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My guest today is a congressman out of Texas and he has been on the podcast before. And now he's an author of a new book called Fortitude.

He is the great and powerful Dan Crenshaw podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience Train My Day Job and podcast my night all day. Congressman, how are you, sir? I am doing. Well, Joe, good to see you again. You look official, bro, you look very official. You have an American flag in the background, you got books. Have you read those books? Be honest. Yeah, it's a good question.

Some of them I mean, this one is like a congressional cookbook. I'm not going to read that. So obviously, some of these I have or at least I dabble in books like I'll Look Over a book.

I've definitely read my book. That one's out there. I've read that way too many times.

I hate reading it now. And that's the one that's out right now. I wrote it. That's the one that's out right now.

The one that comes out. Yeah. That comes out a I don't know when we're posting this, but Tuesday, April 7th, that's tomorrow.

Yeah, that's exactly when this will come out. So perfect fortitude. We need that right now. And we do we do now the rest of this, I just kind of set up for this. I found that weird ass painting right there. It's some like flea market in San Diego back when I was stationed there. It's like a it's like a it's a bunch of ships. It looks like a horrible idea for a tattoo.

You know, sometimes people of those really bad old ship tatties, I yeah, I feel like there's worse tattoos you could get.

Oh yeah. I've got them. Is there. What about the typewriter. Do you use the typewriter.

Oh not that that is a legit typewriter. That was my granddad's old typewriter so I saved that. They kept it in pretty good shape. I didn't really have to do much restoring. But you can still buy the ink for that. Actually we would. We used to have it set up in the house. So when gas came over they could like typewrite message. And so it's like a gas log. It's gone. Oh, that is cool. Little thing.

So what's your take on what we're going through right now, Dan, for everybody in the future? This is day. It's basically a month into like extreme coronavirus lockdown for the country.

It all started sort of in the beginning of March. Now, here we are in the first week of April and everybody's stir crazy and weirded out by this, including me. And I'm sure you as well. What is your take on this? Well, generally speaking, I remember I remember the weekend where everything all of a sudden shifted, it was the March 14th weekend and I remember that weekend because it was my birthday and I remember how everybody was basically still going out to bars and restaurants.

And then all of a sudden everything changed, the entire paradigm changed. And I could go through a long timeline of how we got there. There's a lot of finger pointing right now, a lot of opportunism. The reality is a lot of us didn't. Pretty much everybody didn't know a whole lot. And then we ended up in this situation where and now my general take on it. We we are in a what I would call a tactical retreat.

So I'm going to use a military term there to describe what we are doing. We all of a sudden ran into a hail of gunfire, like I think about this in military terms. We're on a patrol. We run into a hail of gunfire. We're not really sure what hit us. We have a basic idea. We know who they are, generally what the enemy is, but we weren't quite sure how to combat it. So we took a retreat.

Tactically speaking, that retreat looks a lot like a lockdown. Don't talk to anybody. Don't don't touch anybody to maintain that social distancing. Lock things down. We have to slow the spread and allow our back up our our public health system to catch up. At a certain point, we have to come out of that tactical pause. We have to come out of that retreat and start engaging in the enemy a little bit. Now, we do that slowly.

We do it carefully. And so I think that's the I like to look at it that way as the conversation about how to reopen society. At a certain point, we have to move away from this containment and move into a risk mitigation strategy. And we're ramping up our production of things like ventilator's of PPY of testing capability in order to do that. Now, there's some talk of when this is going to end, and I don't know how you even make that distinction.

How does one make a decision? And it seems like one of those things where once it starts, once you lock a country down until people stay away, stay home, don't go to work, don't do anything unless it's very essential, like grocery stores, hospitals, media, there's certain things that are allowed to be done right now. When does that end and how does one decide when that ends?

There's a lot of different ways to think about that from from the public health perspective, I hear them say certain things like after 14 days of a downward trend in cases, then we can start reopening when the R is less than one, then you can start reopening. So are being less than one means for every contagious person. They infect less than one other person. Right now that numbers are out just over two. OK, so there's there's an obvious spread that occurs that I have.

I think those are valid assumptions. I definitely question using those as our standards. I would like to see us use other standards as well, such as are we at a point where we're testing enough and we have enough ventilators and hospital bed space and PPE to actually fight the virus alongside reopening our society? Because I think we have to come to terms with a very certain truth, which is we cannot indefinitely lock down. Those costs are enormous and not just cost to our 401.

KS and our jobs. I mean, there's a public health cost there, too. And I speak with doctors here in Houston. We don't we don't have a huge number in Houston. Our hospitals are like 50 percent empty right now. And they can't do much needed surgeries, procedures, because, you know, what's called an elective surgery is going to be kind of a gray area. So a lot of stuff that isn't getting done from a public health side.

Also, there's there's there's, I think, the obvious public health crisis. When people don't have jobs, there's divorce rates, there's suicides. We have to really take all of this into account as we as we talk about when to reopen society.

Yeah, we you and I privately had this conversation through text messages about the way reporters are using this moment to criticize Trump with in ridiculous ways. And one of them was this questioning of whether or not he should describe these drugs that have some promise, which many doctors are describing hydroxy chloroquine with xpac. And zinc apparently is a combination that keeps getting brought up. And there's a doctor that has been using this to some reported success in New York City.

But what drives me crazy is these are rare opportunities that someone has to talk to the president and they're using it to chastise him for bringing up drugs that do show promise and hope. He's not telling people to go take it. He's not advocating it. He's not pretending that he's some sort of medical professional. He's just talking about some things that show promise in the medical community.

You know, what is your take on all this? Because this is a it's a weird situation that he finds himself in with the press. This is very strange and antagonistic position. Yeah, the press needs to figure out who they want to be, and it's actually like Chapter two in my book, it's called Who is Your Hero? And that and that conversation is about who we think we should be, like, what kind of people do we think we should be?

What does it mean to be a good American, a good citizen? The press believes it is their duty to only be adversarial to to politicians, mostly conservative politicians. They don't treat Democrats the same way, but and that is their job. I wish they would treat all all all politicians the same. And to to an extent, that is their job, to be adversarial, to question what is coming out of government. But I would argue that their main purpose is to simply educate the public, educate the public with full lots of facts, full context, full understanding of what's going on.

I think on that point, they're utterly failing due to a huge extent. I think I've been feeling for a long time. But in a time of crisis where it's so important that they actually do that, that that more important thing of informing the public, they're really failing and they completely waste time. I mean, how many reporters actually get access to the president? I bet there's hundreds of thousands of reporters out there, good ones who would who would love to be able to be in that press briefing room and actually ask legitimate questions that would inform the American public.

But but they don't they play these gotcha games now. They'll ask questions like, what do you want to say to people who are upset with you right now?

It's like, how is how is that a good question? How is the news right in the middle of it? I mean, it was it's so utterly absurd and and unnecessary, actually. A whole list of questions.

I don't I won't read them all, but they're they're they're a complete waste of time. And I think they're failing us miserably. And then there's the opportunism that occurs. Like, listen, there's if you're writing an op ed, if you're a journalist writing an op ed, say, an opinion journalist especially, I I fully understand why you might you might say you might write in your report. OK, the president said this today, but three weeks ago they said this.

So there's been a change. That's fine. That makes total sense. That provides context to the reader. Even it might be biased and whatever.

But but but to but to only do that in direct questioning with the president just to try and play this gotcha game. I it's not helpful. It's not helpful at all. And it's not informing anybody in the least. You know, you mentioned the the president talking favorably about the queen or hydroxyl chloroquine. And you remember the the couple that ingested that out in Arizona because that something something similar to I think it's called chloroquine phosphate or something like that. It might be misspeaking.

It's poison, but that's it. Yeah, it's an ingredient on fish bowl cleaner, fish tank cleaner. And so they saw it and they ingested it, which was obviously a terrible idea. Nobody would nobody told them to do that. And then the media, the media, instead of saying, wow, this is a shame that they did this, they blame the president and they blame the president for talking about what is a at least anecdotally, a proven way to combat this disease.

We don't know through clinical trials whether in mass it'll actually work.

But but to express optimism over it, it doesn't seem to be a punishable offense. But the outrage mob is was fully invested in this kind of outrage, reasoning to to to tear down the president over this. And it's just it just feels so unnecessary. I mean, that's why I wrote this book. But the book is about outrage, culture, and in our like this sort of weird new cultural need to just go after each other in the worst of ways.

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

Yeah, and I actually write about that exact point in my book like this we've begun to do is reward this sort of. I would say overly passionate, emotional behavior, so we've replaced sophisticated reasoning with outrage. We've started to change who we actually view as heroes. This is how I describe it. We all have hero archetypes and like we grew up this way and there's like fictional characters like the Jedi, like that's like a hero archetype or Superman.

And we kind of look up to this person or or like or like real characters like Rosa Parks or Jesus. Like there's there's people that we actually look up to and we identify with. And there's certain attributes that we use and we say, I want to be like that. And so when I act in public, I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to access that attribute. I'm going to be better. And according according to that archetype and we sort of turn that on its head and are in our current outrage pop culture, like we see somebody who plays the victim and we cheer them on when in reality what we used to do is see somebody who overcame adversity, who was a true hero, and then we cheer them on.

We've totally reversed that. Yeah. And like so and so and so you actually get more points. If you're more snarky, if you're mean or if you're if you're if you're playing this kind of cheap shot game. And like in my book, I use this example of like these these this group of veterans, they were waiting for me at my office when I was on the phone and I knew something was off because veterans my age, they we never wear the like the ball cap, you know, the gold letters that say veteran on it.

We never wear that. But these guys were wearing that. So that was it was my first sign that something was different about these guys. But they just asked for a picture and I figured that was it and they would keep going. But the second thing that was off was like they they weren't they weren't looking at the camera. They were fiddling as as I was, like, posing for this camera, for this photo. And I thought that was strange.

And it turns out they were just getting their own video camera ready to record and then they start following me. I'm like, just go nuts. Like, they lose their minds. I'm talking about Trump and betraying the country and just all this nonsense.

And so they were just trying to have a gotcha moment with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is what they do. They're they're an activist group. And they'll they'll corner people like me and try and get a viral video going. And then it's up to me at that point to just like understand what's happening and just kind of walk silently. And I kind of engage with them in some ways. But they were they were becoming extremely emotional. I mean, their voices started to crack.

It was. Which was, you know. And what were they saying about you or to you?

Oh, how could you how could you let how could you betray the country by supporting the president? I mean, things like that, mostly sloganeering like this was like a deep conversation by any means. But but that's the point. The point is, is that they're rewarded for that, like overly emotional inmotion filming while while walking type of type of scenario. And then they like and then there's this whole deal where I have to get in the elevator because that's how I get to the votes.

Like I leave my my office on the fourth floor and can and I take the elevator down to the basement. I walk across like that. That's just my route. And so but what they do is as I get into the elevator, they're like, oh, you're hiding from us. He's running away from us in the Newsweek writes up the same story like there's this there's this entire culture behind this notion that that you that you have to use as much emotion as possible and express your anger in the most exceptional of ways.

Otherwise, it's not worth listening to. But we haven't stopped as a culture and we have to stop rewarding it. And that's what I talk about. We have to stop rewarding that kind of behavior so that it actually ceases to. Control us that way. Well, they accomplished what they wanted to do, we're talking about them right now, although he didn't give up their name. Good for you. But you talked about them and that's what they wanted.

I mean, there's so many groups out there that are I don't even know if they have an endgame. The end game seems to just get attention and, you know, and shine the light on these atrocities or whatever whatever they feel like is an atrocity.

It is attention. It happens on both sides. I'm pretty careful in my book to actually criticize both sides on this one because it means I do see it in the conservative circles. It's different the kind of outrage culture that happens. And conservatism is certainly different and less widespread than that happens on the left. It is more about attention seeking. And and I always tell people that if you're going to if your main goal is getting more followers and more clicks than.

You know, you have to re-evaluate what your priorities are, and I worry about the activist community as well, which is activists sometimes don't want to win, they don't actually want to win the argument. And that should concern us because at least politically speaking, my goal is to win the argument and to win the argument. I have to actually persuade people like that that should be the goal that those lengthier conversations, that's why these kind of podcasts are so prevalent.

I do my own podcast because I wanted to dive deep into some of these issues on a substantive level.

Well, I do appreciate your reasonable and balanced perspective because you are one of the rare guys that's on the right that does criticize the right and do and you do it fairly and objectively, which I think is very important in this day and age. You know, I am on the left, but I find myself more and more getting confused like a man without a country or man, you know, without a side, rather without a team. There's so many people on the left now that want to silence people.

Freedom of speech was always a core tenet of what this country is based on the ability to express yourself. But there's so many people that want people deep platformed for having views that they disagree with or ideas that they disagree with. And this is an enormous problem, obviously, in social media.

Well, bringing it back to coronavirus, there was there was certain messages that were being taken down by Twitter if they were, and I think these type of messages are articles that were being promoted along the lines of, hey, there's there's too much economic cost. We need to we need to reopen the economy and get people back to work. If it was things like that, Twitter was taking them down. They're still doing that. But but I heard reports of.

And on a broader scale, yeah, the attack against freedom of speech is by far one of the most concerning elements that concerns, I think, classical liberals. And if that's how you would describe yourself, I don't know what it does to all of us in the political world. Joe Rogan's political leanings are like the great mystery. And frankly, we kind of like it that way. It makes you it keeps you out of the fray. It's more of a mystery.

Now, as I said, that I wouldn't vote for Biden, that I said I would vote for Trump over Biden.

All these people went crazy. But let me let me be clear. You know what?

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

I mean, I'm not a doctor, but when you can't form sentences in public and you forget what you're talking about and you wander off into these conversations, if you're not smoking pot, you're not high.

If you're not on pills, like what's going on? Well, there's cognitive decline. He's an older man that has mental issues. And, you know, not to be cruel to him. He's he's suffering medically. This is it is the real issue. And the Democrats want to sweep that under the rug. And Trump is already chewing them apart. He's already dismissing him. I mean, there is a recent thing that Karl Kolinsky posted a video on his Twitter talking about.

This is what happens when you don't discuss the elephant in the room. And it's Trump saying he's to do doing a press conference. And they asked him a question about something that Biden rodeos Biden. Right, that he's like he's that's a Democratic operative. He didn't read it. He probably doesn't even know what's going on right now. And he's going to he's going to continue to do that. And it's such a vulnerable point. And I I don't know why the Democrats thought it would be a good idea to take someone who's clearly got a problem.

And this is I mean, I don't want to be mean to the guy, but we've all seen it. That's not normal. It's not normal to forget, like when he's talking about the creator and he literally loses. What he's saying is like the you know, the thing like quote of the Declaration of Independence.

Yeah. Why now? Because, I mean, that's a very simple document. I don't understand.

There's a bunch of those things like when he was talking about the cure and losing what he's saying that you have to take care of the cure. And he he's he's struggling. The guy struggling. He's tired. This is an extremely stressful process to run for president. And the idea that he's going to be able to get through this and be OK on the other side, to run the country for four, potentially eight years is crazy.

Yeah, and I know more from a policy perspective, if we're looking at the coronavirus in particular in the handling of it, this is obviously the subject of hot debate. You know, there's there's plenty of bad faith journalists out there who continue and politicians, including Pelosi, who continue to repeat that Trump has the deaths of thousands on his hands. I think that's a horrible, horrible overstatement. I mean, to say the least, it's just fundamentally not true.

But we need to remember, Joe Biden just recently acknowledged that he now agrees with Trump's decision to close down travel from China in January. And I go through a long I recorded a podcast. I almost have as many subscribers as you do now.

I'm sure you know, I know where I go through a timeline of what actually happened. Right. Let's let's actually look into this debate in an objective way of who knew what and when, because you can criticize people for sure, because hindsight's 20, 20. But it's important to put yourself in the moment and what we all knew at certain times and certain decisions were made. And I have to point out that back when we did this travel restriction from China in late January, at that same time, the World Health Organization was saying that was repeating Chinese claims in mid-January that this virus couldn't even be transmitted in human to human contact.

You know, and Trump was ripped apart for that. Biden ripped him apart for that. Biden continued to rip him apart for that up until a couple of weeks ago.

So, you know, these decisions saved countless lives. And and it's pretty obvious that Biden I mean, he said it. So, of course, it's obvious that he would have made a different decision and and we would be in a much different place right now to put aside all of the issues that you pointed out. Those are certainly issues. And I don't I don't need to repeat them. I don't need to go into it. But it's I feel like we do this.

It is obvious. But that's crazy that this is the guy that's running for president, you know, and then when people got upset at saying that, you know, me saying that I would vote, I'd probably vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden, I'm literally saying I'd vote for anybody that can talk. I mean, anyone who's not in severe cognitive decline. I mean, pick a person.

Should I vote for Hillary before I'd vote for him? Literally. I mean, I just I just think the poor guy shouldn't be in the position he's in. I don't understand why they're doing that. I mean, anyone else could have been Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, people to judge pick a person. They all would have been a better choice. I mean, this is crazy. And I don't know what their strategy is. I don't know why they decided to do this.

It makes no sense to me. It's very, very confusing. Yeah, there was a there was a couple of days where it all happened where, you know, behind the scenes, all of these different candidates basically basically said, OK, we're all going to quit because we are so afraid of Bernie winning. They don't think Bernie can win the Democrat nomination to win the general election. I tend to agree with that. And I you know, I'm very much against Bernie winning the general election, but that's not the point.

The point is, is that the DNC didn't want that. They and and they made moves to make that happen. And the Democratic Party as a whole is trying to find out who they are. You know, I look back in time and the Democrat Party to me seems more like a Labor Party. And that changed over time into a highly progressive activist party where the labor side of that is really just an afterthought. And it has really become this sort of, well, a Democratic Socialist Party when things don't happen to control.

Very recently, because I wouldn't even describe President Obama as I mean, he definitely he definitely paved the way for it. Definitely way more progressive than Clinton. But it appears to me that it happened very recently. And another theory as to how this happened.

I think I think the kind of language that is often used by by a lot of well-meaning Democrats over time and this sort of Labor Party era like let's call it the Bill Clinton era, and before that, the language they used was still rather radical and revolutionary and kind of coming up from the children of the 60s and that kind of revolutionary feel, this idea that a progressive utopia can solve more and more of your problems if you just expand government control that we put experts at the top, we can figure all this out and we can make your problems go away.

I think for a long time, though, they had the Republican Party to always just be against that and and say, hold on, wait a second. There's there's there's other consequences to doing that. And it was almost like there was this sort of. This sort of unspoken balance, the thing, and I'm not even sure that they believed it themselves, but over time their young people did believe it. And so now you have AFSC, who I think truly believes these things.

He truly believes in the virtues of socialism. I think Bernie believes in the virtues of socialism. I think he's dead wrong on this. But but he believes it. And I think a new generation, a new generation of progressives are true believers in a way that I'm not so sure they were before. And they're much louder because of their platforms on social media and they're able to change the direction of their party in a much more powerful way than I think they had been able to in the past.

And we see that in Congress to an extraordinary degree where where somebody like me now views Pelosi is sort of in the middle between moderates and extremists. And, you know, 10 years ago, we would have we would have described Nancy Pelosi as an extremist. But now I view her as sort of center left and the extremists are even to her left. And she's deeply afraid of those those that that progressive squad because of their power on social media and media in general.

So I think it's an interesting battle.

Do you think that the shift is because it seems like nothing works perfectly and this hasn't really been tried or implemented on a large scale in the United States? Democratic socialism, they don't think of it as socialism. The way Bernie describes it, when you talk to them in person, it sounds very reasonable. It sounds like he's looking out for the rights of the workers. And he the way he described finding this money, just taking a small tax on speculation gambles that Wall Street does.

Do you think it's because nothing is worked ideally and that this hasn't been tried before? So they look at this as this could be the solution that solves all this for us and sort of balances out the economic playing field.

Yeah, well, I mean, I would, of course, if he was making that argument and he does, I would simply say, of course it's been tried before. That's the same kind of rhetoric that was used to to move in to the socialist policies of the 20th century where tens of millions of people died. And I would also put it this way of thinking about it.

Yeah, you can you can put forward these these seemingly innocuous ideas. OK, we're going we're going to tax a little bit here. And on that specific policy, by the way, that that's not what people think it is. You tax a little bit there that has wide ranging effects on every single transaction that you would make in the stock market. I think this is the Warren. And I think Bernie Sanders has the same policy that you're describing. But I remember I remember analyzing Elizabeth Warren's policy, which is again, the same.

It would have drastic effects on everybody for one case on pensions. And these are working class people that own these things. This isn't just the wealthy that they that they describe it as. So on one hand, there's always a lot more there's a lot more layers to the policy that they put out than than they're really letting on. And there's a lot more second, third order consequences than they're letting on. On the other hand, as far as they're not being tried.

What they're describing is a is a fast path to the nationalization of production, that owning the means of production, setting price controls, and they talk about setting price controls, setting setting wages is price controls. Setting prices is price controls. I mean, we passed a bill out of the House, H.R. three, which they claim lowers people's drug drug prices. And these evil Republicans like us, we're all against it because, you know, because we just don't want people to have low drug prices.

Of course, that's not true. The reality is, is that when you analyze what it means to implement price controls, you lose supply. That's just Economics 101. That that has to be true. It always is true. But that's why people starved and Maoist China and the Soviet Union, because they put price controls on food and they did production quotas and they believe they truly believed that the government could figure out how much to produce and what price to sell it at and that they would be a perfect utopia after that.

Well, of course, it doesn't work even for something as something as simple as farming and food production. It doesn't work at all. People starved as a result. And so it's even more unlikely that it would work for more complicated parts of the economy, like wages and drug prices. Because the reality is and the Congressional Budget Office confirmed this, many other studies confirm this, we would have up to 30 less new drugs over the next couple of decades if you implement that kind of legislation.

And so they forget to tell you that you're actually making a choice between these price controls and actually having the cure in the first place. And what I tell people is like affordability is definitely important and we should continue to tackle that problem. And and there are ways to do that. But the thing has to exist before you can afford it. It has to actually exist.

Kind of pause you for a second. Now, how do you implement that without making putting a cap on the amount that a drug can cost? I mean, how do you make it more affordable?

Well, so. Well, there's other bills that we're in favor of that do that, so one way is, is improve the way that generic drugs get to market. So just like any innovation, there's a patent on it. OK, but once that patent ends, what happens is some pharmaceutical companies do take advantage of the system and maybe they continue to put out different drugs that are slightly different than the last one. It extends their their their patent or they'll actually pay off generic manufacturers to not produce it.

So there's a lot of these little loopholes that we can actually tackle surgically and make sure that doesn't happen. We also have to remember that a lot of these stories are are anecdotal. They they they are they're about a few different drugs. And instead of instead of a wide price controls on everything that a pharmaceutical company actually creates, we should be looking at some of these lifesaving drugs that we want people to have. But we also don't want to destroy the foundation of innovation and research and development that it took to make that drug in the first place.

And so how do we do that? Well, I mean, there's ways there's ways to reinsure it at a certain caps when insurance companies don't want to pay the exorbitant amounts that it would cost. There's there's other options for reinsurance, but it's it's you have to tackle it one at a time. There's there's more complicated ways to do it with the way that pharmacy companies do rebates with the insurance companies. That gets into a really complicated discussion. But there's ways to do that front, for instance, for insulin.

That was a Republican bill that we tried to pass in and see that got shot down. But it would it would have driven down prices for something like insulin.

Was there anything else to catch that? I mean, why did he get shot down? That was that was just because people don't understand it. I think I think Democrats, they they love the idea of these very simple fixes. We want things to be cheaper. So they will just be cheaper by law. We want people to make more money. So we will just make the minimum wage fifteen dollars. We'll just make it that way and everything will be fine.

There'll be no consequences to that. No second, third order effects. But there are second and third order effects. And when we ignore those second and third order effects, we ignore them at our peril. And in the case of the 15 dollar minimum wage, well, you can't ignore the fact that companies are just going to hire less people. You know, their their budget doesn't change just because you change the minimum wage with respect to drug innovation.

They're just they just won't invest in something. And it takes billions and billions of dollars to invest in these drugs for four for the massive amounts of cost that it takes to to do the clinical trials that take years. I can remember the average on top of my head, but it's enormous and an enormous amount of time. And so you're not going to get somebody to take that risk if there's not any payoff at the end. And I think that's that's what we forget.

We have to balance that quite a bit. I would also remind everybody of this with respect to the drug price discussion, that bill, that H.R. three bill, it won't become law because the Senate won't take it up and the president won't sign it. But if it did, it wouldn't hurt Big Pharma. I think Democrats would like to believe that it would hurt big pharmaceutical companies.

It wouldn't it would put all of the smaller start up biotech companies totally out of business because they're the ones who actually they start that innovation just just like happens in Silicon Valley. These startups start it and then they get bought out by the bigger companies. That's sort of how the system works. And it's a very dynamic system. That's it's it's why we are by far the number one innovator in the world. No other country innovates like we do. They don't do the research like we do.

If we implemented the price controls that are inherent in Medicare for all or H.R. three, there wouldn't be anybody else in the world doing what we do.

I can I can relate that back to the coronavirus discussion, too, on because there's there's like a there's a big discussion about. You know, should we have Medicare for all, doesn't coronavirus prove that everybody should have free health care? And again, what I what I have to remind everybody is, is that if we had Medicare for all, what we're basically talking about are price controls, because Medicare already pays below average payment for for anything, for whatever service, wherever, for whatever doctor visit.

It's about 60, 70 percent on the dollar. What does that mean?

Stop your Medicare available for you right now. What was the seniors?

But Medicare is or is a senior program. So what age is it? Does it kick in? Is it 65? I believe so, yeah, I don't want to confuse it with Social Security, so the idea is that for older folks, we should give them health care and make sure that their basic needs are covered in terms of sickness, illness, injury and such. Yeah, yeah, I mean, the entire you know, we could argue that we could we could even debate the merits of Medicare on its face, but Medicare for all time would be available for everybody now if Medicare for for all was available for everybody.

Well, you're saying is essentially you would fix prices on everything in terms of medical treatments and and that would be a problem because of what? Well, so, OK, so once you once you fix prices, well, imagine this, imagine if if if the government said that your podcast could could only take one hundred dollars per ad and that was just the price fix. From now on, what incentive would you have to really expand your audience? What expensive one incentive would you have to keep going or expand the business?

You wouldn't be able to. It's similar under any industry. Once you once you fix that price, you're going to reduce the supply that goes into stopping that analogy.

Yeah, here's the problem with the difference is, would they would have to be a reason why they would say that I could only get 100 dollars per ad. The reason why you would say that things shouldn't cost too much for someone who's injured or sick is because we want to take care of each other as a community. And the idea is that health care should be something that we provide so many services to people that we we are united right here, the United States of America.

We're supposed to be a gigantic community. And one of the great things that we could do for each other is to make sure that if someone's sick or injured and something's wrong, that we can take care of, that we would like everybody to do their share and we would like everybody to chip in so that this is possible. But there's a big difference between that and fixing the price on an ad. Well, no, but not economically, there's no difference morally there is, and I agree with you morally, we do have we have the same goal of getting everybody adequate care.

Right, from an economic standpoint. But from an economic standpoint, my, my, my point still stands and you can apply that to any industry. I see what you're saying.

But I think we're looking at medical care as a basic human right instead of just an economic issue.

The reason I don't describe it is it's not in your it is both a moral and comic issue, but for my argument that you will reduce supply, that is fundamentally true.

It is fundamentally true. We see in other countries. It's why, as we compare ourselves to other countries right now, all these places with socialized medicine, it's it's important to look at some stats and actually have them here. I could take the time to pick them up, but I'll I'll I'll give you the bottom line up front. We have overwhelmingly per capita more ICU beds in this country than any other Western country, overwhelmingly per capita. We have more ventilators than any of these other people where we're all we're all freaking out right now because we're worried about our ventilators and in our ICU beds on a per capita basis, our system has way, way more than the UK, than Italy and Spain and Germany.

All of them look like orders of magnitude more. OK, so. Also were the ones who innovate, I mean, the vast majority of research and development, new drugs that come out that come from this country. So these are these are facts that we can escape if we do. Price controls in Medicare for all is fundamentally a system of price controls. If we do that, economically speaking, we absolutely will reduce supply. Now, I understand the moral argument you're making, which is we still want to help people.

Yes, we should we should be looking for the ways to do that. But I want to be able to do that in a way that doesn't undercut the foundations of the good parts of our health care system, which is quality and innovation. If we undercut those things and we're the last country doing this, we're the last country in the world truly doing innovation, the world is left out to dry.

Is this what you're saying? Makes a lot of sense. Is there a way to do both? Is there a way to provide health care to everyone, but also encourage this innovation, encourage profit? So you encourage these companies to do all these great things that you're describing and maintain this incredibly high level of health care that we have right now?

That's certainly the goal. Right. And that that should be the goal. And this is why I think there's there's got to be room for compromise on the health care debate because you can't compromise with the other party if the goals aren't the same. Like, I've come to believe that our goals on immigration are actually not the same because it's hard to compromise on health care. They should be the same because we we want everybody to have access to quality health care.

Now, they have a very different way of getting to that point. We have probably a much more complicated. We recognize how difficult it is to get to that point while also ensuring that we maintain quality and and innovation. And so what I'm working on personally is, is the primary care side of things. So primary care, doctor, is your that's your first point of contact and health care. And the system that I think works best for that is direct primary care.

So direct primary care basically means that you, Joe, you're a doctor. You can handle about two hundred and fifty three hundred patients at a time. They all pay you a subscription fee of about seventy five dollars a month and they have full access to you. So it's like less than a cell phone bill. This already exists. This model is prevalent. It's growing. I would like to see it grow much faster. How do you do that?

Well, we can't subsidize lower income people in order to do that. How we do that is very complicated. That's what I'm working out within our complicated system. But that's an idea to make that free market model actually take off so that people who don't need help with their health care costs like you and me, we can still afford that, just like we afford any other monthly cost. And you have access to preventive medicine, you have access to telemedicine.

You actually have a doctor patient relationship that makes it a lot easier to start solving the rest of the problem, making our insurance market more competitive, making putting more choice in it, directly subsidizing those who need it, but in a way that looks a lot more like Medicare Advantage. So Medicare Advantage is a part of Medicare that basically forces competition and choice between insurance companies. It came out to be a lot cheaper than we originally thought it would in the early 2000s when this thing was created.

This was a Republican plan because there's certain foundations that I think we have to adhere to any time we want to. Problems of choice and competition are among them. You can't escape those things. And I think when we talk about Medicare for all, it tries to it tries to move past these essential foundations, whether of a free society that we have to adhere to. And and because the other thing I push back on a little bit is the health care is a right statement.

And I push back against that, because with that, when you're calling something a right, what you're effectively saying is that somebody else has a obligation to serve you. And it's hard to call something a right when that right requires the service of somebody else.

Don't Piki, don't we already do that with the firemen? Don't we do that with the police department? Don't we do that with public schools? No, not exactly. No, I mean, we have public services that I would I would distinguish those public services from something like a requirement of care, and I would distinguish to it to an enormous extent. And here's why you can add a few hundred thousand more people to a you know, to to the nation's population.

And it doesn't change the mission of the military like it doesn't it doesn't taken away thing away from them. But these, because of this sort of non rival, does like an economics term or the sort of non rival attribute of these things. It is different, right? Because there's only a select number of doctors. And we've already said that once you put price controls and there's going to be less doctors because doctors will be paid less, they'll get burned out more, they'll the hospitals will be able to actually never finish that point.

The reason price controls reduce supply and we reason we see supply reductions in other countries is because, well, hospitals don't get the same amount of money. They're not going to invest in that extra ICU bed. They're not going to buy those extra ventilators. They're not going to hire those other doctors. A doctor doesn't want to be a doctor because they don't make the amount of money that they thought they would make. They're doing extra work because there's more people who now have access to them, but there's less of them.

So wait lines are huge and they and they're seeing multiple more patients a day. Doctor burnout increases quite a bit. That's the quick answer as to why why that happens. But does that kind of answer your question? Is getting really that done?

Yeah, the human right issue, we kind of moved around with that. The idea that it's different than the fire department or the police department or.

Well, it's not a right either. Actually, the fire department is not necessarily a right as we would, but it's a public service that's provided to everyone.

It is, but but but understand. So let's call it a public service then, and let's call doctor health care a public service.

OK, well, if we were to do Medicare for all, but wouldn't the result be the same if it's provided for everyone? Not not from a practical standpoint, just because it's much easier, again, you could add one hundred thousand people more to your city and the fire department would have marginally more more work to do, you know, compared to like a doctor, for instance. Does that make sense? Like, you just it doesn't. I think if we're trying to compare them in that sense, that that rival attributes matter, it matters quite a bit.

If I'm describing that correctly. So what you're saying is because competition is necessary with medical innovation and also like doctors profit off of being exceptional. So you you they have incentive to be exceptional?

No, no. What I'm saying is if you have if you have 10 doctors that are serving a community, every time that doctor is serving somebody, it means somebody else can't see them.

Well, isn't that just the signal that we need more doctors and more hospitals? They're understaffed.

It would be, yes. But I'm saying that's how it's different from a fire department, which is sort of lying in wait for a fire to occur.

Well, if there was more fires. Yeah, but it is unlikely most of the time. I'm just I'm I'm trying I'm trying to distinguish why those why those aren't very comparable things, like why one is more of a public service that that we see to work well, while the other wouldn't necessarily be. And and and you kind of just said it yourself. It would be a signal for there to be more doctors, which is why the free market price price points are so important, because the only way to signal that is to actually that demand raises prices when the government tries to do that.

Now, there's this theory as a socialist that they would say the government can just figure that out. I would say that they've tried that in the past. It never works. It never it just it never, ever works. The government can't possibly be so omniscient as to know every single price signal and and anticipate every single piece of demand and production that is therefore required. And so it's not just health care that this is a problem. It's it's every aspect of society.

So if I can go back to what you were saying earlier, you said what you're essentially saying about socialism, that socialism looks at this problem and says, hey, let's make the government take care of everything. Let's take money from the wealthy people and pour it into the government. And the government will then have resources, take care of these issues. And you're just looking at the first step of the problem.

You're not looking at the secondary or tertiary instances or things that are going to go sideways once you do implement that first step is that we're saying. It's 100 percent what I'm saying I would I would add the social leaves out some very important things like like human nature, for instance, and and this this notion that we need incentives, socialism doesn't believe in incentives, doesn't believe that we need incentive to do things. There's there's there's there's this utopian belief among the hard core socialists that that humans will act in this in this kind of philanthropic manner no matter what.

Like we're going to do the most amount of work, even if that reward is is overwhelmingly taken away from us and redistributed. But of course, that's not how it would actually function. In reality, you would start to you. It just wouldn't. Right. And so you're now maybe for a few people, a few altruistic people would be the ones doing all the work while everybody else is pretending to work, which is what happened in the Soviet Union.

You pretend to pay us. We'll pretend to work. Right. That was saying from the Soviet Union that I think we intuitively understand that. And when that happened, again, the same thing with Medicare for all. If you're if you have price controls, your incentives change. And if we're if we're not really serious about understanding that aspect of these of these policies, then we're not thinking through them correctly. And I understand a lot of Democrats would say, well, it's Medicare for all.

It's not socialism. And I'm like, yeah, but but it has a very socialistic tendencies. And it has these qualities that I've described of not taking into account the second third order effects of removing human incentive of of of of forcing somebody services. And because you're calling it a right, which means that you now have a right to somebody else's services like these are these are things that have been proven not to work. And and I think we and I think we have to understand that as we try to move towards the mutual goal of getting everybody access to health care.

Well, it doesn't help with everything, but it doesn't that work with the fire department. Isn't the fire department in a lot of ways, a socialist institution. No, no, again, I still say it is not because it is not under any obligation to serve everybody that that demands its service. Right. It's there for specific emergency service as a as a public good, but it's there for fire.

If there's a fire, they come in and help you. There's not a financial incentive for them to do so. Right, but I've been on a practical level, on a practical level, though, imagine the scaling that has to occur if you're if you're doing that with Medicare, with medical care. And I think that's and I think that's the difference both from an economic point and a practical standpoint.

We're talking about you're talking about socialism overall, not just overall, not just involving medicine. You're talking about socialism in general. And I'm saying, isn't the fire department an example of socialism that works?

Certainly not an example of socialism. I think it's an example of a public good, the way the military is an example of a public good, the way the highways are examples of public goods, the way parks are example. Right.

But they're funded by the people. It's funded by people overall. And it doesn't cost people money to use them. And the people have these as a basic part of our society and our civilization. No, I understand that, and I'm not having a problem with that, I just I just would not call them socialists. Well, what would you call the fire department? How does it get funded? It's a public housing fund. It's a public good if it's funded by the public.

And it just it's not but it's not relying on these sort of it's not relying on the tenets of socialism to function. And so now we're now we're kind of having a discussion of definitions. And this is an important discussion to have because oftentimes even Democrats aren't really talking about socialism.

Well, even Bernie Sanders doesn't call it socialism. He's talking about democratic socialism. And he makes some very clear distinctions between the two of them, which I think you could apply to things like the fire department or the police department. Yeah, there's a lot in that, so I think Bernie, yes, he does say democratic socialism. I think he does mean much something much, much closer to socialism. And that's just me gleaning from his policies because he does talk about putting, you know, government control on corporate boards.

Elizabeth Warren talked about the same thing. So now we really are talking about nationalizing things. When you're talking about mass price controls across all industries and wage controls that you really are talking about more of an actual socialism. Again, going back to the weather, a fire department or a park or a public highway or the military is a socialist institution. Again, I would I would I would really push back against that. That is a that is a public good.

We've never in our culture and our economics, we've never defined these things as socialist institutions. And socialist institution effectively means you're you're you're seizing the means of production and you're forcing everybody into a centralized planning state. You're you're telling people what they will earn and what you will pay them, how much they can sell the start to take more control over the economy. A lot of the policy set out by Bernie Sanders are movements in that direction. The fire department is really not that again, that is that is a public service.

It has a defined as a defined budget. It is a defined role. And it doesn't it doesn't meet any of those other attributes or elements that that I describe when I describe what a socialist is. And so this gets into another question like what will what maybe Bernie just means the Nordic countries. Right. And, you know, I remember the foreign minister from Denmark came to Harvard. I think he gave a speech a few years ago and he said, stop calling us socialists.

We're not socialists. We're we're probably and I would agree with them. All these Nordic countries have, frankly, more of a free market than we do in many ways. When we look at their regulatory standards, they're they're quite liberal. When we look at their corporate tax rate, it's very low. They don't have a minimum wage in many cases. And so, you know, they're not socialist countries. What they do have is a very generous welfare state.

And and that's different. And even that is different than socialism. It's a giant welfare state. Now, I'm still against that in many ways. I think there's consequences to that giant welfare state that that they now have to suffer with as a result. And if you've noticed, too, that they did, they actually used to be very socialist countries, but their economies, Craster, as a result, and over time, they became much more free market.

We see the same thing out of Israel. We see the same thing out of India. Used to be much more deeply socialist countries. A lot of them have just maintained their big welfare state, which they are having trouble paying for, just like we're having trouble paying for our big welfare state, which is mostly based on Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

When you say public good, right. This is what you feel the fire department is. It's a public good. Right. What do you think that it's possible to implement something like that in regards to medical care? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, so this is a discussion. If we get our definitions straight, we're just saying, OK, we just want another public good and it's medical. So that's a more accurate way of describing it.

I think people don't count on what's called. Right. We just want health care. Oh, right.

But but then we get back to the discussion we had before. OK, what if we did that? Well, there's a cost to it and it's a hell of a lot more than the fire department and police department. The cost by by most estimates is in the mid thirty something trillion dollars for cost on now for over ten years. So about about three and a half trillion per year. So that's basically doubling our budget just every year. That's in addition to what we already spend.

So that's additional federal spending. Some some some people try to massage those numbers and say, oh, but that's actually cheaper than what we have now. If you add it all together, that is false. That is that is completely false. Again, I have a whole podcast where I actually interviewed the guy who made that study, the economist who did that study. And that's not a controversial study. Everybody basically agrees Elizabeth Warren's plan was fifty something trillion dollars.

That's adding what we already spend to the new spending that would have to occur. So what does that mean in practice? It means doubling or tripling your taxes. Must we try to deficit spend it, which I think would be crazy? So it means doubling or tripling your taxes. And so then and then the question is, OK, fine. Well, I do want to double or triple my taxes. I mean, some people will say that I don't actually believe them.

I bet once they got their taxes, they would totally change their mind. But let's say they're totally into it. OK, let's say they actually want to do that. Then you have the second and third order consequences, which is OK, what are you getting for this? What is what is this new utopia that we really live in where health care is free? And then I go back to, OK, in order to meet that price point of the three and a half trillion a year.

That's that's, by the way, assuming that we continue using Medicare prices, which is what all the plans do assume, by the way. So if we're doing that, we're drastically cutting prices that we pay doctors and hospitals. If we do that, we drastically cut our supply of doctors and hospitals. And we and we and we cut off and choke off the innovative capacity that we do have. So we're losing those quality, those quality points again.

So how do you get people care? Well, the main problem we have with health care in this country is that it costs too much. That's fundamentally the problem. It is too costly. And so from the Republican side, we'd rather do is actually target the source of the problem, make it easier to get insurance, because right now, I mean, you know. It's for so many Americans that insurance is just too expensive if you have it through your employer.

It's usually pretty good. People are pretty happy with that, but for the most part, it's too expensive, which is why I go back to my direct primary care idea, because once you hit, once you solve the direct primary, the primary care issue, you make solving insurance much easier. You can then you can still protect people through existing conditions. We like things like either high risk pools at the state level or reinsurance programs. You can make this you can continue to make improvements to the system that make it affordable for people and get people out that they need a while to get out of that.

Sorry, Brooke, up there for a second, the whole connection of doing things remotely sucks. What did can you say that last statement again? Just the last few words that you said. I well, you were talking about insurance, here's my question about the whole thing, like insurance still has to pay for it, then it's still you're still paying someone, still paying for all this health care. If the insurance companies aren't making any profit because they're paying for all the health care, then what happens then?

Do we fund the insurance companies? I mean, how does all this stuff get evened out? Are you referring to cases where, you know, the costs of somebody care is so astronomically expensive that even the insurance company can't afford it?

Well, look, here's the problem, right? People can't afford health care, so we get them insurance. Insurance takes care of health care. How does the insurance companies make any money then?

Well, I mean, they make a profit just like just like anybody else, but they're also they're they're also what we found is, especially with our experience with Medicare Advantage, is when you pit insurance companies against each other in in a free market, they lower costs. You know, they they are a natural. There's a different there's different elements of the health care system. On one side is driving up costs because the doctor wants to keep doing more tests or whatever it is or or a patient wants to do more things.

The insurance company's job is to say, hold on a second, why are you doing this? What is the reason for this? What's the outcome that we expect from this? So that naturally drives that's that's a natural bulwark against higher costs.

The government with a Medicare for all scheme, the government would simply replace that insurance company. We we should be very careful when assuming that the government will somehow be better at that than insurance companies. I'm not saying insurance companies are great at all. Everybody doesn't seem to like them. But I also don't want the government doing it. I don't want to be in a case like in Great Britain, where where the government will say, you know what, your grandad's not on the ventilator anymore.

We're done with that, or your baby can't get that care. I mean, we've all seen these stories and we don't have that issue in America. But can I pause?

Don't we have a problem with insurance companies? Not want to pay for certain things? They might, but they still but the care still happens. The hospital has to eat that care a lot and there's different funding mechanisms that reimburse them. And we have a really I'm not defending our health care system. I want to be clear about that. It's definitely not perfect. It's a huge patchwork. But no, that doesn't that that's not the way it happens over there, because over there, like in Great Britain, if you actually nationalize the health care system the way they do, it's when they say you're not going to be on the ventilator anymore.

There's no choice. Like that's that that is that is the decision. And that's what they have to deal with. And so it's it is different.

But don't they have some private health care over there as well?

I think they might have elements of it. Same with Canada, but but not for basic care like you can for for other kinds of health care surgeries or. Yeah, like elective stuff. Orthopedic surgery. Yeah. And I'd have to really get some details for you on what each country does. But it's it's limited. They limit what they can actually do.

I don't want to get bogged down too much in socialism. But one of the things that you said, you said socialism has been implemented before, but it's never really been implemented here.

Right. Thank God, but this is but this is what I was saying before, that I think that when people look at it as an attractive notion, one of the things that attracts them to it is that our system doesn't work that great and that maybe this should be a system that does serve people. And there's a bunch of buzzwords that people use, you know, wealth disparity, economically disadvantaged, you know, the working class, all these different these are words that they used it.

This is maybe maybe socialism would benefit those people. And there's more of them than there are the elite. And what do you say to that? I would say that there has been times in this country where we had astronomical tax rates and higher government control and some things, and we ended up with skyrocketing inflation and downward growth. So I'm talking about the 70s and the when Reagan came to power, we reversed a lot of that. And we've been in a pretty good, good trend ever since.

I know that I know what people are saying and you repeated it, which is that our system doesn't work well. I want to I actually want to push back against the premise that our system doesn't work. The evidence for that is not great. I mean, I think there's a lot more evidence to suggest that we live in the best time in modern history, in history, in modern times. It's hard. It's hard to argue. Otherwise, I would agree.

There are certain there's I mean, there's certain problems that people point to, especially millennials. My people my age, housing is more expensive. Our purchasing power isn't as good with, say, things like housing and health care. These are true statements. Also depends on where you live. The problem, Joe, is.

People are identifying issues, they're not putting them into context and perspective, but even if they're right about the issues, like our purchasing power is lower with respect to housing and health care, two very important things. People are misunderstanding. Why that is, people forgot to ask the question, why is it why is it that I can't afford this? People are instead jumping to a solution that is frankly very shallow and simple, which is make housing cheaper, make health care cheaper, how?

Write a law, say it's cheaper. Well, no, that's not how it works. We can't just do that. We have to first ask the question like, why did this happen? So in California, let's talk about housing for a second. California and Texas don't have the same problems. And housing in Texas is much easier to come by than it is in California. Why is that? Well, as it turns out, we don't have zoning here in Houston.

You can build where you want to build. It's a much easier I talk to developers who develop here and develop sometimes in California. It's like four times more expensive to develop because of all the regulations in California, which means the housing itself is going to be more expensive. So what is it? Government too much government control. Frankly, in San Francisco, you can't build anything else. They don't allow building high rises full of apartment buildings. So it's no surprise that supply is too constricted and prices have to go up for the limit of the intense amount of demand that's out there.

We don't have the same problems in Texas. OK, so again, it's like, why is this happening? Same with health care. Health care is not a free market, hasn't been and basically forever and prices have gone up as a result. Now, health care is a lot more complicated than housing, and we've spent a lot of time talking about it already. But we really have to ask ourselves why something is is so expensive, what we're getting from that.

And then and then we intelligently look at what are the solutions to solve it.

California is a mess. And a lot of ways there's a lot of problems, but you really feel like the reason why San Francisco's housing has gone up radically with the tech boom, I mean, I think a lot of it is supply and demand.

A lot of it is just I mean, but it's also people that just have ridiculous amounts of money. And so the the wealth in San Francisco is so off the charts that people are willing to buy a stupid house for, you know, three million dollars. That really should be 300000 dollars in taxes. Yeah, no, I agree with you, it is a supply and demand issue and the supply hasn't caught up with the demand. That's that's what I'm saying, is like the government won't allow more supply to be built.

Well, they're trying to ruin the city, too, though. Yeah, that's fair. But that's but that's a and that's totally fair. And as a as a city, people in San Francisco might just decide we don't want anybody else living here and we don't want to build anything up.

But what's it? They have no problem with homeless people. I mean, the homeless was the last time you've been to San Francisco. I it's it's been a while, but but I have been there quite a number of times and I was going to say, like, I spent 10 years in San Diego, San Diego doesn't have these problems.

Well, it's a far more conservative place. And they just they let big buildings get built, you know, like I used to live in downtown San Diego and when I was there, it was one way and now there's like 15 more high rises and the rent is basically stayed the same. So which is good for renters. It's bad for owners and developers. But, you know, the irony is like the populist kind of left and right, like are really mad at the owners and developers, the owners of capital.

Right. Like kind of screaming and yelling is all about. But the irony is that the policies they want to implement help those people. And if we let more deregulation occur, you're helping the renters whose rent hasn't changed in years. And I know this like I follow the market in San Diego very carefully because we still have property there. And so I rent out to people I haven't been able to I have not changed the rents in years, years, and that's because of upward supply.

And so, again, so I guess my you're completely right. It's a supply demand issue in San Francisco. The thing is, it's like you have to choose one or the other. If you want prices to go down, you have to allow more supply. If you're comfortable with prices the way they are and you don't want more people moving into San Francisco, well, then fine. But you have to be comfortable with the prices the way they are and then deal with the homeless population on top of the homeless populations and saying, I mean, you've never seen anything like it.

Los Angeles as well. Go to downtown L.A. and drive around. It doesn't even seem like it's real. It does. It seems like it's a movie.

It's it's it's really sad.

And there's no solution. There's no solution that's on the table. There's nothing that anybody's like said that, look, this is what we're going to do. This is our ten year plan and we're going to clean this up and we're going to do X, Y and Z. We're going to take care of this because there didn't used to be 70000 homeless people in the city and there is now. So obviously something went wrong. And over a period of ten million years or ten years, rather, 70 million people, 70000 people.

And how many throwing out a bunch of numbers here that don't make sense. How many million people live in L.A.? It's like twenty million people and there's 70000 homeless people. Right. Is something like that. That is a crazy number. 70000 is a it's a good sized town.

It is, and I wouldn't say there's no solutions, although there's no solutions being proposed in California. I mean, you're correct about that. They should propose solutions and they could look to Houston for some ideas. But what have they done?

Well, we we took it seriously.

One thing we do is a housing first type of policy. So you you offer services, but after you've gotten them somewhere and maybe that place is a warehouse, but you you also have to have a forcing function. So there's there's also a degree of allowing this what is basically a crime to take place in California, whereas in Texas we don't allow it. We're saying, OK, just camp on the street.

Yeah, right. It's just so that's the first thing you have to actually make it illegal, but then put systems in place to actually help them. But but it does have to go in that order in in California, their main problem is that they they allow it. And in Austin, we have this problem because Austin is a very liberal city. And so their instinct was to do the same thing that they're doing in San Francisco. In L.A., the governor stepped in and said, OK, you know what?

No, we're actually just going to solve this. We're going to put everybody somewhere else are going to take them away because people are camping out right outside businesses. Right. And so we took them out and but but made sure that there was some kind of access to hygiene, to porta potties and then and then access to social services that get people back on their feet. There's also a good private I like there's a real nonprofit sector in Houston that works together very well with the city over time.

A lot of private investors I mean, I went in toward this like the shelter. It's mostly they try to maintain it mostly for families. But this shelter looks I mean, you go into this thing, it looks like a like a new college campus. How nice it is. And this is ninety five percent privately funded. They take some HUD money to to fund some of their more longer term like apartments that they have there for people. But this is how people get access to new job training.

And so it has to be a public private relationship and you have to have some leadership that says we're just going to we're actually going to try and solve this problem.

Is there anything on the table like that for California? I don't know, man, I'm a I'm a Texas guy, I should be. I don't know. I don't I don't know.

I could guess, but I'd be speaking out of turn. I really I don't know what the what the deal is. I just know you guys are sheltered in place.

It's growing like barnacles here. It's really strange. I mean, I've been here since 94 and I've never seen anything like the current situation. And like you said, it's a crime they're allowing to take place. You can't litter. So how come you could just leave your shit under the underpass? I mean, you can't walk under underpasses and a lot of Los Angeles. And I mean, I'm not exaggerating. There's needles and cans and garbage and cardboard and tents and bikes.

It's nuts. I mean, it's really, really strange. Almost every underpass in certain parts of L.A., you'll find homeless encampments. Yeah, I mean, it's it's just it's a stain on. What are they doing right now during coronavirus lockdown?

That's a very good question. I don't know that because we're locked down. So, I mean, I go here, I go to the grocery store, I go home. That's basically all I've been doing for a month. And it's most people that are following the regulations. It's all they're doing as well. So I don't know what they're doing. I haven't seen any talk about it. I've seen the fact they had to shut down beaches because people were just getting silly and they're using it like a day off and going to the beaches and being on top of each other.

So they had to shut down parking at the beaches and they've slowly tried to close the loopholes, the loopholes for knuckleheads, basically.

Yeah. Is there is there an end date to California's?

I believe they're talking about having it the end of April, but I think there was some talk about it now being the end of May. I don't find out that our Jamie is there.

Jamie doesn't have a laptop in front of me because we're doing this. I don't know. You know, I don't I don't I mean, I think it's flexible, too, because if if the cases keep rising or they they stop falling, I mean, who knows? Yeah. There's, you know, health care and this is a health care issue, obviously is so complicated and there's so many levels to it. But I mean, I think one of them that we really have to address is diet and obesity.

There's there's a giant problem with diet and obesity in this country, healthy food, eating, eating the proper food. And, you know, I had a friend who said they were talking about people who do drugs and people who drink and, you know, maybe they shouldn't get access to those same health care. And maybe that's a good incentive to stop people from drinking and doing drugs.

And I said, yeah, what about people do that? Would it help people who are fat? Like, you're going to use the same logic with them because you can't fat shame. So can you tell? Hey, hey, fatso, you can't get the same health care that a healthy person does? Well, if you got a healthy person who likes to drink and they run and they jog, but they do like to drink and they occasionally smoke a cigarette, what are they healthier than someone who's morbidly obese?

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

You know, there's a lot of things you can do are free to take care of your body. Yes, I agree. I think it's indicative of a problem in our culture where we've started to sideline this notion of personal responsibility.

I Chapter seven in my book, I forgot I got to talk about my book and 42 available now.

Well, now order from your local bookstore. Did you really need more? They need more help than Amazon.

Did you read the audiobook version of it? Yeah, good. Thank you for 14 hours, very important. I enjoy that some other dork is reading for you. I'd be very upset. Yeah.

Now I was I was very much against that. And so, yeah, we got it done. Chapter seven is called A Sense of Duty.

And, you know, part of the part of the deal when we when we when our founders wrote out the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and and built the framework for this free society that we live in, where government's role is to protect your rights, it's fundamentally the government's role. You have God given rights. And and these these are life, liberty, property, effectively taking life, liberty and property and the Constitution, the declaration that Jefferson wrote, the pursuit of happiness.

And they choose these words really carefully. Now, part of the exchange there is is a necessity for citizens to live with a sense of duty and to live as a citizen. This idea of citizenship and to do what is right, to do what is good, it's hard for me to imagine that people are just so uneducated that they don't know that they're unhealthy. You know, I think I think I think they know it right. The problem is that that they don't care.

That's a problem. And you're getting at that problem.

I don't know if that's true. I don't think it's that they don't care. I think they have no discipline. I don't think it's that they don't catch the difference. Well, there's there's a difference is they have never been taught to push themselves. There's a lot of people look, it's just so easy to go by my book. Well, that's one of the reasons why I love the title of your book. Fortitude is what people need.

And and also they need to understand that there's a great value in doing difficult things. And this society under which chapter is a Chapter eight, is it?

Well, the name of the chapter is called Do Something Hard.

Good for you. Well, listen, man, that's a look. You're a Navy SEAL. You know it. You get it. You live it. This is what we need. We need more people who understand that. I know it's hard to get up. I know it's hard to do things. I know it it's hard for me to. But I still do them. And you should do them, too. I mean, it should be something that we encourage everyone to do and that we we all talk about and then we all praise each other for and we all get excited about accomplishing these things and taking care of your physical body, taking care of your meet vehicle.

If everybody just did that, we would have health care costs. This country would be radically decreased.

That's a fact that that's that's a fact. That's an absolute fact.

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

But it's kind of used against us a lot, right? It's almost like we're accused of being immoral and unfeeling and uncaring when we say, you know, in this whole like, oh, just tell everybody to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and whatever and like that we even use that term. But but the point is, is that it's actually important. And I don't think conservatives have done a good enough job over time explaining why it's so important and personal responsibility as a as a foundation of our culture.

It's important because it leads to empowerment. It gives us the agency to control our own destiny. It's if you're constantly in victimhood, if you're constantly being told that you can't control your own destiny, well, that's fundamentally disempowering. And that's a terrible psychological state to be in. And the other thing I tell people is that is a fundamental American attribute. There's there's some interesting polling out there. And I forget the numbers. Right. But I always I always have them in a speech that I give.

And when when you ask people, what's the exact question, it's like, do you do you have or do things that happen to you?

Are they within your control or outside your control? It's something like that. In Germany, the answer was, was overwhelmingly things are happening to them outside of their control. Right. Like like you understand what I'm saying in America on the same question was asked, it was like, you know, 30 or 40 percent of people said yes versus in Germany it was like 50 or 60 percent. So it's a pretty market difference. And that's a uniquely American thing that we believe we are in control of our own destiny.

We tend to overwhelmingly say more than European countries, that if we work hard and and play by the rules and do what's right, that we will get ahead, that we will find that opportunity. And I think that's I think the world recognizes that, too. When you when you go around the world and you ask people, where would you rather be to to if you could immigrate right now, what's your number one destination? Well, it's the US of a.

. Like, overwhelmingly second place is Canada and Germany at like six percent of respondents. The USA is like twenty one percent of respondents. So second place isn't even close. And so for all of the left wing like anger and only saying how bad it is and how nothing works here and everybody's just and in crisis all the time, obviously we're in a crisis technically right now, of course. But this rhetoric was was was prevalent before all this for all of that commentary.

It's it just it's just isn't true. And so and the reason they use crisis language, the reason they tell you're going to die in 10 years, climate change, the reason they're always telling you that corporations are taking advantage of you and the one percent is just got you under their boot. And all of this, it's oh, it's very victimizing language. And there's a reason behind it because they want very they want very, very extreme policies put into place.

And you can't justify you can't justify revolutionizing the whole system unless you convince people that the system is so bad and so corrupt that it needs to be revolutionized. And once that's created, is a real undermining of this notion of personal responsibility, because you have to tell people they're victims if you're going to convince them that they need you to save them and when you undermine personal responsibility, disempower people. And fundamentally, to me, that's what socialism does, because you're telling people they're, you know, each to each to their need, each to their ability.

What you're telling people is that they don't have to work that hard that they deserve. They have rights to all of these other services from other people. It's their right. And we should distribute that accordingly. Everybody's perfectly equal. What that does is it removes agency from people and it's truly a disempowering thing. And we've seen this throughout throughout history. I just talk to the Venezuelans and Cubans and they're so happy when they get here. They're so happy because they just want to work hard and move up.

And they're just so excited about this meritocracy that we've that we've that we've built into our into our culture.

Well, Cubans are such a great example to my friend Andrew Schultz, who's a hilarious comedian, has a great bit about how communist Cubans come to America in the moment. They step foot on soil, they become Republicans. It's really hilarious that it's true. Yeah.

And they do appreciate that that aspect of this country.

I think one of the things that you said earlier is that we live in the best time ever in history.

And I agree with that. The consequences of it being such a great time are it's far easier to get by because it's far easier to get by. People look for things to be more difficult than they actually are. They look for things to be more stacked against them than they actually are. They look for more. More of a woe is me standpoint, when you find people that actually have a real difficult life, they don't look for things to be hard.

They find hard things everywhere they look. And oftentimes you find that those people that have a real struggle, that it's there's a great documentary called Happy People by Werner Herzog. And it's about people who live in Siberia.

And it is a brutal, difficult existence in extreme cold. But these people are overwhelmingly happy.

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

And the fact that you've actually done the things that you needed to do in order to survive, it's built into us.

Yeah, it really is, and this is why I wrote a whole chapter on this Do Something Hard is it is a real deep dive into the benefits of suffering. Yes. And and I distinguish between just going through something hard, like getting blown up in the face, like, yeah, that's suffering, but it's not self-imposed. I wouldn't wish that upon anybody. I'm not saying you need to get blown up in the face of losing I to have this sort of spiritual awakening and how good it feels to to go through something hard.

But you should you should habitually move into a self-imposed suffering. You were about to say something. No, I wasn't.

No, but but you just by virtue like you're a seal and seals people that are special operators, people that have gone through just whether it's military or first responders, really difficult physical tasks to get to where you are. Just that alone creates character, creates a different kind of person. And the type of people that gravitate towards those endeavors, those they're special people.

They are. But, you know, I didn't write this book for them and I wrote it for everybody. And and what I what I point out is, listen, SEALs have our hard thing, and it's Buddz, which is an acronym. It stands for Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training. It's six months of hell. And it it is it pushes you beyond limits. You ever thought you had hell week especially? And when you're done with that, when you when you come away from Helwig, there really is this sort of spiritual awakening.

It's that you have higher confidence. You feel prepared for anything, even in the some of the worst situations. You can think to yourself, well, it's not quite Helwig, is it? You know, and so you're able to have much more perspective.

We're lacking and perspective quite a bit. Also, chapter two is is called Perspective from Darkness. And I point this fact out that too many of us have have gotten so comfortable we've removed suffering from our life to such an extraordinary degree. And that's not a bad thing. OK, that's that's that's that's a that's a that's an element of the modern times that we live in. And I'm happy we live there. But the reality is, is that my ancestors were like struggling through Texas, trying to find water on a daily basis.

And and in my life, I'm complaining because when I'm at thirty thousand feet flying through the air, the Wi-Fi isn't as fast as I'd like it to be like. So we have very different complaints and it's good to every once in a while. I just think, you know what? I have a pretty damn good. And to remind yourself of that again, to do something hard chapter is it's one it's a deep dive into the psychological literature, which I just enjoy doing.

There's there's a lot to back this up, whether it's modern psychology, the history of stoicism or the Bible, all of these all of these texts, these these ancient pieces of wisdom that have been around for a very long time, they all talk about this. They'll talk about the value of suffering, the value of enduring and hardship and how this builds character and how this actually quite literally makes you stronger and boasts that we've built a metaphysical sense in a psychological sense and a physical sense actually actually go to the to the science of it as well.

And like how the the changes in your brain, what exercise does what hardship actually does both physically and metaphysically.

Like there's real there's real benefits to this, but you have to do it and it doesn't have to be Joe Rogan's life. I wonder if a lot of people look at your life and they're like, that guy is too productive for me and it's just too intimidating. And maybe that's so. But don't compare yourself to other people. Compare compare yourself to who you were yesterday, you know, and I think that was it's not a Jordan Peterson. That might be a Jordan Peterson.

Yes.

I think I just go to that. But but but the point is, is like these things are true because they're true. Like, that's why Jordan Peterson does that. Because it's true. You know, I don't pretend like I'm the first one to come up with these ideas. I'm just trying to put them into language that people can understand and use my life experiences to bolster those those lessons. But it just has to be harder than what you did yesterday.

And maybe it's physical, but not everybody can do physical things. Maybe it's hard for you to finish a project at home. Just do that. Maybe take a cold shower. And just so you can, like, kind of you feel tougher the rest of the day because you're like, you know what? I just sat in ten minutes of icy cold water. I didn't do that the day before, but I did it today. And now I feel a little bit more like a badass, like, you know, and I feel like more like a badass than I did yesterday.

It's small things. It's the self imposed suffering is so important for our lives. Like me. For me, it's usually physical, right. Like I want to do this challenge of a workout. And that kind of keeps me sharp. Or maybe it's like running for Congress or something like, I don't know, like we all have something. And I'm just saying you have to find that and make it habitual. It can't just be once either, because seals can get soft too.

Yes, we all know we know who those guys are and it's because they stopped. They stopped listening to the lessons from buds into this value of self imposed suffering. I feel that resilience is almost like a muscle. It's something that you can build and it's also something they can get soft. And I think that I look, I love comfort, don't get me wrong, but I don't appreciate it unless I've done something difficult. You know, if you look at, like, all the different things I do and say, oh, real productive.

And it's nice to. I also like to watch TV. I like to put my feet up. I like to kick back, like to have beer. I like to relax, but I don't like to relax if I'm not doing shit. I know me and I get mad at me. If I'm not doing anything. I don't like me when I'm not productive, but when I am productive, I also can enjoy to relax. I enjoy relaxation and I don't enjoy it unless I've earned it.

And I think that's what people need to do. The they need to earn their comfort. You do have a proper sense of shame, which is what you're describing. That's Chapter six, right? You're describing this because you already know this. You read my book. You'll be like, I already know all this, but because it's true. All right. Now I'm trying to give these lessons out in a clear and coherent and kind of fun way.

But these things are just true. You feel bad when you don't act the way you envision yourself to be. You have this hero archetype and I'm talking about here archetypes for you have this idea of like what you think is the right way to be and you're trying to live up to that at all times. We often fail and you've built that archetype over time. Maybe looking to others is like the right kind of hero. Maybe you've seen how how successful people are and you're like, I want to be like that.

I'm maybe doing comedy or fighting or whatever it is. Like you're like they have a way of doing something that maybe I should see built this over time. And, you know, when you you know, only, you know, really when you when you don't meet that standard, when you don't meet that standard, there should be a degree of shame that you feel. And and again, this is a problem I viewed in society where I don't know that people are feeling that shame anymore.

It's almost the opposite. And and when you when you don't feel that shame, you can't feel a sense of duty to be that citizen that we talked about earlier. And I find this to be a big problem, even with the small stuff like and I use examples in the book, like, you should feel shame when you're that person who doesn't put the shopping cart in the little shopping cart section of the parking lot. And that leaves it in the parking space.

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

Right. Did you feel bad about it? And if you didn't feel bad about it, what the hell is wrong with you? OK. Yes, these are very simple lessons.

We have to start small, have to start small.

The shopping cart one is a great example. That's such a good one. This is a classic.

Don't get makes you mad. It's like I've got the greatest parking spot in that damn car.

It's so easy to do. Just just put it back bitch. Just walk it over there, put it in the little stall and you feel better. You like, look, I did it. I know what I do. I bring it all the way the fuck back to the supermarket complex. I put it back in the thing right in front. Yes. I don't even put it in the store. I walk those extra steps and it doesn't take much time.

But I feel like I did something, even if it's just a trick. The grocery store doesn't even have to put those little sections out in the parking lot. They could just tell you to put it, walk it all the way back.

Welcome back, bitch. But the reason why I like the little stalls is because of people that do have kids. If there's a mom and she's got a baby with her gray, give her a way out or hire some kid to gather those things up while people are walking out with them. Fine. But if you're just a guy and you know you're shopping for yourself and you don't put your car back, fuck you. You know, and that sense of shame that you're talking about, that there really is important.

People need to feel shame if you've come up short like that, because you can do better, you can do better, and you should want to do better. The way to get the way to get ahead in life is to do everything that way. The way you do everything is the way you do anything. The way you do anything is the way you do everything. I mean, that's really what it is. If you just do the right thing, do it the way you're supposed to do it, you can do it.

And you'll feel better if you're supposed to get a workout in today, like, oh, fuck, I'd rather just sleep and no, just fucking get your ass up and do it and you'll feel better when it's done. You're like, damn, I did it. I can do this tomorrow too. You can. And it's momentum and just developing that momentum. It's a skill. It's like everything else. It's like learning how to be polite. It's like learning how to be cordial, learning how to be a nice person.

These are learned things. You can't just accept that you're a piece of shit and this is just the way you are. No, just look at yourself as if you were another person judging you like as if you are a person who like a life coach judging you. What would you tell you to do? That's exactly right. And the reason I the reason I wrote about this was because, you know, throughout this book, I'm identifying a problem and then trying to come up with a solution.

So the solution is effectively saying what you're saying. And I write and I write a lot about it. I write about the psychology behind it. But the problem is, is like. We I feel like we've removed shame in our culture to to a huge extent, to where it's almost celebrated to, you know, to do these wrong things, we started to change the definition of what's right and wrong. This sort of kind of post-modern society. And I think with some examples of what I mean by that.

Well, in one part, I do bring up the example of of how we view, you know, assistance like government assistance.

And there's the movie Cinderella Man where Russell Crowe plays the whatever the name is, the boxer. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, he gets a welfare check and the guy in the movie by the end of the movie is pulled himself back up and he returns it. And that's sort of like, ah, classic heroic thing to do. Like, you know what? Like we believe in helping people who need it, but we also believe that you shouldn't take it if you don't need it.

It seems like a pretty good, good piece of civic duty to live by. And then I go to my own experience leaving the Navy where we were actually encouraged to get on Social Security disability insurance as I was leaving the Navy. And so I was in a classroom full of fellow Navy service members, none of which were seals, none of which had been in combat, none of which appeared injured in any way. I was the only one with a visible injury or it's obvious as to why I'm being medically retired.

And so we're all getting medically retired. And by nature of getting medically retired from the military, it's guaranteed that we have some kind of benefit on the back end of that. And what I would call a very generous benefit, people would disagree with me on that. But I think it's a I think we get a generous benefit. And to want to stay on top of that, that we should also take money out of the Social Security trust fund for disability insurance, even though every single person in their walk right out of that classroom is perfectly capable of working was so frightening to me that that it is so ingrained in our new culture that that it was actually in the curriculum at a government classroom and in this kind of stuff is cheered on.

And I see this a lot. People will tell a story of victimhood and be cheered, but we're not supposed to cheer for that. We might feel compassion for them, but to cheer for them. And this explains why we're seeing these sort of hoaxes that we've seen. Like why did Jesse Smollett feel that he had to say that to Moggach guys in Chicago beat them up? Like, why did what was we didn't ask and what the underlying psychology behind that was?

Why do that? And I think the reason is because we started to elevate victimhood. We sought to elevate this sort of shame will behave. And this is what I mean by we sort of change the definitions of what it even means to feel ashamed and what it means to feel like you're doing the wrong thing, because we've changed the definitions of right and wrong. And I and I see a need to get us back to some traditional definitions before we all just lose our freakin minds.

Yeah, I think that's that's a very good point. I think what you're saying is absolutely correct.

I think victimhood should be look, if you are an actual victim. And I feel for you. It's terrible, but if you're not a victim and you're playing up victimhood, it's disgusting. It's one of the grossest things that you see in our culture, especially when we're talking about how easy society is. And now when you have a person who is affluent and successful and famous, like Jesse Smollett, who does that, and you're like, Jesus Christ, man, a boy.

Did you miss the point? That's why it's so foul for us when we see someone who's just trying to for their own personal gain, they're trying to game the system and make it out like they're a victim. It's one of the grossest things that you could see in a successful culture. I mean, there's people out there that really are injured like yourself from combat. There's people out there that really are sick. There's people out there that are really victimized by violent crime.

And to fake it, it's such a it's such a disgusting insult to people that actually are injured.

Yeah. And that's that's like the most extreme. I think that's the extreme consequence of this victimized culture, because there's definitely a difference with real victims and victimhood culture. You have to distinguish between those two things. And we have to respect somebody who's actually a victim. Yes. You know, in my case, in the disability insurance thing, I didn't take it. But what concerns me is that if I had taken it and if I had gone on and said and sort of proudly explained that I got this and I needed it, like, shouldn't somebody call me out for that?

You know? And the reality is, is that I don't think people would I don't think I would be called out for that, even though I'm a perfectly capable of working. Yes, I'm kind of blind and like, I can't see even out of my good eye, but I could work. I mean, I've shown that I can work. Why would I take that? That that wouldn't be just that would I think that would go against our classical definition of what is fair and just and yet in our current culture, I do I don't believe that anybody would call me out for that.

And I should be called out if I had taken that money. I really believe that just because I was already getting benefits. Right. I'm not saying it shouldn't get anything. I was blown up and then had to get out of the Navy as a result. But but I but I feel our culture is a little bit backwards on this, and it worries me a great deal. We've changed we've changed a few definitions like what it means to be a victim.

I think we've changed that definition overwhelmingly and we've changed the definition of justice. Also an injustice and what an injustice actually is. We've forgotten how we've forgotten how to distinguish between discrimination and disparities. Like just because you don't have the same thing, does that effectively mean there was some injustice that occurred there? We're not asking those analytical questions. And I think that's a real problem. And it's it's made debate very difficult. It's it's a debate with my colleagues in the Democratic Party, very difficult because every disparity is assumed to be originating from some kind of injustice every time somebody is wealthier than somebody else.

The assumption nowadays is that, well, it's ill gotten money and that there is some kind of injustice that occurred. You know, when we were when we were voting on this giant stimulus package, not really a stimulus package, more of a rescue package. Remember how this happened? There was we were negotiating through this thing. It was actually looking pretty good. Nancy Pelosi comes in, says, hell no, blowing up the whole thing and we're going to protect workers and damn not these damn corporations.

OK, so, you know, fast forward a few days ended up passing basically the same bill anyway, that's a long story. I'm happy to go into the details of that politically, if you'd like me to. But the point is this. There was this outrage from the populist right and the populist left against anything that had the name corporation attached to it. And we've forgotten how to ask ourselves, why is that? Why did they do something evil?

What exactly is evil about these entities? You know, they employ lots of people. They create lots of wealth. In this particular case, they're not being bailed out. They didn't do anything wrong, but we're really mad at them for some reason. We really hate them because there's this sort of cultural movement towards towards feeling that any time something is successful, like our reaction should be to punish it and that that cultural movement worries me a great deal.

It worries me a great deal. I think that's what leads to these sort of topics of socialism.

Well, I think that that is one of the bad aspects of the ideals of socialism, is this inclination to think that when there is an inequality, that then inequality is because of either corrupt corruption or greed. There's also inequality of effort. People do not put in the same effort. And when you put in more effort, you're more focused, you're more disciplined, you do more work, you should be rewarded. And there's people that don't like that idea and they don't like that idea of because they're fucking lazy and they're weak.

And that's a fact. And there's people in this world that are weak. And there's it's an unpopular thing to say because we want to say that, no, they're they're economically disenfranchised and some people are. Yes, some people are. And there's also some people that work like a motherfucker. And those people get by and they get ahead and those people should be rewarded for their effort.

One of the problems that I have with people that espouse socialist ideals is that they don't want this competition aspect of our culture in our society to exist. Where you put in more work, you get more reward.

That's my whole life. That is my whole life. I mean, every everything that I've ever done, I realize, oh, all you have to do is work harder than everybody else. All you have to do is put in more time. All you have to do is be more obsessed, more focused, and you can get by. You can get ahead. Well, the people that don't like that are the people that don't like competition. They don't understand it.

It makes you feel bad when you lose everyone. You get a trophy every once you get a participation trophy. That is a giant problem with our culture and this inequality. Yeah, there is income inequality. Some of it is corruption. Some of it is bad. Some of it is inequality of effort. And that needs to be addressed as well. And it's not you can't have this blanket thing that all the people that run corporations are greedy and all the money that they have acquired is because of ill gotten gains.

It's just not true. It's not true. And it's anti-American, frankly.

Yeah. I list a few tenets of a culture that make it a sustainable, successful culture. First one is personal responsibility. I went into detail on that. The second one is mental toughness, which I wrote a whole book about. So and it's important that you said it exactly how I describe it when I give speeches on this, which is we need mental toughness because otherwise how do we survive in a free society where we have to compete? Because the only alternative to a bunch of mentally weak people is that we do live in a society where competition is not necessary because the government will just give you everything.

But I don't want to live in that society and frankly, that society can't function very well because nobody would actually do anything. And you have to be mentally tough to deal with that. And I think the American spirit and the American our history as a culture is a really, really tough bunch of people. And I just want to remind people of that. And I want to remind people that it's something to aspire to. Like this is a good thing.

Like it's cool to be tougher. It's not cool to be a victim. Right. But we have so many like postmodernists, who actually again, let's go back to this victimhood culture. They want you to be that victim and then they'll celebrate you for it. Yes, they will tell their victim it's stories. They're cheered, but it's like, wait a second, where's the where's the part where you overcame it? I thought that was the story we're supposed to cheer.

Well, they also connect. They also connect competition with cruelty. And I think that's that's foolish as well. Yeah, it feels bad to lose, but that's just because it feels great to win. There's it's a it's a peak and valley thing. And you have to understand that. And look, every competition that I've ever had and the anything where I've ever competed and lost has fueled me beyond measure. It is what gets you by it's what makes you better.

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

This is an intensity to those bonds that's almost indescribable to anybody that hasn't experienced it. I mean, I'm sure it's not as as tight as people that have gone through combat together. But there's something there's something in those people.

They they fuel you, they help you, and they help you by trying to kick your ass. They help you by trying to be better than you. They help you by trying to be the man they want to be the best they can be. And you think about those motherfuckers when you go to the gym, you go, God damn it, Mike is here, shit. And you get fired up for that person that you know is going to kick your ass and they provide you with fuel.

People that are better than you provide you with fuel. Competition provides you with fuel.

It doesn't mean you have to be mean. It doesn't mean it's cruel. It doesn't mean it's insensitive. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean that. It just means that competition is good. Competition is good for you. It's good. It shows you your better abilities. It shows you that you can aspire to greatness. You can aspire to be better than you are. You can do this and you can do this by looking at people who also do it.

They are your future inspiration is fuel.

Nobody gets inspired by Jesse Smollett putting a fucking fake noose around his neck and walking into a hotel, still holding a Subway sandwich. Nobody is inspired by that. Maybe you're inspired to never be that guy and that. But it's a weak inspiration. You're inspired by greatness. You're inspired by great people, stories, great people's autobiographies and documentaries and stories of them putting in that work. And I mean, that's why there's so many people that, you know, their Instagram existence is essentially just all they're doing is just providing inspiration to people like David Goggins, that fucking guy every day.

I mean, that guy is fueling millions of people just by being a badass. Just doing just life is hard, motherfucker. Stay hard and just getting out running every day just by doing that.

OK, I need to I don't know him said love him. Who is who was filming these.

His wife, like his wife. She ran in a car or something. She's in a car now. But there's been other instances where he's like climbing a mountain. I don't know. It's a very it's a very smooth like maybe she has a stabilizer, I guess. Oh, yeah. Probably has one of those. There's there's been some instances where I'm like, OK, this seems like a car, but this seems impossible to film. And without like some some of the better equipment than just like a selfie video, you know.

Well, he's got a lot of money. I mean, he sold the shit out of that book. So it's a fantastic book and I can't recommend it enough. And you can't hurt me. It's called and the audio version is even better because the audio version, he actually gets somebody else to read it. But then he comes in between and discusses each and every chapter. So it's like the audio book and a podcast together. You know, he he lives an incredible life.

And he's that guy is an amazing source of fuel for people, but is an amazing source of fuel because of his own competition with himself. And he's a guy that's talked really openly about being weak at certain points in his life and being fat, lazy, and that he got through that he's not he wasn't born this fucking warrior that came out of the womb running 100 miles. He became that person and it became that person from being a slob. And he's real open about and he's he's even open about his own weakness.

Currently. He's like, sometimes I'll stare at my fucking shoes for a half hour before I run my shit. I don't want to do this fuck. But then I'll go out and do it. And while he's doing it, he'll yell, you know, like that people like that or fuel. And there's certain people that don't like people like that because they make them feel bad. They look at themselves and they go, oh, God damn it, I don't work as hard as that guy.

I don't have that kind of mental toughness. And then then they'll try to find something wrong with it. But it's it's because they're they're not willing to look at themselves objectively. They're not willing to try to be the best person that they can be. Yeah, I agree with that. I want to introduce you to. Yeah, yeah. Where does he live? He's in Vegas now. Vegas, yeah. What do you guys. You want to bring it back to coronavirus, sure, I would love to.

Because this is. I mean, I think there's the thing I wanted to maybe discuss is, is the balance that that needs to be talked about. And we this is where I would have taken the conversation from earlier about the media.

How do you feel about Sweden, the way Sweden's handling it? Because we're talking about balance. Sweden has got a very different approach to it. Their approach is essentially, listen, old people, vulnerable people, please take care of yourself. Stay home. They'll provide assistance. They'll get you food. They'll do whatever they can to get to you. But people that are healthy, they want them to go out and live their lives. They don't want the restaurants to shut down, the pubs to shut down.

This is a disease that, you know, it's ravaged people of all nationalities and all ages and demographic groups. But their their ideas take care of your health. Be careful, but let's get society back on its feet again. And they're widely criticized by that. I would love to hear what you think.

Well, I think the jury's still out on whether that's a good strategy or not. There's three different strategies and there's a Harvard white paper that that delineates these pretty well. I spoke with one of the professors from the center of ethics that that was an author of this. And you can describe these three strategies in the following way. One they call freeze in place, which is basically what we're doing right now. It's what most countries are doing, a hard core quarantine.

Of course, that's different depending what part of the country you're in the second. Well, let me jump to the third one. The third one would just be surrender. OK, let it happen. We'll deal with it as we go. But we're not keeping anybody at home. That's effectively what Sweden is doing. The second option would be sort of a mix of the two, which I think will end up being the American option or better. Well, should be where we have a defined period where we remain in place.

But then we we confront the enemy. And like I said, we're in a tactical retreat right now. But a certain point we actually have to come back out swinging and we need to be prepared to do it. Sweden took on the third approach, which is like basically they they think they can deal with it. And we're going to see now their cases are jumping up pretty dramatically. I don't know how much they'll continue jumping up. The Swedes are also very good at culturally following the rules.

You know, like Americans don't like a lot of rules. So sweet. The Swedes will will will stop at a red light at two a.m., even though there's, like, nobody around. OK, same with people in Switzerland. OK, this is this is have deeper cultural differences. I think there's social cohesion and their ability to follow rules. How like the Koreans is different than our culture. Where we are, we are just way more individualistic and we're going to do whatever the hell we want.

We want a flamethrower in our office. We're going have a flame thrower at our office. And I don't tell me I can't have it right. I mean, you can relate to that.

I have a flame coming right behind me, the good old flame thrower I don't like, but I don't have a flame thrower, but I have a lot of guns and they're better. Guns are better having. Yeah, it depends on the situation.

No, they're always better unless you want to start a fire. Well, that's what I mean. That's the only situation is sometimes the situation is you just want to throw fire unless you're in the movie Alien.

Yeah.

You know, the point is, is you need a diversity of weaponry. That's that's that's the truth. Right. And so and so. OK, so this is the three options. I think the jury's still out on. What if it works for Sweden or not? I think it can work. And I would like to see us move to that rather quickly. Now, we need to be careful about how we do it. But I'm very I'm very concerned about these indefinite extension of the timelines of stay in place.

I think I think we have to start having reasonable conversations about the cost of that. And the costs are a lot more than just dollar signs. The costs are a hell of a lot more than just people's 401k is tanking. The costs are actually people's lives. Also, whether it's mental health or suicides or divorces or putting off all of these all of these procedures that we're just putting a freeze on. So like and it's and I have a lot of problem with this.

I mean, in places like Houston, our hospitals are not overwhelmed or 50 percent capacity still because we're not getting that many more cases.

But why that is why do you think Texas is less prone to this? Well, I'll answer that question by stating why I think New York is the way it is and New Orleans is the way it is. New York is the way it is because it's a it's a giant city with enormous density, the most it's the densest city in the country by far. It's also the most likely place that a lot of international travelers are coming in and out of.

And so I think it's safe to say there was multiple hot spots that occurred within New York City and then it spread wildly because people ride subways and elevators. I mean, it's not like Los Angeles. It's not like Houston where we take a car everywhere, no matter what. There's a natural social distancing that already occurs in New Orleans. They had Mardi Gras. I mean, Mardi Gras.

There's explanations behind these things. And I do worry sometimes that our modeling is using these numbers in the wrong ways and not taking enough into account into the fact that we just we have very different lifestyles in different parts of the country and also take into account that we can target certain solutions. And so we're going to Harvard white paper that this says the second solution is mobilize in transition once you've slowed the spread by doing what we're doing. And again, I'm not against doing what we're doing.

I just think we need to stick to the timelines and maybe make those timelines sooner than later and then come out and fight. And what is fighting mean? Well, while we're in wait, we're basically we're ramping up production of protective gear. We're ramping up production of ventilators. Again, our system is amazing. We are producing we're going to be producing. But I think next week or so, up to seven thousand new ventilators a week, we haven't run out of ventilators.

I went through the numbers before. We're talking about socialized medicine. Like one of the benefits of our system is we are actually way better prepared than people realize. Now, we have a big lack of PPE. There's a lot of reasons for that. And I can go into one reason is that China was stopping export from 3M and going on to China to the rest of the world back in January and February just just came out and in an article that was written was confirmed by three and a lot of people in government, they were preventing the export of and produces a lot of it in China.

They're preventing those exports because they want to hoard the supplies. Then they act like the good guy and go around the world giving it out. I mean, China has to we're going to have to really look at our supply chains and our relationship with China after this. But that's one of the reasons we didn't have the proper amount of PPE and also depends on the hospital. Again, there is some accountability that has to take place with specific hospitals and specific cities and why they didn't prepare.

What I've noticed as of late is this strange belief that the president is everybody's micromanaging boss, and that's just not how our system works, nor should it. And there has to be some level of accountability at the local and state level to again, I just got off the phone with some of the doctors here at the Texas Medical Center, and I'm like, how are you guys on PCP? And they're like, we have so much because we're used to disasters here and we prepare.

And so they're just not worried about it. We've set up the supply chains in advance, like there has to be we have to work together. There's what I've noticed in all the finger pointing and a lot of it's just political opportunism. I don't know if you if you like, if you if you put these people up to a lie detector test, I wonder if they really think it would be the president's fault that this happened. Like, I don't I don't think they could pass a lie detector test.

I think it's I think it's a lot of political theatrics. But in any case, it's it gets us away from the right way to look at our system, which is local and state government are managers. They manage on those smaller levels. Like if California wants to try single payer health care system, let's see it work in California or a smaller state. And then let's then let's scale it. Let's let's see if it works in a city and then let's scale it.

You know, there's a reason federalism is the way it is. It's hard to compare us to different countries in so many ways because these countries are like the size of our city. You know, like L.A. is bigger than most. So many countries are really like it's it's it's a matter the scale matters to a huge extent.

And it's like socialism works. If you've got maybe like 50 or 60 people because you can hold each other accountable, there's a little bit easier maintenance as you scale it out. You just can't. Right. That's why co-ops exist in this country like Bernie Sanders.

Baldwin, you can make it work if you can literally see everybody all the time. Family, a family unit is a socialist unit. Teach there to teach. They're to teach their ability. When you scale things out, it dramatically changes things. And we have to remember that as it pertains to dealing with the pandemic and dealing with public policy as well. The point I was making about the media a second ago, one of the problems, it's not just that they're not informing people correctly, which we discussed earlier.

The other problem is that the. Preventing us from having the right discussions, because we do have to have this discussion that we're talking about right now, which is how do we how do we responsibly move into a into a system where we're simultaneously combating the pandemic but also reopening our economy? And we have to have that. And the natural reaction from disingenuous people is, oh, well, how many lives is it worth to save a job?

And I'm like, OK, that's that's not the right question.

It's a very dishonest question. And, you know, first of all, it assumes that somebody's going back to work will actually cost a life. You can't prove that. I mean, if we're going to play this dishonest game of counterfactuals, but also it misses the point. We live in a world where we take risks and we have to take those risks and then mitigate those risks accordingly. And we can better mitigate risk and we better understand what we're dealing with and when we're better prepared.

And those are the two things we have to do over the next month is get better prepared. And that's the answer. There is more people, especially test people with antibodies so that we can see who is actually immune. We can give them like a certificate or something. They can do go do whatever they want, getting more ICU beds where they might be needed, getting more ventilators, getting more PPE. That's the preparedness side. And on the other side, we risk mitigate.

It's just like, you know, like you explained in Sweden, let's keep sick and vulnerable people away. Let's target our efforts a little bit better. Let's take a more vertical approach as opposed to a horizontal approach. We can do this. We can do this if we give each other the grace and the space to do it instead of like this bad faith, finger pointing of like, oh, you're just going to kill people. You don't even care.

Let's think that's that's a terrible way to think about it. I mean, I could moralize this situation and say, well, I could, but I'll save 30000 lives this year because I'm not going to let anybody drive. And I am a better person than you because you have the blood of thirty thousand people on your hands because you want people driving.

That's a great example of that is a great example on the more people.

Yeah, and that's a cheap analogy. But it's not. It's not at all. No, you're absolutely right. And I'm worried about that when we do go back. I'm worried about that finger pointing. I really am, because I think it's just going to muddy the waters. And I'm also worried about it being used as political opportunism. And it's going to scare people already.

Yes, it's already happening. I have a bunch of quotes I could read you. I please read some.

OK, yeah, well, because I wrote an op ed on this hasn't been published yet, but I note some of them there. But well, Nancy Pelosi last week said, you know, they're responsible for the deaths of people. The where is it?

It's. This is why I said maybe I won't, because then I have to actually look for it here. I wrote all this stuff down, but there's a lot of quotes out there from media and from oh, from from pundits, from Twitter users. But I only quote people who are well known, either they're well known journalists or their politicians. But it usually goes along the lines of exactly what you just said you were worried about, which is Trump is more concerned about the stock market than people's lives.

All right. That's kind of the typical one you hear. And it's certainly been been said quite a bit. And my my my fear is that it continues to be said know, and it prevents us from having a reasonable debate because we we truly need to have that reasonable debate. The other the other thing that frustrates me about these kind of bad faith arguments is that the people saying them made the same claims themselves. February 1st, Washington Post. Here's a headline, Get a Grip, America.

The flu is a much bigger threat than the coronavirus to February 1st. USA Today coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier and more widespread, like February 3rd. Washington Post. Why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus. And so these same papers are now destroying the president all. You didn't act early enough. You didn't do anything if you have the blood of blood of people on your hands.

But like, that's amazing. It is. Yeah, hypocrisy is insane. And like, I have so many more of those.

Go ahead.

New York Times who who says it's not safe to travel to China. So this is following President Trump's extremely at the time, a very bold move to restrict travel from China. And, you know, and of course, all of these papers and prominent people are now saying something different. I go through a timeline to where I look at because, again, my my Democratic colleagues are very quick to continue to accuse this administration of dropping the ball, doing all these bad things.

But I have to remind everybody how this is. This is a good one. On the same day that that Trump implemented the restriction on travel, this was. Jan. Twenty seven. OK, and then they announce the they announce the the ban on travel, as well as the task force, January 30 first. Sorry, the 30 30 first. The Trump administration implemented the restriction on travel January 31st and also declared it a public health emergency. On that same day, Nancy Pelosi talked about a bill, promoted a bill called the No Ban Act, which would limit the president's ability to impose travel restrictions.

So. You just you just can't say you just can't say that this guy wasn't acting in the public's best interest and then didn't have facts like this when I do remember this, too, and I pointed this out at the time because, you know, a lot of people were not talking about coronavirus in February and.

On February twenty eight, which is a few days before February, twenty eight, the trumpet, the twenty fourth, the Trump administration asked for two and a half billion dollars from Congress to combat the spread. So that was a money that had already been spent by HHS, by CDC that needed to be reimbursed. So the Trump administration has already been dealing with this and they're like, hey, Congress, we need more money, we need more supplemental funding.

He got slammed. I don't know if anybody remembers this, but he got destroyed, he got told he wasn't taking it seriously. Why is he asking for more money? The president's response to that was, OK, fine, give me more money. Like, I just just write something that that we you know, we voted on in the House floor. We didn't vote on more money and they had days to give more money because this was earlier in the week.

We actually voted on that. We were close to three three nine, which is reversing the Youth Tobacco Epidemic Act. That was a bill to ban flavored tobacco, according to House Democrats. Things like hooka grizzly wintergreen, which is maybe what I might like, is now illegal. Now, it never got into law, of course, because it never went to the Senate. But I want people to understand, like I'm not I'm not blaming Democrats either, because there was a lot that we all just didn't know.

And I just want I just want to point these things out because it's important to give each other to Grace to be like, hey, not everybody knew what was happening. It wasn't until early March that it was exploding as a virus. And Iran and Italy and South Korea, these things happened. And it wasn't it wasn't clear that there should be massive, massive lockdowns of society. Those are very bold moves. And it's so easy to have this 20 20 hindsight and and act holier than thou and point fingers.

But it's entirely disingenuous. And I and I built this whole timeline out to show it. And I also point out that the timeline can end, you know, from here on out, we could just we could just give each other some grace and solve these problems together because it will be very easy to blame each other for the deaths of Americans. No matter what the decision is, it will be easy because the counterfactual is impossible to prove. And the fact that it's so easy that political opportunism is so easy is is what worries me the most.

And we have to have those conversations, though, about reopening society and when to do it.

And we have to have the conversations about this political opportunism and shaming it and calling it for what it is and really being honest with those quotes from The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, and letting people know, no, we didn't know what this was. We didn't see it coming. And when it was coming, we were real confused as to what the consequences were going to be. And we're also not getting honest data out of China.

Right. China China is just they are not honest about the body count. They're not honest about any of it. We don't really know what happened over there. The version that we're getting is got holes in it.

Oh, yeah. Let's talk about that. I did find the quotes that I told you I had. I hear, though. Sure. They're from people like Jen Rubin, like CNN. So generally when Trump deathtoll equals Trump dead lives that would have been spared had he acted on warnings. The rest of victims, the rest are victims of Trump's stupidity and narcissism. This is from a prominent Washington Post columnist. I'm not choosing random Twitter users, you know, from a New York Times president, Trump was so focused on fabricating threats involving Central American caravan's that he was oblivious to the real threats.

So, again, I could keep reading. I have a bunch, but let's talk about China. Yeah. So I just mentioned that one that story that just came out, which is that they actually prevented me from being delivered outside of China. So we are our companies, 3M, they produce it there should have been export it out. They prevented that. There was a study that showed that if they had if they had actually been honest and given us, given the world three weeks extra notice.

Ninety five percent of the spread could have been contained. OK, well, five million people left. Who have they allowed travel out of Wuhan? Five million people traveling all over China, all over the world. The reason this this became so bad in Italy, in Iran is because of the belt and road initiative. These are major hotspots for China's economic development and the belt and road initiative. So then let's get to the World Health Organization. There has got to be a come to Jesus moment on the World Health Organization again mid January.

World Health Organization says that, says that or they repeat the claims made by China that that that it can't even be transmitted human to human contact. On January 30th. World Health Organization says something along the lines of there's no reason to be shutting down travel or limiting travel. So they are directly controlled by the Chinese government, the World Health Organization. It should also be worth noting, I forget the guy's name. He runs it, the director of the WHO.

But he's the latest from Ethiopia in Ethiopia is one of these countries that is a huge and has a huge investments from the belt and road initiative. And so, I mean, we need to be calling for a complete, complete change in leadership at the I mean, we've seen that where they refuse to acknowledge he refuses to acknowledge the existence of Taiwan.

He won't even say it. The world keeps questioning him and he shuts his his camera off.

It was like when you asked me about marijuana use and I pretended I couldn't hear you, OK? You were joking though. We were right in front of each other. Joking. That's different. I mean, yeah. Yeah, he shut his connection off and then he said, China's doing a great job. Let's move on. And, you know, like what? Know very way.

So deeply corrupt. So deeply corrupt. And I mean, you know, I don't I don't think that who will ever have the standing that I did before, not without an immediate and serious leadership change because they've lost all credibility and then move on. You know, fast forward. The Chinese were perpetuating. It's unclear whether they started this, this this talking point or whether it was the progressive left and the Chinese just repeated it and latched on to it.

But this whole notion that it's racist to call the virus, the Chinese virus was it was such an utterly absurd thing that we were focused on as a country when that just doesn't matter. It just didn't know matter, no matter what your opinion on whether it's actually racist or not. I mean, I personally don't think it is. There's a there's there's a history of calling a virus some kind of geographic name based on where it's from. That's fine.

The point is, is that Chinese authorities were tweeting, we're spreading that quite a bit in February. So they're doing things like that. Then they claim that perhaps it was the US Army that had started the virus in Wuhan. They haven't let international inspectors go in and investigate the origins of this virus so that we can better understand it. They've I mean, there's going to be well, there already is quite a few things that we're looking at is what we can do to, one, rebalance our supply chains, that as a country, we need a better industrial policy on bringing a lot of important manufacturing back home and being more competitive in that sense.

Can I ask you this? Is there any evidence that this was a manmade virus? You know, this is the big conspiracy theory, that there was some sort of a level for bio weapons lab in Wuhan.

Yeah. And I just don't know. I mean, I could pontificate, but it is true that there was a bio weapons lab. Yeah. I don't know if it's meant for weapons, but there's certainly a lab there that would have housed viruses like this. And we just we just don't know the answers. And I don't, you know, especially in my position, I don't want to. Of course.

Of course I don't want to I don't want to assume, do you think, that this because of the consequences of this virus and all this, that this wakens people to the need to manufacture things in America, particularly medical supplies, so many things that we rely on China for. One hundred percent, and this is something Trump has been talking about forever, and I think both, I think he's received skepticism from both the left and the right on that for different reasons, mostly from the right, because we we have and the Republicans need to come to terms with this is we have really adhered very closely to a more libertarian mindset of free trade where where the more free trade, the better where where somebody else can make it cheaper than than we should just have them make it.

All right. This comparative advantage theory, and that's true in theory it is true. But but we can't ignore the consequences. And I think we have ignored those consequences for a little too long. Like what happens when you when you close down that factory. Yeah. Like your t shirts are three cents cheaper per unit, which is a really big deal for the margins of your company and other company can hire more people and you get a cheaper T-shirt.

But but we kind of miss those manufacturing jobs.

Like there there's there's also there's like a moral or not a moral, but it's like a psychological benefit to these manufacturing jobs as well. You're creating something people like that. People like to feel like they're producing something and that they have meaningful work that pays pretty decent. And so there's consequences and there's consequences to the efficiency that has occurred. And then there's national security consequences. And we're learning about those right now. And it's not just medical supplies that when you take a look at I'm from Houston.

So our oil and gas industry is is a big, big, dire straits right now. We risk we risk the possibility that we lose energy into. Between Russia and Saudi Arabia now, hopefully, I think the administration's values and diplomatic pressure and figured that out to it to an extent, but there's we have to come to we have to decide whether we think there's value in doing things ourselves. That's the ultimate question. And I would answer that. Yes, there is.

Now, do we take it to an extreme? No. But are we out of balance right now? Maybe yes. And maybe we do need to look at changing our supply chains. Maybe that means some things are just slightly more expensive. Maybe that's what it means. But for for a lot of elements, for a lot of items we have to be looking at that we'd be thinking that way.

Well, I think also when you look at what are the consequences of allowing us to have things manufactured over there, what kind of karma do we take on for when you look at Foxconn, those buildings where they manufacture iPhones, they have nets around them to keep people from jumping off, like how many people have to jump before you put nets up? And like what what has to happen there where your life sucks so hard to make an iPhone? I mean, how much would it cost to make those here?

Is it worth it for us? And, you know, is there some real value in that? The label that we used to love to look for made in America, that's that's not really discussed that much anymore. But I think it would be wise for all of us to invest in that idea again. Yeah, and the problem is, is like we we hold ourselves to those standards of good labor conditions and good environmental standards, and we but we punish ourselves almost out of business completely.

And so we punish ourselves out of business, usually through these specific regulations or labor or environmental. But then we also engage in free trade. So it almost guarantees that we lose out our own manufacturing base or sometimes the energy sector, whatever it is, because we simultaneously make ourselves less competitive while also forcing our people to compete against people who are who work their employees so hard that they have to build nests around the office. Yes, they throw themselves off of it.

That's such a good question. By the way, how many how many people actually jump before they put the nets? What is the number?

That is just a crazy reality. And it's also one that we just accept because we want an iPhone. And I mean, Apple is one of the most profitable countries. I mean, companies, rather, the world's ever known. I mean, it's a spectacularly profitable company and like an.

And there's a whole of government policy and a whole host of state governments, really society that we all have to kind of collectively look at this and it's going to take the private sector as well, because Apple would tell you, OK, I'd love to do I'd love to open up a plant here. And they do, but they'd like to do more. The reason they don't is because when they put out that job application, nobody will show up, or at least not enough people.

And so. And so what does that tell you? It tells you that we're not educating people in the skills that are necessary to engage in these jobs. There's a lot of technical skills that we are not teaching because so this gets to education policy. Why aren't we promoting more STEM? Why aren't we promoting via the federal loan program student loans? Why aren't we promoting things and majors that actually get us to a higher paying job? Why? Why why should the taxpayer be on the hook for a measure that is guaranteed not to pay anything once you graduate?

Like, what are you going to do with that degree and whatever? Who knows you can name. But you know what I'm talking about. You can name a bunch, right? Gender studies, whatever. It's these are not high paying things and they're not useful for the economy that that we want. And so what kind of incentives need to shift is my is my point. To encourage more of that, so that Apple, when they do look at a place to build a new factory, they can be they can be confident that people will actually show up to work there.

One more question, Dan, before we go. When are you running for president? I know you're going to I mean, I'm in my 30s. Come on, I got I got so much time for years.

Well, I mean, technically, yeah, but but why now? How old are you? I'm really not I'm really not planning on that. I'm on the top line.

Thirty six. Thirty six. Are you sick when you're 40? Perfect.

That's that's the time I wrote. Perfect. I mean, I, I do like being in politics. I like having a voice. It's a place I never thought I, I would be. The day before I decide to run for Congress. I was about to take a job working at the Department of Defense, just kind of moving along my same trajectory and like the national security space. But I like this. I've always loved policy. I've always loved thinking through these things and kind of the foundations of what makes this country great.

And, you know, I think we've got great years ahead, but. Yeah, but just answer your question super. Honestly, I was not not thinking about it. There's so much change in politics right now, so much so much changes from year to year like so much. It's crazy how how it's not like there's no pipeline in politics. It doesn't work that way. You know, whether you're running for the first time or whether you're trying to move up to a different position.

It's just like you just got to do what feels right. And when the people want it and the people will let you know when they want it, that's a very diplomatic answer.

And I think you're uniquely qualified for politics. I appreciate you. I appreciate how reasonable you are and how honest and objective you are. And I've always enjoyed talking to you. So thank you very much, Dan, and good luck with your book. It's called Fortitude. It's out right now. Go get it, folks, and I'll put it up on my Instagram and all that. Good stuff to. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it, man.

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