The Sevan Podcast - David Pan | Getting California Back on Track

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

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Starting point is 00:01:04 Oh, I love it. Good audio. Good video. Sweet. All right. Yeah, I think I got it figured out. That was a good spot, though, before. I like it. I like the family home basement look. And I do like the fact that you had a bunch of family over for the holidays. It's always a good sign when someone's got the family together and they're bringing people home for the holidays. It's really nice. It's a really nice time for us. I mean, we're kind of spread out, so it's nice to be able to get together. David, in a nutshell, I was raised in Berkeley, California. I was raised in a very political family. All Democrats, Republicans were bad people.
Starting point is 00:02:06 a libertarian. And the process of CrossFit is to take kind of absolute responsibility and accountability for your health through diet and movement and to let the body express itself in a the way it's supposed to be expressed and to take really, really good care of yourself and not to put that out on other people. Right. So you can live a strong, fulfilled life. And the owner is a, his dad was the former chief scientist of Hughes aircraft and he's a bit, he's a big brain guy and he trusts his discernment over outsourcing discernment because of his consciousness and his capacity to see things. Right. And he's a big advocate of freedom. So slowly over the years, as I work for him, my perspective, I would hear his perspective and I was always hearing it. And of course I would have these emotional pushes against it, right? Because of kind of my loyalty to my upbringing and my family. And then I had kids
Starting point is 00:02:56 at 49, I started having kids and now I'm 51 and I have, sorry, at 43, I started having kids. And now at 51, I have three kids. I have two seven-year-old boys and a nine-year-old boy that I'm raising myself with my wife. We raise them out of the system. And so I've gone through this dramatic shift of understanding, being more logical in my choices. And, you know, when I went to college, I went to UC Santa Barbara and it was called affirmative action. But I never asked what affirmative action was. I never thought, oh, when these kids get in, these kids don't get in, right? And I'm to let the people – I'm to help people, right? And I was tricked by definitions of words and not asking what things meant and not actually looking at things. So I've had this awakening, right? And now I have this platform through this podcast, and it's a fun process to share.
Starting point is 00:04:05 And when I saw your stand up, I think it was at a regents meeting and you were defining the actual implications of diversity, equity and inclusion. and inclusion. I was so excited that someone like you was running for office who could speak in this calm tone and who could express it that actually through this forcing people to believe this thought, we're actually doing the antithesis of diversity. It's been okay for years for an example for people not to like Christianity, but now all of a sudden, if you're not a fan of Islam, you're Islamophobic. And so we have this lack of balance in what you're allowed to think and say. And I appreciate your stance on it. So I just wanted to have you on and talk with you. And I have a broad range of questions for you in regards to that.
Starting point is 00:05:04 Great. Yeah, I really appreciate this. So you're a German professor at the University of Riverside? University of California, Irvine. Irvine. Okay. I always get those two confused. And how did you become a German professor? You do not look like a German professor. Right. So I started out in college and I did one of the, this is at Stanford, they had this Western culture program.
Starting point is 00:05:33 It was called, well, it was a special program called Structured Liberal Education. And they did the classics of Western civilization. And a lot of them were Germans, right? We studied Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche and Freud and Kafka and, you know, a lot of classic Western writers, but included a lot of Germans. So I got really interested in that. And so I started to learn German. And then I just kept doing that. When you went to Stanford, what did you go for?
Starting point is 00:06:04 What was your intent? My intent was to study physics, actually. Okay. But then, you know, I really just enjoyed doing humanity stuff. I think a lot of it from this course that I took in the beginning was like a freshman kind of comprehensive Western culture course. A kind of course that they don't really do so much, you know, today anymore. But my department still does that kind of work. I mean, it's a department of European languages and studies, so we obviously do western culture.
Starting point is 00:06:37 And when I search the internet for videos about you and I want to learn about you, searched the internet for videos about you and I want to learn about you, I see you speaking about, I don't know how to categorize it. I want to say it's, you have a focus on maybe the constitution or on liberty or on liberal values or, can you explain that to me? liberty or on liberal values or can you explain that to me um well uh let's see i guess there's a lot of different things that i've done but uh uh yeah i do have a focus on um i don't know what you call it i suppose oh good that makes me feel good that you don't know what to call it either but clear but clearly you're interested in in the truth and the operational mechanisms that allow society to function through law. Yes, but also, you know, I think a lot of what I've been trying to promote is something that actually comes from one of my mentors, Paul Taccone, who's passed away. He was the editor of this journal, Telos.
Starting point is 00:08:11 And he developed this idea that he called federal populism, which is a real strong focus on our Constitution and the way it's structured, particularly the federalist aspect, which is to say federalism for him meant putting as much responsibility down toward the local communities and away from the central government. But he promoted an idea of populism, which was combined with that, which really meant we're not going to try and micromanage people. We're going to give them freedom. We're going to give them responsibility. And I think those are the two things that really guide a lot of what I think, what I'm, you know, what I've been thinking through, which is to say, we have to rethink the way we relate to our government. You know, right now, you know, we've got this legacy of welfare programs, from the New Deal, where the idea really is to kind of micromanage people and the way they live. And that's something, you know, it takes away freedom, it takes away responsibility. And we really have to rethink, I think, the way in which the
Starting point is 00:08:59 government relates to us. I mean, you know, I feel like the government relates to us as if we were some kind of machines, you know, like clocks or something like that. You know, I feel like the government relates to us as if we were some kind of machines, you know, like clocks or something like that. You know, some machine needs oil, you give it oil. Like, you know, you think people are needing food, you give them food stamps, right? But people are not like machines, right? They're more like, you know, at the very least, they're like animals, like a dog, right? You know, like you treat a dog a certain way, you know, you give him table scraps every day. He's going to be always begging, right? I mean, you affect people's behavior by the types of decisions you make about, you know, how to
Starting point is 00:09:35 provide for them. And if, you know, I think the government, I'm not against government, right? What I'm against is the government trying to micromanage. And so, you know, the way in which you want to promote certain kinds of behaviors, which is something like, you know, promoting responsibility, promoting freedom is not the is not to somehow, you know, we've got benefit systems in which we only give people, you know, the food stamps, if their income is below a certain level, if they don't collect up any assets, well, you're kind of promoting that behavior. You're promoting this behavior of not producing income, of not, you know, collecting up assets, right? And it's totally kind of antithetical to what you really want to be promoting people to do to, you know, you want
Starting point is 00:10:18 people to have meaningful lives, you want people to be productive, people want that people want to have meaning in their lives. And you're taking away like one of the key ways that people are able to develop that meaning in their lives, which is, sayrespect and responsibility for yourself, obviously, right? And so you take that away from people and you're undermining their relationship to themselves and their meaning for themselves, right? So anyway, so that's like a kind of a fundamental aspect of what I'm thinking through, or the way I think through the way we should relate
Starting point is 00:11:04 to our government. So this is a long answer, but I hope that gives you an idea of kind of my perspective. I'm here for it. The three platforms or the three topics that you're driving home on your website and that I've heard you talk about is a school choice for parents, reducing inflation, and return to law and order. I want to dig in on those briefly. When you say return to law and order, what do you mean? Well, so, you know, one thing that I really think that we've gotten into a problem with, and this has been, you know, frankly, it's been a problem with our courts to a certain extent.
Starting point is 00:11:46 So, you know, a lot of people in my district are concerned about homelessness. Right. So we're not you know, this is not Los Angeles. This is like Santa Ana, which is Orange County. But it's, you know, some of the problems from Los Angeles are kind of leaking over over here. And, you know, people are worried about the homelessness. are kind of leaking over over here. And, you know, people are worried about the homelessness. And, you know, there was this recent court case here in California, Grants Pass, California, where the court had made this judgment that the city of Grants Pass was not able to enforce an ordinance against vagrancy, right? Vagrancy means like sleeping, like if someone sets up a sleeping bag in front of the door of my small business, right?
Starting point is 00:12:31 Exactly. Right? Okay. Okay. And so, and so the, you know, the determination of the court was this was cruel and unusual punishment. And in fact, they set a really high standard. They said that if there are not enough shelter beds for everybody, for all the homeless people in the city, then you can't make it illegal for any single homeless person to be in violation of the law.
Starting point is 00:13:03 of the law. And so, you know, this is, this is actually, it was just announced it was going to the Supreme Court, you know, because it's, this is such a big deal about taking away the ability of cities, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to make it a violation to be, you know, like you said, sleeping in somebody's, in somebody's business or having, setting up a tent on a public sidewalk. I mean, you know, this is, this is, you know, this is a basic right of a community to be able to enforce certain laws that, that maintain public order. And we've lost that to a certain extent, partly because of our court system. And, you know, I mean, it's, it's a shame, because the court system is supposed to be upholding law. You know, this was, this was actually, I mean, if we want to go back to affirmative action,
Starting point is 00:13:48 you know, the whole affirmative action thing, you know, it really started with the Supreme Court, you know, in the, you know, the Backe decision about setting, you know, setting up or allowing this whole system of preferences. Even though they tried to restrict it, you know, it really had this kind of perverse effect. So this is one of the spots, going back to like how we use words, affirmative action, abortion, and now the word homelessness. So I spent many years homeless by choice. And the thousand homeless people I met, there was one other guy besides me who was not a drug addict of the 1000 homeless people I met. Anecdotally, two of us were not drug addicts. And I think it's just a crazy mischaracterization to call them homeless because me and you, David, we we sort of have these and I'll project this onto you. We have these priorities, right? We want to get oxygen and then we want some food
Starting point is 00:14:45 and then we want shelter. And then we would like some intimacy with a family, a woman and create a family and start building. And so there's this, this order, this natural order that I would say that we're in. And when you are a drug addict, what happens is, is you're willing to forego shelter. You're not concerned about shelter and food. You do want air, but also your occupation is stealing because there's a by any means necessary component when you're a drug addict. And that's another thing that frustrates me because it's similar to what happened with COVID.
Starting point is 00:15:26 We are trying to cure the symptom instead of the cause. And we'll never build enough. And it goes back to what you were saying. If we just keep building homes for homeless people, the non-homeless people who are on the fringe, instead of fighting to get better, they'll be like, well, I can get shelter. I'll just fall off this way. Because for them, they're like a rat trying can get shelter i'll just fall off this way right because for them they're like a rat trying to get through the maze they just want to be covered by the rain or covered from the rain yeah right um you know i think a huge part of our welfare system really
Starting point is 00:15:55 functions that way it really just incentivizes people to to do these things that you know from their perspective is really rational right you know uh if if if by earning money and having doing making a decent living i'm going to lose all sorts of benefits oh then why should i be doing that right and then you know you got people next door you know who are working really hard and they're just basically barely getting by and they're watching somebody else it's you know that that's really not doing anything is getting kind of the same benefits, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's demoralizing for people. But by, well, and by mischaracterizing the problem, they're exacerbating it. So if we know the problem from a COVID infection is overweight, four or more comorbidities,
Starting point is 00:16:39 we conflate the issue as COVID as opposed to nutrition and movement. Yeah. Like I don't, not a single, you know, maybe of the 4 million people who do CrossFit on all the continents in the world, maybe two died from COVID. And because at our baseline in our cult, we have a food pyramid. You know, we have, we have nutrition as our number one and then movement. And one of our things is don't eat sugar and so um i just get concerned when i hear it called homelessness
Starting point is 00:17:12 because to address homelessness will exacerbate the problem of homelessness right yeah as opposed to address them as what they really are they are and then here's another thing imagine if you or i like if you had a daughter who was addicted to heroin, or I had a son who was addicted to heroin, I'm not opposed. I don't want free needles given to them. And I don't want them allowed to be on the street. I would like them to be arrested and get reprieve in a jail for two weeks or a month. Yeah. And I think to force them into rehabilitation, I think that's a necessary thing, right?
Starting point is 00:17:48 It's a good thing for them. Right. If they're not able to choose to get into rehab, then yes, I think it would be a much better thing to force them into some kind of rehab program. There's this demarcation line, right, David, where we have to – like you said, you're not against government. Like we need the government to tell us red means stop and green means go because if we don't agree to that, we're going to get in car accidents. But somewhere there's a line where if they tell us too much, it's like, hey, you can't fix everything. You will exacerbate the problem.
Starting point is 00:18:19 Yeah, right. Well, and it's also kind of the – I mean, it's not just about the quantity. It's really the quality of the type of interventions you want. So, like, you know, one thing that the government does, you need government in order to have a free market. Because the government guarantees the market. The government sets up the conditions for a free market by the types of laws that it establishes. Obviously, a communist government is not allowing a free market. And so our government has certain policies that promote that free market in a lot of places, but not in all places, not enough places, I think.
Starting point is 00:18:59 And so it's about thinking through the way the government is going to really relate to people. And it really is more like, I guess, you know, one metaphor you can use is maybe like a garden, right? I mean, I talked about like how you would raise your, you know, deal with your dog or something like that. But it's something where you have to be smart. You've got to set up the conditions for flourishing, right? That's what you need to set up. You can't be directly intervening, right? That's what you need to set up. You can't be directly intervening, right? But you want to set up the right conditions and the right kind of structures.
Starting point is 00:19:32 David, you're running for Congress in the state of California, and your area is Orange County, the Orange County area? Yeah, well, it's a, you know, yeah, part of Orange County, right? So there's sort of the northwestern edge of Orange County. So it's Santa Ana and Anaheim, basically, a couple, you know, part of Fullerton, part of Orange and Stanton. So it's like, yeah, Orange County includes about five congressional districts, and this is one of them. Is it a, do they have a Democrat or a Republican representing the region now? Right now that district has a Democrat representing it. He's been – his name is Lou Correa. He's been in there for – this is his fourth term.
Starting point is 00:20:17 And they're four-year terms or six-year? Two-year terms for Congress. Oh, okay. So it's like seven years or so. Okay. I had no idea. Oh, okay. George Floyd incident and the lockdowns. So it was a double fear, right? It was the mischaracterization of what I call the suicide or death of George Floyd with the lockdowns that sort of sent this, our civilization to break its informal partnership with law and order and basically cause police to be afraid to, um, to interact with people with darker skin. And, um, and there's tons of anecdotal information out there. If you talk to cops,
Starting point is 00:21:18 um, does that interest you at all at the root of where we tipped? Because all of us, we weren't seeing all of these things of roaming groups of kids going into Nordstrom's and cleaning the place out until sort of this happened. And there became these laws like in Santa Cruz where it's not a, it's not a, basically not a crime to steal stuff or it's a really small crime under $950 and things like that. Right. Well, that's a huge problem here under $950 and things like that. Right. Well, that's a huge problem here, right? I mean, this is not the courts, this is our legislators who have created this law that basically legalizes, you know, petty theft. And it's undermining, yeah, it's undermining the legal, I mean, it's undermining law and order.
Starting point is 00:22:04 And it's just created this sort of culture of petty theft. It's really a shame. And so this is obviously something that I'm really concerned about, too. And it's disproportionately hurting small businesses, right? I mean, I can't have, if I have a small business, I can't lose $500 worth of product in a day. If I have a small business, I can't lose $500 worth of product in a day. Yeah, right. I mean, but even large businesses, you know, I mean, Target has been closing down stores in some of these inner city areas. I mean, it doesn't matter what kind of business. I mean, especially small businesses, but yeah. There is some crazy number, David, where like it's in the 20s, CVS is or Walgreens closed in the Bay Area because of the thievery and then and then in the northwest it's disputed
Starting point is 00:22:54 why but like for four Walmart's closed like in a region up in the northwest like in Washington but I but I think it's safe to say that it was because of the stealing yeah Yeah, right. No, no. Public announced some of these decisions. It said, yes, we can't deal with all of this theft. I mean, you know, business can't run that way. And that, you know, there's no way to do anything about them.
Starting point is 00:23:21 You're just supposed to let them run in and run out. I mean, there's no, you know. And so that is part of the public safety, right? I mean, because we're working, we're making money and that money represents our human energy. They're basically stealing time from us. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No, that's absolutely a huge problem here in California. And you know, I, you know, it'll take some time before we can turn there's so many i mean there's a you know super majority of of democrats in the in the state legislature here uh and it'll take
Starting point is 00:23:50 a long it'll take some time it'll effort um to to turn that around to be able to change those laws the the homelessness thing i think it'll you know some something can be done more quickly but just if if the supreme court can can make a new decision on this issue of how cities deal with things like vagrancy. But these laws that are in place in California, that'll be more difficult to change. Were you always a Republican? No. In fact,, I was like, I'm a Democrat all my life. I just, I switched to Republican last year, though I guess my views had been changing for a long time. I mean, I've written, I wrote on affirmative action like 20, 25 years ago against affirmative action. But, you know, I guess, you know, I started as a Democrat mainly because I thought Democrats were kind of the party of rights for minorities, really.
Starting point is 00:24:53 I mean, that's, you know, I mean, I think, you know, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that's something like, you know, the Democrats really pushed. Although a ton of Democrats voted against it, including Al Gore's dad. Okay, yeah, right. But it was bipartisan. I mean, it was Republicans and Democrats, but it was something where you could think that Democrats were, I mean, we've always, I think, thought that Democrats were more the party of minorities and kind of supporting things like equal opportunity. But, you know, they've subverted that right where they're against equal opportunity now and in favor of this idea of equity. Right. That's I think that's the key shift that they've made. Right. Where they say, no, we don't want equal opportunity. We want equity. And that's this whole concept that, I mean, yeah, it's this idea. It's actually, I mean, I think of it as a form of socialism, really, because it's saying that we want equal outcomes, equal results. We're not looking for equal opportunities. So then we have to engineer these results, right?
Starting point is 00:26:05 You know, admit more minorities, admit more, well, but specific minorities, you know, the ones that are deemed to be underrepresented. And I hate that term too. That's the term they use, underrepresented minorities, but they're talking about blacks and Hispanics, but they're talking about blacks and Hispanics. But they're not actually underrepresented in the sense that the qualified applicants, there's
Starting point is 00:26:32 a certain number of qualified applicants from blacks and Hispanics. And those are the ones that should be admitted. But if we're admitting more Blacks and Hispanics because we're letting in those who are less qualified than people from other races, right? And so that's not underrepresentation. They're actually overrepresented from my point of view in the sense that you should be admitting, you should be using the same standard as everybody else. Now, if they're underrepresented as a portion of the population, right, then the issue is not so much, you know,
Starting point is 00:27:10 on the level of college admissions, the issue is in primarily, I think, in schooling on the more basic elementary level, right? Primary schools, you know, high schools, right? And Affirmative Action's not solving that at all. It's actually diverting attention from that problem, right? Where we really need to be focusing there and that, you know, and affirmative action is not solving that at all. It's actually diverting attention from that problem. Right. Where we really need to be focusing there and that, you know, we can get into school vouchers. But that's really one of the things that I think that that we need in order to improve the schools.
Starting point is 00:27:34 But, you know, there's this whole teacher union lobby that opposes that. I want to go back to switching to become a Democrat. Was that difficult for you? I want to go back to switching to become a Democrat. Was that difficult for you? And what were the implications of switching and running for Congress as a Republican while you're in a system, which is the UC system? And I don't know how involved you are in the Chinese community, but in a system or in an area where, you know, 80, 90% of the people are Democrats? Yeah. Well, you know, I guess I've been developing a kind of reputation as a conservative anyway, just because of the stuff I've been writing. I had just not, I guess, yeah, officially announced that I was Republican and kind of, I guess that's been difficult to a certain extent.
Starting point is 00:28:32 You know, academia itself, all of academia is really heavily skewed toward the Democrats. In fact, you know, the ratio on our campus, you know, in this area around UC Irvine is something like 25 to 1, where Democrats are Republicans. I can't think of a single Republican in my whole school of humanities. There's one guy who retired a little while ago, but's that's the only one um so yeah i think that the difficult thing that i had was really that i wasn't really making much headway in in academia and um you know publishing my stuff and and getting a hearing for things that i was writing right uh and that's what was so frustrating and that's why I've said, okay, look, I need to get out of this system and, you know, work outside the university in some kind of
Starting point is 00:29:32 political capacity. Because, I mean, you know, the type of work that I was doing was a lot of political theory, a lot of stuff related to politics, but not like activist stuff, right? but not like activist stuff on more of a theoretical level. And that was where a lot of the frustration was, where I just was not getting a hearing from anybody. Was the shift scary? Were you scared? I was scared about going into politics because it was such a new thing for me. How about losing your job, though? I mean, here you are uh very successful respected you um how long have you been at the at the at the university uh i've been here since 2006 so i guess 17 almost 18 years yeah yeah and so many people would be afraid to um
Starting point is 00:30:30 express logical views in their workplace or anywhere for fear of retaliation. I mean, it's real in California. Yeah, I guess so. I guess I wasn't so worried about that. I mean, theoretically, I guess, you know, what happens, i think there's there there have been other tenured professors who have been able who who have somehow lost their jobs due to positions they've taken right um and so it's not a it's not like there's no danger of that um generally though what they've had to do in order to do that is to find some kind of excuse to do it. And generally, it would be some kind of like, you know, sexual harassment. That's like one thing that they can use, right? If there's something that ever happened or even, you know, they can use that to force somebody out.
Starting point is 00:31:18 But it's true. Also, something about discrimination, right? They could use that to force somebody out as well. But they would have, you know, they have to use kind of these underhanded means, in a sense, in order to force somebody out. So I don't know. I didn't feel that I had any vulnerabilities there. I mean, maybe I'm just being delusional about that. But on the other hand, you know, the reason I got into academia is to pursue what I felt to be, you know, to pursue truth, right?
Starting point is 00:31:48 To pursue, you know, to be figuring out the way things work and talking about it. So I didn't feel like I should, I didn't want to compromise that. And yeah, and I felt that even though I was publishing things, especially through this journal, Tilos, it just wasn't getting me hearing from people. I mean, Tilos, you know, we've been around for a long time, over 50 years, but, you know, our readership has been going down and down because our readership was was mainly academics right and they just they won't they won't listen to what we're doing anymore i mean it's i don't
Starting point is 00:32:30 know it's it's it's really a shame um because um i think i mean look i'm biased right i'm the editor of the journal but i think we're doing some of the most interesting stuff in stuff in academia now we you know we have a wide range of perspectives. And we've been calling out a lot of this stuff. I mean, we had an issue on universities about a year ago. I thought it was a great issue, really revealing a lot of the problems that are at universities, which are really serious problems with where, yeah, I feel like truth has kind of receded from what's top of mind amongst people at university. And, you know, what's replaced it is a kind of bureaucratic rationality where they, you know, there's, there's this sort of a set of ideological ideas, and you just
Starting point is 00:33:29 want to promote those ideas. And you have in the research has turned into, you know, different ways of reproducing those ideas and reinforcing them. And they have to go through these really like complicated intellectual like um strategies in order to to reinforce what they want to say uh it's just it's only only only an intellectual could uh could appreciate it and and believe it right because of the way it's it's so convoluted i mean it's just i mean and i don I don't know, my field is literature. And so there's all these literary critics talking about whatever Franz Kafka or talking about,
Starting point is 00:34:13 I wrote an essay last year was about contemporary German writers talking about Islamic women in Germany. And there were some real serious critiques of what's going on within the Islamic community in Germany, in this text that I was reading, but people did not want to see it. You know, people were just, you know, the critics, you know, the German professors who were writing about it, they're all about, you know, Islamophobia and stuff like that without really wanting to address the – I mean part of the issue here was how misogynistic a lot of the Muslim practices were in Germany or are in Germany, and they just didn't want to see it. They just didn't want to talk about that.
Starting point is 00:35:02 But that situation also is an interesting one in regards to um what's the jews uh the jews are clearly marginalized and underrepresented um that yeah i think there's 15 million of them worldwide and there's 1.8 you know billion uh muslims and there's you know 54 muslim countries and there's one jewish state that's always another one that interests me those words aren't convenient in those arguments either when you have this tiny little piece of land with these few people who happen to be armed to the gills. But those words don't work there either. You talked about DEI and about how when someone applies to go to work at the university, there's a part of the application process. There's a DEI section.
Starting point is 00:35:57 Can you explain that to me? Because now I haven't been in the workforce for – I worked at CrossFit for 15 years, and then I've been just doing my own thing self-employed for the last five years. So I don't have no idea what's going on in the outside world, but I had a friend apply a couple years ago at a community garden, and I couldn't believe the questions they were asking him. Like they were asking him questions about how he feels towards certain groups of people based on like their sexual preference or the color of their skin, and it was to work at a community garden. I was like, yeah, Berkeley, Berkeley Berkeley California okay that's Berkeley okay yeah Berkeley ironically a Jewish gardens too that they had there but um what's going on at the university
Starting point is 00:36:37 this process that's supposed to increase diversity is actually reducing it correct yeah well I mean you know the first issue is just that the way they define diversity is actually reducing it, correct? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the first issue is just that the way they define diversity is just in terms of color of your skin, right? Which is really kind of absurd to me, right? You know, diversity of perspective, it's just about, they just reduce it to color of your skin. Which is, which would we agree that just, it's a biological, at the most factual level, it's a biological at the most factual level it's a biological phenomenon and the only reason it matters is your uh relationship with the sun yeah right yes um i mean it's i mean the problem is that everything else is just a correlate is what i'm saying
Starting point is 00:37:19 yeah right it's not a fact yeah yeah i mean it's like hair color or something like that or eye color right basically right right it's no different fact. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like hair color or something like that, or eye color, right, basically. Right. Right. It's no different. But, you know, the problem, obviously, is that people have used skin color in the past as a way to categorize people, right? Right. But that's just not the case anymore in the United States. I just don't think, I mean, you know, we had, you know, this, we had a black Republican presidential candidate, right, Tim Scott, nobody talked about
Starting point is 00:37:49 his skin color. It was all about his character, about his ideas, right? And so we've advanced really far in this country, and we should be proud of that. And people are just, people are not seeing that. I mean, I've seen that, I mean, I, you know, I was born in 1963, right? That was before the Civil Rights Act. That was, we had colored bathrooms in the United States in 1963, right? And, you know, just to see the progress we've made since then, it's just incredible. I mean, I think we should really be proud of that. I mean, I think we're probably the least racist country in any any in the entire world i don't think there's there's there should be any doubt about that um and and yet people think that
Starting point is 00:38:30 there's this big problem of racism anyway so uh by the way there's a there's i'm gonna i'll get you back on track with the dei but there's this comedian now who has this bit and he said you know why they call sweden sweden in iran Iran and China China? Because those countries are just saying we're racist. Our country is our race. So when you think of the – like that's the premise for all countries except for one, and that's the one we live in. Exactly. Yeah, it's fascinating. And those other countries will be like, hey, I don't understand why you guys got this racist problem. Well, it's because, hey, listen, you only have Koreans there or you only have armenians there like you're you you're not involved in this social experiment but okay so so i'd love to hear about the process of getting a job right yeah so
Starting point is 00:39:14 um so the first thing that happens right is anybody that applies for an academic job these days you have to submit what they call a diversity statement, right? And the diversity statement, basically what they're asking you is to kind of explain how you promote this ideal of diversity, equity, inclusion in your teaching, in your research, in your service to the profession, right? So it's like a kind of ideological litmus test, essentially, because, I mean, if you say, oh, I'm totally opposed to this idea of diversity, equity, inclusion, they're not going to give you a job. They won't even consider you. Right. And even if you're not, you know, they're using that as one of the components for filtering through the applications right in the very beginning.
Starting point is 00:40:02 Right. filtering through the applications right in the very beginning, right? And so, you know, this is the kind of thing which is an ideological litmus test where they're clearly taking a position that's promoted by, you know, by one party. I mean, it's the Democratic Party that promotes this. And they're saying that this is a condition of, or a criterion, one of the main criteria that we're going to use to judge your fitness for the job that you're applying for. I mean, this is just it's just so if I said if I apply for a job and I said I'm a practicing Muslim and I'm against homosexuality, that that would be that's that doesn't count as a diverse viewpoint. would be that's that doesn't count as a diverse viewpoint um like right i'm not sure yeah yeah yeah right they're not they wouldn't be like okay we don't have they wouldn't look at the list and be like muslims who oppose homosexuality oh we only have
Starting point is 00:40:59 three percent of those let's up that to five percent they're not they're not doing that they're basically they see that as someone who, if you don't fall into their ideology, which is to accept everyone under every circumstance, you're not in. It's a misnomer to call it diversity. Yes, that's the first thing. You're right.
Starting point is 00:41:22 I mean, that's separate from the diversity statements, right? So, you know, so there's, that's the, on the applicant side, that's what you're going to see. On the other side, you know, on the search committees, you're going to see something different. I mean, you're going to see, on the one hand, you'll see this, you know, you have to go through these, you know, they're demanding the diversity statements and they're going to use those diversity statements in order to evaluate candidates. But also, in addition to that, they're going to have their own agenda about, oh, we want, you know, we have this preference for, you know, blacks and Hispanics and women to a certain extent. Right. Maybe homosexuals, I suppose. Right. I think sexual preference is huge. It feels like it's huge from where I sit. Yeah, no, I mean, I think they're all clearly important. It's just that I think they're focused really much, the explicit focus is more on Blacks, Hispanics, and women
Starting point is 00:42:22 because that fits into, you know, you know, you, you know, those, those forms you fill out from the federal government also often about, you know, identifying yourself by race or by gender, right? You've, you've seen those, right? Yeah. You know, you apply for a loan, right? You gotta, you gotta do that, right? And so they're really kind of focused on those federally mandated categories. So the homosexuality isn't on that form, right? So it has less of an explicit focus, really. You know, recently in Los Angeles, I'm Armenian, and I was, many years ago, my wife was hit by a car, and she got a settlement., one of our friends, one of her family friends was a Jewish lady. My wife's Jewish, uh, Ashkenazi, I'm Armenian. And, um, we, we went to go visit her
Starting point is 00:43:11 to get some advice. She was vice president of a big bank in Southern California, not city bank, but a different bank. And, um, she, when we were there, we were asking what we should do with the money. And one of the things she pointed out is just so you know, we don't lend money to Armenians. Like she just freely told me that. And if we see someone with the last name I so you know we don't lend money to armenians like she just freely told me that and if we see someone with the last name ian we don't lend them money and um interestingly enough i don't know if you saw a couple months ago city bank got in trouble and they were fined 25 million dollars because they had a policy this just came public a few months ago where if your last name ended in yan or i-n or i-a-n city bank of california didn't lend you money they had that in writing really yeah and um the thing that's hard that's hard
Starting point is 00:43:55 also to accept it like it didn't upset me at all right i i there's there's a rationality to it. No one put that in because they hate Armenians. Someone put that in because they had experienced a lot of Armenians defaulting or being on their loans. It's the same thing. So when you go to – when I go up to Stanford for – I go to Stanford, some sort of doctor's appointment. I want the Chinese doctor. I don't want the local doctor in my town. And you know what I mean? Like, there are these things that these categorizations that get lumped up as being racist when it's really just discernment. You see a snake with a big mandible like this, and you don't get close to him because you know he has venomous jaws jaws in there there's a reason why chinese get um mathematic phds at a hundred times the rate of people of other ethnicities right and so we can take this information and use it to make discernment and it just gets lumped up into this racist category yeah right and it really it really sucks it it dumbs it just dumbs down
Starting point is 00:45:08 it speaks to the lowest common denominator of humanity and just and just dumbs everything down but for some reason but for some reason also it's okay in basketball right everyone wants everyone wants the tall black guy and it's okay to say that everyone wants everyone wants the tall black guy and it's okay to say that yeah um yeah there's i mean i think that's that's one of the sort of fundamental problems with uh with affirmative action or these different preferences is um you know this idea we talked about i talked about before about this idea of the underrepresented minority, right? Where, you know, if in any profession, you know, let's say with, I don't know, I think I've read something about lobster. What do you call them?
Starting point is 00:45:54 Lobster. What do you call the people that collect lobsters? You know, whatever. There's a word for that. Lobsterians. Lobsterians. Lobsterians. Caleb will find it. I got a guy in the back end.
Starting point is 00:46:08 I never even knew. You went to Stanford. I went to UCSB. Come on. Anyway, these guys, these lobster men. I like that. Lobster men. Lobster women.
Starting point is 00:46:19 Be good, David. Lobster women. Well, there were not very many black lobstermen right lobster men or harvester okay you got it okay and so there was this whole program to increase the representation of blacks amongst the lobstermen right yeah yeah um as if it was there was a kind of racist thing going on i mean it wasn't a racist thing right clearly it was just there it was, there was a kind of racist thing going on. I mean, it wasn't a racist thing, right? Clearly, it was just, it was just not a thing that people, that Blacks got into. And I don't think there was any, I mean, maybe there was some kind of prejudice against them,
Starting point is 00:46:57 maybe, but in the same way that like, you know, for a long time, you had nurses were women, and you didn't have as many men in the nursing profession, probably still not as many, right? But there's a, you know, there's kind of aspect, there's a kind of arbitrariness to that, right? Where some, you know, people choose to do that. You're talking about Chinese and math, right? There's a lot of Chinese that go into math, right? And I don't know, you can't fault the system for that, right? There's lots of things that go into that kind of decision. Partly it's cultural, partly it's tradition, right? But I don't think there's anything nefarious in that. And so if you have a large percentage of whites in lobstering, you know, that doesn't mean you've got a kind of totally racist profession there, right? And that's the difficulty.
Starting point is 00:47:41 My dad ran a liquor store on Middle Eastern. Yeah. Every every single dry cleaner shop I've gone to is run by an Asian. There's there's nothing there's nothing wrong with that. And there's no there's no Armenian Middle Eastern mafia keeping white people or Jews or blacks out of running liquor stores. They can't do. And there's no mafia of Asians keeping, you know, white people out of running dry cleaners. Right. Yeah. So we kind of have to accept this kind of aspect that, you know,
Starting point is 00:48:14 there's going to be sort of all these factors that go into people's choices of profession. And we can't be looking for exact proportional representation in all the different professions. It would be absurd to try and socially engineer that. But that's the premise behind the idea of underrepresented minorities and the whole basis of kind of our our freedoms in society. Right. In trying to socially engineer that. And it's dangerous. Yeah. Right. I mean, someone in as a pilot who's not qualified. Well, there's that problem. But but also in the clean, clean water plant in your city, you want you want three of the smartest people running the clean water plant in your city you you want you want uh three of the smartest people running the clean water plant you can't have some guy who's put in there because of diversity equity inclusion
Starting point is 00:49:10 who's not going to keep the water clean for your city right exactly right um but but even even on the level of trying to fight racism you know by by using these categories categorizing people according to their race and and then trying to use that to make these decisions, that's increasing the racism. Absolutely. Just get rid of all those categories. I mean, we shouldn't have to fill out our race on any kind of form, right? That's really just reinforcing this idea that skin color somehow matters beyond just the color of your skin. The statistics are also completely used one way.
Starting point is 00:49:54 So if you look at, you know, I think it's like 13% of the United States or 13 to 16% of the United States has melanated skin, is black. And half of those are male, let's say, at six percent. And then you look. It's like 51 percent of murders in the United States are committed by people with melanated skin. Now, obviously, that's a correlate. There's no fact there. You're not black and predispositioned to kill more people. positioned to to kill more people but these are also the stats that aren't mentioned the stats are always used in a bias i feel like on the media to present it as if um well there's more blacks in prison proportionally to how many white people there are without ever mentioning this other stat six percent of the population is doing 51 of of the murders. It's like, uh, that, that, that doesn't even, that, that's almost impossible to compute. If you categorize by skin color, what you're proposing,
Starting point is 00:50:52 let's just throw that away. Yeah. Right. And the only person who needs to know your skin color is your doctor. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yes so yes exactly i totally agree with that and um you know and but this problem about you know um homicide rates you know within black communities that's that's a serious problem it's but it's a it's obviously a cultural problem right and the same way that the chinese doctors and chinese math whizzes are it's a cultural issue right yeah yeah um and how would you define culture david how would you define culture when are, it's a cultural issue, right? Yeah. How would you define culture, David? How would you define culture when you say it's a cultural issue? Well, it's, at a basic level, it's like who your parents were and the types of views and habits they have.
Starting point is 00:51:38 Right? And that, you know, it matters who your parents are. So I like that, habits. The habits that were instilled in you or your culture. Yeah. Right. And obviously that happens, right? You, you, you get a lot of your habits and perspectives from your parents and that will have an effect. And so, you know, because different parents are different and it'll be, you know, a lot of be based on their affinities they're you know who they're related to who who they're who they associate with you know there'll there'll be
Starting point is 00:52:10 differences in in a society amongst different groups right um but that'll be a cultural thing it's not based on skin color um but skin color can correlate with culture? And that has been the case for, you know, for, you know, the history of humanity, right? But that's changing in the United States. I mean, you know, like I said, I mean, I think the United States is obviously unique in the world in the sense that we've, we've, yeah, we've kind of decoupled that relationship. You know, like you said, you know, we're not like the Swedes where we're just one ethnicity. You know, we've got so many different ethnicities, but also different skin colors. But we, you know, we've created this amazing culture in this national culture where everybody mixes.
Starting point is 00:53:03 this national culture where everybody mixes and there's a kind of new kind of way of thinking through the different boundaries between attitudes of different cultures, right? And so, you know, obviously we don't have just single race couples anymore. We've got biracial couples and nobody bats an eye at that today. I mean, in fact, I just watched um um what was that that movie um sydney poitier uh who's coming to dinner look who's coming to dinner is that the title yeah
Starting point is 00:53:31 right and they were talking it was like i came it was like 1967 or 68 or something like that and uh and and i think one of the one of the things the phrases was you know it might sound crazy, but it could be that your children, one of your children could become president. Well, the guy who would become president, right, was already born at that point, right? Wow. Wow. You know, who was black, right? Yeah. Barack Obama.
Starting point is 00:53:56 Okay. Right. And so, you know, that's this huge change that, you know, that we've gone through. But, you know, we just, people don't, people don't give us enough credit for this incredible transformation we've gone through, but people don't give us enough credit for this incredible transformation we've made. I mean, in fact, one of the things people all over the world might criticize us for being racist, but one of the ways you know that we're one of the least racist countries in the world
Starting point is 00:54:21 is that we actually take this problem seriously, and we've been trying to solve it and and it's become such an issue in the discourse because we're you know we're we're hypersensitive to racism where these other cultures i mean you know you take sweden or germany um you know they don't have to deal with so many different races but i mean i think there's a much more racist undertone in those cultures, but they don't talk about it, obviously, at all. Right. Right. Right. Right. I saw something this morning. Both my parents are Armenian. I come from, you know, Armenian was my first language.
Starting point is 00:54:56 And the people are much, much more forthright. They don't play the kind game like we do in the United States. They don't have all the political correctness. And I saw I saw a video this morning talking about Chinese culture in the same way and that if you called someone fat in China, it what i mean so you knew that if you were fat you shopped there and and and that's all that's also uh that's an enormous problem here in the united states too where people are putting feelings which we all know change from second to second to second as a higher truth than than than the facts right so? So you see these weird things like you see in Oregon where two plus two saying is four is racist because anything where there's just one answer
Starting point is 00:55:52 is the white man's way. And it's like, wow, we're getting out there, guys. Was there something like that that you saw that's like, okay, I'm running for office? Was there a tipping point for you? I don't know if it was a single thing. You didn't see a man in the woman's bathroom? You didn't see a man in the woman's bathroom and you're like, all right, it's time to.
Starting point is 00:56:30 You know, it was much more, you know, the experience I've had gradually banging my head against the wall in terms of the academic job and like publishing the work I have. And maybe it was really that. I guess it was probably this case where, you know, I was, I had known of this search committee where, you know, this is why I talked about in that that video with the regents of the University of California, where I realized it was this explicit, I mean, it was, it was not just the mandate to, to hire in, you know, black, Hispanic or women, but actually, where when the shortlist didn't include enough of those, they actually said, No, or women, but actually where when the shortlist didn't include enough of those,
Starting point is 00:57:06 they actually said, no, you can't continue your search until you add somebody from lower down in the pool to your shortlist, right? But not because they're lower down in the pool, but because of their physiological makeup, right? Skin color or genitalia or something like that. Exactly, right. And that you need to use that as the basis for including at least one other person in your shortlist from lower down in the pool. I mean, it was just, it's just so egregious, right? I have a friend who works in the accounting department of a top five largest university in the United States, largest budgets.
Starting point is 00:57:42 And they told me that there is an explicit written I think they even sent it to me it was about six months ago statement that says all outside contracts first must go to and it lists what they are and it is it's women and then it's it's I forget how they but it's like marginalized women or underrepresented women, and then it also mentions about their sexuality. And that is all contracts must – any contracts you have, you must first try to give to those business owners that fit that makeup, that can check those boxes. And I was just – I couldn't even believe what I was just, I couldn't even believe what I was seeing. I couldn't even believe what I was seeing, but it was even explicit. And it might be in reaction to some kind of federal program too, right? Oh, wow.
Starting point is 00:58:37 That they're rewarded from the federal government if you have this. Right. Yeah. So this is what's gotten me into politics because a lot of this is not just coming from these businesses. It's not coming from people being racist, right? It's coming from the federal government mandating a lot of this stuff. Mandating racism. Yeah, it's crazy. Mandating prejudice. Mandating prejudice. And it's so, you know, we've got to do something to change this. I mean, there's just, I mean, it's really pushing our nation
Starting point is 00:59:07 into this direction of kind of a, you know, racial war, right? I mean, it's not coming from people. It's coming from the government. And, you know, I mean, when you look into a lot of the most egregious cases of kind of ethnic warfare, a lot of it ends up coming from the government, right? I mean, the Rwandan genocide, a lot of that was not, you know, people themselves somehow going crazy. It was like a lot of these, you know, influence from the state that was sort of promoting this kind of stuff. And it's just, I mean, yeah, people have good intentions on this
Starting point is 00:59:39 a lot of times, but they've, they just, somehow they haven't been able to think through the consequences of these types of policies. I saw a couple things here. One, going back to just how statistics can be misrepresented. I read this. It's an old book, but Thomas Sowell wrote it. You're probably familiar with him. Oh, yeah. He's great. Yeah, The Economist from the Hoover Institute.
Starting point is 01:00:06 There was a thing where they were comparing white people's income to – white Jews in New York's income to Puerto Ricans. And they were saying that Jews made, like I forget what it was, 200% more than Puerto Ricans. And then Thomas Sowell points out that the average age of Jews is 50 and that the average age of Puerto Ricans is 25, but they never mentioned that when they published that. And the irony is, is at 25 myself, I was homeless and didn't have any money. And now at 51, I'm a millionaire. So you can't even compare the, the, the two, right? I mean, it's just completely, it's completely insane. That being said, Thomas, so I saw recently that, and this is really rough numbers, but the top money makers in the United States are Asian people. Then at the 50 yard line
Starting point is 01:00:51 are white people. They make about half as much as Asians. And then about the people who make half as much as them are people with melanated skin. If you were to characterize people by their skin color, right? So it would be, it would be, uh, um, uh, people with black skin, white skin, and then whatever skin you want to, I don't even know if Asians have get categorized by their skin color right so it would be it would be uh um people with black skin white skin and then whatever skin you want i don't even know if asians have get categorized by their skin i don't know what how we lump you guys up um but that being said um so well goes on then then i remembered something i read so well said that the reason why the asians have gotten so far ahead and the hispanics and the blacks have not is and this is probably tied into culture is because asians put their head down and worked and mexicans and blacks hispanics and
Starting point is 01:01:31 blacks tried to use the government to help them and that's where that's where you look at all the the the the blacks and the hispanics who went into politics but not asians very very underrepresented uh through the years they just put their head down and worked. Asians have been through some shit, right? The Democrats built those Japanese internment camps. Right, yeah. They had their shit taken from them.
Starting point is 01:01:57 Have you thought about that at all? Maybe, like, look at the success of your people. You're Taiwanese, right? My parents came from Taiwan. I mean, they originated in China, but then they, you know, there was obviously war there and they were on the national side and they migrated to Taiwan. Legally?
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Starting point is 01:03:06 bucks in your pocket. Easy. Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. At the time, it was, you know, they were refugees, basically. Yeah, yeah yeah wild um do you think about have you have you thought about that at all about the fact that like hey maybe the you know i can see people in the comments someone's like hey why don't we just stop talking about it and it will go away or why don't you just keep your head down and and work have you thought about that you know like hey look at the success of of my of people, what we've done.
Starting point is 01:03:45 Yeah, well, I mean, going into politics. Yeah, I mean, that's that's certainly a solution. It's just that, you know, there's so much today that, you know, these these DEI policies end up penalizing people who, you know, put their head down and work. Right. And and that's the problem, right? That that's, you know, I think, you know... And you're not running as a Chinese man, right? I mean... No, not at all. Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, the district is 65% Hispanic. Okay. And actually, I think it's a good district for me. I mean, one of the reasons I'm running in this district is because it's Hispanic working class, where I think my message has actually been really, you know, appealing to them.
Starting point is 01:04:35 So, you know, one of the things that I really am focused on is in thinking through the deal. Learning Spanish. You're focused on learning Spanish thinking through the Spanish, learning Spanish, you're focused on learning Spanish. Oh yeah. No, I speak Spanish. Um, um, um, I could, yeah, I can improve my fluency on it somewhat, but yeah, but I've been speaking to in Spanish to my constituents. Um, but the, um, you know, this gets into the whole, um, reducing inflation part and reducing government spending. So I have this idea that I've talked about it already, about the welfare programs that are right. They reward people for not working, for not building up wealth. You have more than $2,000 in your bank account,
Starting point is 01:05:27 you're disqualified from Medicaid benefits, right? So it's just forcing people to remain in poverty, right? And like you said, a lot of, you know, there's a lot of certain groups that somehow are, you know, they put all of their ingenuity and effort into getting government benefits, right? This is an it undermines it's bad for them, right? It undermines their own work ethic, it undermines their whole sense of responsibility, in fact, right. So, so I have this idea, right, where I would like to take all of our welfare and entitlement programs all of that phase them out and replace them with a universal basic income that would
Starting point is 01:06:14 just go it would be with all that money you can give everybody sixteen thousand dollars a year anybody 21 over and get sixteen thousand dollars a year and that would be equal for everybody right oh david you're scaring me what i'm having a uh you're you triggered me okay well um i i don't but this um why why i don't i don't like this universal uh basic income it seems like you're just moving the problem from one place no so so if you so so you think about it if we if we were to eliminate all these different programs, all the food stamps, student loans, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, right? Okay. We would be eliminating like half of the entire federal budget right away, right? We would be able to.
Starting point is 01:07:03 And in doing that, you remove lots of government agencies. You remove all of these restrictions on people's freedom that are based on government managing people. You give them this money. For a lot of people, for you, it would be a tax cut, basically. How do you manage that? That's what I want. I just want a tax cut. Right, but this is what it would be.
Starting point is 01:07:25 For you, it would be a tax cut. For people lower down, they'll get money back, right? But it's, you know, so it's, I don't know, Milton Friedman had this idea of a negative income tax, right? It was basically working the same way, right? Where, you know, everybody gets a tax cut. If you're at the bottom,'ll get you'll get this money right if you haven't been paying taxes but you have to be working oh let me let me interrupt you sorry
Starting point is 01:07:51 because i'm just so i'm so triggered i'm gonna okay go ahead i'm about to jump off into the lake here how does this comport with your idea of incentivizing people to work hard. I don't like the idea of giving people $16,000 for two weeks. How will you ever get them off of that? And haven't we then at that point done exactly what we didn't want to do? We're rewarding them for not doing anything? Or would there be some sort of stipulation to get the money so so the idea is we've got a system right now right that's takes the same money gives it to people that aren't working and doesn't give anything to people who are working okay i i okay right okay yeah you set up a system where everybody gets the same whether you're working or not right the first thing it
Starting point is 01:08:44 does it helps working families the most right away oh my goodness hold on a bat just flew in the room let me see if i can let him go holy cow wow hey guys greg greg i don't know how to catch a bat. I can't even believe it. There's a bat down here. Hey, Greg. Guys. Do you know how to catch a bat, David? No.
Starting point is 01:09:21 Let me see. I don't think I've ever seen a bat close up. Oh, he's cruised over to the corner. Wow. How did he get in? I don't know. I'm in this big home on the lake in Idaho. We'll get back to universal basic income in one second.
Starting point is 01:09:38 Give me one second. hopefully he finds a uh hi david i'm caleb i've just been running the back end oh hi caleb hopefully he finds like a maybe a hat or something he can just throw it on top and scoop it up and throw it out there. Probably harder to catch one of those than it is to catch a rat. I don't know. I guess once it starts flying, it won't be so easy, right? Yeah, that's where it's tricky, right?
Starting point is 01:10:20 I've caught a few mouse in my day and they just scurry around the corners all the time and it's easy to catch them. You can just corner them. Maybe he's figured it out, or he's just going to leave it. You're a good dude, Caleb. Thanks for coming on and checking in on David. The owner of the house, she's coming down here.
Starting point is 01:10:42 She has a bat net. Oh, my God. He's so cute. I feel so bad for him. He does not look like he's in good shape. Oh. Oh my goodness. Oh, she has a bat net. Sounds like that. He's right here. He's so cute.
Starting point is 01:11:00 I'm afraid if I open the door, I'll run him over. Ooh. He's dying? Oh. Oh, man. What are you going to do with him? Want me just to leave him alone? He's making crazy sounds. you will you climb up in there
Starting point is 01:11:28 hold on oh you got him wow just leave that outside that net all. Won't be like any other interview you've ever done, David. Thank you, Maggie. All right. One that down. OK, so so there's all of these all of this money is being spent already in this one direction for all these welfare programs, food stamps, et cetera. You're saying let's dim those, turn those down and gather that money and just give it to people. Right. Exactly. Because it'll be equal, right? Everybody gets the same thing and everybody has the same responsibility now. Now people are responsible for themselves, right? They can make decisions about their own lives based on this sort of,
Starting point is 01:12:26 well, they'll have to stable income, right? So they can, they could sit back and surf for the rest of their lives. But I'm betting that people, you know, they, they want meaning in their lives, right? And they've got a basis for developing that, right? Do they have to, what would they have to do to get that? I would say U.S. citizens 21 or over. So they could be, what if they, man.
Starting point is 01:12:50 But think about it. Right now, the problem is that we're incentivizing people to not work, right? So that they've got this positive push to not work. Once we get rid of all the restrictions you don't have that anymore they can do whatever they want right plus i mean would we do something david where we match the income up to sixteen thousand dollars so this is the earned income to work okay go right again right you know what you're doing is you're saying oh if you if you earn a certain amount you're not going to get this benefit right um and so again it's kind of forcing people to say oh okay i
Starting point is 01:13:31 shouldn't earn more than this amount or i shouldn't you know i shouldn't earn money right and so what if we what if we reversed it what if it what if you what if you reversed i mean i don't like the idea at all i can't believe you got me in the conversation but what if we reversed it and we did um uh you make sixteen thousand dollars you get an extra thousand dollars in a job you make thirty thousand dollars you get an extra five thousand dollars and we just encourage people to make more money and then and then that goes up up up until some point until you get to a hundred thousand dollars then you get the sixteen thousand dollars i'm just how are you gonna stop people from not just taking this money and doing – like if I'm a 21-year-old kid and I'm so excited, I turn 21,
Starting point is 01:14:11 I start getting $16,000 a year, what I'm going to do is I'm going to buy a VW bus and just cruise around the country. Okay. So do that for a while. How long are you going to do that? How long are you going to do that? Right. I mean, I just – so I guess part of it.
Starting point is 01:14:26 I'm going to buy a lot of weed and live in my mom's basement. I mean. Well, but then your mom knows, your mom knows you're getting this money. Right. And maybe your mom will say, well, you know, you're living in my basement. I'm going to charge you rent. Right. And I like, okay.
Starting point is 01:14:41 Okay. You know? And so, I mean, so, you know, I get a lot of complaints about this idea, but – and from both sides, right? Right. Isn't it socialism? Isn't it socialism to be doing that? It's less socialism than we're doing now, right? I mean because you can't compare it with the system we have now.
Starting point is 01:15:03 I agree. I agree. I agree. Right? So imagine if we just phased out all these programs, right, and just turned it into a tax cut, right? Okay. So then what you'd have is, you know, the people that would benefit the most are the ones that are earning the most money, right? The people at the bottom, you know, they would get nothing, right? And, you know, I think there's a certain case to be made that based on the fact of your, of birth, things that you can't control, some people are in a better position than other people, right? You know, some people have parents that have wealth that can, you know, kind of finance their children
Starting point is 01:15:49 as they're trying to make their way when they're young, and some people don't. I mean, I kind of feel like we should give everybody kind of a level playing field, equal opportunity on that, right? And that it's not as if we're we're trying to engineer their lives. Right. That's that's the problem that I see. You know, you put in these restrictions. It's handing responsibility again to the federal government to manage people's lives and tell them what they should be doing, what they shouldn't be doing. Whereas I really believe in this individual responsibility, where everybody
Starting point is 01:16:25 should be on an equal footing in terms of their individual choices. And this also means, you know, I'm getting rid of the social security system, right? So that people need to be thinking about their retirement, and they need to be thinking about it on their own. Because basically, that money is supposed to be for their retirement. And that's the money that if they invest it, you know, every year for their retirement, they'll have a great retirement. I think what we want to do is we earmark something like $4,000 a year of that for a health insurance voucher. That would replace Medicare and Medicaid, where everybody's going to have health insurance, but it'll be private. It will all be private. 4,000 a year,
Starting point is 01:17:06 it will give you like a catastrophic plan, right? And, you know, $8,000 deductible, where, again, you're kind of responsible for that first part. You know, you can pay more if you wanted to get a better plan. But, you know, what that creates also is it creates this huge market for healthcare where it's just doctors and patients relating to each other and doctor charges, patient, patient pays. Right. And we're getting back to a more of a free market system that way. Let me ask you, let me ask you this. How do you, you said it gets everyone on equal footing. And I struggle with, there's two things that, two things I'm struggling with.
Starting point is 01:17:47 On one hand, you're saying that we shouldn't be using equity. We should be using equality, and yet you're also using this term like get everyone on fair footing. even this idea of, I think privilege is a, um, is a snake oil salesman's word for what we determined as culture, because I don't think your privilege matters relative to your habits. Right. And so like, look what happened to Hunter poor, poor Hunter Biden, right. Born into absolute privilege and he's just completely ruined his life. mean he's probably not a happy man right and yet he has access to wealth beyond you know most of us how are you don't think that maybe you're just um my my my my listeners my crowd is a very conservative crowd and they're very christian i am not christian like one of the things i'm still very pro-choice even though i do believe that abortion is is just um word fuckery for killing a baby like i can see both sides right i really i think it is killing a baby
Starting point is 01:18:56 um you don't think that maybe you and so my my listeners accuse me of still having that liberal disease do you think that maybe you're there's's any chance David Pan is still trying to navigate these liberal roots by doing this? Like maybe you're still attached to this like – or do you logically think that this is the way out? Do you see what I'm saying there? And I'm accused of it by my my audience is just always being like oh seven we still have hope for you we won't give up but i'm like all right all right thank you yeah i mean um maybe maybe i have that um but i i do think logically it is a good way because you know would you want to get them off of that would you want to get them
Starting point is 01:19:44 off of that eventually would we want to win that over the next 200 years or no? No. So, so the idea is that we've got, right now we've got this, I mean, we've got a social security system, right. That provides for people when they're not working, when they're older, right. And it's also a system that kind of takes away the responsibility that people have for saving for their retirement. And I'm saying, no, people should have that responsibility and they should, you know, we've got the system now, so we can, we can adjust it so that people just get this cash with the idea that they're supposed to be investing that for their, they're supposed
Starting point is 01:20:21 to be saving. And that'll be on them, what kind of retirement they have right um but more than that it's bringing people right now you know we talked about the the um the homeless and the drug addicts um we're bringing them into the system we're saying look you've got a stake in the system now you're getting like basically you're getting a thousand dollars a month right it? It's not really enough, you know, to have a good life but you can kind of get by, right? But it's also something that you can lose too, right? I mean, you know, clearly this would be a way,
Starting point is 01:20:56 if you've got a deadbeat dad, right? Who owes child support, you can tap that money, right? To have that person pay child support you can tap that money right to to have that person pay child support all of a sudden they've got something loose they're they're gonna call it right they're gonna say oh if I father a child without you know you know and without wanting to I'm gonna face some consequences to that right there's a I think there's just lots of effects in terms of promoting individual responsibility once people have this sort of basic stake in the system. And it's getting them into the system, and it's fostering a kind of, yeah, individual responsibility on
Starting point is 01:21:39 everybody because they've got this stake. So, I mean, I do think logically it works out. I mean, I think it is in some sense, it is a kind of form of social engineering, but again, it's thinking through people, not as if they were machines, but really as if they were living things that, yeah, that respond to certain incentives and you wanna promote and create the conditions for them to thrive. Right. And so say that last statement again, it's responding to responding to people as living things. Say that part again, because that kind of ties into what you were saying at the very beginning of the show.
Starting point is 01:22:21 spot in the maze so that they go that way. Right. But it's, it's, it's more than that. It's, it's really setting up the whole maze in a certain way. Right.
Starting point is 01:22:29 So that, you know, so that, you know, I guess I, I do believe that, that people left to themselves want meaning in their lives. They want responsibility. They want to be able to achieve things.
Starting point is 01:22:44 Right. Well, it's where happiness is. It's where happiness is. Just like no one wants to be a drug addict either. Exactly, right? And so you want to set up a system that promotes that, right? And part of that kind of system is individual responsibility, right? And part of that system is individual freedom. And so, you know, the reason that I think that the universal basic income is the way to go on that is because it's the maximum of individual responsibility and freedom. Because once you start putting restrictions on the money, you're taking away that freedom. And you're undermining
Starting point is 01:23:24 that relative. When you say that, though, you're saying that relative to the spending we have now, you're making the presupposition that that's okay, that that spending will always be done. Well, as opposed to someone like some other politician might just be like, Hey, let's just, and sorry to call you a politician. Someone else might just say, Hey, let's just turn off all the spigots. Right. Or let's keep, let's, or, or let's keep a politician. Someone else might just say, hey, let's just turn off all the spigots. Right. Or let's keep the current system but just make it harder barriers to jump through to get these resources. Right. But see, again, see, all the barriers and stuff, that's just more and more government intervention in people's lives.
Starting point is 01:23:56 Right, right. And I hate that. That's the thing. You just got to get rid of that. Right? Right. I consider all those people on the welfare state, by the way. All the employees of the U.S. government, I consider them as just welfare recipients. Yeah. I agree with you. Right. Right. And so I consider all those people on the welfare state, by the way, all the employees of the U.S. government, I consider them as just welfare recipients.
Starting point is 01:24:07 Yeah, I agree with you. Right. Yeah. So so the only way to get rid of that is by getting rid of all the restrictions, because the restrictions, every restriction is another government employee or a whole slew of government employees that are somehow watching over those rules, right? And that's just undermining everything. And so that's the first priority is to get rid of all of these government agencies that are trying to micromanage people's lives, right? And we can't do that on a massive scale unless we basically dissolve all these different programs. And then you've got this,
Starting point is 01:24:44 it's like $5 trillion a year. What are you going to do with that money, right? Well, obviously you can just, you know, make it into a tax cut for everybody, right? But, you know, I mean, I think that's not, I mean, by structuring it as a universal basic income, I mean mean again, it works out as a tax cut for a lot of people, right? Maybe it needs to be rebranded. Well, maybe it needs to be rebranded, but I mean I don't think –
Starting point is 01:25:17 Every time you say it, I just hear drug money. It sucks. I apologize. I just see this as just people going to the liquor store and buying alcohol. Yeah, but see, that's... I think... And I apologize for that. I want to hear you out.
Starting point is 01:25:35 Actually, I think that you don't have enough faith in people. Okay. And I do. I have faith in people that the things they want are fundamentally good things that they want ultimately. And they get into the predictions. I agree. I'm just talking about it based on the already consumption of those things today.
Starting point is 01:25:59 Well, but see, but again, I think that the reason that that type of behavior exists is because of the way this money is structured. Again, you have to think through that the money that we're giving out right now, it's premised on the idea of not working, of not developing assets. It's undermining people's faith in themselves, and it's leading them into that kind of depressive situation. I get that. I just don't get how making them responsible for this lump sum. Anyway, let me pivot just really quick. Okay. I've had you so long, and I appreciate it. Tell me about the border. What are your thoughts on the border?
Starting point is 01:26:46 Well, I mean, I think clearly we need to secure the border. I mean, there's no question about that. I mean, you can't have a country without a border, right? But on the other hand, I think we need to have some kind of sane immigration policy, right? And so, you know, obviously we need to set up both of those we need to have a secure border um and you know whatever you know i i mean i think just people need to think through well what what's necessary for a secure border and what are the policies that we want to to establish to to make you know immigration possible and productive for everybody. Right. So, yeah, I mean, that's the short answer. Would you, would you say, so would you say that it's, it's catastrophic
Starting point is 01:27:31 right now down there? Like, like my kids can't go to school unless they take drugs. They have to take drugs that are mandated by the U S government. And yet these people are coming in and my kids don't take the drugs, but, and yet these people are coming in and my kids don't take the drugs. But and yet these people are being coming across the border and they're not required to take those same drugs. Yeah, right. No, it's insane. And they're getting in California, they're getting free health care, too. Yeah, that's absolutely nuts. OK, the next thing. What do you think about censorship? Someone with an enormous YouTube channel. In my community yesterday, had his YouTube channel taken away. He had Dr. Huberman from Stanford on and then another doctor who was some sort of expert in health issues around the sun. And he had them on as guests and he was asking them questions.
Starting point is 01:28:22 And he had them on as guests, and he was asking them questions. And basically what it sounds like is YouTube pulled down their video – pulled down their entire channel because he said that they weren't – that channel wasn't authorized to talk about these things. I find – and then we also have this other law in California that Newsom passed. I don't know where we are right now with it, but where you can't get a second opinion outside of the state's stance on COVID that passed last year. I think that that's probably going to end up going to the Supreme Court. But are you familiar with that law that passed like a year or two ago? No, I'm not actually. Yeah, it's outrageous. I mean, yeah.
Starting point is 01:28:59 Basically, a doctor can lose their license if they give you an opinion about COVID that contradicts or goes doesn't line up with the state stance on COVID so if a doctor if the state stance was um uh saying that you should take the injection and a doctor said hey I don't think you should take it because of these reasons um the doctor could lose their license do you have any are you concerned with the censorship that's going on you know yeah no it's it's it's I mean like I said you know it's kind of partly how I got into politics right I mean that's you know just the United States? Oh, yeah. No, it's, I mean, like I said, you know, it's kind of partly how I got into politics, right? I mean, it's, you know, just within my, you know, it's kind of low stakes what I do. I mean, I write about German literature, right?
Starting point is 01:29:34 But even there, I mean, you know, I've been running into all these problems about, you know, getting my stuff out and it's just, it's, you know, there's just such an orthodoxy now that's been cemented into our bureaucracies um that it's it's yeah it's suppressing free debate and and uh and and free expression yeah it's i no i totally agree with you on this um there's a it's complicated though because uh on the one hand, I'm, you know, totally for free speech against any kind of censorship.
Starting point is 01:30:11 On the other hand, in universities, it's not, there's two issues. There's freedom of speech and there's academic freedom. And there's a difference between the two. Freedom of speech, everybody gets to say what they want to say, right? Academic freedom has to do with who the university hires and what kinds of restrictions they can set up on the type of work they do, right? Now, let me give you a really clear example, right?
Starting point is 01:30:39 Thank you. So, you know, we hire in people that do medical research, right? And the purpose of the medical research is to save human lives, right? But there's clearly possibilities for doing medical research like, you know, bioweapons that you can be doing research to harm people, right? And the university certainly has the right to forbid that kind of research and to say, we're not going to hire in anybody that's going to be creating viruses that'll, you know, wipe out humanity, right? And that's an issue of academic freedom, right? Now, when you move
Starting point is 01:31:20 into other issues like affirmative action, right? So people have been hiring in people, you know, social scientists that promote affirmative action, right? And there, I think, yes. I mean, I think there can be, there should be some kind of restrictions on academic freedom there that align with kind of social political priorities that we have, right? social, political priorities that we have, right? That, you know, we don't want researchers researching how to, you know, wipe out humanity. But we also don't want people to be supporting policies that would be creating more discrimination. So that's a, that's a difficult line. I mean, in terms of how you're going to, how you're going to manage that.
Starting point is 01:32:06 But I think that there's a responsibility, just as in medicine, in other disciplines to be thinking through, well, what are our values? And how are we going to align our values with what we're promoting in terms of our faculty and our research and our teaching? values with what we're promoting in terms of our faculty and our research and our teaching so i don't know oh boy that that's that's a um that's a god that's such a that's a real that's that's a really intense discussion yeah but let's say someone was doing this let's say someone was doing a study on brains and they wanted to categorize it by um race and they wanted to be and they wanted to make some sort of statement like that um aj kanazi jews had the most brain cells then chinese um then black people and then hispanic people or something like that but they did the research right this would be some sort – and it was under some sort of – done with scientific rigor, right, in protocols. But then someone could say, hey, you can't do that. You're promoting racism.
Starting point is 01:33:13 It just seems like such a slippery slope. Right. It is. But I mean these are decisions that are – yeah, go ahead. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know where to put the rules are. But there's way too many rules already on what you can and can't say or do so and I know we're kind of it's interesting to see you play you you have a pretty um you play both sides because do you know what I mean by that not that you're um disingenuous I'm not suggesting that at all but but you you want to move the goal line but maybe you don't want to move it all the way.
Starting point is 01:33:47 Right? You know, what I'm seeing is – And I guess you started the conversation saying that there is a role for government. There is a role for rules. Yeah, right. And that's what structures our lives, right? I mean, you have to have – if you don't have a government, you're just going to have, you know the the war of all
Starting point is 01:34:06 against all basically right yeah stateless situation is is a bad situation right so you need to have a state you need to have a government because it establishes the ground rules for you know for for civilized behavior right um and and it and it sets up structures that allow for, you know, for market competition, right? You can't have market competition until you have political stability, right? And that's what the government gives you, right? But it also gives you these types of ground rules, right? That, you know, that would disallow discrimination, which is, the government is not doing properly right now. But that's, that would be a ground rule, right? I mean, certainly you have governments that clearly favor discrimination, right? Partly are, but there's much more egregious cases,
Starting point is 01:34:56 obviously, all over the world, right? And so, you know, there's a role for that, but again, you know, getting back to this university example, these are decisions that are being made every day about who gets hired, what kind of research they're doing, you know, what kind of research they shouldn't be doing, right? But I think we need to be much more cognizant as a society about those decisions and understand that these are consequential decisions and they cannot be left
Starting point is 01:35:26 to the professors themselves, right? You do need somebody from the outside to be aligning the values of the university with values that we hold to the people, right? By the way, that's also what happened with COVID. We let the doctors make the decisions. When the doctors should not have been making the decisions, they should have just been giving us the information. And then people who have an idea, who have a better perspective on civilization and the operations of civilization make that decision. Shutting down society for two years is a horrible idea. But if you're a doctor and you're just looking just down this funnel, you might think it's a good idea. Right, exactly. So this is kind of what I'm talking about is that by ceding control over these kind of value decisions to researchers and experts, you know,
Starting point is 01:36:17 we've undermined our, in a lot of ways, we've undermined our liberal democratic values because we're essentially kind of saying, oh, it's the experts that should rule over us. I mean, that's not the way our government should be working. And it was with Joy Reed. And she was interviewing a lady who's trying to get these books taken out of a school that talked about a child being sodomized and raped with a dildo and all this stuff. And Joy Reed said to this lady, what makes you an expert to say that this book shouldn't be in elementary schools when this is, award-winning literature is the basis for allowing books that are inappropriate for kids to be in kids' schools and that a parent's own discernment doesn't take a priority over that. I mean, it is insane. They're not even hiding anymore. That's the interesting thing also.
Starting point is 01:37:22 The racism isn't even being hidden anymore. It's just overt. Do you ever feel like we're dealing with crazy people? They can't even say, I know we're being racist, but we do think it's the best way moving forward. Do you ever feel like that there's just a of delusion, I think. I mean, you know. It's unsettling a little bit. It is.
Starting point is 01:37:57 Like they want to win instead of get to what's best or what's right. Well, I do think a lot of them do think that this is what's best and what's right. And it's part of the delusion and it's part of, you know, there's this, there's this idea, this, this idea of paradigm, you know, Thomas Kuhn has this idea about scientific revolutions and paradigms and how in a particular discipline, you can get stuck in a particular paradigm, you know, like thinking the uh um that the earth revolves around the sun right versus the sun revolving around the earth right um those two you know the whatever copernicus and ptolemy right there was this paradigm and people just think
Starting point is 01:38:36 in terms of that paradigm and they don't question it right you know it's just like they're saying oh well of course the sun goes around the earth right why would you ever question that and so i think that's where they're at they're in this kind of delusion of this sort of it is a kind of scientific paradigm that they have um because it's it's it's reinforced by all their scientific studies in fact you know that they have this premise in these in in a lot of this social science and humanities research about the way racism is or works or this idea of systemic racism, for instance.
Starting point is 01:39:15 Really, it's this horrible concept that they have today. We were talking about it before, about how there's this sort of somehow because things work out that more people in particular race in a particular profession, that must mean there's a systemic racism in the system that's causing that. But it's a totally absurd notion, really. But they don't see that.
Starting point is 01:39:40 They've got this sort of disciplinary bias, in a sense um it comes from this whole expert culture that's kind of driven this in themselves and they've driven themselves into this kind of rut and they can't see beyond what do you what do you think um growing up in the bay area you know i've been to many um handful of plays throughout my life where, um, uh, women are played by men. I would go to the city and watch, you know, and, and I, and I would go to the gay pride parade and, you know, being grown up in the Bay area in San Francisco and Berkeley, I'd seen, you know, I'd seen it all. Right. And I, and I enjoy just the eclecticness and wildness of the Bay area and the freedom. Right. And this is going along those lines of just taking things too
Starting point is 01:40:26 far. And no one has anything wrong. I've never heard anyone say anything bad about cross-dressing men or anything like that. And then all of a sudden we have this movement where men who want to dress up as women are somehow the token person who should be reading to our children in public libraries across the country and i'm thinking to myself why don't we have navy seals reading to our kids in public why didn't that take off or why don't we have um immigrants reading like uh successful immigrants reading to our kids in public libraries or why don't we have just amish women you know what i mean reading mean reading how did we get to this place where the preferred person to have a reading hour and libraries across across the country are men who have an unquenchable desire to dress as women and read to our kids and
Starting point is 01:41:20 at that point I think oh they're not – someone's not thinking correctly anymore. It's like you said. They just got into this rut of defending this certain group of people by any means necessary. Yeah. And I'm just like there's – it's not like that. It's not – there are boundaries. Yeah. I mean, you know, one cynical way of thinking about it is that, you know, all these organizations before that were working for equality for everybody, right? Anti-discrimination. You know, once they achieved what they wanted,
Starting point is 01:42:03 they still had this whole organizational institutional framework. They still wanted to do something with it. Right. And so they're going to continue on this, this path in order to have something to do. Otherwise they should dismantle themselves. Right. Right. Yeah. That's another concern, by the way, the homeless economy is wild. The homeless economy is wild. Yeah, right. Yeah, especially in places like Seattle. I think it's over a billion dollars. Yeah, right.
Starting point is 01:42:31 And it comes through federal funding, state funding, right? And it's a gravy train for people, right, for a lot of these nonprofits and stuff. And, you know, they're all kind of hooked into this whole system. And this is, again, this is, I mean, the easiest way to dismantle it is to just dismantle it. But you can't dismantle it, I think, practically speaking, without thinking through some kind of alternative. Right?
Starting point is 01:42:59 So anyway. David, do you have a chance of winning? I think I do. Nobody else thinks I do. But, you know, because it's the last election, 2022, the Democrat won 62% to 38% to the Republican. But that candidate, that Republican candidate effectively did not campaign. And so I've been knocking on doors. I've been walking the streets and talking to people.
Starting point is 01:43:33 And I get a really good response. And so I think I can. Is it happening? When I look online, it does look like Hispanics and Black blacks are moving to the right like they're like oh like they have some very practical logical things they want from the government that they know aren't being fulfilled yeah well i mean it's especially working class people working families who are are not poor i mean not totally poor but struggle to just kind of stay in place. And they're not rich, obviously. They really are kind of fed up with this.
Starting point is 01:44:10 I mean, what we've been talking about in terms of the DEI and the welfare system and stuff like that, they're fed up with that. And so I've been seeing that. And so I think I have a good chance. We'll see. But it'll take, you know, what it'll take is is is knocking on lots of doors. Right. And get volunteers to help me to do that, to get my message out, because Republicans just haven't addressed the people in this district for a long time. And so they've just kind of lost hope. And so I'm trying to give that hope back. Awesome. Hey, thank you so much for coming on. Great to meet you. I'll definitely be watching. I'm excited for you. Thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for letting us dedicating your big brain to helping society and pushing things forward. You're a good dude, man.
Starting point is 01:44:57 Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah. Anytime. All right. Thank you, David. All right. Take care. Bye. Have a great day. Ciao. Anytime Alright thank you David Alright take care bye Have a great day ciao David Pan That was good for me Challenge you a little bit What
Starting point is 01:45:16 Challenge you a little bit Well I'm just not going to find Jesus isn't running for president So You know what I mean So it's like It's like the people who are like
Starting point is 01:45:33 Don't forget that Donald Trump was the one who made the vaccine You know what I mean They're looking for someone who did everything perfect And it's like Yeah I mean I cannot stand the thought of universal basic income, but I really like that guy on the topic of what's going on at the university. I mean if he can fix that, I think that's – if we can just get some people who aren't virtue signaling racist into the educational system, it would be awesome. I mean that would be – I mean those are the people teaching the future. Those are the people teaching our kids.
Starting point is 01:46:11 I really enjoyed him. That went way better than I thought. I don't think I said fuck once. What's a carpetbagger? I don't know. I learned that term in high school. This liberal outlet calls him a carpetbagger? high school they're calling this liberal outlet calls him a carpetbagger it's a irvine republican carpetbagger to challenge representative correa for congress um liberal oc this is the name of the outlet challenging orange county's right-wing noise machine look up carpetbagger hey you know
Starting point is 01:46:39 what else i like i like i know this is pretty superficial but I like the way he looks. Yeah, I mean, he's easy to talk to. He seems welcoming. He's not like a... He doesn't have like a hardened... I like his face and I like his body. He looks just like a good dude. And he's well thought out. And I think he cares.
Starting point is 01:47:02 It's not easy what he's doing. There's only two. They're like, like, you have to be up for the fight. Damn. So they came down here. They got the bat. I told I said, don't let the kids come down here, please. I'm doing a podcast.
Starting point is 01:47:19 All the kids came down here. And then they fucking left the door open and it's freezing. Carpetbbagger a political candidate who seeks election in an area where they have no local connections a person from the northern states who went to the south after the civil war to profit from the reconstruction a person perceived as unscrupulous opportunist wow what scumbags i don't get any of that from him yeah not at all i don't get any of that from him yeah that i think that's a good takeaway too he believes in humanity
Starting point is 01:47:54 yeah i like his face i like his face i like what comes out of it i've seen pictures of his body i like his his body. I like the way he stands. I like his posture. I like his speaking cadence. I like the tone. I don't even know what tone means, but whatever I think it means, I like that part of it. Excuse me. Yeah, he's cool. Hey, I listened to some other shit that he's he says too i couldn't even understand half of it he's like something he talks like greg sometimes like just like there's be like 12 words in a row i don't know the meaning of they're all just one right after another i'm like whoa whoa whoa whoa got that vibe to him for sure when i started reading that telos telos news outlet yeah lost i'm not yeah i'm not up there yeah it's crazy big brain shit it's crazy when he said it's
Starting point is 01:48:53 not i i listened to some uh telos um talks yesterday and i'm like well that's why it's not popular because it's fucking dense uh universal basic income is trippy because it sounds somewhat logical at the service level. Here's the thing. It has the presupposition that you need. He had the presupposition, and he obviously admitted it, that that money is going to be spent no matter what. You know what I mean? And I don't agree with that.
Starting point is 01:49:24 I think you have to start turning the spigot off. Because I think it goes against what he's saying before. It doesn't motivate people. Dude, if I got $16,000 when I turned 21, hey, do you think that you would have gone into the military if they had given you $16,000 when you turned 21? Or 18 or whatever? Sure. I'd already like been making.
Starting point is 01:49:45 Change the trajectory for a lot of people. Yeah. No, I probably would have still done it. But because I had already had jobs before that. So I kind of understood like that you need to do that. You can't just rely on somebody else to give you money. So. I would have got a job.
Starting point is 01:50:00 I would have got a job, bought a fucking dope, some sort of dope camper, and then just take my money and cruise around and bang chicks. I think I might still do that. Except for the last part. Just one. Singular joke. Judy Reed. You handled the part where you didn't agree so well. Very respectful.
Starting point is 01:50:20 Yeah, I'm cool. I'm a cool dude. Got squirrely when that bat showed up. Yeah. Sebon, origin story of the landscape artwork that calls out all the buckets of death if i remember correctly it was like cartoon art uh you the stuff on the chalkboard that was all greg's idea we we had this guy there was this guy dude he was the former art director over at the ufc he's such a stud oh my god and he lost like this he lost like 60 or 100 pounds or something and he came to work for crossfit even though he had this killer job at the ufc because he wanted to have like more
Starting point is 01:50:56 meaning in his life so he comes to crossfit and he and he starts working there and he becomes the art director there i work very closely with him obviously worked for me and he starts working there and he becomes the art director there. I work very closely with him, obviously worked for me. And he's probably the most talented person we had working at CrossFit. And he drew those on there. But you know, what's crazy is he came there and then all of a sudden the whole fucking media team got fired basically, except for him and like two other dudes.
Starting point is 01:51:19 And it fucking, and I think he still works there. He's such a good dude. What? He's a mega talent,. He's a mega talent. Mega, mega, mega talent. A Mexican dude. Maybe even born in Mexico.
Starting point is 01:51:32 Eric Diaz. Crazy talented. Crazy talented. I mean, like, stupid. Like, if you saw this guy do Photoshop or After Effects, it would blow you away. Blow you away. On a whole nother level. Smart too.
Starting point is 01:51:52 Can critique, can direct, can mentor. I wonder what he's up to. He was dope. He had a big fucking crazy handlebar mustache he had he had he had a kind of a funny accent he talked like a foreigner a beautiful wife beautiful kid maybe kids two kids daughter and son i think one of his kids maybe played the violin yeah that dude was cool as shit i wonder what happened to him. What a shitty fucking thing to happen, right?
Starting point is 01:52:30 You're the art director of the UFC doing all this cool shit, come to CrossFit because you really want to, like, help humanity and just not watch gay dudes beat each other to death in their fucking bikini bottoms, and then the fucking whole team around you gets fucking fired. Holy shit. Holy shit. He could do anything Yeah yeah he He did the new games logo
Starting point is 01:52:55 Yeah maybe I don't know he could do everything Whoever did the new games logo is a G The fact that it looks like Glock Is fucking wild it's finally not like Atari 1970s I never really liked it when I was there although it made cool sounds
Starting point is 01:53:18 when it moved around alright Kyra Milligan and then... Oh, tomorrow, Jimmy Letchford, the president of GORUCK. That's cool. That's an old friend. I used to hang with Jimmy a bunch. Then Wednesday, Greg Glassman. I'm staying at his house. That should be easy.
Starting point is 01:53:42 Thursday, Dale Ceron. That's going gonna be cool I don't know if you guys remember that's the guy I've had on the show a bunch attorney crashed a few helicopters he's a larper what's that? live action role play dresses up in night armor
Starting point is 01:54:02 and fights people oh yeah yeah he's like a furry but instead of like doing wake worship yeah i'm gonna ask him that i'm gonna compare him to a furry i think we got this guy coming on who trains with pool boy too he's an hwpo guy rafa rafa something that's gonna be an interesting story i think that dude's got a crazy story how he got into the country uh yeah so you know does greg have a gym in that um 11 or 12 000 square foot yes there's a crazy the garage is dope there's a little skateboard ramp in there beautiful um but it's so I went in there yesterday to work out.
Starting point is 01:54:46 So fucking, have you ever worked out and your ears start hurting and it hurts for like 30 minutes? You think you're going to fucking go crazy? Yeah. Like it's cold or like just from the workout itself? I was on, he has a, not an assault bike, but like some other brand. Schwinn Airdyne? Schwinn Airdyne. And airdyne and it blows so much cold air i can't even believe it's real it needs to be covered it's un-fucking-usable and it was
Starting point is 01:55:13 blowing on me and i was just doing 20 cals 10 push-ups 5 pull-ups and i i made it to uh 160 um uh calories like what the eighth round and I had to stop. My head was throbbing from the cold air because the garage is freezing. When I mean freezing, I mean No, it's probably freezing. 20 degrees. I was completely bundled up. I should have worn a hat.
Starting point is 01:55:39 How do you work out in the cold? Do you have to wear a hat? I should have covered my ears. Sweater and sweatpants usually is what i'm doing you don't cover your head uh i wore socks i wore socks it was crazy i've never like that was nuts to me i was wearing socks i threw away all my long socks when i was in virginia and i just had ankle socks and then i had to like scrounge through all my boxes to try to find long socks and i moved back here because my ankles get cold oh oh i got a cool pair of og socks from chase and uh bill victim yeah i was a victim victim of the cold damn i was a victim yeah okay so cover the ears okay yeah if this headache this like pain set in for 30 minutes
Starting point is 01:56:29 i went i was kind of writhing a little bit on the floor as being a little bitch but i came downstairs to my room and my wife's like what's wrong i'm like dude my and i'd heard my son on cold mornings when i would take him skateboarding complain about his ears hurting and he'd cry a little and i'm like what a pussy well you guys i should take you guys outside to see the um um can you send me a link and the text oh i could send myself a link um right copy i'll take you guys outside here are you sending it? I just sent it to the
Starting point is 01:57:11 oh you're a good dude let me see I'm going to remove this dude allow access to my Sevon I'm going to remove this dude, allow access to my, I'll, I'll show you what's going on. So I just walked, let me show you a little broader perspective. So this is, that's the setup. Wow, nice. Right?
Starting point is 01:57:53 Sweet. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. And so the bat was down here cruising around on the ground, but then, it's cold holy shit it's freezing this place is so i've never been in a house like this this place is so massive and there's a dog down there normally in the summer but it's gone and there's like an elevator that comes up to the
Starting point is 01:58:23 oh you're kind of breaking up it's completely quiet out here what'd you say i'm breaking up a little bit oh but you could see that right the lake yep that looks beautiful Wow. Yeah, it's nuts So it's basically this oh I don't know how many stories the house is maybe it's for Massive log that though. Yeah, it's massive. It's a massive massive massive lock can but I see if I can close this thing I hit and will that end the show just leave it should be leave studio on your phone.
Starting point is 01:59:28 I don't see it. I'll just swipe up. There, it works. House doesn't even look that nice. Dude, it's so crazy. All the doors are like eight feet tall. Every floor has 10 ceilings doors are all thick as shit washers and dryers all over the place by fireplaces it's the heated floors um whoa dude it's I have this whole floor to myself. It's massive.
Starting point is 02:00:06 This floor is bigger than my entire house. I mean, by far. And just me and my kids and my wife on it. It's not on a street. It's on a lake. The place is so isolated that when they built it, they had to bring in they brought they had to bring everything by barge right so they brought everything in the whole this whole house was built
Starting point is 02:00:31 and it's it's all logs that are massive it's just built with all logs on a steel steel and concrete foundation and frame it's wild i asked greg i'm like could they build this today he's like no they would not build something like this today i think that the owner of popeye's chicken built it whoa and nowadays it's all like brutalistic architecture just like squares and whatever's easiest to put together this was not easy yeah this. This is crazy. And I think there's something about the way the logs are stacked so that there's no, uh, whatever. There's no gaps in it.
Starting point is 02:01:10 There's, it basically is like, there's not even any screws. They're all cut and laid and they're huge. They're the biggest logs you ever seen. They're massive. It's a trip, a polar plunge.
Starting point is 02:01:23 Oh God. I don't know if I can do that. a polar plunge oh god okay anything else who did i say we have tomorrow jimmy yeah jimmy leftford oh that's cool okay Jimmy? Yeah, Jimmy Lifford. Oh, that's cool. Okay. Let's see if I have anything fun in my notes here. Finish the show with something fun. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Buy a t-shirt from Vindicate. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:02:03 Use code SEVON. See if that ties. Use code SEVON. Paper Street. channel buy a t-shirt from vindicate yeah use code sevon see if peptides use code sevon paper street coffee all of it there was this doctor friend of mine about a year year and a half ago, I was talking to him about Emily Rolfe and the other guy. And somehow we'd come up to this, onto the subject of cancer too. And he joked around and he goes, what, so you believe in turbo cancers? And like he, I didn't, I'd never heard that term before. Now that term is everywhere. Turbo cancers. Have you heard that term is everywhere turbo cancers have you heard that term yeah i think you brought it up still not super sure i understand it though just like yeah i don't understand it at all all right what do you guys want to do? Go back to work? Go back to sleep? Ken Walters. Patrick Vellner says media doesn't know anything. It's a great answer.
Starting point is 02:03:14 Where was he? Did he just do an interview recently? I think he was on Coffee Pods and Wands. Recently? Yeah, he did that. Oh, on the show. Yeah, right. Oh, oh, oh, the show. Yeah, right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 02:03:31 Yeah, four days ago they had it. Maybe that's what he was talking about. Oh, when is episode six coming out? What's today? Monday. Oh, shit. It's supposed to come out today. Good thing you guys are members.
Starting point is 02:03:49 Jesus Christ. Let me call Patrick. I don't know who to call anymore. I don't know who the fuck's in charge. Hold on. Let me call Sousa. Hold on. Just call him.
Starting point is 02:04:04 That's a great question Jesus criminy dude you guys are going to have a blast with episode 6 it's wild it's the longest one so far yeah it's really good I could just make it public right now I can I have the ability to go back there and just make it
Starting point is 02:04:21 public you want me to put it for members only right now? Yeah. Do you know how to do all that too? Yeah, I guess of course. Probably better than I do. Yeah. Is there any reason why we wouldn't?
Starting point is 02:04:37 I don't think so. I think it's ready. Okay. Okay. All right. It's going to go on, uh, your,
Starting point is 02:04:44 your CEO member. If you're not good, subscribe, be a member, and then you can watch it. All right. It's going to go on your, your CEO member. If you're not good, subscribe, be a member and then you can watch it. All right, cool. It's up there. It's ready to be watched.
Starting point is 02:05:02 Russian robot fighting gone wrong oh there's no way that's real let me send you this there's no way this is real do you way this is real. Do you think this is real? You guys are going to love episode six. Did you make... I know that there's a bunch of them up there. Did you pick the right one? Yeah, the one that's... doesn't say private copy.
Starting point is 02:05:44 That's actually titled behind the scenes 2023 CrossFit Games part 6 I'll have to read those okay look at this there's no way this is right this is real that's not real is it no way they'd kill people there's no way that's real dude that that was crazy all right guys thank you that was fun episode six is live go enjoy
Starting point is 02:06:33 it and I'm guessing tomorrow for members water palooza will come out let me just check with Patrick Rios and see I think do you see it uploaded I saw it taking forever to upload the other day do you see it in there it looks like it's ready I think it's uploaded yeah
Starting point is 02:06:49 okay maybe we'll make that one available tonight dude we're turning this is this is like we're fucking crushing right now where would I see it just in videos
Starting point is 02:07:04 private copy all access hopper or all access hopper pepper gerard oh wow and it says unlisted it's the very top one yep that's the one crazy oh look it says monetization on oh that's just to see if there's anything illegal in it. Right. Any copyrighted shit. Yeah, I think so. Once we let that go. Okay. Once we put that to members,
Starting point is 02:07:31 we turn off the monetization. Cause they don't have to watch the commercials. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right, guys. Thank you, Calebaleb thank you uh see you guys tomorrow morning 7 a.m pacific standard time maybe we'll do another um a pop-up show on twitter today too all right buh-bye

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