens this is why i asked you this. Do you think that there's benefit, that maybe there's a way that with this idea that you have of having a country with a billion people, do you think that this would force more of a melting pot type situation and have less polarization, that maybe it would be better if there was more of us? better if there was more of us. I mean, the idea is that it would be better to have a big aspirational goal, right? And so that kind of growth, right, that we are going to triple the population, that we are going to support people having bigger families or families at all,

that we're going to be more open to immigrants, that we're going to build the infrastructure transportation-wise that it takes, that we're going to dedicate ourselves to being number one forever and not kind of slipping behind China and India. But how does this, if at all, how does this help stop this polarization that we're experiencing? Because it gives us something to work on together, right? It's like going to the moon or facing down the Soviet Union. It's like, it's a project that right now for the past 10, 15 years, all of our politics is picking

at the scabs of sort of division that exists in our society, which are real, you know, like lifestyles are different, values are different. I mean, everybody knows that you go around. But we have a lot in common. I mean, I started talking about, you know, China is trying to use their market power to sort of censor Americans.

And nobody in America thinks that's good, right? Like there's nobody is like, yeah, I think it's great that like Marvel had to take a Tibetan character out of Doctor Strange. Yeah, isn't that crazy? Like that's, you know, it's not the biggest deal in the world. It is kind of a big deal though. But it's BS. Like what is that, right? And it puts in perspective like what our disagreements actually amount to.

That like when you compare us to china this is gulf right and like don't we want to stay number one don't we want to have the biggest market the biggest economy so you think that it's ever possible though to if we got big enough we could ignore the influence of china do you think they would put that money aside? Because China's always going to be big. Well, I don't think you ignore it, but you are able to have the upper hand. Do you really think that we could ever get to a point where Marvel would say, you know what, fuck China, we're putting a Tibetan guy in there.

It's supposed to be Tibetan. Well, you're in a place where you can say to them you've got to. We don't have to make it a white woman with a bald head. Let's make it a Tibetan guy like it is in the comic book. I think in the comic book it's a guy, right? I think so, yeah. Well, either way, it's a Tibetan. It's definitely Tibetan.

Yeah. The ancient one. Yeah. I don't think it's a woman either. I think they went full diversity. Maybe it's a good move going with a bald lady and people will say less shit than if you go with a white man. I mean, I think that that's right. You gender bend it.

So then it's like, well, maybe you shouldn't criticize that. Right. Because it's good. But it's like, no, we know what actually is motivating this. It's gross. And it sucks. But do you think we could ever get to a point where China wouldn't have an influence? Because China is still going to be a billion people in a huge market.

They're big. But I think we can be number one. I mean, there's beyond growth. I think that we have to be more forceful government-wise in how we treat our own company's willingness to cater into that. I think that we need to put some social pressure, if nothing else, on Hollywood to not do that kind of thing. But see, they did hedge their bets by making her a woman. It was very clever. Sure.

It's a clever little way of being a bitch. Do you remember when the World Health Organization, there was a spokesperson for the World Health Organization being interviewed by this woman, and she kept asking him about Taiwan. And he hung up the phone phone he hung up the camera and then when he came back on she was like uh so we were talking about taiwan it's like well china's done an amazing job and i think we've kind of covered that and she's like well and everybody's like look at this he won't even mention taiwan like because taiwan is not a recognized entity by the people's republic of china or whatever the fuck they call themselves i mean you know the who is it like a unique

uh bind in that regard but it's you know it's troubling right like when you see the olympics right on nbc like the broadcast was referring to taiwan as chinese taipei which was like some kind of international yeah and you're watching like this is bs you know like it's fine if the ioc itself because like you want to have china in the olympics it's a big country and so you know they want to be a pain in the ass about it i don't know maybe you got to give in but like an american television broadcaster it's like have some self-respect. Yeah.

It's called Taiwan. Like I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what Taiwan means. I was just like that's what it's called. Yeah. You're not allowed to say it. I'm not going to pretend.

Isn't that amazing though that they're willing to capitulate? But that's what people do. You know? It's so weird. Like the Doctor Strange thing is weird. But there's a lot of instances. The NBA thing is weird. There's so many of these things's so weird. Like the Doctor Strange thing is weird. But there's a lot of instances. The NBA thing is weird. There's so many of these things that are weird.

You're like, what? Really? But you just realize how much money is coming from China. Yep. And that they've worked very hard to expand that influence and reinforce that influence. They're very deliberate about it. And I think it's something america needs to be more serious about you know and i think people just like people in culture and society need to

be more outspoken that like you know because each little compromise i'm sure whoever in the script meeting was like can we just make this a white lady yeah it was like well what's the big deal right well okay but we're like completely erasing the doctor's tibetan well also tibetan culture right yeah you know like tibetan culture is not that big a deal in the united states of course because we're the united states but this is one of its footprints right and to just snuff it out like that because of chinese money because you want the chinese market and like that's that sucks yeah there was a video about all the different things they've done to films to cater to chinese markets and how different they make these movies it's and it was really bizarre yep um would that change at all if there was a billion Americans? I mean, I think it would.

I think that the more America has clout, the more we can say, look, you have to say no to Chinese censorship if you want to be in the American market. I don't think that's going to be a realistic approach if we slip and fall further and further behind. But they don't know that there's Chinese censorship until after the fact we find out,

well, Doctor Strange's mentor was actually supposed to be a Tibetan man. They turned into a bald lady. Well, no, I mean, with the movies, there's a whole process. Pan America did a good report about this, but where Hollywood films are submitted to the Chinese censors.

And we ought to say, I mean, the whole billion thing aside, I think we ought to say, mean a whole billion thing aside like i think we ought to say like no like you can't you can't do that did uh you know if the chinese don't want to let you say no to that didn't did tarantino say no to the editing of scenes i think there was a a thing they wanted edited out it might have been about bruce. Because you know there's this, which I found distasteful, even though I'm a giant Tarantino fan, his portrayal of Bruce Lee is just not accurate.

It made him look like a buffoon. Oh, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, yeah. I think they resisted the changing, is that true? Here it is. Tarantino, one of the rare directors with the power to demand final cut on his relatively expensive films, reportedly has no intention of re-editing the picture.

Not for Shannon Lee, not for Chinese censors squeamish about the film's graphic violence, not for any reason. Yeah, he refuses to re-cut for the Chinese market. Yeah, and I mean, you know, I don't know. I mean, that Bruce Lee was not... It was funny, but it's not really fair to him.

Okay, look at that. The film will not... It was funny. Scroll down on it. But it's not really fair to him. Okay, look at that. The film will not be released in China. Wow. He refused to edit the Bruce Lee scene out in order to secure a theatrical release in China. Yeah, the Bruce Lee scene is a problem for Bruce Lee fans who know of the historically wise Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee was very wise, and they made him look like a fucking idiot in that movie. It's kind of unfortunate. He's kind of doubled down on the criticism of that but I don't think he was a Bruce Lee fan. I think if you're a deep fan of Bruce Lee, you could say because of some things

that he said that maybe he was arrogant. I would argue that he's very confident and one of the reasons why he's very confident is he was at the time the premier martial artist of the generation and reintroducing martial arts and also a pioneer of this eclectic style of martial arts, which was completely taboo and forbidden. Martial arts were always very segregated. Like the people who did kung fu felt like what they did was the best the people who did karate thought what they did was the best and you did not share information exchange techniques and you do not incorporate them together into one system what he did was like completely taboo and it turned out

to be the very best way of expressing martial arts what he did was he's literally the founder of mixed martial arts putting all these styles. But to sort of characterize him as this cartoonish, arrogant buffoon, it's not accurate. I mean, look, Bruce Lee deserves a respectful movie about his life and his contributions, things like that. At the same time, I think it's great that Tarantino had, he wanted to do it that way for, you know, whatever reason. Yeah.

And he didn't change it because the Chinese government wanted him to. Agreed, agreed, yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, I really like Tarantino movies. I love them. There have always been people

who don't like them. Yeah. And that's fine too. They're probably my all-time favorite movies. If I had like one director who's made like a group of movies that I go, I can always count on this guy, it's Tarantino. They're always wild. They're probably my all-time favorite movies. If I had one director who's made a group of movies, I'd go, I can always count on this guy.

It's Tarantino. They're always wild. They're fucking crazy. All of his movies. Yeah, they're weird. I mean, that's his thing, right? He writes history. A lot of stuff gets extreme.

Yeah. And it's outlandish. And it would be a shame to let the government of China second-guess those decisions. Agreed. You know, and there's always, in any one of those movies, there's something that's too far. There's too much for somebody, you know? And it starts right with Reservoir Dogs, and they're sawing the guy's ear off. And, you know, it's horrifying.

Yeah. But I love that movie. Yeah, they're fucking great. They're great. They're great movies. Yeah, they're nuts. But that's also why people go to see great. They're great. They're great movies. Yeah, they're nuts. But that's also why people go to see them. You know you're in for a ride.

You go for a Tarantino movie, you don't think you're going to see Mary Poppins. You're going to see some wild, crazy shit. Some guy's going to smash some woman's face into a mantle on a fireplace and kill her. And you're like, holy fuck, this is nuts. The dog's going to bite that guy in the dick. Oh my God, this is crazy. They the dog's gonna bite that guy in the dick oh my god this is crazy

you know they're wild movies man it's hard to be genuinely shocking in this day and age and also genuinely i mean i was i was watching one time in hollywood and it's like they got the flamethrower out in the pool and i'm laughing i'm laughing my ass off in the theater and then i think it's like why why am i laughing but it's good like that's that's the magic of the movies well that's the magic of his movies yeah he knows how to make a tarantino movie better than anybody and the amazing thing is that there really haven't been very many people that have tried to duplicate that and be successful i guess you could say that robert rodriguez is in a similar vein with some of his films but it has his own flair as well like his films like um they have

like dust till dawn that's a rodriguez film it's got tarantino's actually in it right yeah he's one of the bad guys in it but that film it's kind of it's in the same vein, but his own thing. Well, there was this like Tarantino ripoff era in the 90s, right? So you would get movies like Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead. Yes. Which is okay. A pretty good movie, right? What is that?

He wrote it. Oh, there you go. There you go. So that's why it's similar. That totally makes sense. But Tarantino then totally transcends that genre right so it's like no he doesn't just make hard-boiled crime movies right he makes a world war ii movie he makes uh fucking once upon a time in hollywood he makes a western he makes django right and it's

much more hatefully visionary yeah than looking at reservoir dogs and pulp fiction and saying oh well these are movies about criminals in southern california who say funny stuff to each other right right like right well that's where the frauds come in right right yeah the what is that the one there's two fucking stupid movies with the well you know i'm talking about you know what is it the brothers yeah we're not saints. That's it. That's the worst version of it. Oh, there's a bunch of people who love that fucking movie

and I want to know who they are. I know what you mean. Yeah. I want to, I want to get their email addresses. They're canceled. I'm going to send them nonsense. Yeah.

You do long shows, man. Yeah. You okay? You got a pee? You hanging in there? I'll survive. well i feel like i feel like that's how you really get to know somebody yeah yeah um this idea has to have some drawbacks right what about all the waste what about all i mean is it you're just relying on science you're relying on technology. There's problems already with dealing with enormous numbers of people. You triple that in America. We already have problems with fracking

and problems with nuclear waste and problems with industrial waste. Yeah. So I mean, I do. I want people to know that the United States is a very low population density country right now. I am not talking about us pushing the frontiers beyond what is possible in human societies. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, to say the country's proper name, those are all much denser than even a billion Americans. So I don't think we need like off the wall science to address these kind of things. Number one, absolutely 100% real drawback is traffic. You know, it's like the pettiest thing, like, ugh, traffic jams.

But it is 100% true that the more people you have, the worse your traffic issues kind of get. So I love transportation policy. And my original draft of the transportation chapter, my editor was like, it's a bit much, Matt. You gotta reel it back here. There's a lot that we could do to have better transportation infrastructure in terms of pricing our roads, in terms of being smarter about how our commuter rail works, in terms of being smarter about how we locate houses. I mean, if you like to nerd out on

transportation stuff, the book is in it for you. But it is true that this would be tough, right? That America does not have a great record at its civil engineering. Our projects are incredibly more expensive than what people in Europe and Asia spend on them. And getting control of that and executing things that really make sense would be challenging. Because when you look at our fast-growing cities, I mean, we've talked about Los Angeles, but, you know, you look at Atlanta, you look at Dallas, places that a lot of people are rushing to. It's not – there's nothing wrong with those places. Like, they're great, thriving cities.

But the infrastructure build- out is not great. They sort of take what works for medium-sized cities and then just do more and more of it. And it's a big problem. You know, I don't think people are wrong to be concerned about those kinds of things. Waste. Waste.

What do you mean waste? Just like trash? Just everything. Everything that we have. Plastic, everything we like trash? Just everything. Everything that we have. Plastic. Everything we have. Recyclables. Everything that we have.

Well. Waste from, I'm assuming, we would have to build things here. Yeah. Got to build things. Right. So we have to manufacturing waste. But, you know, we are getting better at those kind of pollution things, right? The air and the water are much cleaner than they were a couple generations ago.

We are, you know, even beyond like the electric cars and all that really good stuff, even our gasoline powered stuff has gotten cleaner, which is all really good. And, you know, so I don't think that we have sort of unmanageable waste problems or going to in the future. But you could because you consider, look, if more people move here, it's not like there wouldn't be waste like back where they were coming from. Have you ever seen what happens in Los Angeles when it rains? What does happen? A bunch of things happen.

One of the things that happens is the ocean becomes impossible to go into. People that surf that didn't know. A friend of mine was a yoga instructor. Oh, the runoff. He's from Argentina, and he didn't understand that when you deal with rain in the runoff, you literally shouldn't be in the ocean because it's toxic. And he got really sick because he basically got poisoned because he's in this water that's just filled with pollution because it's all coming down the LA River, which is really just a fucking cement tube so you're it's in plastic and garbage and all the oil from the

water or the oil from the roads rather because the it never rains and when it does rain you're dealing with layer upon layer upon layer of oil that's just seeped into the the city streets and all that shit all the pollution all the brake dust everything just it's washed off into the city streets. And all that shit, all the pollution, all the brake dust, everything, it's washed off into the ocean. Imagine that with three times the number of people. Yeah, I'm going to be honest. This is like an area that I wish I knew more about. I know that in the part of the country where I live,

that there used to be much, much more severe problems with wastewater runoff into the Potomac River, into the Chesapeake Bay. And there was a big effort to mitigate it. And I honestly don't know exactly what it was. This is like, you know, I got to do a good interview. But it is doable, is I guess what I'm saying. A lot of East Coast rivers, the Hudson, around where I grew up, have gotten much cleaner over time by trying to manage the wetlands, things like that. I don't know what the Los Angeles situation is exactly.

But so, I mean, this is definitely the area where I kind of take the most heat from people is on these environmental, ecological-type issues. And, you know know i get it at the same time i don't think we can have a solution for our society that involves shrinking and having fewer people right or just wishing away the desire for economic development in the third world, or developing world, I guess is the polite phrase for it. Either we are going to be able to come up with the electric vehicles, the clean fuels, the next generation nuclear stuff, all those kinds of things that let us have a prosperous, clean planet, or else we're not. But saying, well, we're going to shrink our country or not allow people to move here, to me, that's kind of a fake solution.

Other drawbacks. What are the main criticisms that people have what first of all have people criticize this arbitrary number of a billion people like how do you uh how do you justify that you've come up with this is just to be provocative like how'd you come up with that number i mean it's not arbitrary arbitrary it's triple what we have right now. It would equal China as they're coming in decline. I totally can see it. Like, look, if we had $850 million or if we had $1.1 billion, it's fine. It's just a ballpark.

You got to have an anchor. I think if you do anything in life, it's like good to have a goal. And the goal can be a little bit arbitrary. So the goal is a billion? Yeah. Can you imagine someone saying that, though? Obviously, you are saying it, but imagine someone saying that on television.

They're running for president. What we need is a billion people in this country. So start fucking. Everybody, get together and have more kids. So Kennedy said, we're going to put a man on the moon within this decade. And as it happens, we did, right? 1969.

If the Apollo program, if it had taken until 1971 like what's the big deal like what's the difference but you set a goal very different goal than just a billion people like people would want to know like why a billion and what are you going to do with this billion and why would it benefit us to have so many more people and how is this going to make us stronger how is this going to be if you're about american exceptionalism and yeah about american nationalism like what is what's good about a billion people that's not good about 300 and whatever million people that we have right now 330 well but i mean bigger is better do we have 330 now yeah in fact i mean i'd take 2 billion 3 billion i mean it makes it makes it what well 3 Well... Three billion here? You couldn't get them.

Ten times what we have now? I don't know where the three billion would come from. How dare you, Matthew? You're talking crazy now. I want us to be the biggest country in the world. What about the food? How are we growing all the food? We got lots of food. Oh, do we, though?

America's got too much food. Yeah, we also have factory farming that we're also trying to factor out. Yeah. Don't you think that most people, if they could... I factory farming that we're also trying to factor out. Don't you think that most people, if they could... I mean, that's why they have ag gag laws. I think it's weird, actually, that we export. We're such a big farm exporting country. Which, to me, it's fine for New Zealand to just sell primary agricultural products. They sell a lot of meat.

America, we should eat our own food. Right, but you know that a lot of stuff that they send out is just like surplus corn and things along those lines. We probably shouldn't be growing. So we have less farmland, actually, than we did 50 years ago.

And yet way, way, way more food. Because the productivity has just surged. But you know there's also a real problem with topsoil. There's a diminished topsoil in this country that is pretty significant, and they don't really have a way to replenish it. Other than the people that are doing regenerative agriculture, which is a different way of farming than monocrop agriculture. Monocrop agriculture, when they're growing like hundreds or thousands of acres of corn, it's totally unnatural. It's not normal.

And they have to replenish that soil with nitrogen. They have to do different things to try to fertilize the ground. But there's an estimation of the number of years that we have of topsoil left and i think it's less than 60 i think some crazy low number of years that we can continue with the process that we're currently using and you know there's a lot of scrambling because a lot of people feel like we're regenerative agricultural even though you can buy food from these farms that essentially has almost a zero carbon impact overall. Because that's the way animals are supposed to live.

They're supposed to eat the grass and then shit. The manure becomes a part of the fertilizer. It's all... Alfalfa. Yeah, it all grows into a... And they're also not supposed to have monocrops, right? But you can't feed enough people with fast food and all the things that people desire today with the structures that are in place in terms of like delivering chicken and chick-fil-a and beef to

jack-in-a-box you're not going to get that through the same kind of regenerative agriculture because it doesn't yield the same amount of animals per acre right you'd have to have much more ground and you'd only have a certain amount of areas that are capable of doing this. Like, you have to have areas that are growing a lot of grass naturally. You have to have areas where these cattle can live year-round. You have to—there's a lot that has to be in place. Yeah, look, I mean, there's going to be a lot of issues about agriculture. That's a big one, right?

Well, this is not really about population growth, but about the sustainability of the food system and also climate change, right, which is going to alter where crop yields are high and where they're low. I mean, not just here, but all around the world. So, you know, there is an incredible need, I think, to push those kind of better farming practices, different eating practices. I mean, we were talking before, It's not good for us to have, like the processed food machine is an incredible business success story, but it's not good for us as people

and probably not sustainable as a sort of soil management thing. So, you know, I agree. Like we need to go back to that. But the world on a calories basis just has an incredible amount of food to sustain human life. Yeah, but people may need more than calories. They need nutrition. Right, right, right, right, right.

But we are on the wrong side already of that curve, right, in terms of these, like, meat yields and factory farming and overuse of the antibiotics and stuff there, if we were to pull back on those kind of things that are problematic for completely separate reasons, that actually increases the amount of like grain and acres and stuff that's available because meat is this incredibly inefficient use of the land. Is that, wait a minute. So how, so would you say that people have to change their diet then? So if you're ramping it up to a billion

people, you're going to have to cut out meat consumption? No, I'm not saying people have to, we have to do that to get to a billion. We have to change their meat consumption? We could leave everything in agriculture absolutely the same and have a billion people. We would just not be exporting agricultural goods.

We'd be consuming them domestically. Like America grows far more food than 330 million people need to eat. But do we grow enough meat and eggs? Yeah. And all that stuff to reach a billion people? Yeah, because we're right now feeding foreigners with it. Now, I thought you got into, I think, an interesting point, which is just our agricultural system has a lot of problems with it

that should probably be addressed. But it's separate from the population issue. I mean, right now, agriculture— But wouldn't it be exacerbated by an increased population? No. I mean, we would be redirecting our agricultural product from external markets to an internal market. Yeah, but you're saying this like you're the Chinese government and not individual farmers and businesses that have set up a life of doing things a certain way. This is not like you can have some national government mandate where they come in and tell you this is what you're growing now.

Fuck your alfalfa. You need to start growing wheat. Wait, wait, wait. I'm just saying we've got two separate questions here. One is, does the United States produce enough food to feed a billion people? And I'm saying it does right now already. Is that real though?

It's 100% real. Do we ship two-thirds of our food overseas? More. More than two-thirds? I mean, it's just incredible. We ship two-thirds of our food overseas? More. More than two-thirds? I mean, it's just incredible. We ship two-thirds of our meat. This is why when all the trade stuff was going down with China, right? The issue was always the farmers.

We made these huge payments to American farmers to make up for their sort of loss of those external markets. farmers to make up for their sort of loss of those external markets, because Americans don't buy enough food to keep the American farm sector in business. But then you raised, I think, the excellent point, and this is not in the book, but just like the farm system that we have is kind of dysfunctional. You know, like, we could just continue with soybean monocultures and exporting all this corn oil all around the world. We are sending corn to Mexico now as a result of NAFTA, right? And A, I mean, it's like they traditionally cultivated corn in Mexico. It's a very Mexican thing to have corn. Also, we're the rich country and they're the poor one. And normally

trade would go in the other direction, right? Exports would come, you know, raw materials from the less developed countries. But America is just such an incredible farm superstar. The other really weird thing is that we're the world's number one agricultural exporter. Number two is the Netherlands, agricultural exporter. Number two is the Netherlands, which, you know, that's like a tiny-ass country, super-duper crowded.

But that's because their farming operates on totally different principles from ours. Everything's in greenhouses, and the yield per, what do they call it, hectare over there, is astronomical compared to what we do, because it's a much more

capital-intensive system. So it's more expensive more capital-intensive system. So it's more expensive. But they get staggering amounts of fruits and vegetables and things like that grown out of very, very small areas of land over there. So there's a lot of different things you can do with an agricultural system. But our way is just great at using land lavishly, because we have a lot of land and not a lot of people who want to work on farms. You know, we have very few farmers in America, but an incredible amount of farming. And that's what drives these monocultures,

because they're very efficient in that sort of sense. But we may want to rethink it because there's a lot of ecological issues. What would be the method that you would rethink this? Like, how do you get these farmers on board, these farmers that are receiving subsidies for growing corn? And how would you shift that? It seems like you're asking a battleship to do a figure eight. Well, no, but you were the one who was asking.

How so? I mean, I was just saying we grow plenty of food right but then you were bringing up these points about the top soil yeah and other things like that so what do you want to do just so that's a fucking die out well it's a question we're gonna have to address yeah one way or the other right and you know we gotta we gotta look at the subsidies right we need to change what we pay people to do and pay them to do something that's more beneficial to society, which I think should be possible. I mean, people like money. Yeah, but the growing of all that food is beneficial to society. And the reason why they received subsidies in the first place was this all post-World War II. You know the whole reason for it because they thought that there was going to be legitimate – they really thought there was going to be a problem with the food supply.

Hunger, yeah. And so to subsidize the farmers meant that, listen, we're going to make sure that we put money into this so we have a stable food supply so that we have stockpiles. So there is a situation where something's wrong. We can get food to people. We will have food. We'll pay these farmers. To this day, we have a national cheese stockpile. Yeah.

It's a miracle. But what do you think we should do about the topsoil? Something has to be done where we – I don't know if it's even possible method, and the natural method is how the world works in terms of the wild. The animals chew the grass, they shit it out, it fertilizes, and because of that, in the wild, you have rich soil in a lot of the places where there is grass and these animals grazing. You don't really have that when you beat that ground into the dirt you know literally and figuratively over and over again some method has to be devised in order to make

that soil vibrant and i don't know what that would be i mean it seems like there's a problem with growing what we're growing now for the population that we have now. But you're saying that we give away or we outsource or ship out, export two-thirds of the food that we make. I didn't know it was that hard. Well, I'm saying we're exporting these tremendous amounts of meat, of pork, especially over to Asia, beef, and to some extent to parts of the world. And that consumes a huge amount of land to grow the feed. So we don't need to be doing that. I mean, we do it. to parts of the world, and that consumes a huge amount of land to grow the feed, right? So we don't need to be doing that.

I mean, we do it. It's a good business for pork people. But the environmental impact of the sort of pork, the pig shit lagoons and stuff, it's horrifying. You ever seen that one video where the guy has a drone and he flies it over this area? Yeah. Yeah. It's stunning. They've got lakes of? Yeah. Yeah. It's stunning. They've got lakes of pig shit.

Yeah, it's not great. The smell must be fucking insane. You know, my parents used to live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And when I went to visit them, I would drive to this area of Pennsylvania that was all farms. And it was so nasty. You'd have to roll your window up. And I'd be like, imagine living here. Imagine if you have a house over there, but this pig farm over here is just – or cattle farm, I don't know what it was – is ruining everything for you.

You can't smell outside because outside smells like shit, like literal shit. Yeah, that's not great. And they have the ability to do it. You're not just polluting the air. You're polluting life. Like life smells like shit. Like you smell the roses. Yeah, I smell shit and those roses.

Like no matter what you do, you're smelling shit. It's everywhere. And you're breathing in those particles no matter what you do. Yeah, the pork people. I was in Denmark one time. And so people took me to see a factory or some kind of facility where they were turning pig shit into biodiesel to run uh you know fuel trucks and it was the most foul smelling thing that i've ever seen because they had to concentrate

pig shit in a i think probably beyond theoon level to like pipe it into this place. Can you imagine though, running your truck off big shit? Well, what people want, you know, when people talk about like a healthy way of life, they talk about sustainability. They talk about having like a communal farm that the neighborhood shares. They talk about, you know,

figuring out a way to incorporate animal manure and agriculture and food waste and use that for composting and to have some sort of a natural way of living and dealing with the land. You all right? Yeah. That is true. Now, look, I mean, I think these agricultural questions are really, really fascinating for the sort of long term environmental picture of the planet. But I feel pretty confident that it is solvable.

How would you solve the topsoil issue? I mean, as you say, it is difficult politically to get people to change anything. But we have a lot of money. There's a lot of federal policymaking going into the agricultural process. And we probably have to put more into it because, you know, you're going to ask people to change. And then, as you say, like, we've got to tell you, look, if you want to get this money, you have to move to these more integrated methods where you don't have the same crop in the same field year after year after year. What about people that aren't receiving subsidies? What about people that are just growing food and selling that food? Like, how do you get them to shift?

And what do you do? Well, I don't think there's a big problem with the smaller, they call like specialty crop uh kinds of things i mean i might be wrong but my my impression is that these problems come from the large like one crop enterprises that are sort of dominant in the midwest that's not historically how farms have been operated uh but it's very effective labor saving technique you know because if everything's the same you can run a giant tractor off it well what could fix the topsoil issue on these enormous places you gotta well you're gonna have to find a real topsoil guy not but it doesn't have a big part i mean food has got to be a big part of having a billion people they have to eat well i

just i'm just i'm trying to say to you right so like we have a global food system now obviously there are people who are hungry in the world but it's a distributional question like the world is not anywhere short of food right moving and the united states is not short of food moving more people into the united states does not cause a food scarcity problem. There are a lot of other issues, right? Like one billion Americans, it's not everything. Like we got to think about our energy system, our agricultural system, all our kind of environmental type stuff. But I think those problems exist one way or another.

The other question is moving a bunch of people into the country that don't exist here right now. What would change with the quality of life of the people that live there? And would there be an adverse impact? Yeah, I mean, I don't think so. I mean, I talk a lot in the book about the studies of the, it's called Mario Boatlift, sort of influx of people from Cuba into Miami circa 1980. Scarface. Yeah, Scarface. Seems like it was negative. Well, yes, the portrayal in Scarface is a little bit negative. The statistical work indicates that, you know, it was good. Pay for most people went up. Miami's cool.

People like to go there. Pay went up. You know why? Cocaine. All the cocaine. It just didn't. There's a lot of cocaine over there, man. No, I mean, there was just a look at all of these Venezuelans who have moved to Colombia

because of the sort of terrible stuff that's happening in Venezuela. And it was the same thing. It was like wages for Colombians didn't go down. There was a study about Hurricane Maria, which drove a lot of people from Puerto Rico into the Orlando area. And so pay for construction workers went down, but pay for people who work in restaurants and retail stores went up to offset it. So I think that kind of immigration, it just can be great. I mean, it enriches culture. It's fine economically. Of course, you don't want 600 million people to just like come tomorrow.

Right. You know. So what's the plan to get us to a billion? You need controlled chaos. How much time for controlled chaos? It's like an 80-year time schedule. So two parts, right? So there's the immigration part.

And then there's we got to give people with young kids more money. Give them more money. Yeah, give them money. Who's we? Like the government. The government has to give people with kids more money. What do you mean by that? Most countries have, they call it a child allowance.

So parents of young children get a few hundred dollars a month to help with the financial cost. They just get it from the government. Yeah. And where does the money come from? Like taxes. I mean, where does money come from? So to give everyone who has children a few hundred dollars a month,

how much is that going to cost? It's about $98 billion. And where does that money come from? It comes from taxes. So you increase the amount of taxes that people pay yeah yeah so basically childless people will be subsidizing people with like two or three kids do you think that's going to be popular yeah people like it i don't know about mike lee likes it you know it's a republican mike lee okay um do you think that

there would be a lot of pushback on this idea? Because it seems like you're asking for people to pay for other people's lifestyle. Yeah. I mean, I am. I think that's the American way. I mean, we've got to pay for the health care of people who are sick. I think we've got to pay for the needs of families with children. We pay for Social Security, right? Yeah, kind of.

I mean, at least for kids, right? I mean, so look, if you're elderly, you get Social Security money in the United States, right? And like we think that's important. Retirement, it's something that we value as a society. Is there a cutoff if your income is like, say, over X amount of money per year? Yeah, you could structure it that way, right?

So one way to do it is to phase it out. So if you're making over $100K or whatever, you don't get the money. The other way is to have more affluent people pay higher taxes. I mean, there's different ways to make it work mathematically. I don't have a sort of dogmatic view about it. Personally, I like the completely universal program. But, you know, if the politicians want to do it. want completely universal meaning if you make a million dollars a year you still will get a couple hundred bucks a month if you have kids yeah just like bill gates is going to

get to social security hmm i think bill should opt the fuck out how about that well you know he's probably just going to give it away one way or the other. Yeah, he probably will. Yeah, a lot of people will. It just seems like this is a kind of, this is a crazy tax situation now, like to pay for all this. It's not that much. I mean, they just. Well, you're talking about a billion people. You're not even just talking about the people that exist now. Well, we're talking about people having more kids. So just in Trudeau's government, they implemented a policy like this in Canada last year, maybe two years ago.

They do a phase out, you know, like you were suggesting. So it's only people. I think it's like the bottom 60 or 70 percent of the Canadian income source from get it. It's a very effective way to combat child poverty. The Trump administration, they wouldn't put it this way, but they in their tax law, they expanded the child tax credit and sort of took a step in this direction. So it's, I think, less radical than you might think. I mean, if the, you know, Senate Republicans were doing it, at least moving in that way, it's a pretty liberal idea. I mean, Democrats, Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennett had a proposal that's similar to this,

Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennett had a proposal that's similar to this. They call it the American Families Act. So there's a fair amount of political support for these kind of ideas. And I think it could do a lot to reduce child poverty, which is good. I think it's sad to have kids growing up in poverty and to strengthen families, which is something conservative people care about, as well as more progressive-minded people. So I think it's good. Well, I certainly am in favor of doing anything that's possible to lessen child poverty and child starvation and hunger and child health care and making sure that people are taken care of. dealing with a billion people yeah and you've got x amount of hundred dollars per month that's going to how many hundreds of millions of families well but it's also more taxpayers you know how you think this is only a few billion dollars this sounds like it's in the trillions like what no

sorry sorry how much to be clear because it replaces some of the existing child support programs. Replaces, like what are you going to get rid of? So a lot of people currently get the child tax credit. Okay. Right, so you fold it into the new program. That's the main thing. So the net cost, I mean, $98 billion a year, that's a lot of money. But, you know, that's what it costs.

That's what it costs to give this few hundred dollars per month to all these families. To lower income families. And what would you get rid of? I say, you know, you get rid of child tax credit. You get rid of some of the tax deferred savings accounts like the 529 for kids college tuition. Because these are other ways the government funnels money to families with kids but usually in regressive ways that mostly help rich people a lot of people have a real problem with universal basic income and the same people that have a

problem with welfare they think that it reduces incentives it reduces people's desire to do better and it increases their reliance on the state. What do you say to that? I just don't think that's right. How so? I mean, I don't think that a modest supplement to people's incomes makes the difference between whether or not they like want to go out and, and desperation is the mother of invention, right?

When people are desperate, they do things that make them, you know, they work harder to, to try to get ahead. And a lot of times people with families and they realize that, Oh my God, I have to take care of these family,

this family and these people that I love so dearly. I'm going to really bust my ass and work hard. Yeah. And the human nature perspective is that if you give people a safety net, they always use it. If you tell people they have to go out there and they have to earn their own, they're forced into action. And most people will go out there and figure it out. But if you say you don't have to figure it out, here's some money. And what we're going to do is we're going to take this money from people that are already

successful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But look, this is why I am not talking about like the full UBI, right? Where you just get this money, like whatever, you know. $1,200 a month or whatever it is. Young kids doing nothing. You know, I'm talking about families with kids. Because kids just come with costs, right?

Sure. To help people out with that. I think you are still easily at the margin where going out and working and having some more money makes a real difference in your life and in the life of your family. And do you think that this will strengthen... To get people out of poverty.

You know, also, economically speaking, right, it's like the value of having somebody work 70 hours a week as opposed to 40 as a low-paid retail worker. Like, that's not high to society. Like, there's no need for people to be working like crazy hours i think the idea is the most medium the best case scenario is that they work their way up right so they work really hard in the beginning and then they use that money to get themselves out of a jam and then they keep improving their condition and that's the best case yeah obviously there's examples that we could both pull of pro and con you know where it works and where it fails miserably. And, you know, people's lives fall apart and you don't take care of your children and they grow up all fucked up because their parents aren't home because they're working for a small amount of money.

Look, I think that we have more cases where people are going to be able to work their way up if they, as children, are well taken care of. You know, if they have stable housing and a stable food supply and things like that. I think that that is the barrier that we can overcome. Yeah. Right? To let people sort of have that kind of upward mobility rather than saying, well, we got to like crack the whip. Along the lines of what Bill Gates is saying is about making sure that children are healthy

and that it pays off in the long run yeah i mean he's talking on on the very the very low level of you know the developed world and basic vaccinations but yeah i mean to say to somebody in kenya like well if you want your kids to not get sick and die like maybe go work a little fucking harder man like that's crazy like that's right right that's kenya no no i mean in america obviously there's more opportunity there is more opportunity and and and that's why a lot of people want to come here but i still think that fundamentally we get more out of human possibility by helping people as kids right then we do by being harsh on them as adults i agree the the problem that people have with relying on the government also is that you're relying on the government to

divvy up this money correctly and then you're relying on the government with no auditing at all you don't get a an account balance sheet of where your taxes went that the government's gonna do what they always do when you give them plenty of money. They're going to waste it. There's a lot of suspicion of the government in America. This is not a country of people who love the state, have a lot of confidence in government programs. I think at the same time, Social Security is something that people really like and appreciate because actually cash benefits are much more transparent than the idea that like,

sometimes people will say it's very fashionable in the business world to be like, well, we need these like complicated like job training programs and we're gonna give people the skills they need. And you know what sounds great? Like I would like people to have skills. I could use some skills, I don't know.

But like, does anyone really believe that Congress is going to sit down and make a program that trains everyone? That to me is unrealistic. They could definitely send money around. I mean they send money to old people. They send veterans benefits. They can send family benefits to people. So they can send money but they can't create job programs? They can't create

training programs, right? I don't think so. It's hard. It's hard for the government to guess what's going to be useful to employers. You know, that's the kind of thing that's left better. I don't want to wreck the vibe, but I think I'm going to have to get to the

airport. Oh, no. No need to wreck the vibe, but I think I'm going to have to get to the airport. Oh, no. No need to wreck the vibe. Dude, we did three hours already. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. No, listen. Thank you very much.

I really appreciate it. And good luck with your book. And it's a fascinating and it's an intriguing topic. And it definitely opens up a lot of debate. Thank you. I don't know if I agree with you or not. I hope you're right. I hope it works out. Well, this is great.

This is like a ton of fun. I enjoyed it very much I'm really flattered to be on here thank you so much my pleasure thank you very much and good luck

thank you bye everybody