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Dan Crenshaw is a politician and former United States Navy SEAL officer serving as the U.S. Representative for Texas’s 2nd congressional district since 2019. His new book "Fortitude: American Resilience in the Outrage Era" is now available everywhere. https://amzn.to/3b0jyxL
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The few, the proud... oh wait, wrong jingle
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Try it in there.
Yeah, this one is from Goggins.
David Goggins gave me this one.
That's his coin?
Yeah, he's got his own coin.
You need a Dan Crenshaw coin, bro.
I do.
This is kind of a big coin.
It's a fat one.
It's not one you can really carry in your pocket.
No.
So it stays on the desk.
He's really trying to outdo everybody else's coin.
That's David Goggins.
The uncommon amongst uncommon men, even with your fucking coins.
Dude, Jesus.
That coin's not going to be that big.
I'm still working on it.
Are you going to get a coin?
For real?
We are, yeah.
We're way behind the power curve on this.
We need one.
It's all about, you know, you've got to get the right symbology in there.
You've got the right amount of Texas, the right amount of seal, the right
amount of Congress.
It's all going to pack that into the right symbology.
Yeah, test different ingredients, try it over and over again until you get the
bacon right.
Basically.
Yeah.
Well, thanks for being here, man.
I appreciate it.
I'm glad to be here.
This is pretty cool.
You rose to prominence through a joke.
Isn't that strange?
Yeah, I mean, a form of a joke.
Yeah, Saturday Night Live.
Yeah.
That was a weird moment.
And I was like, ooh.
It was.
You handled it really well, though.
Well, thank you.
When that happened, it was a Saturday night, obviously, Saturday Night Live,
and we heard
about it the next morning.
I got a lot of texts, and everybody's like, oh, hey, man, you made it.
It's a bunch of seals, too.
So the seal community is not prone to righteous indignation kind of reaction.
They were more likely in private to just double down and make fun of me more,
which I love
about them.
But here's what they would say.
Only we're allowed to make fun of you, not this guy.
So that's how we found out about it.
We watched it.
And we were right in the middle of the campaign.
The election was about two days away.
So you're struggling just to do all your last-minute things to get the vote out.
And so it did not dawn upon me how big of a deal this was going to be.
At the time, it felt more like an annoyance.
It felt more like, okay, I've got to come up with a statement.
I'm seeing people really upset about this, but I'm not going to lie to them and
tell them
that I'm emotionally upset, like I'm emotionally triggered by this.
That would be a false reaction on my part.
So we crafted, I think, the right statement, which was, listen, like, it's
offensive doesn't
mean I'm offended.
And you don't have to be, you don't have to choose to be offended here.
And as just a general rule, we should try hard not to offend people and try
hard not to be
offended.
Okay, there, that's it.
I'm not going to demand some apology and kind of stand on my high horse and
play this, play
this aggrieved victim role, which is the expected role to play these days.
We don't want to do that.
Well, good for you.
Good for you for not doing it.
It's refreshing.
Yeah, but the joke was kind of funny.
I mean, I have to admit, he said you looked like a bad guy in a porno film.
That was not the offensive part.
What was the offensive part?
Yeah, that part was funny.
Now, it drew a lot of questions.
He called me a hitman and a porno.
Right.
And so the obvious question is, what kind of porno is this?
I mean, that's right.
That's the very, that's the next thing that goes through your head.
Porno has a hitman.
Right, right.
And like, what's the role of that?
I mean, there's just, your mind goes to all sorts of directions.
That part wasn't.
The offensive part was he lost his eye in the war or whatever.
That's what set people off.
That was very dismissive.
That's what set people off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, after having gone on the show and seeing how they do things and
how carefully
scripted it actually is, it's unclear to me, and it always will be, and nobody
will ever
come out with the actual truth on this, on how that mistake got made.
I think, I think probably Pete, Dave, if I'm just giving him total benefit of
the doubt
and also have, after having met him and just, you know, having a general rule
that we should
try to give some people some space and assume that they're not the evil people
that we might
assume they are.
He probably just kind of looked at the line and didn't feel like finishing it
and just
said, oh, whatever.
And it just, in that, but that caught in that, and that created this, you know,
what actually
was a pretty offensive comment.
But, you know, did he mean it?
Well, we'll never really know.
Now, when I'll back up and say the whole premise of that joke was ill-intentioned.
I mean, they said as much, right?
They said, look at these gross people.
We don't like them.
And just to appear somewhat fair, we'll make fun of one Democrat.
I mean, they did say that.
So, you know, this was the thrust of the entire skit was obviously not well-intentioned,
but
I'm not sure he meant to be as deeply insulting as it turned out to be.
Yeah, he could have said the same thing, that you're an American hero, but you
look like a
hitman in a porno film.
Yeah.
It would have been funny.
Yeah.
And it would have been okay.
Yeah, it's the whatever, that part.
He's no Joe Rogan.
He was just trying to be funny, man.
That's all it was.
You know, people look so deeply into why comics do things, but the majority of
the reason
why they say offensive shit is because they think it's going to work.
That's why.
Yeah.
They find a thing.
It's not like they harbor some deep resentment or anger towards any protected
class or anything
like that.
This is like what people who are non-comics look into it.
Guarantee 100%, like this is going to work.
That's all it is.
This is going to get a laugh.
Yeah.
That's all it is.
A hundred percent.
And there's other things you talk about that are important to you, that you're
trying
to figure out how to make funny.
But for the most part, especially on something like Saturday Night Live, where
they're all
kind of competing to be funny together.
I mean, that's a very weird show.
It is.
And it was cool being behind the scenes and watching how it all takes place.
You know, they come up with these wacky ideas.
They test them out.
The writers go try it out.
They see how it goes.
They change some things.
They'll do it in front of an audience.
They'll see how the audience reacts and they'll go with that.
It's fun.
I mean, it was fun to be a part of.
It was fun to actually have my input on the comedy.
What was great about it, though, is that you came back after that and he
apologized to
you and you accepted it graciously.
But it also got, I mean, it was great for you because it got people to know who
you are.
And then I started paying attention to you after that.
I started watching some interviews and watching some speeches and different
things.
And I found you to be a very reasonable right wing guy, which I think we need
way more of
in this world.
You know, it's like in this polarization of left versus right, it just seems it's
so toxic
right now that when you can find people that are reasonable and intelligent and
think along
logical lines that you could easily follow and go, oh, OK, maybe I agree or
disagree with
this guy.
But I see where he's coming from.
Yeah.
And what you're getting at is a problem in politics is politicians and
political leaders,
I think, forgot to explain why we believe what we believe.
And that's pretty important.
You know, well, I think too often talking points are relied upon.
And it's not that those talking points are false necessarily, but they're not
persuasive
because you haven't gone a couple layers deep.
Again, I think you talk about this a lot.
Why are podcasts so popular?
They're popular because people want to hear a little bit more information.
They want to get a deeper understanding of why you think what you think.
People are ready to hear that.
They're ready for some nuance.
That being said, being in politics, you wouldn't think you wouldn't think that
we're getting
any closer to nuanced conversations.
I think political conversations on podcasts are opening up a whole new door
where you understand
people like Tulsi Gabbard or Andrew Yang or Bernie Sanders, the people that I've
had on
this podcast, one of the things that I've talked to people about, they said, I
didn't know that
Bernie was like a normal person.
You hear him talk.
And, you know, it's always in these very quick sound bites on television.
He's always yelling about wealth or race or something.
He looks like a madman.
Yeah.
But then you sit down and talk to him for, in a long form conversation, you let
him expand
on his thoughts.
You go, oh, he's a reasonable guy.
He just has, these are his principles.
These are his ideas.
And he's not a cartoon.
Yeah.
I mean, on a personal level, most people in Congress are not exactly who you
think they
are.
They are just people.
They make jokes.
And we make small talk in the elevator.
You know, these things happen.
Bernie in particular, he's on the Senate side.
I don't really interact with him at all.
Tulsi Gabbard, I know you mentioned her.
You know, we, we, we do, we, we do have good conversations, uh, that, that does
happen.
We disagree vigorously on, on lots of things.
What do you guys disagree on?
Uh, Tulsi in particular?
Sure.
Uh, well, most things I would say.
Uh, one, one thing she's quite outspoken about is, um, is our involvement
overseas.
Uh, she's, she would generally say she's, she's much more of an isolationist
than I am.
What I remind people when we're talking about that particular subject, why, why
do we keep
troops in Syria, why do we keep troops in Iraq?
Why do we keep troops in Afghanistan?
Isn't the war over?
Um, why don't we bring the boys back home?
And the, the answer is this is not a conventional war.
This is not something where you sign a peace treaty with a uniformed, uh, army.
It is, it is a different, it's a different situation.
We send guys like me over there so that they don't come here.
We send guys like me over there so that we keep pressure on them and, and, and
prevent
them from having the operational space and timing to commit another 9-11.
You have to understand that these people over there wake up every single day
trying to plan
another 9-11.
It is, it is, it is what they do.
And, uh, we've already seen an increase in, in ISIS activity just from the drawdown
that
we already did have in Syria.
So, you know, that's a, that's a fair disagreement again, but she's a really
cool person.
And I want to, I brought up Tulsi just specifically because we do talk and I,
and I, and I, and I just
like her as a person.
And we just disagree on things, but there's a respect there to play devil's
advocate.
Some would say that the reason why they want to plant plot another 9-11 is
because we're
over there.
Yeah.
I disagree with that.
So let's, let's look at the Osama bin Laden, um, example.
What exactly did we do to this guy?
You know?
Well, we helped him, right?
Yeah, exactly.
He was fighting against the Soviets with the Mujahideen.
Exactly.
And he, he was a Mujahideen fighter.
We helped them fight the Soviets.
We protected Saudi Arabia from invasion from Saddam Hussein.
That's his homeland.
And yet he hated us.
And when we left, we never occupied Saudi Arabia.
We left when they asked us to leave after we defended them, um, and prevented
another invasion
from Saddam Hussein after we invaded Kuwait.
What is it we did to make this guy so mad?
And the answer is we didn't do anything, objectively speaking, he hates us
because of our Western
ideology.
He hates us because he hates us.
And, and, and it's hard for us to understand because it's not logical, uh, but
it is the
truth.
And, um, it's, it's, you know, so that's the, and it's the prime example of, of
why we would
this, this, this is a long-term fight and it's, um, it's not likely to go away
anytime soon.
And at the last thing I would say, the world is a very small place.
We can, when we pretend that we, to ignore things going on in the middle East,
we can
pretend that they won't come here.
But the reality is that's a 12 hour flight and, and, and, and the speed of
information
travels even faster.
You know, when we were seeing a lot of attacks in the U S and in Europe, when
ISIS was at
its peak as it's, uh, as it's peak strength, that was because they were able to
radicalize
online.
Notice that they've stopped having that power and it's because we actually took
the fight
to them.
Well, there, there certainly are some conflicts between their ideology and
Western ideology,
but why on Western values, but why is it that they're dedicating their entire
life to try
to take down America?
Well, I mean, there's, this is always the question.
It is a question.
And it's, and it's, you don't, you almost have to ask them exactly why.
Right.
But I mean, at its core, we are infidels at, at its core.
There's, they're, they're, they're taking an extreme view of, of Islamic
fundamentalism
and believing that we are infidels that must be destroyed.
I mean, that's at its core, uh, there, there it's, it's less political reasons
and a little
bit more emotional reasoning.
There has to be some, some part of it because of our policies and some part of
it because
of our actions.
And I don't know, I'm not so sure that we should always assume that it's our
fault.
And I think that's a common, that's a common theme, uh, in politics these days
where anything
bad happening must be America's fault.
It must be decisions we made.
I mean, maybe, but let's objectively make the case.
If that, if that's, if that's true, I think there's an automatic assumption and
I, it's
not self-evident to me.
But if we're in, what are we in a hundred and how many countries do we have
bases in?
What's the number?
Do you know?
It's a lot.
It might, it's, it's definitely over a hundred.
Yeah.
And if you were one of the people that is in one of those countries and you had
to deal
with that and you saw like the drone attacks in Yemen that have killed people
and wedding
parties and the kind of shit that we hope never happens again, but has happened
in the
past, you can kind of understand why there would be a hatred against the number
one superpower
in the world.
Well, opinions in these countries are not, are not homogenous, right?
They're, they're, they're vastly diverse.
There's a, there's millions of people in Yemen probably begging for us to come
there.
Same with Iraq.
The Iraqis did not want us leaving.
They knew this would go badly, but again, not all Iraqis, right?
So it's the ones who understood, right?
I mean, it just depends on who you talk to.
So again, it's, it's, it's, everything is more complex than a simple, than a
simple black
and white scenario where America's bad or good.
It's just, it's, it's always more complex than that.
So you feel like if we did pull out of all these countries, particularly pull
out of the
Middle East, Afghanistan, and all the bases that we have over there, that it
would be
very similar to like what's going on in Iraq, what happened in Libya.
There's a power vacuum.
The vacuum gets filled by bad guys.
It'll a hundred percent happen that way.
Um, you know, and it's, I, there's not a doubt in my mind.
There's not a doubt in any experts minds.
Who's looking at this.
I would also say when we're, when we have a base somewhere that is, that is at
the, that
is, that is at the discretion of, of that, uh, local government.
There's, there's no cases here, except in the case of Syria, uh, where, you
know, their
local government, Bashar al-Assad doesn't want us there.
That's the only case that I can think of and that, that we don't have an
agreement, a status
of forces agreement with the government there.
So I, I, I don't, I don't think it's quite right to paint it as some kind of
imperialistic
occupation.
That's just, that's just not how we, how we do things.
And you're right over there.
Yeah.
I'm just making sure the sound is off.
Good for you before anything actually did happen.
Now, um, do you think that this is a political ploy, that this is a popular
thing to say because
so many people that have, uh, you know, a cursory understanding of foreign
policy, they look at
our military bases overseas and they say, Hey, let's bring those people back.
Let's end these wars.
Let's stop spending this money.
But you're not the only one that's told me this and particularly not the only
one that's
told me this, that's has a military background saying it's virtually impossible.
impossible to prevent any of this stuff without having bases over there.
That's a hundred percent right.
Yeah.
I mean, and you, you need, you need that relationship with the host nation, of
course, that you want
to partner with.
And that's generally what we do, especially in the special operations community.
When we're in a hundred plus countries, we're there to partner with them.
We're not there doing our own thing where they're partnering and training and
equipping
and enhancing their capabilities.
So that that's part of what we're doing.
And the other part is just knowledge.
We want to know what's happening.
And if we don't know what's happening, why do we have embassies everywhere?
Part of that is just relationships and knowledge and understanding of what's
going on, because
we can't look at it from afar and actually get it.
It just, it doesn't work that way.
So, and again, I'm not, I think it is reactionary to just assume that we have
bad intentions all
the time and that everything is America's fault.
I hear that constantly, um, mostly coming from the left, but, but, but that
isolationist sentiment
certainly comes from the right as well.
And, uh, and it's a reaction, it's a reaction to the Iraq war and some of the
mistakes we
made there.
It's a reaction to Vietnam.
It's never, that's never left the American psyche, uh, in many ways, but these,
these matters
are complex and they deserve complex reasoning and analysis and a little
nuanced understanding.
And I just think that's how we should look at it.
We don't, we don't say that we're always right.
That's, that's not what I'm saying.
Right.
It's no one gets really educated on it.
It's not like there's a cursory, you know, examination of this that's given to
the American
person, like when they sign up to register to vote, it's like, you know, you
don't say,
okay, before you vote, let's explain to you what's going on.
And this is why there's basis here.
And this is why we do this.
And I mean, not even as a real simple explanation of these things.
It's just have to go searching for it, or you have to rely on political pundits.
Usually have a bias one way or the other, it's an MSNBC or it's Fox news.
And it's, you know, you, you don't know where the reality is.
You can apply it.
And you can apply that.
It's not just our foreign policy.
It's every issue.
Yes.
You know, why are things the way they are?
It's, it's a really good question to ask when we're trying to find the
solutions for
the things we don't like.
The first question we should ask is, why are things the way they are?
And that question really gets manipulated, uh, again, on any issue.
And, um, it is unfortunate.
How do we fix that?
I don't know.
My, my message when like high school kids are asking me, how do they get
involved in politics?
And what I tell them is it's okay not to know things first of all, and it's
okay not to
choose a side just yet.
Right.
Because there's, there's nothing wrong with your ignorance on the why behind
this issue.
There's nothing wrong with that.
You're young.
You don't have the experiences yet.
It's fine.
But there is something wrong with having a very strong opinion on that when you
don't
actually understand it.
Yes.
That's, that's what creates the animosity.
That's what creates the divisiveness.
Because once you're emotionally attached to an opinion, it's, it's not easy to,
to remove
yourself from that.
Uh, it takes a massive amount of, of, I think humility.
Um, and which is an attribute we all aspire to, but maybe don't have exactly.
Yeah.
Uh, and it's hard.
And so it's, it's, it's okay not to know and to ask questions and to just
wonder and
to think, uh, maybe what I'm hearing isn't exactly the whole truth.
Maybe I'll look into it before I start posting on social media about how, how
awful that situation
is or whatever.
People love to know, you know, even if they don't, they, they love to be the
person that
has the information.
And one of the things that social media has done is allowed this sort of text
based debate
format where people can shut people down wrong and say this.
The problem with that is this and this, and everybody wants to be correct about
things
because they're married to these ideas.
If these ideas succeed, they succeed.
If they, they get a zinger off on someone in some sort of online political
debate, they
walk around with like a fucking, like a peacock strut, you know, like they won,
they got one
in.
Yeah.
And for many people, this is like the only form of competition they participate
in, which
I think is a real problem in our culture.
Human beings desire competition.
Yeah.
Especially men.
It is a giant.
And when they shy away from it, they usually become secretly quietly angry.
And they, they, they, they harbor, harbor resentment and bitterness and they
never understand the
feeling of losing and getting better.
The feeling of failing and improving the feeling of not knowing something and
then learning something
like these, these things are critical.
And to pretend that you know something when you don't, it's a terrible way to
go about your
life.
Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point on the competitive aspects of things.
Uh, you obviously compete a lot.
I've competed a lot in my life and I can't imagine a world where that didn't
happen.
And I can't imagine a world where I didn't have to suffer as a kid through some
losses
in my soccer game.
And then when my parents didn't say, well, you deserve to win.
They said, well, you lost.
So, so that's what happens.
And guess what?
Welcome to life.
Yeah.
I mean, we still love you, but you fucking lost that's life.
That's real.
Should've trained harder.
It's, uh, the idea that they're doing that with these little kids, man.
When my daughter was three, she had a soccer game where there was no winners,
no losers.
Like, uh, the other team fucking won.
I watched the ball went in the goal.
Everybody was cheering.
Like, what are we doing?
We don't, we're not keeping score.
Yeah.
This is bananas.
You're going to, you know, it's soft times.
And this, this is what we're living in.
Soft times create soft people.
Yeah, that's right.
Um, and we've talked about this before the show.
I'm writing a whole book on this actually.
I'm glad.
Uh, and, uh, it's, it's about outrage culture.
It's about becoming too soft.
And, and, but I, but I try to make it a, you know, a, uh, productive
conversation.
Each chapter will be lessons, you know, derived from my own experiences and
derived from psychology, uh, derived from ancient truths.
Actually, uh, the, you know, nothing I will say in this book is going to be new,
but that's kind of the point.
And that's how, you know, it's good.
Yeah.
We need to hear those things over and over again.
You know, sometimes you forget them.
Sometimes they just need to be cemented in your psyche and competition doesn't
mean being mean.
It doesn't mean people, they're, they're associating it and equating it with
either violence or aggression or, uh, toxic masculinity.
There's all these words that kept thrown around for people feeling bad because
they lost, but that feeling of feeling bad because you lost something is
extremely valuable in your life.
It, and I don't want to say it hardens you because it doesn't hard you
emotionally.
You still are the same amount of emotional availability, but you get, if you're
accustomed to it, I always tell people, young men get involved in martial arts,
especially jujitsu.
Cause you can do it.
You're not going to get brain damage.
You get strangled a bunch.
You get your ass kicked all the time.
And it teaches you humility.
It teaches you humility.
And then you learn after that, that you can get better.
And then eventually you become the hammer instead of being the nail.
And that's, that's something you can actually apply to your real life.
You can understand that these lessons of failure and humility and humiliation
and just getting pummeled, like all that stuff pays off.
Ultimately, if you just keep showing up and that's analogous to life in life,
if you can just keep showing up and keep working hard, you're going to have setbacks,
but don't let them define you and you can move forward.
But if you don't, if you just like the world's toxic and we need to nerf
everything and you know, everyone needs a safe space.
Well, we're just going to make a whole island full of pussies and we're in
danger of doing that.
Yeah.
We're definitely in danger of doing it if it hasn't already happened in many
ways.
And like what you're saying is intuitively true, that hardship creates a
stronger mind.
Yeah.
Right.
Lessons.
But it's, it's not just intuitively true.
This is, this is in data.
This is in, this is in science as well.
And, and, and, and a lot of psychological research, you know, this is, and, and
we know it to be true.
What the reason I like, actually, I love the, the subject of psychology because
it kind of tells us things that we already intuit to be true.
And, and it just makes sense.
And this is certainly one of those.
And there's a lot of studies that show people who have suffered deep trauma, um,
uh, end up better for it.
As long as they're telling themselves the right stories.
And so this, I go into this a lot in my book too.
You have to tell yourself the right story about that trauma.
Uh, you have to tell yourself that you are resilient and that you, and that you
are empowered to overcome it.
That's, that's a very important narrative that you have to tell yourself.
If you tell yourself it just happened to you and it's not fair and everybody's
out to get you.
Right.
I wouldn't wish that psychological state on my worst enemies.
I agree with you.
Well, maybe my worst enemy, but, but, but that's the point, right?
Like you would never wish that upon somebody you like.
Uh, and that's, and that's, that's, that's an important truth.
I think we have to tell ourselves.
When you were in the military, is this something that they taught you or is it
something that you learn through example?
Uh, yeah, I think learn through experience.
So, you know, the, the reason buds, so buds is basic underwater demolition
slash seal training.
It is, it is our six month trial by fire, um, selection process that we go to
become a seal.
It's the very first thing you do.
And, uh, it's where you see all the infamous footage of GI Jane and hell week
and all that stuff.
That's all, it's all first phase and buds.
And so I like how you brought up GI Jane.
Yeah.
The most hilarious.
Yeah.
I mean, it is that, that, yeah, I mean, it's probably the wrong example in
hindsight.
But it's all the Navy SEAL movies on the military.
Because I can't think of any other movies that show buds.
Um, now that you bring it, actually lone survivor, the very, the first intro I
think has some, but anyway, find it on YouTube.
Uh, most people know what I'm talking about, but, uh, is GI Jane is not a
realistic movie.
It's one of the least realistic movies in every single aspect, uh, about the
seal teams.
But the point is, is, is that there is a, there's not just a hardening of the
mind that occurs from hell week.
It's like a, it's a, it's an, it's a increase in confidence in a pretty
excessive way.
Like if I can push my limits this far, imagine what else I can do.
And, uh, in that, and then you, and you continue to push those limits.
I mean, just even after hell week, you do it, uh, when you're kind of what we
would, what I would describe as controlled drowning and, uh, in second phase
where we, where we learn to be super calm underwater under the worst conditions,
meaning you can't breathe and you're about to pass out.
Uh, and you're still going to go through procedures in a very specific way.
You have to learn that, that, that calming and then, and you've pushed another
limit and you've pushed another limit.
So, but the, by the time we do get to combat, uh, we have already suffered so
badly in training that the combat doesn't feel all that bad.
And, and we're ready to get your eye blown out of your head.
Like I did, uh, you're ready for that.
You, you understand it and it's, it's not surprising and you don't react as in
an emotional way when it does happen, uh, because you've allowed yourself to be
hardened and you've told yourself the right story about that.
What is a traumatic experience?
I mean, the hell we can be, it really is.
I broke my leg the first time through, I had to do it again.
So break your leg.
Uh, just a stress fracture that turned into a fracture and it just snapped at a
while we were running with the boats on our heads.
So we run with these two or 300 pound boats on our heads that are basically the
kind of boats you use in, um, river rafting and, but we run everywhere with
them.
Um, some estimates maybe up to 200 miles in just hell week alone.
So, uh, it's, it's one of the reasons older, older guys, you know, 25 and older
have a lot of heart, a hard time getting older guys.
25.
That's hilarious.
Yeah.
Because your, your, your body just breaks more, you know, early twenties are
probably the prime time.
Your muscles are developed about that time.
Uh, your bone structure can still handle the, the just immense amount of
punishment that it's taking.
And, uh, you know, except for mine, we called it, we know, and then we'd make
fun of each other and say, oh, nice weak jeans you have there.
That's why you broke.
So your leg broke.
And how much time did you need before you went back to do it again?
Uh, six months.
So I was rolled three classes.
What, which, uh, which bone?
A left tibia.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's a big one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It hurt.
Um, you know, it's a dangerous one to break too.
There's not a lot of blood flow there.
Yeah.
It's amazing that you got back in there six months later.
A lot of times I had no guy who broke his leg and, uh, he was, he was fucked up
for a good solid couple of years.
Yeah.
And, um, it was a risk because we weren't sure.
I, I, frankly, the command was getting impatient.
They're like, we're not going to let you heal anymore.
Six months is it.
So go for it.
Um, and, uh, you know,
it's, you know, it's not like a compound fracture either.
This is a crack in the bone.
So maybe in any case it worked out just fine, but, uh, it's a risky thing
because you, I knew it broke.
Right.
I mean, I felt that I rounded a corner and my adrenaline kind of took me
through the rest of that run.
Then we sit down for lunch and I couldn't get back up from, from that seat.
Like it was, it was the adrenaline worn off.
There was something bad, badly wrong there.
And, uh, there's always this question that the instructors will ask.
Are you hurt or are you injured?
Because there's a difference.
Yes.
Like, and if you're just hurt, because everybody here is hurt.
If you're just hurt, then you're just quitting.
Right.
If you're injured.
Okay.
We might give you another chance.
Isn't that interesting?
That's a, for the average person, that's such an alien thought.
It's an alien question.
Are you hurt or are you injured?
Yeah, it is, but there's a difference.
There is a difference.
Yeah.
Now, um, do they have any courses where they explain to you how your mind works
and how to
overcome questions and doubts that, that creep into your head?
Are they just, they're teaching you through fire?
Right.
And we wouldn't want those courses, frankly.
Um, so when you see all those like online people, what you got to do is you got
to face
your fears and understand who you are and say, it's going to be okay.
Does that drive you crazy?
No, it doesn't drive me crazy.
I don't mind that somebody is trying to do that.
I say that we wouldn't do it because, uh, the point is, the point is that you're
already
that person.
You're a seal before you got there.
Okay.
We're just, we're just making you prove it, but you are already that guy.
Okay.
Because you never had a choice.
And, uh, there's another chapter in my book.
I call it no plan B.
You go through this with no plan B.
If you ever thought for a second that, oh, maybe I can make it through buds.
Like maybe I'll make it through hell week.
I hope I do.
You're not going to make it.
Right.
There's a choice there.
You're, you're, you're, you're telling yourself that you actually have a choice.
I think that's with everything.
Yeah, it is with everything.
Again, this is, it's an extreme example, but it's, it's certainly applies to
everything.
If you, it replied to my run for Congress.
Like if I, I didn't plan anything after the primary on March 6th, they just
didn't.
Now you could argue that that that was probably not a great idea.
Maybe you should have had some kind of backup plan.
Well, it worked, but, but, but mentally, it was more of a mental state than it
was like
I don't have a backup plan.
I'm not saying don't have contingencies in your life.
I'm just saying, and only, you know, when you've actually decided to quit,
right?
Because it's one thing to be like, I have tried to be an artist for so long and
I'm just
not good at it.
And then you quit.
Well, is it really quitting or is it just facing reality that you're just not
good at
being an artist?
You know, that, so it's, it's different.
You have to distinguish between those two things, but you know, you know, if
you quit because
you actually quit, you gave up on yourself and that's, and, and nobody, nobody
can really
judge that for you.
And I just, I think that's an important lesson and that's how you make it
through buds.
Cause you never had a choice.
Yeah.
I don't think there's a way you can get through what I've heard described and
while having
a plan B, like, I hope I get through this, but if I don't, I've got, you know,
I'm going
to open this pizza place with my cousin.
And yeah, I always talk about it like bandwidth.
And I would say to people, like, if you want to really do something, you only
have a, like,
let's call it, let's like pretend you have a, like a certain amount of juice,
like your
juice is 100.
And when it's fully on, you have a hundred.
Well, if you take 30 of it and you put it towards this and another 20 and you
put it
towards that, well, guess what?
You think you're all in, but you're really only 50% in because you've got all
this 50%
of your juices on all these different things.
You got to be a hundred percent involved in what you're trying to do at your
best.
If you're not like for fighting, that's a big one.
When I tell guys, there's a lot of guys that I know that are kind of one foot
in, one foot
out.
And I'm like, get out, get out.
Cause there's a fucking animal out there.
Some Mike Tyson, when he was 20 years old and he's going to rearrange your
liver, don't
do it.
Get out now because there's people that are all in.
And when you're half in those people that are all in, you become their
highlight reel.
That's a good, that's probably good advice.
It's the best advice.
You see it.
You see guys that are starting to think, well, maybe one more fight.
Like, fuck, stop.
Just stop now.
Yeah.
Don't do it.
That's how you get hurt.
It's an interesting thing because of this world where there are so many people
that are
teaching lessons that are teaching, you know, what you got, but then there's
real ones like
Jocko, you know, like when a guy like Jocko says something, everybody listens
cause he's
done it.
Like this is real shit.
And you know, you see his watch every morning on his Instagram, four 30 in the
morning.
It's so annoying.
He's up.
It's fucking very annoying.
When you wake up at eight, we're not all morning people, Jocko.
He's not either.
Guess what?
He's not a morning person either.
He'd like to sleep in, but he gets up and he fucking gets after it.
And that guy's fuel for fucking millions of people in this country because of
his books
and his videos and all the, that video, good.
You've seen that video.
I don't think I've seen a lot of them.
I'm not sure which one you're talking about.
The one good.
I think about that when I run.
Cause like it's talking about things going wrong.
Good.
Oh yeah.
Chance to get better.
Good.
You know, everything fell apart.
You're welcoming the failure.
You're welcoming the failure.
And like, that's just when I was on his podcast a while back and I hadn't
gotten to his book
yet.
And I was like, Jocko, I'm so sorry.
Haven't read your book yet.
He's like, it's fine.
It's just, it's, it's one lesson you have to know.
Everything is your fault.
It's extreme ownership.
He's like, everything we learned in the teams.
I'm like, oh, okay.
Yeah, I know that.
Cause you taught it to me.
Cause you were, you know, he was, he was the head of trade at when I went
through and,
um, God, he just crushed us.
Like every, every, every, uh, every training op was, uh, there's people on this
life that
are born to crush things.
Yeah.
That guy's born.
He's put here to crush things.
He, uh, rolled my friend, John, my friend, John Dudley, who's a professional
archery coach
and a bow hunter.
And, uh, he wanted to learn jujitsu.
So we started taking some classes and then he rolled with Jocko and Jocko
literally broke
his neck.
He broke a bone in his neck and he didn't even mean to broke his, broke the
other guy's neck.
Yes.
To be clear.
He broke John's, a bone in John's neck.
He's got something in the back of his throat that still tickles him to this day
where it's
none of the surprises me that Jocko broke somebody's neck.
I told him, I'm like, don't fucking roll with that gorilla.
What are you crazy?
The guy's 5'10".
He weighs 240 pounds.
Don't fucking roll with him.
He's a, he's, he's, he's a terrifying person for jujitsu.
Yeah, built to snap things off.
Yeah.
That's what he's built for.
It's exactly right.
But people like that, that, you know, have real lessons because of real success
and real
failure in life and a real understanding of what it takes to motivate people
and what it
takes to be a leader.
Like, I think those guys are extremely valuable, but they get watered down by
so many people
that are out there giving lessons and, and like making a career out of being a
motivational speaker when you just want to grab them and go, what the fuck have
you
done?
Right.
What have you done other than motivate people?
Right.
And with words that are, you've just, you, you like collecting words out in the
field and
jumbling them together and you're like a word harvester and you're putting them
together,
but they're not really coming from a real place.
Yeah.
And then the question is, are they even, are they successful?
Maybe they are, but you're right.
If you're not backing it up with, I think, real experience and a real story to,
to,
to frame the argument that you're trying to make.
And maybe the argument's the same as the other guy that you're talking about.
It doesn't really have the experience, but if it's going to be powerful and
meaningful
to somebody, I think it does have to come from a place of experience.
Well, it's one of the reasons why I, I really like politicians that have served.
I think it's so critical when you're talking about sending people overseas to
have an honest
understanding of what that really means and to have been there.
It's one of the reasons why I really like Tulsi.
And it's one of the reasons why I really like you.
I think that is, it is a giant factor.
I mean, I don't want it to be mandatory, but God damn, when, when people start
talking
about going to war and they have no understanding personally about what that
means, it bothers
me.
Yeah.
And it's going to war or not going to war.
Yes.
Or not going to war.
Both opinions.
Because again, what me and Tulsi really disagree on fundamentally, I think on a
deeper level
is whether our troops out there are victims or not.
And I, I do, I think there's a common misunderstanding that our troops don't
want to be there, that
our troops are being victimized by our bad political decisions.
And that's, to me, as one of those people who voluntarily goes out there, which
is by the
way, everybody, because everybody volunteers to do it.
You know, that's, that's a deeply problematic opinion because it's just not
true.
You know, the, the truth is, is that we want to be there.
We want to be serving.
Have you ever debated her on this and had her clarify her positions?
No, no, we've, again, we talk a lot, but.
It'd be interesting to have you guys sit down and talk about it.
Yeah.
Again, I like Tulsi.
So that'd be one of these days we could do that.
That's also nice too, that you guys have these differing political philosophies,
but yet you
can be friendly with each other.
Because in today's day and age, I mean, I don't know what the fuck happened.
Somewhere around 2016, when Trump won, everybody went haywire.
And now you're either with us or against us.
You can't talk to Republicans and if you do, you're a bad person and you're a
part of the
problem and you're probably a white nationalist.
And like, it's just, it's the most divided I can remember ever this country
being.
Yeah, it's insane.
Now on Capitol Hill, it's a little less like, I think behind closed doors,
people do talk
to each other quite a bit.
And I think it'd be good if the American people understood that that's actually
what happens.
So they, we do debate vigorously in public.
And some of us don't talk to each other, just to be clear.
Why don't you guys know a reality show?
Not everybody.
Yeah, wouldn't that be?
Well, we kind of do, right?
Little people of Capitol Hill.
I mean, between, we kind of do.
I mean, I put so much of what I do every day out on social media and others, as
other members
of Congress do sometimes.
Well, it's a new thing, right?
Yeah.
And it's a great way for people to get to know you.
I think there's a lot of value in that.
Yeah.
You know, the old political way of thinking is don't say too much because you'll
get crucified
for it and stick to your talking points because there's just, there was, for a
long time,
there's still, there's still this argument to be made that there's no reward
for being
open and honest about things, for having that nuanced conversation.
And that is still true, by the way.
I've certainly discovered it on my own.
Really?
How so?
You don't think there's a reward?
I think the backlash that you'll get from certain groups of people is quick and
swift
and unforgiving.
And this is why, now, again, is it worth it for me?
Yes.
I think it is because I'd still rather have that open conversation.
I'd rather sit with you for hours and actually get through this stuff.
I think that that backlash is just the vocal minority.
And I think there's a tremendous amount of people that are happy that you've
done that
and support you for doing that.
They're just not vocal about it.
I think you're probably right.
I know for sure.
Because when I talked to my buddies that, you know, when I said, hey, I'm
having that Dan
Crenshaw.
And they go, I fucking like that guy, man.
I'm like, did you ever post on his Twitter?
No.
Did you ever post on his Instagram?
No.
There's a lot of people like that.
They just, most people are not going to comment on a YouTube video.
Most.
Right.
The vast majority.
Most people are going to watch it and go, oh, that was good.
Or that fucking sucked.
I've never commented on a single YouTube video.
There you go.
That's exactly right.
I mean, I have disparaged people who comment on YouTube videos in the past.
But look, I don't have a cubicle job.
People get fucking bored.
I'd probably be commenting to, but the, the idea that just the people that are
angry at
you are the only ones that are paying attention.
That it's all backlash.
I think you're just not seeing, you're not reaping the positive aspects of it
immediately.
Perspective is hugely important and you're absolutely right.
But, you know, trying to, going back to the political culture, trying to move
it into this
a little bit more of an open and honest, nuanced discussion, I think is
important.
And we just, I want to be part of that solution.
And it's why I come on a show like this.
It's why, it's why other politicians come on shows like this.
It is moving in that direction.
And I think it's a, I think it's a cool thing.
I think so too.
And I think people need to understand that there's, you know, what are the
motivations
behind these decisions?
Like what, what's the, what's the thought process behind these decisions?
Right.
You just don't never get that on one of those panel shows where there's two
people barking
over each other and you got five minutes to talk.
Less than that, you know, and that's why on every major bill I'll put out a
video and I
have to be conscious of how deep I can go into the policy because again, people
will just
stop listening at a certain point.
And so there's, there is a, the, the, the, the appetite for long form
discussion isn't
all that big, but two, three minutes, five minutes.
Is this on YouTube or what do you, I put it on YouTube.
I put them on Instagram.
I put them on all my social media accounts.
So, and on every big bill, on every big bill that we're voting on.
Um, and I just try to explain why am I for this?
Why am I against this?
Here's the reasons.
Here's what the other side says.
Here's what I say about that.
Okay.
And so just let me explain to you why I do what I do.
And it's turned out people really like that.
No, people love that.
And they didn't exist before.
I mean, we are the first generation that's experiencing politicians having
their own channels to express
themselves.
You used to have to go to NBC or CBS or what have you in order to, and you had
to, you
had to be prominent enough to have a conversation with someone.
Like they're only going to talk to a select number of people.
And the only reason why they're going to talk to those people is because they
think those
people would be viable in terms of the amount of numbers of people that would
tune in so
they could get a good advertising money for it.
And that's really the market.
That's what it was all about.
We're in this new world now, you know, and I think it's for the better for
everybody.
It is, it is.
I mean, like everything, it's got its pros and cons.
What are the cons?
Well, just social media in general, I think, allows a lot of that vocal
minority who's mostly
angry and it elevates that to a high extent.
And it makes us a little angrier at each other, I think.
And that's, that's just a downside.
Now, does that mean I want to get rid of social media?
No.
What is your take on what we're seeing now with social media in terms of like
algorithms
that sort of accentuate that, that, that hate where they find the things that
piss you
off, whether you like to post about immigration or abortion and whatever it is,
and that's
what you're going to find in your feed.
Puts that in front of you.
Yeah, you know, I think I, my, my concerns with the social media companies are
more the
censorship issues.
I was going to get to that next.
Yeah.
And that, and that's generally what we talk about.
Um, I don't, I haven't thought a whole lot about the algorithms and how that
works.
I kind of wish they would do it differently, uh, but they don't, and I can't
force them to
do, do it differently, but maybe they should recognize that it is accentuating
that anger
quite a bit.
And you have to ask yourself at a certain point, well, why, why, why, why?
Why encourage that?
Right.
It's not, it's not helpful.
So.
No, it isn't helpful.
And it seems like it's only for profit.
The reason why they do it is because the more people click on things, the more
advertising
revenue they're going to generate.
Right.
The best way.
I mean, it's not a malicious idea.
It's just the algorithms have figured out what's the best way to keep people
engaged.
And that's through outrage.
It's not through, through cuteness.
Yeah.
It is.
Adorable memes.
And it's, it's, it's frustrating that, you know, you know, what tweet is going
to get
50,000 plus likes.
Yeah.
It's got to be hard hitting.
It's got to be punchy.
It's not going to be like a, your, your, your nuanced, thoughtful.
Take on issue X is, is, is not going to get a ton of traction.
And so there's an incentive there.
And again, so we can, and it's not totally the social media company's fault.
Like we always have to look to ourselves as a culture.
And I think, and, and be a little introspective and, and just ask ourselves,
like, why am I
react?
Do I want to be this way?
Do I want to be that person that reacts so angrily that, that, that, that, that
post
comments to somebody that I would never have the guts to say to their face.
Right.
You know, do you really want to be that person?
We, we do have to ask ourselves as a culture about that.
And, and it's this, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot of what I wrote
about after
the Saturday night live thing.
Like let's, we, we have to get to this point and it's a pretty low standard
where we're
attacking ideas and not people and not the intent and character of people.
And, uh, it's a low standard, frankly, as far as political discourse, but it's
a, it's
a good place to start.
It is a good place to start.
And there is a problem with the gatekeepers of social media and that these
companies are
all left with their policies and they might be right in terms of their business
practices.
And David Pakman came on here and argued that.
And it actually makes a lot of sense that in terms of like how they still, uh,
shuffle
money overseas and avoid taxes.
And they do, there's a lot of right wing business practices.
But my thought on that is it's probably just compartmentalization.
And you're dealing with business people that have taken over some multi-billion
dollar corporation.
And that this is the business aspect of it.
And then you've got your social engineering aspect of it.
And the social engineering aspect of it is, it's very problematic for me.
Um, there was an article that was written recently and one of the guys, uh, he
was saying
something about me and that no silencing white nationalism and keeping them off
your platform
is not censorship, which is the dumbest way to sort of boil down my position on
censorship and ignore
the real problems of other people deciding what someone can or can't say and
what is or is not offensive.
One of the best examples is a woman named, uh, I think it's Morgan Murphy,
Megan Murphy,
Megan Murphy is her name.
She's a, what's called a trans exclusionary, exclusionary, exclusionary.
What's the word?
Why, why am I, exclusionary, trans exclusionary, radical feminist, a TERF.
And she was in a debate with, I don't blame you for not being able to remember
that.
Trans exclusionary, but exclusionary is a weird word.
She was in a debate with people about whether or not trans women should be able
to invade
feminist women's spaces.
So a person who's biologically male who becomes a female later in life should
be able to make
decisions in feminist debates and decisions, right.
And get into their sports.
So she says, yes, the sports is the big one for me.
It's particularly fighting.
Yeah.
She says, but a man is never a woman.
This is what she says.
Okay.
So Twitter asked her to take it down.
Yeah.
So she takes a screenshot of that.
She takes it down, takes a screenshot of it and reposts it.
Like, fuck you.
Like, I'm going to put it back up again this way.
They ban her for life, for life.
You know, who's on Twitter with no problems?
OJ Simpson.
OJ Simpson murdered two people.
He fucking went to jail for armed kidnapping.
And he's on TV.
He's on every day.
Hello, Twitter world.
He's fine.
Among other things.
I like this.
This is Megan Murphy.
She says a man is not a woman.
She's fucking correct biologically.
She's biologically correct.
I mean, if we wanted to decide socially and culturally that we're going to
accept this
person as a woman, this is a completely different discussion.
But she's right.
She's biologically correct.
Right.
The scientists would say, well, here we go.
We've got some chromosomes here.
We've got X and Y.
And this is a penis.
This is a vagina.
This is a man.
This is a woman.
And, you know, maybe this person identifies with being a woman.
But she's saying, you're not a woman.
And you're banning her for life.
This is crazy.
It is.
But it's woke culture in its most boiled down form.
It has nothing to do with white nationalism.
It has nothing to do with race.
It has to do with a person that feels like their own particular protected group,
being a
feminist, being a woman, and trying to carve out rules where women are
protected.
And she's saying, well, I don't like the fact that these trans women are
entering into the
space and dominating it in certain aspects.
Right.
And it's an example of this intersectional coalition that they've created
coming to terms
with itself.
And, you know, a lot of the feminist groups aligned with us against the Equality
Act,
because the Equality Act would have put into real practice this, into concrete
terms,
biological men getting into women's sports.
Yes.
And so a lot, among other things, by the way, that a lot of feminist groups
were finally
coming out and saying, no, this is not correct.
Like, we're a feminist group, so let's protect women, which I fully agree with.
And, but, you know, on a deeper level, it's interesting to watch that
intersectional
coalition just implode.
And it stems from this desire on their part to divide everybody up into three
categories
of oppressed, the oppressors, and then the champions of the oppressed, right?
Yes.
And the woke culture is the champions, of course.
That's how they label themselves.
They label their intersectional coalition as the oppressed, and then they lump,
and then
they have this whole other kind of intersectional coalition of oppressors.
And they connect it all with the worst of the worst, which is white supremacist
Nazis.
Yes, Nazis.
And so you're all, and they say, you're all connected with that somehow.
Even if you're just making a pretty bland statement about biological men and
women,
somehow that connects to this, and this is how you see them reason their way
through it.
And what that does is it undercuts real basic arguments because you're
attacking the intent
of that argument because you're connecting it with the worst of the worst,
right?
Not we kill Nazis.
That's what our country does.
We did it.
And so if you're connecting all of these things you disagree with with that,
well,
you don't even have to make an argument anymore.
Yes.
And the idea that you're going to somehow or another convince people that
everyone is a
Nazi just because you say so, that's not going to work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What's going to work is people are going to just, they're going to go to the
other side.
You're making more Republicans with this crazy talk.
Well, I hope so.
Well, that's really what's going on.
I mean, my friend Chris Pratt wore a t-shirt that said, don't tread on me.
I remember that.
I've posted about that.
What the fuck, man?
It's a, it's a goddamn ancient flag representing our separation from England
and our, our want
to be able to start our own country.
I mean, that's what it was.
Yeah, exactly.
And it gets to a deeper culture war, one of there's many fronts on the culture
wars.
This is a big one is America based on bad things or good things.
Are we good intrinsically good?
Or are we bad?
This is, this is a huge fissure in the culture war right now.
Yeah.
And you know, when, when we, and I, and I have a lot of fear that, that, that
these things are boiling
up and that we're destroying the things, the few things that hold us together.
You know, as a country, like what makes us Americans, it's, it's not ethnicity.
It's not religion.
It's not even really geographic area because our geographic area has changed
over time.
It is, it is ideals.
It is ideals.
And those ideals are symbolized by certain things.
And that's the USS constant, the U S constitution, the declaration of
independence, the pledge of
allegiance, the flag, uh, the national anthem, like these things matter.
And I, and I think they're very important for a culture and, and be, and this
actually all ties
back into this sort of oppressor oppressed kind of ideology, because if you
tell people that they're
oppressed, well, then they have to look for an oppressor and that starts small.
It starts with your parent or your boss or somebody you don't like, okay, it's
their fault.
That's why I have something bad happened to me.
It's somebody else's fault.
And then it grows into groups.
Okay.
Now you get into identity politics and pitting identities against each other.
Then you're starting to blame institutions.
Okay.
And this is kind of the, this is, this is when we talk about Bernie Sanders,
this is,
he's doing this often.
He's blaming institutions for our, for our, for our, for our issues constantly.
That has met him.
That has morphed into blaming the entire country.
The entire country as a, as an American ideal is to blame.
I just think that's really both.
I think it's historically inaccurate.
I think it's inaccurate objectively, but I just think it's dangerous.
I don't think it can go anywhere.
Good.
Unless you just want total revolution, which I think
some people do, um, it just, it tears us apart.
Right.
And we're getting divided along where we're, we're, we're, we're allowing the
pop culture
to get involved in this too.
So we can't share pop culture anymore, uh, because, you know, musicians are
getting
involved in politics and comedians and late night shows.
And it's like, okay, well now half the country can't even watch it because
those people are just telling them how stupid they are.
Yeah.
We're losing these basic symbols that bring us together.
And then we're also losing the pop culture that kind of brings us together.
That should be something we can just share and then not talk politics.
But that's been removed as well.
And I just, the, the, the culture war is a, it's, it's, it's not going a good
direction.
Well, I'm hoping that this is an adolescent stage in the development of this
strange country.
That's an experiment in self-government.
That's what I'm thinking.
And I think this, this experiment in self-government, which is a completely new
thing in human history,
that's redefined the way the rest of the world governs itself.
I mean, this, that's what America really is.
Is it perfect?
Fuck no, but humans aren't perfect.
There's not a goddamn human anywhere.
That's perfect.
There's not a single culture anywhere that doesn't have something that's
inherently wrong with it.
It's the best system for imperfect human beings.
Yes.
Right.
And it's, it's a system based on the, the fact, the, the unavoidable fact that
we are imperfect.
Yeah.
Okay.
And that, and that you cannot, you cannot constrain mankind's nature to the
extent that progressives
would like to.
There's, there's a belief from, and it stems from just Marxist ideology and
kind of French
revolution thought that you can perfect human nature, that you can get people
to be perfect.
Eventually, if you just give the state enough control and, and, and, and stop
certain thoughts
that are bad, keep those down, keep these, elevate these other ones, you can
eventually
get us to where we think we should be.
Uh, I think that's utopian.
I don't see how that's ever possible.
And I think our, our U S constitutional system understands that, you know, it's,
it's not,
it's not like the founders got together and just made a bunch of stuff up,
right?
They were, they were, they were very well versed in history.
They, they studied it relentlessly and they took ideas from Jerusalem and
Athens and Rome
and London.
They took all these best ideas and these best practices.
And they said, this is probably how we should govern.
We're first going to say why government exists.
Okay.
We're going to say that in the declaration of independence.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that the declaration of independence was, it wasn't
just declaring
its independence.
It was also declaring why government exists and it exists to protect inalienable
rights,
life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, right?
And he gets these ideas from guys like John Locke, who said life, liberty, and
property,
those are unalienable rights and you protect rights.
You can't give them to people, but you can protect them because they're already
inherent in
you.
They're natural rights.
Okay.
And then the constitution told us how to govern.
It's like, how do we live together?
Well, there should be checks and balances.
You should have an emphasis on local state control because, because the
problems are closest
to the people and they should be closest to the representatives down at that
level.
Um, 51% of the population shouldn't be able to tell the other 49% what to do.
You know, we should have an electoral college so that the biggest population
centers can't
tell everybody else what to do.
There's important structures like embedded into the constitution that have,
that have allowed
us to actually last.
I think as long as we have, we have the oldest political, it's the oldest
document in the world.
It's the oldest constitution in the world.
So we're the youngest, one of the youngest countries, but we're the only ones
that had
such a longstanding constitution.
I think that's important to realize too.
It's very bizarre that they had the insight to realize that could go so
sideways that they put all these checks and balances together that actually can
reasonably
well in a reasonably well way work today.
I mean, there's a lot of people that disagree with a lot of the aspects of it.
One person, one vote.
They would like that.
They don't think that representative democracy is as important now because we
have this ability
to communicate that we didn't have in the 1800s.
You know, you had to send a fucking pony with a letter on it in order to get
your word across.
Now you can actually tweet and you could vote online if we so deem it and we
made it legal.
But the electoral college, do you feel like that, especially with things like
superdelegates,
do you think that that's still the way to do things and is still an effective
way?
Yeah.
Why is that?
Because the alternative is the 51% versus the 49%.
And what that really boils down to is New York and Los Angeles telling
everybody who the president should be.
But the vast majority of people don't live in New York and Los Angeles.
New York is like 20 million and seven, what is it, nine million or something in
New York?
I'm just saying, but, and that's the issue, right?
Because you really are, you're, you're, you're, and when people congregate in
population centers,
they also tend to start to think alike.
And I, I just think, and on a more fundamental level, look at the difference
between Democrats
and Republicans.
People always wonder what that difference is.
And there's a lot of differences, of course, but a really kind of simple heuristic
to think
about it is the word Democrat and Republican.
Okay.
One believes in a pure democracy.
One believes in a Republic.
I'm saying Democrats believe in total pure democracy, but, but when you're
saying abolish
the electoral college, you are saying pure democracy.
You're saying 51% of the population can tell the other 49% what to do.
The electoral college is a, is a check and balance against that, that gives
those states
in the middle, uh, some kind of voice that they wouldn't have otherwise had.
It makes them, why is everybody in Iowa right now?
Do you think they'd be in Iowa if, uh, if, if we didn't have an electoral
college?
Good deer hunting there.
Yeah.
Well, that's a good reason to go, but the reality is, is they would only, they
would only
be campaigning in the big population centers.
They wouldn't bother going to the rural areas, uh, because you're going to get
the most bang
for your buck going to just the populated areas.
In terms of campaigning physically.
Right.
And also, but also who you're accountable to.
So that's the most important thing.
Who are you accountable to?
You're not going to care if you're accountable to the rural areas, like you
should be into the
middle of the country, like you should be, because if you only care about 51%
of the vote, you're
just going to go to those main population centers and you're only going to talk
to them.
And you're only going to care what they think.
And I don't think that's good.
That's not a good, that's not good for democracy, especially when we have such
a wide
diversity of preferences and, and, uh, just styles of living across the country.
Is it still that important to be physically in a place to campaign?
It's like to physically go to Chicago to campaign to physically go to Iowa.
Yeah.
People, I think people want to see you, you know, it was a good argument to be
made that
Hillary Clinton lost because she just didn't go to Wisconsin in the last days.
So I think people, people want to get to know you, people want to see you.
Well, the good, the good argument with Hillary too, is she, people didn't
believe she had enough
energy to go and campaign.
And I don't know.
I never met her, you know, uh, I can't, I can't tell you what the inside look
at that campaign
was.
I just, I just know it didn't work.
Yeah.
Whatever happened.
Um, when you think about what are the problems that we're facing today in terms
of, uh, of
voting and, uh, registering to vote in primaries and electing someone from, you
know, your party
to, to get, to go against other parties.
And that this whole process is convoluted, gigantic involved process.
Could that be simplified?
Do you think that in, in any way doing something online and having your ability
to register to
vote when you get a driver's license and that it automatically registers you to
vote.
Is there, are there ways to get more people involved?
Well, you know, there's two different philosophies here is, are you just trying
to get everybody to,
to, to quickly spend five minutes of the day and then vote?
Well, that's what they're doing for the most part anyway.
Don't you think a lot of people?
No, no.
If you have to actually take the time to register and go to the polls, you're
going to do at least
a little bit more research on what's going on.
I think you haven't talked to my friends.
Yeah.
Not saying everybody, not saying everybody, but, but you're going to get, but I
think you'll,
you'll exponentially increase that number when you, when you, the other, the
other problem
is, is simple election security.
And, uh, if we're worried about the Russians hacking on our elections, then I
fail to see
how putting everything online is also a good idea.
Uh, so that's, we can't, we can't be worried about both things there.
Um, and, and we are worried about Russians hacking our elections.
They've obviously tried when you tried hacking the results.
I mean, they've, they've clearly tried to influence the way people.
They did try each other.
They tried everything.
What did they try to do?
Yeah.
They did try to hack the results.
They're, they're unsuccessful.
One of the reasons they're unsuccessful is because a lot of our election
machines are
air gapped, uh, and they're also different every county you go to.
I mean, so it is a mess because, because, you know, we allow counties,
states and counties to be in charge of that, but that also makes it highly
resilient because
it's so compartmentalized.
I mean, so from an intelligence operations perspective, you want things to be
compartmentalized
and our election system actually meets that.
And we're, and we're working a lot with the DHS is working a lot with local
authorities to
even improve upon that a lot.
So they were going in the right direction.
So you can't hack dangling chads.
Remember those things?
What were those?
What was it called?
Those, those things that hung, just a hanging chad, hanging, just hanging.
It wasn't dangling.
It could have been both.
That's totally different.
Remember that?
It was like, like they weren't exactly sure whether they had a vote counted.
They had to like examine them.
Yeah.
That seems like a silly way to, I mean, if we can do banking online, why can't
we vote online?
Isn't there a way to make something where it's hack proof?
Is that possible?
It might be.
It might be again.
Um, but now you're getting into a problem with, with identity.
You know, again, there's a lot of people believe you shouldn't even have any
voter IDs.
I think that's crazy.
I think we use IDs all the time.
I think you should have an ID to register.
So we know it's you.
Right.
Of course.
And then you should have an, you should just show your idea when you vote.
But what I'm saying is like, would it, wouldn't it be a better thing if more
people voted?
Or do you think that it's better if only the people motivated to vote and
participate, vote the
way we're doing it now, where you have to register within a certain amount of
time and you
have to show up at an actual polling place.
Do you think that's better?
It's not self-evident to me that by nature of more people voting, things will
get better.
I'd like them to go vote.
I'd like them to put in the work and the civic and then do their civic duty and
to get educated
and go vote.
I would like them to do that.
But that's a separate discussion from just from, from moving safeguards on our
elections,
just to get, make it easier for them to do what is already quite easy.
I mean, there's, there's this weird argument against this.
Like it's so hard to vote.
We're so suppressed.
There's just no evidence of that.
And it's just hard, but it's not as easy as it could be if you could just
register online.
Yeah.
I mean, I can make a million things easier, but again, they remove safeguards
that, that,
that, that create safe elections and, and, and elections that we can have faith
in.
And that's a very important thing.
If, and I think you see this when you have this discussion with people, they're
already on edge
about whether their vote really counts because, you know, some people think
illegals are voting.
And again, there's not a huge amount of evidence for that either.
It does happen, but it's not as easy.
How can illegals vote?
I mean, don't they have to register?
In, in, in, in places where there's no voter ID, you can, you can make it a lot
easier.
Where are there no, where's there no voter, voter ID?
I don't believe there is in California.
Is that, am I right on that?
How dare you, California?
Is that true?
I, let's check on that, but it's definitely not the law of the land everywhere
in Texas.
It is.
So Texas is a good example.
I think of like very, it's very easy to vote.
I just can't imagine that people don't think it's easy to vote in Texas.
If you're a senior citizen or disabled, you can mail in your ballot 30 days
prior.
We have two weeks of early voting.
You can go to any election place in the county and, and, and vote from 7:00 AM
to 7:00 PM for two weeks
straight.
You hold your ballot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, and you just show your ID and you vote.
I mean, this is, I, we feel in Texas, like it's safeguarded.
We're not, we're not overly worried that our vote doesn't count because it's
canceled out by some
fake vote.
And, and it's hard to, and it's hard to argue that, that there's, um,
suppression either,
because again, it's so easy to vote or you can go on election day.
It's just a shame that we have so little faith in our ability to do things
electronically that we're
worried and that we wouldn't want people to vote online because we're worried
about people hacking it.
Well, that's, that is a shame because I just feel like if you could watch, like
maybe if you were
going to vote online, you would have to watch a five minute video explaining
people's positions on
things, explaining where they stand and why this makes sense and show that, and
after that five minute
video, then you get to vote.
Yeah.
That's an interesting idea.
Um, I'm not opposed to the, to the videos, of course, forcing people to do
things just generally speaking.
That's true.
It's tough.
Um, but it, it, it still goes back to how do you even know it's the right
person who's
sitting there at the computer?
That's true too.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the, that's the difficult part.
With your phone, you have face ID, you know, Apple ID, you know, use
fingerprints with other phones.
Oh, sure.
I mean, there's interesting ideas that you could, that you could look into to
make this work,
but it's a pretty massive change.
It'd be a massive federal takeover of what is, what is constitutionally a state's
right.
Right.
To, to implement that.
So, you know, it's just, and then the question is, what are we trying to fix?
You know, what we're going to do is a massive change onto something.
What kind of improvements are we expecting and why?
And those are just good policy questions to ask.
It doesn't mean we don't have those discussions.
But there's always been an issue with voter turnout, correct?
I mean, isn't, it's a fairly insignificant number of people that actually wound
up voting, right?
Yeah.
But is that because, is that whose fault is that?
That's a good question.
It's the people who don't go to vote.
Right.
So do you think that those people, like, fuck those people?
They're just lazy and shouldn't have a say.
No, not at all.
It's just that I just would encourage them to go vote.
Right.
Right.
But isn't it been fairly consistent?
Like the, the number of people that vote, the percentage of people that vote
across the board?
Yeah.
But again, it's, it's, it's not self, it's not self-evident that that's a
problem that government,
it's up to government now to force that into, into a fix.
You know, I, I'm not sure I see that argument.
It's not self-evident that things would all be better if we forced people to
vote or made
it so easy that they didn't have to think about it at all and just got on their
app and voted.
So, yeah, it's, it's an interesting question.
Do we want to increase voter turnout?
And then, yeah, sure.
But how do we do it?
I think civic education is a more appropriate answer to that, as opposed to, as
opposed to
making it as easy as buying something at the grocery store.
Civic education in what form?
Well, in our, I mean, starting with our schools, we just don't, we don't teach
a lot of civic
education anymore.
And I think that's obvious from our political discourse.
Sometimes it's, it's, it's not required.
Like I think it should be, you know, just, I mean, the basics, like where does
government
happen?
If you're concerned about your schools, should you go to your congressman or
should you go to your
mayor or who do you go to?
Right.
We don't even tell people this stuff.
It's like, no, you should go to, you should, you should get involved in your
school board
elections for one thing.
You know, it just, as an example, uh, it's just a lot of things that I think
need to be
taught before we, so I think we're trying to solve the wrong problem when we
say, well,
voting is not easy enough.
I'm not so sure that we're, we're hitting at the heart of the issue when it
comes to voter turnout.
So when people talk about issues in this country, there's a, there's a giant,
there's a giant
divide with, with one thing in particular, and that is mass shootings, uh, mass
shootings
and gun control.
There's a giant divide between people that are second amendment advocates and
people that
want to round up all the assault weapons and take away all the guns.
And they think the guns are the problem when you see this pretty disturbing
increase in
mass shootings in this country, what is, what is your take on it?
And what do you think could be done?
Well, it's awful.
Um, they're terrorist attacks.
And I think, I think it's safer to call them that, uh, the, the, whether
depending on how you
define a mass shooting, um, now you define when we look at murder statistics,
we're actually at a
very, very low point in our history.
I mean, look at the early nineties.
It was vastly more murders by gun, uh, than we have now.
Uh, just statistically speaking.
What's, what's that because of, do they know?
Uh, well, there was a massive kind of war on crime, I think in the nineties, uh,
increase in
police, you know, you have the, some of the crime bills that went through,
which are obviously the
source of a lot of debate right now in the Democrat primary.
And, uh, yeah, I mean, just, it was just, there was a, there was an approach to
fix that.
Okay.
You know, tackling gang violence, tackling all of these things.
And, uh, we, we live in a much, even though you wouldn't think so because of
these kind of
theatrical, again, they're, they're terrorist attacks.
I don't know what else to call them, uh, because, because the person doing it
is trying to commit
terror.
Right.
And, uh, you know, for different reasons, of course, but, but there, at least
they attach
themselves to some kind of reason, but in the end they're, they're angry at
something.
And they're, they're probably been, you know, probably been taking some kind of
psychotropic
drugs over time.
And they've gotten to this point and they'll attach themselves to whatever
reason they need
to, to do this.
And it's awful.
Um, so, you know, how do you fix that?
Um, we have to understand the problem.
We have to diagnose it.
And, um, and then we got to, and I think we have to be realistic about what the
solutions really
are and what our ability to influence those outcomes really is.
And that's the, that's an emotional conversation for people.
Uh, you know, we've, we've been dealing with it for the last few weeks.
Of course, I mean, it's, it's, it's front and center, um, in the debate.
And so, but we got to have it.
What can be done?
Yeah.
Um, well, the, the, so obviously the reaction by many is to go after the tool,
right?
To go after the guns.
Um, I don't think that's the right approach.
It's not, it's not, again, it's not clear that that would actually solve the
problem.
There's, there's two, there's two main requirements when you're, you're looking
at a,
an approach to gun control.
It's like, does it infringe on law abiding citizens rights?
Number one, what's the answer to that?
And two, is it going to actually affect the outcome that we're trying to affect?
Is it going to feel good or is it going to do good?
Okay.
And I think the vast majority of proposals, um, fail both of those standards.
They, they definitely infringe on law abiding citizens rights,
and they probably wouldn't even solve the problem.
You know, look at example is assault rifles or let's not, well, ARs.
Okay.
They're called assault rifles.
They're really, the reason they're in AR is because they're called Armalite.
That's a brand.
Um, assault rifle is not a, is not a real thing.
It's not a real definition.
And, um, but what if you banned them?
Well, rifles are responsible for less than 3% of all gun deaths, about 2.66% of
all gun deaths.
Okay.
Hammers and knives, I think are, are, are responsible for far more deaths.
Um, is that true?
Yes.
Hammers and knives are responsible for more deaths than rifles?
Got statistics.
Including ARs.
My bag.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rifles account for, for 2.66% of gun deaths.
How many folks are killing people with hammers?
Well, I mean, it's a good weapon, I guess.
I feel real good if somebody has a hammer.
For obvious reasons.
If all you have is a hammer.
Well, but yeah, if you have a gun, yeah.
Yeah, but I mean, even if you don't have a gun, I feel like I could stop a
hammer.
Yeah, but you're a pretty good fighter.
You can't do a goddamn thing about an AR.
Well, that's not true.
I can take away your AR if you're, I don't know.
How close do you have to be to do that?
I just got to reach it.
Yeah.
It's very easy to take away an AR.
Yeah?
Yeah.
How easy?
I just need, I just need to get a hand on the barrel.
You should give out AR takeaway classes.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, I've taken those classes.
Yeah.
That's why I know it's so easy.
Whoever controls the barrel of any gun controls the gun.
Right.
People don't quite realize that.
They think if they're gripping it, then they control the gun.
That's not true.
Right.
We're in the weeds now, though.
Yeah, we're in the weeds.
We can demonstrate that afterwards.
Yeah.
I have a flamethrower.
Maybe grab that.
Yeah.
No rifles in here.
Is that what that?
That's Elon Musk's flamethrower.
I wasn't sure what that was.
Are you going to take a picture with that later?
Okay.
Can I actually use it, though?
Yeah.
We can turn it on, as long as you don't cook the ceiling.
Okay, but I can cook anything else?
Yeah, you'll be the only one who's ever turned it on here other than Elon.
It doesn't have to be in the room.
Yeah, it does, though.
I'll take a picture.
I'll do it in the room.
So have you thought about this?
I mean, if you had a magic wand and they said, "Hey, Dan Crenshaw, what can you
do
to solve this mass gun violence?
What can you do to solve these mass shootings?"
Yeah.
I mean, you have to target the source of them.
And it's just not an easy conversation.
Right.
And so let's also think about where these things started.
We're talking about the theatrical mass shootings.
There's a lot of statistics out there.
They'll say we have hundreds of them, which include four or more deaths.
But these are usually gang violence.
So gang violence, it's in a category, right?
I believe there was 279 mass shootings so far this year.
And some of them, they do include gang violence.
Right.
I think it's two or more.
Is that what it's deemed?
Mass shootings?
Yeah, it might be more.
Which is so fucking weird that we have a statistic.
Well, that doesn't count.
It's only...
Yeah.
It's only...
Yeah.
I mean, you got to draw the line somewhere.
You got to be able to...
If you're going to analyze it, you have to look into that.
But I think the dramatized shootings that these guys are doing, it all started
with Columbine.
And it's become this sort of copycat crime that has occurred over time.
And we didn't have this before that.
And I think that's interesting.
And I think it's something to take note of.
And it's not clear what you do about that.
You have to look for signs of people before they do it.
And so one bill that I'm on, which is...
I've taken a lot of fire for because people are just, I think, misunderstand
what it actually
is, is the TAPS Act, which is the Threat Assessment Prevention and Safety Act.
All this does is give local law enforcement the ability to apply for grants to
get training,
training, and behavioral threat assessment training, and data analytical tools
to identify
these threats beforehand.
And people that are opposed to it, they look at it like red flag laws, right?
They combine those two quite a bit, and that's just not true.
I mean, the TAPS Act doesn't actually have anything to do with guns.
And red flag laws, depending on how they're implemented, could take someone who
looks like
they're erratic or who has a penchant for violence, and they would say, "You do
not have access to guns."
Right. In theory, that would be how they work. And they would fill a gap, I
think. And it depends on the
state. Some states have all the ability they need to see threatening behavior
and then arrest that
person. But it depends on criminal law within that state. So theoretically, red
flag law would fill
that gap. The concern with red flag laws, obviously, is there really due
process. A lot of people hear
that and they're like, "Okay, that means my neighbor can tell on me and they're
going to have my guns
the next morning." Well, yeah. I mean, if that's how the law was written, then
yeah, you better be
against that because that's a terrible law. And to be fair to a lot of the
people who don't like red
flag laws, they see how these are written in a lot of states. I think
California has one. And they see
how those are written and they say, "This doesn't protect due process. How can
we possibly be for this?"
Now, on the other hand, there hasn't been any cases where there's been some
obvious abuse of that
law either. So, you know, I've encouraged the conversation. I think the
conversation has to
happen at the state level because every state has different criminal law. And
that's where criminal
law happens. It does not happen at the federal level. The only other
controversial approach that
I've heard is putting armed police or soldiers at schools, which is like, that
seems incredibly
disturbing to me that you have to have people. I'm not opposed to it, but it's
disturbing to me that you
would have to have someone standing by ready for violence. Well, we have guards
everywhere. Why not
our schools? Because we've never had them before. And it's sort of signaling
that we've reached this
point of impasse where we have to do something about it. And we're not doing
anything to prevent these
things from happening. What we're doing is protecting the people that are going
to be there when these
things happen.
Yeah. I think inner city schools have long had police presence there. So I don't
think it's
totally new, the idea. And I think we could rapidly get used to it. There's a
good argument to me that
gun-free zones are the first thing that are attacked too. So, I mean, you know,
it's a counterintuitive
response to this, but it's true. If I'm going to commit a terrible act, of
course you're going to go to the
place where you know nobody is caring. Yeah. You're not going to a gun show.
Right. Yeah. Unless you're
just really looking for a fight. Yeah. But there's some truth to that. And it's
just hard. It's so
hard for people to have this conversation because it's so emotional. And there's
a cultural fissure
here too. People don't understand some people who like guns. Right. And there's
a cultural divide
there. Yeah. And I just don't like people who like guns. We have to admit that's
true.
Well, they have this idea of guns, that guns bring violence and violent people
want guns.
And that's just not true. And one of the things that people like to gloss over
is how many people
have defended their life and defended the lives of their loved ones with guns
in this country every
year. It happens all the time. I've got a whole list of stats and examples that
I could read to you
right now. Unfortunately, one of the things that gets brought up during gun
violence statistics and
talk about how many people die from firearms every year in this country. They're
also talking about
people who've defending their lives and defending the lives of their loved ones.
People get their
houses broken into all the time by armed criminals and they shoot those people
and they live to see
another day and that person dies. And that is the whole reason why people don't
want to get rid of
guns. Right. And I want to bring something up along those lines. So it's far
more likely in
countries like Great Britain that you'll get your house broken into while you
are there.
Far more likely than in the United States. Like by a good order of magnitude
actually.
So why is that? Right? Because they know that there is no gun in that house.
And you do that
in Texas, there's a good chance there's a gun in that house. Probably a hundred
percent.
Yeah. Even the liberals like... They get mad at you if you don't have a gun.
Right.
Hey, take one of mine. Fuck you doing without a gun.
So that's an interesting point. The other good statistical analysis to do is
okay, when there's
high amount of concealed carry, what does that do to crime rates? And the
correlation is there's less
crime. Okay, now it's not fair to say that's a causation. That would be
intellectually dishonest.
But it's an important correlation to note. It's also important to note, okay,
per capita, places like
Switzerland and Israel have far, far more gun ownership than we do. People don't
realize that.
Is that true? Yeah. I wouldn't... Switzerland?
I wouldn't come in here and lie to you. I know, but I mean, I'm stunned. It's a
rhetorical question.
Well, it's because of the... Now, somebody would counter-argue in that and say,
no, those are government weapons issued to people. Yeah, fine. But they still
are with the people.
Like the people have the guns, okay? And they're at a rate higher than the
United States.
Thought they were neutral over there. Yeah, yeah, but that's how they stay
neutral.
So, they have almost no crime. Almost no crime. Israel too. Almost no crime.
Except for the obvious issues that Israel has in general with the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict.
But as a criminal act, like they have very little crimes. Like this is
interesting. So, you combine
that with what we know about concealed carry data here in the United States,
you know, how do you solve
this problem? The other thing to think about is the vast majority, over 50% of
all gun crime,
it happens in like 2% of all counties. So, it's highly concentrated. So, as we
look to solve this
problem, like we do have to really peel back some layers here. Like who is
committing the crime?
Where is it happening? Why is it happening? You know, we can detect the tools,
but it's just,
it's so far from self-evident that that would work. Again, going back to ARs,
they're responsible
for less than 3% of gun deaths. And also, let's say you banned them, are you
actually stopping 3% of
gun deaths? No. Because why don't they just use another gun? Why don't they use
a different weapon?
Why don't they use a truck? Like they can use, if they want to kill, they can
kill.
The horror that we're seeing is that they like to kill this way. And maybe that's
like,
why is that? And again, I go back to Columbine, it all started with that. And
that's interesting.
We should look at that and like, what is driving people to like that?
Well, I think there are a lot of people, I mean, if you look at mass shootings,
a lot of these people, when you read their description, they're very disenfranchised,
they're very angry. And when you're disenfranchised and very angry, there's
like an archetype,
right? There's a, an image that you have in your mind of shooting all these
people that wronged you.
I mean, this is, uh, goes back to our victimhood conversation and blame
somebody else.
Well, and then the real conversation is how many of these people are on psychotropic
drugs
and what are those, what are those drugs and what are the effects that those
drugs have on people?
Well, when you look at the numbers, it's fucking stunning, whether it's anti-anxiety
medications
or SSRIs or amphetamines or whether, whether it's what, whatever they're on
that alters the chemical
frequency or the chemical, the biological structure of your brain in terms of
like
what chemicals are in there, serotonin, dopamine, these speeds that so many
kids are on Adderall and,
and various types of speed, that stuff radically changes the way you look at
the world.
Yeah.
How many of those drugs contribute or are a factor in these mass killings? I
don't know
if correlation equals causation, but I do know the correlation is phenomenally
high.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's in the high-
Fatherless homes, things like that.
Sure.
Let's start analyzing it.
Abuse, bullying, incels, which is a new word. Involuntary celibates. Did you
know about that?
Huh.
You didn't know about that? I taught you about incels?
You just did.
Amazing. Look at that.
Yeah. There's whole groups online on message boards that they can't believe
they can't get laid.
And they're just going, "Fuck!"
Involuntary celibates.
Yeah. They're just guys who can't get laid.
Yeah. That's just a fancy word for that.
Yeah.
Well, let's not call them losers. That's what makes them crazy.
Well, if there's a game, there's winners and losers.
Yes.
And that high school football quarterback who's banging all the cheerleaders,
that guy's a winner.
It sucks that that's true.
It's so unfair.
Yeah. It is unfair.
You know, I'm hoping genetic engineering fixes all that in the future.
But, you know, this is what you're dealing with a lot of times is these guys
that got a really
shitty roll of the dice. And there's no other way to describe it.
They got handed a terrible hand of cards.
Right.
And some of them are pilled up and angry and abused, and they have access to
guns. And then
next thing you know, there's a mass shooting.
Right. And then, again, going back to the victim of a conversation,
maybe they weren't dealt a bad hand, but they also tell themselves the wrong
story about why
that is and who's to blame. And that narrative just seeps within them. And it
creates this. I mean,
you're absolutely right. When Bernie Sanders was on here, there was one thing I
thought I agreed with
him on, which is we have to look at the effects of these drugs and really what
they are. I don't see
anything wrong with that. I think that's true.
Well, it's amazing how much blowback you get from that. And it's by people that
want to look at the
guns. They just want to say, no, no, no. Why are you talking about psychotropic
drugs? It's the
guns. No, I'm talking about the guns too. I mean, I don't necessarily think
that really angry,
volatile people that have criminal records should have guns. I think they
shouldn't.
Right. And we already outlaw that.
Yes, we do. And we probably should have some understanding of who you are
before we give you
a gun. The real question is, what is that understanding? And how do we go about
doing
that? And how do we keep people from making these incredibly rigid rules? I
mean, particularly regionally,
right? If you have states that decide to have incredibly rigid rules that procured
most people
from having guns. I mean, that can be possible if they just devise their own
tests and you're honest
about your perspectives on things. And that's the fear. And it's an honest fear
to have because,
yeah, what is the limit? You know, if you're on psychotropic drugs, should you
be barred from
having weapons? Right. Of course not. You know, and how do you manage that? And
the way we do it now,
again, you have to have committed a crime of some sorts. There's other things
too. If you abuse
medication, if you abuse, yeah, medication, then I think you're also, I think
according to federal law,
like you're barred from owning that, you know, that's in the system. I think
dishonorable discharge
from the military, things like that. So there's already a lot of standards that
actually preclude
you from buying a weapon. And there would be a very vigorous debate on how you
add more standards to
that. Dishonorable discharge keeps you from buying a weapon? That's what I've
read. We can fact check
that. That's interesting. I didn't know that one. I thought you had to have a
felony.
Maybe. I mean, it makes sense. But there's no answers. And this is the thing
that I came up with
from, is there something, Jamie? Yeah.
Dishonorable discharge and NFA. What's an NFA firearm?
NFA refers to the National Firearms Act. So that's what banned like automatic
weapons.
Based on the general court martial conviction, a person who was convicted of a
crime that is
punishable by imprisonment for more than one year, including dishonorable
discharge is prohibited.
Okay. That's where we're headed from. Yes. Okay. That's what it is. So it is
true.
So if you're imprisoned, not just a dishonorable discharge. Yeah, yeah. There's
a lot of people
dishonorably discharged that probably could not violently. You know, they're
not violent offenders.
What's disturbing talking to you, talking to Bernie, talking to Tulsi, talking
to everybody is nobody
has a solution. I mean, with all the brightest minds that are thinking about
this all the time,
no one has one thing that makes sense. This gets to a very deep question about
what are capable,
and I think I briefly touched on this before, like, why does government exist
and what are we capable
of solving and what needs to be solved by ourselves? You know, there are, there
are, and what is just
inherent to human nature and it's evil and we hate it and we don't want it to
be there, but it is.
And, and, and, and is it, is it appropriate for us to scream to our politicians
and say, save us?
And sometimes it is, sometimes we can solve it. We should try, but we have to,
we have to do it
with some kind of constrained vision as Thomas Sowell would put it about what
is possible. And then let's
be reasonable about what is possible and, and, and, and hit those two
categories. I said, are we infringing
on the rights of everyone, uh, for the sake of doing this? And second, is it
going to actually solve
the problem? And those are, those are very important questions. And if we don't
frame the debate within
those, I think we're, we're, we're, we're not doing, we're not doing justice to
the, to the problem
itself. True. But again, no one seems to have any logical course, any logical
clear path. Like,
this is how we're going to reduce gun violence. This is how we're going to stop
mass shootings. I mean,
other than arming all these public places, I mean, I was in Rome recently and,
uh, when you go there,
it's fucking stunning. It's military vehicles, guys with guns, just strapped,
ready to rock,
just standing by all over the place. And I was like, it used to be that way. No,
it didn't. And
I was like, wow, this is a very, uh, it's, you know, you were trying to enjoy
yourself when you're
on vacation, you're checking all these ancient buildings and then you're like,
oh, look,
fucking guns, military, tank. Look at that. You know? Yeah. And it's, I wish it
wasn't that way.
Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, but again, like, you know, you're right. We don't, we don't,
we haven't come
up with perfect solutions. We have some ideas that I think would mitigate these
threats. And we've,
we've discussed those at length. Um, but none of them seem tangible. Everything
seems like just talk.
No, well, the taps act that I talked about, I think is perfectly tangible.
Again, it's not a,
it won't solve everything, but it mitigates something. Uh, I think armed
security at schools,
I think certainly mitigates things as far as school safety goes. So no, I don't,
I don't,
I don't think it's just talk. I think those are tangible things. And I, I think
they're perfectly
reasonable. Um, you know, it's when people just are so reluctant to think that
we need armed guards at
school and I understand that I'm thinking about it myself. I'm like, ugh, is
that really what it's
going to take is armed guards at school? I went to high school in Bogota,
Colombia. So we had armed,
like a lot of armed guards at our school. Yeah, that's right. You went to, you
grew up over,
your dad was a banker. It's not foreign to me at all. Is that what it was? No.
Oil business? No,
oil, oil, petroleum engineer. Yeah. Yeah. So we moved to my, my life growing up
was between Houston
and overseas back and forth. That ought to be very bizarre. Yeah, it was fun. I
mean,
I don't regret a minute of it. It can be hard at times, um, moving around a lot.
How good's your
Spanish? It used to be better. It's not bad. I'll do an interview in Spanish.
So it's obviously,
it's not bad by any means, but it's not great. So you can go into a taqueria
and hang. Oh,
I totally hang. Yeah. I speak, I speak really well, conversational Spanish. My
Spanish,
it's harder when I'm talking complex policy issues because I didn't learn that
kind of Spanish.
Right, right, right. So, but yeah, I'm pretty good. Um,
one of the things that you said that you disagreed with Bernie on was lobbyists.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I disagree with his notion that everything is attributable
to some kind of
corporate greed and therefore lobbyists. It's just not the source of our
problems. Um, it's,
it contributes to it in some ways for sure. I mean, these are not, these are
selfish actors. They,
they, they have a role, right? They're advocating for a specific thing. Um,
but I think politicians like to point to them as like the, the, the, the Nia,
the boogeyman,
let's just blame them for everything. That's, I have not, that has not been my
experience that it,
what hasn't, it has not been my experience that these lobbyists have any kind
of excessive control
over politicians. I just don't see that. Okay. They, you know, they, the
corporate PAC can give you
$5,000. That's it. I mean, this isn't, this is not in no way, shape or form.
Can they buy anybody off?
Um, it's also a very transparent form of doing things. There's this other
talking point that it's
all dark money. That's just not true. A corporate PAC is a group of people who
work for a corporation.
They pull their money together. They can't use company profits. Just be clear.
It's just personal
money and they have limits on what they can donate to that own PAC. And then
they use that to advocate
for whatever's important to that business. And I tell people, where do you work?
I'll ask you where,
what industry are you in? And they'll give me whatever industry. And I'll say,
you definitely have a PAC
lobbying for you on Capitol Hill. All right. And they'll, and they'll just
point out bills.
They'll say, listen, this is problematic. And this one, this would hurt our
workers. This would do
this and put us out of business. Like, don't do that. That's it. Um, you know,
and so the other,
they're selfish actors. Don't get me wrong. Like they're, this is, but they're
advocating for their
thing, but that's also our democracy. Individuals can donate more.
No. And so an individual cap is $2,800 to, to a campaign. And then a couple
like you and your wife
would can double that. Okay. So it's basically the same as a PAC.
It's basically the same. It's only $5,000 ish.
Yep. That's the maximum.
That is the maximum, but there's also influence that comes with that on top of
financial. There's
also influence in terms of just cronyism and people reciprocating, getting
along with each
other and working, you know, establishing long-term relationships where they
agree on things and they
make deals and they make deals that might not necessarily be in the best
interest of people.
Like deals in terms of like what businesses get subsidies, what businesses don't
get subsidies,
what things get negotiated, what don't, what like, here's a perfect example.
That's exactly why I think we should have a less powerful government that can't
be bought off like
that. You know, you want government, if you want government to, because cronyism
certainly happens.
Right. And they'll say, listen, like there's, you know, and, and, and who can,
who can lobby as the
bigger, the bigger company. So there's, there's some agreement here, but it's,
I think there's
somewhat misunderstanding of what's really happening. So yeah, a big business
can, can lobby and then
they'll ask for more regulation. So, and then who does that really hurt? It
hurts their smaller
competitors. So the answer is actually who's at fault here. It's the fact that
government's trying
to excessively regulate so much and it, and it creates, it creates a situation
where there's no
longer competition. Okay. And then that's a, that's a real problem. Now you
know, that excessive
influence though, again, it's, it's not something I've seen because there's a
lot of competition
for influence. Anybody can come to your office and they all, they all disagree,
right? There's all
these different interests that actually compete with one another and then they
represent different
interests. So it's, it's not, it's not self-evident to me that that influence
is,
is it's certainly not bought. And, and I don't, I don't necessarily believe it's
excessive either.
It's just not what I've seen. Maybe they don't, maybe they just don't come to
me.
Well, when I think it was Northwestern university did a study recently where
they were, they showed
the public support for policies and public support for, for, for bills and how
low the public support
is in comparison to things that get passed and how, when the public, what it
was things that the public
absolutely wanted, like across the board had something in the range of a 30%
chance of getting
passed through. Whereas there's many things that the public absolutely did not
want across the board
also had a 30% chance of getting through. And they were talking about the
various influences that lead
to these policies getting passed. Now, the argument is that you're rep, you're,
you're electing
representatives. Those representatives don't do you justice and pass bills and,
and, and enact policies
that would help your community and help you, then you elect them out of office.
But the damage
gets done while they're there. And the idea is that these people would then go
on from there once
they've established that influence. And once they've helped these people get
jobs in the corporate
sector, get jobs that represent what they've done for those corporations while
they were a representative,
supposedly of the people.
Yeah. I think that's a, you'd have to really dig into like what issue they're
talking about,
what issues not supported by the public. I mean, that's a, you'd have to unpack
those statistics,
I think, to really understand what's happening there. The, but I also, I think
that's too cynical
of a way to look at politicians. I just don't, I don't feel that way about my
colleagues on the left
or the right.
Well, how long have you been a congressman?
Seven months. So I just, and my,
maybe it's like nine months in, they start coming to you.
Maybe, no, we meet with them. It's just like, they just, they don't have this
influence. You
know, they're not, I mean, listen, they, they present one, they, one, they
generally meet with
the lobbyists that they already agree with you. And they're generally bringing
up very minute
things that are, that you just would never know about if they didn't bring that
to you.
Well, there's some bills that get passed, like that don't, like, here's one,
right? Medicaid,
Medicaid spends billions of dollars on drugs for the elderly and people that
can't afford them,
billions of dollars. But by law, the government's not allowed to negotiate the
price of those drugs.
Okay. So the price negotiations issue.
How did that happen?
Well, it, it, how did it happen? It's, well, it never, it was never a thing to
begin with. So the, there's an argument you made that the government should be
able to
negotiate prices, right? The question is, what is the price? And the other
thing you have to point
out is there's already a strong force against the pharmaceutical industry,
which is the insurance
companies, because they have an interest in making sure that price is as low as
possible. They're
fighting all the time against the pharmaceutical companies and in the
healthcare industry, all of
these groups are often pitted against each other. And then as politicians, we
kind of look at all of
them and we say, all right, what are your arguments? What are your arguments?
Um, is what you're saying really makes sense? And then we have to make those
decisions based
on the overall good, but you're going to piss everybody off when you do that.
Like that's,
especially with healthcare, because all of these, a lot of these groups are pitted
against each
other. So you've got insurance already pitted against pharmacy. Um, and then it
becomes a pretty
good question. Like what is government's role there? Cause I've, I've, when I
first looked at this
problem, I said, yeah, yeah, just negotiate. Well, that makes sense. Um, I
learned a lot more. I learned
a lot more and, and it's not because I met with any lobbyists. It has nothing
to do with that. It's
because I'm in with healthcare professionals and experts who know this issue
really well and
economists who, and it's very far from self-evident that this would work and it's
far from self-evident
that it would be beneficial, uh, at all and actually make a difference. You
know, when we, when we look at the
differences in healthcare spending between us and other countries, uh, the drug
prices actually have
very little to do with that. Uh, they're able to negotiate those, but they also
get, they also get
last choice for medicine. Okay. When you look at Great Britain and Canada, like
they're not getting
the premier new drugs like we have in the United States. Um, you know, we get
screwed as Americans
because the patent laws are not enforced in these other countries. So our
pharmacy, our pharmaceutical
companies, um, they immediately get ripped off in other countries. And that,
that's a problem.
I mean, how do we, that's, that should be something we fixed. They get ripped
off in that they've done
the research to create these drugs and then these other companies in other
countries just copy these
drugs. They make generics. Yep. Because they have socialized medicine and their
obligation is to
provide medicine to the people. So their obligation is to, they don't care
about these copyrights. They
just care about getting medicine to the people. Now, some people would argue
that that is in favor of the
population, in favor of the people that need healthcare. I would argue it's not
sustainable though. Might make it feel
good, but it's not going to do good in the long run. But if they still profit,
even if they're,
well, they're, they're having, they're profiting because they're charging
America. Well, America's
basically paying for this. Right. Okay. Which is, which is why it's, which is
why it's important for
like trade agreements to say, Hey, you guys have to enforce the same patent
laws that we have.
Otherwise this, this is not sustainable situation because eventually you don't
make a profit. Right.
Right. And that's, and that's not fair for Americans. So that's the new NAFTA
deal was negotiated this
way. The USMCA like addressing some of these concerns for instance. Uh, and
that's, that's the
right thing to do. Like you have, you have to, you have to align a scent
incentives when you're talking
about any policy and we have to dig a few layers. It's never as simple as
Bernie Sanders says it is.
It never is. He always makes it out to be so simple. It's greed. Everything is
attributable to greed.
Everything is attributable to 1%. They own you. They, they, they own the lobbyists.
They own all this.
Listen, there's elements of truth and all of that, but is, but my point is it's
just not the overarching
thing. There's so much more complexities to that. And we have to have those
conversations and like,
we're just, we're, we're, instead what we see is just very extreme talking
points. First of all,
very extreme interpretations of the actual problem and therefore leading to
very extreme solutions to
that problem. Right. If you say the world's ending in 12 years and why not have
a green new deal?
Right. Like it's, so it's, you're operating off of a premise that is highly
extreme.
And it's just, it's not, it's not healthy political discourse. It's meant to
animate people. It's meant
to get people upset and to have a villain. It always comes back to the villain
and the oppressor and
oppressed. It always comes back to this. Everything, everything, somebody like
Bernie Sanders says can be
traced to this specific ideology where one person is to blame or one
institution is to blame. And I think
that's extremely unhealthy way to look at things and also intellectually dishonest.
I don't know the parameters of a green new deal, the new green deal, whatever
the it is,
but you hear it all the time. What, what is the idea behind this?
Uh, at its core, uh, a complete shift to wind and solar, uh, at its core. So,
uh, and an idea that if
you do that, you will, you will have zero emissions in the next 10 years, but
it's an obsession with wind and
solar, which I think is interesting. It bans nuclear. Remember when the talking
points came
out from the green new deal, didn't like nuclear. So that's how, you know, it's
not an actual
environmental plan, uh, or at least associated with carbon emissions and
climate change, because
why would you ban the, the one reliable piece of energy that we have that has
zero emissions,
which is nuclear. So, you know, it's not about that. It also includes free
healthcare for everybody.
It includes free college. So it's like, it's like every socialist plan wrapped
into one and
then they call it an environmental plan, uh, and, and, and ban fossil fuels and
things like that. So
that's a fundamentally what it is. It's a wishlist of, of things like that.
Well, nuclear has this inherent fear of things going wrong. Chernobyl, you know,
Fukushima and that kind of stuff, but we also put nuclear reactors on like
submarines and put a bunch of people on them and go down to depths and put
torpedoes and stuff on
them. So, I mean, it's sure, you know, it's very safe amount of nuclear energy
that's been used in
this country versus the amount of times we've had nuclear disasters. And there's
also the problem
with these old systems that weren't like Fukushima that were implemented in the
1960s and 1970s. They
just, they're not as good. Yeah. We just, it's true, but we, we do have the
technology to make them
good. And there, and I think we should look at ways to research more, uh, the,
the miniaturized modular
nuclear devices that are, that are being looked at a nuclear car. Maybe we can
get you. We don't have
them yet, but imagine you should have a nuclear car. Why'd you have a nuclear
car? What about a nuclear
flamethrower? Now we're getting crazy. Um, so the, the new green deals, just
wind and solar. It
concentrates on just windmills and solar. And then the idea is to replace the
grid with some sort of,
I mean, California, it seems like it could be possible. Like you could just put
solar panels on
everybody's roof in California. You'd probably reduce the amount of electricity
that we need from
the grid radically. Yeah. It gets complicated because you don't have sun at
night. And, uh,
and so this is the complication of wind and solar in general is that the, you,
you need battery backup
to really make this work. And that technology just isn't there. Um, the
theoretical, it's just not
there. I mean, you live off the grid with solar power. Right. But you, to make
this a, to do that,
but when they don't, like when there is no sun, the plants shift to either, you
know, natural gas
or coal or something else. But here, this is a perfect example. Like here, this
is a goofy place
to live because it doesn't rain. We have sun every day, but not at night. And
so, so this is,
but 12 hours of sun is enough. Well, only if you have the batteries, only if
you have the batteries to
store it. And so, yeah, in theory, if you, if you, and we don't right now, like
for, if you actually,
if you want to, if you want to shift the entire energy grid to that, we do not
have the massive
amounts of, there's some good data on this. I don't have it off the top of my
head, but it's massive.
It is a massive amount of batteries and farms to actually hold that. There's an
energy density
problem with wind and solar. It's just a physics problem. So the science can
only go so far. And even
the theoretical limit to how much a battery can hold probably, which we're not
even, we haven't
discovered yet, but it's a theoretical like capacity of a battery. It would
still make it very difficult
to actually do this. And so it's, it's just real, not realistic. Also, also
there's other consequences
to wind and solar, like massive, you know, solar term or wind turbines. Okay.
Those are,
some people don't like those things, massive amounts of space needed for, for,
for solar. And also
where are you going to get that, that the, the, the, the special materials
needed for solar panels. Like
there's, there's other consequences to this. Um, and it's, it's, it's, it's not
self-evident that
that's the only possible way to do it. It's not, it's not that we should shun
it. Okay. And nobody's
saying that it should, we advocate for all and above approach. If our goal is
less carbon emissions,
then we need to be focusing on 100% of carbon emissions, meaning the world's
carbon emissions.
The green new deal focuses on 15% of carbon emissions. Basically says, let's
kneecap the United
States economy. We'll, uh, we'll destroy fossil fuels. We'll have a utopian
society full of wind
and solar, even though the batteries don't exist to make that work, but Hey, we'll
make it work.
So then, then that, then that solves 15% of the problem and has almost no
effect on, on the actual
climate. So when I say a hundred percent of the problem, what I'm saying is
technological innovation,
whether that's nuclear or carbon capture, if the goal is less carbon, then let's
actually focus
on carbon capture. So I just dropped a bill, uh, Senator Cornyn did on the, on
the Senate side
called the leading act. And it basically re repurposes grant funds in the
department of energy
to focus on carbon capture for natural gas plants. So we have natural gas
plants in Texas that are zero
emissions. They take in natural gas, they operate the facility, they create
electricity, and then they
recapture that carbon and they power the facility with it. Zero emissions. So
if our goal is zero emissions,
let's do what works. And also, by the way, that plant can keep going no matter
what, doesn't
matter what time of day. I didn't know that that existed. That's amazing. It's
called net power.
We talked about something on the podcast before, just as a joke, I was saying,
why don't they just
make a giant building, but make an air filter like a huge building, the size of
an air filter, but a
carbon capture, huge air filter, the size of a building. But apparently they're
doing that.
Apparently China is in the process of building things like that. I've heard of
some things in China,
I kind of think, yeah, because they have an air pollution problem that's
different from
carbon. Okay. So like, because carbon dioxide, you're breathing it right now.
You're not polluting
it necessarily. So they've got a different problem and they're just a mess. And
so that might be what
they're doing, but on the carbon capture side, it's definitely happening. It's
all the oil companies
actually doing it because there's actually an interest in the oil and gas
industry to reduce carbon
emissions. There's a huge interest. I mean, they realize where the conversation
is going and we should
encourage that, you know, so there's pretty impressive big projects going on by
a lot of these,
by a lot of these folks. So your take is that what the green new deal is, I
mean, if I can encapsulate
it, the green new deal is basically more of an emotional plea to people that
are worried about
the future and that sea wind and solar as being free and clean alternatives. It's
a dogmatic approach to
those. Yeah. It's not based in makes people feel good. It's a, it's a feel good
thing. And it really
shouldn't make them feel good because just because of all the consequences I
said about wind and solar,
it's not, these aren't necessarily clean by themselves. It also involves
conflict minerals,
right? That you need for these. No, that's what I was getting at too. Yeah.
Like where, where do you,
where do you mind these things? It's not, it's not the United States. It's not
the United States where
we have child labor laws. Okay. Afghanistan is the Congo. It's a lot of, a lot
of places that have
these good intentions often lead to bad things. So look at the ethanol issue.
When we decided that
we wanted ethanol in our gasoline. Well, I think it was, I want to say it's
Indonesia or Malaysia,
but they cleared tons and tons of forest to, to make room, um, so that they
could, so that they could,
uh, produce the ethanol oil. All right. Carbon emissions there increased
rapidly because of that,
you know, all because of our good intentions. And like these incentives and
these second,
third order effects, they matter. And we have to think about them when we're,
when we're talking about policy. And if our goal again is, if our goal is less
emissions,
then let's, let's be thoughtful about how we approach that. Let's not decide on
a solution
and then look for reasons to back up that solution. Um, is there any other
things that are on the horizon
that makes sense in terms of trying to mitigate all the, the problems that we
have with carbon
emissions in this country? Like, is there, is there anything else that people
are working on?
Uh, I listed a lot of them. The carbon capture technology I think is, is the
most promising
because it's profitable. You can sell carbon. There's a lot, there's a big
market for carbon.
So they can use it in cities. Like, can they use it other places other than
plants? Like you were
talking about the natural gas plants? Yeah. Well, you want to focus, you want
to focus something like
carbon capture on the places that emit the most carbon. Uh, that's, that's why
it's generally focused on
the, the, the, the plants themselves, I think. So like something like net power
just makes the most
sense. Um, yeah. So I, I think that's still the right way to go. The other
natural gas too. So
here's another statistic. The department of energy has done a study on this. If
you replaced coal
burning plants and are the boilers coal burning boilers in China and India with
natural gas, meaning
we have all the natural gas in the world, by the way, in Texas, like we can
export it for decades to
come. It's far cleaner than, than, than oil and coal. If you just replaced the
China's India's boilers,
you'd reduced, you'd reduced emissions by 40%. Like the reason the United
States has, has reduced
emissions by I think about 15% since the year 2000, it's because of, it's
largely because of the natural,
natural gas boom, the fracking business, because it's so much cleaner than,
than these other
technologies and it's profitable and it worked. But when you say fracking
immediately, red flag,
right? I saw that movie Gasland. People are lighting their water on fire. Yeah.
Like there's obviously
consequences to natural gas extraction through fracking as well, including
earthquakes.
Yeah. It's pretty rare. And then all the, all of these factors have to combine
for an earthquake
to actually happen. And then also the technology has progressed a huge amount.
Like haven't they radically increased the amount of earthquakes in places like
Oklahoma just because
of fracking? Yeah. Yeah. And they decided that fracking did have something to
do with that,
but they've also figured out how to make sure that doesn't happen. How do they
make sure
that don't drill on the ground? I don't know. I don't know the details. I just
know. Well,
there's just ways to do it. Like there's, in the early days, I think there were
some problems. The
set, the water setting on fire that had nothing to do with fracking as it
turned out that that was
debunked. Something else, some kind of methane emission, but it wasn't, wasn't
related to the
fracking. If I, if I recall, uh, how, how that conversation ended up playing
out. The,
that seems like a big factor. I mean, I feel like we should know what the fuck
that factor was.
Yeah. I mean, I, I would, I wouldn't, I would say to people like, you know, fracking
happens a lot.
It's it's the technology has, has moved on quite a bit. Uh, it's pretty safe.
And there's also,
there's more, the initial implementation of it where they weren't really. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean,
I wouldn't, I wouldn't argue that it was perfect, you know, and I know it was
associated with, with
some earthquakes, but there was a lot of other factors. So, you know, specific
to that place.
It's like, there's nowhere, there's not earthquakes in Texas that I'm aware of.
That's where we have
in West Texas, where we have a variety of most of this fracking going on. So, I
mean, just people
should know. So it's sort of like nuclear power, like the old plants, they
really didn't know what
they were doing and they made some big mistakes. Yeah. I think it's probably
like any technology,
but, but I would, but I just still want to point out, uh, it's, it, it caused a
huge decrease in
emissions, you know? And if we're, and again, it's over, if we're looking to
decrease emissions,
why don't we focus on things that work? And, and you have to hook people on my
people. I mean,
the world, especially developing countries that don't care about our dogmatic
approach to wind and
solar, they never will. And, uh, but what can you do to help them get energy to
keep their people out
of poverty? And because that's what they care about, uh, in a way that's
reliable and cheap and
market-based because the only thing that's sustainable is market-based
sustainability is an
important term here. And I, and I mean that not in the sense of like
environmental sustainability,
although we are saying the same thing, I mean it in terms of what policy will
last and what will
implode. And it's important question. And it's one reason I'm a Republican
because our policies,
they don't feel good. They're not based on emotional reasoning, but they are
based on
realistic reasoning and sustainability of that policy. And this is, this is a
case like that.
And if you don't take into account market forces and incentives and just, I
think basic human nature,
then you're, we're not doing justice to the problem itself.
Now, one of the big issues that's in the news right now is the trade war with
China. I mean,
this is a huge issue and it's made me dive into a lot of, uh, really weird
stuff with Huawei and with
the Chinese governments involved in various corporations. And it's a hard
concept to grasp
for the average American citizen that the corporations in China are next to be
connected
to the communist government. And that this is, they, they work hand in hand.
They do the bidding of the
government. They work together, even though they are profitable, radically
profitable. They also do
things specifically at the bidding of the government, including inserting shit
that can allow people to
spy on people, which is why they're banning Huawei devices. And this is, it all
comes back to what
you were talking about earlier to an intellectual copyright with, uh, in terms
of pharmaceutical drugs,
the same thing could be said about electronics. I mean, there's entire Apple
stores in China that
have nothing to do with Apple. They don't even, they just make their own stuff
and call it Apple stuff.
Thieves. Yeah. It's very strange, right? What, what do you think about this
sort of like tug of war
that's going on right now that we're seeing play out publicly? Well, I, I think
that Chinese deserve
every bit of it for all the reasons you just stated their intellectual property
theft is rampant and it
has been for a very long time. And we've been in this position where our
business community doesn't
want to bash them too bad because they want that market to be opened up and
they'll, and they'll,
and they'll be very conciliatory to whatever the Chinese want, uh, in order to
get openings to that
market. And, uh, you know, this is the, and Trump is the first president to
really say, no, this is
enough is enough. Um, I've, I've, and so while I'm, I'm sorry to interrupt you,
but do you think that's
because he's the first person that actually has a background in business, like
real big business?
That could be it. That could be it. I don't, I don't know why exactly, but I
know he's doing it.
So like that, he's been talking about this for a very long time.
Yes. He has. That's what I'm saying.
This isn't new to him talking about this in the nineties.
He was. Yeah. And, uh, and I, I'm not overly sympathetic to trade wars,
especially with our allies.
And I was, I was happy to see us getting to a deal with Canada and Mexico. I
don't see a point in,
in, in strong arming them, but with China, I'm much more sympathetic to it. And,
uh, and I think
that that should largely be bipartisan. You don't even see Democrats slamming
Trump too much for
this. Uh, and, but there are consequences. And so I would like the president to
be more forthright
about, listen, we are going to feel some pain too, because when you implement
tariffs, you're affecting
people's supply chains. And when you do that, you're hurting American
businesses too. Right.
There has to be a reason for that. Okay. And the reason is the Chinese are bad
actors and we are,
we are in sort of an economic cold war with them. The Chinese think in 50 year
terms, we think in
four year terms, they have a huge advantage in the sense they have huge
advantage that they can prop
up their businesses and, and, and, and, and, and put forth their belt and road
initiatives and made in
China 2025, I think is might be getting that wrong, but you know, they can,
they can manipulate
public opinion to encourage those status policies. And there's disadvantages to
that too. It means
they're much less dynamic. The fact that they steal everything means they'll
never be
competitive. They're not truly a great, you know, great nation, the way they're
making themselves out
to be because they're thieves. And, and I think we should point that out, but
we are in this cultural
war with them. We are in this economic, you know, cold war with them. And that's,
that's, that's nothing
new, but it is coming to the forefront. And so we've got to be careful. I would
prefer, you know,
we take fights to the WTO. We actually have a good history of being successful
in the WTO against the
Chinese. Uh, and we go after singular companies like Huawei. Uh, that would,
that would, I would
like to see that. Um, you know, again, I'm sympathetic to the tariffs, but they
do hurt us.
They hurt us. There are a lot of people in my district. Texas is a, a good, uh,
competitive market.
We do well when there's free competition. And so we tend to want more free
trade and more free
competition. Cause we know we can handle it. Uh, so, so when there's not that
it, it, it, it can tend to
hurt because we have very complex supply chains throughout the world. And that
is, we have to take
note of that. Well, it seems like a game of chicken almost. I mean, yeah, that's
what it seems like
back and forth. It's like, who's going to blink. It is like that. Yeah. That's
so crazy. International
business gets done. I mean, it seems so bizarre to a dummy like me sitting on
the sidelines going,
what are these guys doing? And there's, there's no playbook that tells you
exactly how you should
go forth with this. And there's just, you know, and, and so, um, there, there's
a, there's just,
isn't, um, and, um, it makes it harder. You, you've got to take a lot of things
into account and,
and have a good end goal in mind. And I think, I think we could do a better job
of having that.
But, um, but in the end, I think I'm, I get as a holistically, I'm more
sympathetic to being hard
on the Chinese. I'm realizing as we're talking that I never really, uh,
continued my thoughts on, uh,
censorship in the media. And I wanted to know what you think could be done in
terms of how,
how you could stop particularly conservative voices from being silenced on
social media.
And what could be done? Do you think that like government regulation should be
enacted? Like
what, what should be done to stop? Cause there's a bunch of stuff that's gone
on behind the scenes,
shadow banning and, you know, what do you think about that? So there, uh,
Senator Hawley
is looking at some legislation in the Senate on this and it, it, and, uh, I
want to get in too much
detail because I don't want to screw up the exact details of this, but it
essentially gets at section
230, which provides protections for, uh, internet platforms, right? Like you
can't be sued for libel,
like whatever you post on Facebook is not Facebook's fault. Okay. So that's, it
protects them in a way.
Mm-hmm. And as it should, frankly, because how could it be Facebook's fault?
Like if you have a crazy
comment on your YouTube videos at your fault, they were trying to enact that
for a while there,
they had released something saying that we had to be in charge of the comments
on our page. I remember
that and it's crazy. Jamie and I talked about it. I was like, we're just going
to shut the comments
down. Cause otherwise we're going to go to jail. Yeah. It's just fucking crazy.
People are constantly
posting nutty things. Right. And like, and why isn't it YouTube's fault? Why is
it your fault?
Exactly. You know, I mean, you were going to be responsible. Like where, where's
the blame lie?
And so like that's, so that's why they should. So that's, so that's that
conversation. It's the
conversation of what is a platform? What is a publication? Because you can sue
the New York
Times. Right. If they, if they publish something that you don't like. Okay. So
the problem we're seeing
is that Facebook and Twitter, they're acting like both. They're getting, they're
trying to get the
best of both worlds where they're this like open platform, but then they can
also decide and kind
of act like a publisher and decide what kind of content is allowed on that
platform. And the,
and the problem is the standards they're using are utterly vague and, and
subjective and then
politically biased, obviously. And so like, that's a real problem. And so I
think, I think this
legislation might get at kind of removing that protection and basically
allowing someone to say,
Hey, you're being libelous. And once that incentive is there, it's like, okay,
there's a better incentive
now to say we are a pure platform. Uh, you know, we'll, we have to have much
stronger standards in
the sense of clearer standards. You know, maybe it's a word that you don't
allow. I don't know,
but at least be specific. Cause right now it's like, you know, they define hate
speech in the
Vegas terms possible. Not just that they move the boundaries all the time. Like
now you can get
banned for life for dead naming someone, which means like, if I, if I wrote
something about Bruce
Jenner looks cute in these heels, if I wrote that I could get dead name banned
for life from Twitter.
Like literally, if I write Bruce Jenner looks cute in these heels.
Oh, because he's not Bruce Jenner.
His son called him he hilarious in that, uh, whoops, one of the, what was it?
The, uh, the hills,
when the hills came back. Oh yeah. Yeah. His son is on. I think it took a lot
of heat for it. Cause
he called his dad. He said, my dad, when he became his dad, what is he supposed
to say? That's his
actual dad. I don't know. But that's where we've, we've entered into this cuckoo
land. You know,
you can get banned for life for dead naming. But again, OJ Simpson, hello,
Twitter world. Yeah. You
know, fucking kills people. And he's on there. No violation of terms of
agreement. We looked at
the terms of service. It seems like you're fine. Mr. Simpson, please rant about
politics in the draft,
NFL draft. We want to hear your, your, your picks. I don't follow him. Maybe it's
awesome.
Well, Stan Hope and I had an idea way back when we were hosting the man show,
we had this idea to
have OJ Simpson. This was after he got acquitted the man show. We were going to
wrap up some
memories. We were going to have OJ Simpson wrap up every episode, like Mickey
Rooney. You know,
Mickey Rooney sort of gives his, well, why is toothpaste always come in a tube?
You remember
that? Mickey Rooney? Not Mickey Rooney. What the fuck's his name? Andy Rooney.
Andy Rooney. Okay.
Yeah. Mickey Rooney was the actor, but Andy Rooney would, uh, we were going to
have him,
OJ Simpson, just give some sort of a down home anecdote at the end of every
episode to sort of tie
everything up and let you know that this fucking show is bananas. But then the
whole murderer thing.
No, the murder thing was before that. This was way after the murderer thing. Oh,
okay.
This was in like 2002. Okay. But then, you know, they, the, and Comedy Central
shot it down,
but now you can actually get that on Twitter. I mean, that is what he's doing.
He's, he's pretending
like he never murdered anybody. Right. And he's just, uh, hello, Twitter world.
And he's doing this
thing. Well, I mean, it's, and it's not clear to me that we should ban him. You
know, like why,
why would we? Because, because again, the, what's again, free speech is a very
specifically protected
thing and it matters to us. This is the question. Is it free speech when it's a
company that owns,
they own this platform. Should they be allowed to create their own rules?
Because this is what Twitter's
done. This is what Facebook's done. This is what Instagram's done. They've
created their own rules
as to what is and what is not acceptable. Yeah. And that's, that's the heart of
the question.
Yeah. Because we've never dealt with this, right? Because the first amendment
was always created to
protect you from government infringing on your speech. Because we, we always
assumed that government
would be the only thing powerful enough to actually infringe on your free
speech. Right.
We never, we forgot about this other world that we now live in. We didn't
forget about it. We just
didn't know about it where there are other entities that have very, very
powerful abilities to actually
infringe on your free speech. And it's, but like you said, they are private
entities. And so is it
really up to government to tell the private entity? Are we enforcing the spirit
of the first amendment?
Or are we enforcing the first amendment according to, to protecting you from
government? Right.
And so, and that's an interesting question. Should we enforce the spirit of the
first amendment?
I think we certainly think we're encouraging it. I mean, I, I, I'm definitely
very vocal about
encouraging it. And I say, you don't have a, and I, when Google was in front of
me in a hearing
the other day, uh, I said, and it was Google, all of them were there. I said,
you don't have a legal
obligation to do what I'm telling you, but I do think you have an American
obligation to actually adhere
to free speech standards and to adhere to the same standards that the
government adheres to, which is
your speech is not protected if it incites violence directly. It's a pretty
clear standard.
Yes. Uh, everything else is, is entirely vague and, and, and only leads to a
slippery slope and,
and frankly, a very dangerous situation where we're just at each other's throats,
even worse,
because not only are you yelling at each other, but you're telling certain
people that their opinions
are just utterly unacceptable and can't be heard at all. If you want to create
civil war, that's a really
quick way to do it. Right. When you really disenfranchise people, and it's just
so
dangerous and we just shouldn't do it. I fully agree. And I really appreciate
the way you were
holding their heels to the fire on that, particularly in regards to the
description of people being
Nazis, right? That was you. You were talking about Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro,
who are Jewish
gentlemen who were being labeled Nazis by internal memos. And was it Google? Uh,
that was Google.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's just so intellectually dishonest. So intellectually dishonest.
And not
only that, no, no pushback internally. Oh, also, you know, I always, I always
tell people when, when,
when they're, when they're complaining about something Trump said, they're like,
look at the violence he's
inciting. All right. And I say, well, you call us all Nazis. When you call
somebody a Nazi, you,
you are calling somebody something that we agreed as Americans to bomb and kill
and destroy.
So you're labeling me with a label that we all agree should be destroyed. Like,
how is that not
inciting violence by your, by your standards? Most certainly is. I mean, it's
terrible. You take away
that name, you take away the word Nazi, and there's far less targets for people
to be upset about.
I mean, if you just stop using that word, stop using the word Nazi. And look,
there are clearly
real white nationalists. I mean, we saw that in Charlottesville when those dorks
showed up in tiki
torches. Those are real white nationalists. Those are real. There's a lot of
people that are not.
Ben Shapiro is one of them. You know, you can't, it's not even close, not even
close.
Like it's not even, yeah, it's, but it's this convenient label that once you
decide that someone
is the other, you dehumanize them, their perspective becomes intolerable and
you can label them as being
this, this target. Right, right. And they, they do it to Trump too. I mean,
Trump, you know,
this is continues to be said by basically everybody running for president, uh,
that Trump is a white
supremacist. And, and white supremacist and Nazi are practically, I think the
same thing. I think we,
we have a, we have an understandably deep objection to anything white supremacist
as we should, should
be condemned totally. And when you're calling the president that I think you're
also there for,
and they often call his supporters that too.
Yeah. So you're calling 60 something million people who voted for him the same
thing. I just,
I just can't imagine a worse way to engage in dialogue. I just, and a quicker
way to escalate
things to, to just the worst possible scenario. But it's new. This is not
something that existed 10
years ago. People didn't run around calling everyone a Nazi. Like what happened?
How did it, how did it,
the word Nazi just get tossed around like a beach ball at a concert? Cause it's
so free to use now.
And people on the left are the ones who are using it. It's not people on the
right who are labeling
left-wing people Nazis, but fascists and Nazi, that word just gets thrown out
without any real
comprehension or any real responsibility for the actual definition of it.
Yeah. And I don't know where the origin is. Um, it's within like 10 years,
right?
It is. And they found the word and they liked it. They just, they found
something effective,
I think. Um, you know, there's, there's Herbert Marcuse is, is sort of the, one
of the original
thinkers from the new left who said that like the, the new way of progressivism
needs to be dividing
people up into that other. Okay. And then, and then not only that, but, but
labeling them and then
suppressing their speech. So this started in the sixties. Okay. This, this sort
of the policy,
this is no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like a, a left wing thinker. Right. Okay.
So his,
his ideas. Yeah. Yeah. This was a strategy that he, right. Right. An actual
strategy of suppression
because the, the goal was to take the previously oppressed and suppress the,
the previous oppressors.
This is how, this is how they talked about it. So that's enslave the slave
owners. Right. So this,
so in a sense, this isn't new, like this, this is the, the kind of radicalism
we're seeing. It started in the
sixties. It was imbued into our universities and now we're seeing it manifest
again and amplified,
I think by social media and, and, you know, labeling somebody a Nazi is just
really an old tactic.
They're just using a different word. And I don't know if I think if we were, I
think if we looked
into history, there's probably other cases where they continue to call us Nazis,
but it's obviously
extremely prevalent now. I mean, never to this extent. Right. And, and I just,
I don't know why
that it, well, it's, it's the rise of identity politics fundamentally. And so,
and then there,
and then I think there's, it's fair it is because the left would say, well,
there was a, there was
kind of a white identity politics rise and they were given some kind of voice
by Donald Trump,
right? That this is what they would say. And I, I think that there's probably
some truth to that.
And then that's terrible, but I think that, I think that was a reaction, you
know, uh,
it was, you always point out that like, when you do surveys of what race, race
relations are like
in America, they were much better before than they are now. And do we really
think we've gotten more
racist, you know, like what happened? And this is under president Obama's
presidency. And I, and I think
those identity, that identity politics just came to the forefront in the last
decade in a really
terrible way. And, and again, I think identity politics is one of the worst
things we could do to
each other. Um, when you divide people up into different groups and, and, and
talk about
intersectional hierarchies of victimhood, I just think it's, I, it's, it's just
dividing because
fundamentally what it is, is you're dividing people up and you're saying your
group is oppressed
by that group. And if you vote for me, I'll give you power over that group.
Yeah. And you can trace
a lot of, of, of policies to that. And this all stems from Marxist ideology,
where it was more
socio-economic division of groups, but that is, but that has become, uh, an
ideology of
intersectionality, uh, ironically put forth by a woman named Crenshaw.
Really?
Yeah. Kimberly Crenshaw. I think she came at it from a much more academic
standpoint. I think it's,
I think whatever her original theory of intersectionality was, uh, has been
transformed
quite a bit, but yeah, I find that interesting. So I'm so opposed to that.
Yeah. You know, now that I'm thinking about it, I don't even think it's 10
years.
I think the Nazi thing is only about four or five years old to the extent we're
seeing it. Sure.
Yeah. You know, and so strange and people use it so freely. I look at people on
Twitter, use it so
freely and they use it in regards to my guests. And you know, it's, uh, they
use it to say that I've
had Nazis on the show. I'm like, this is crazy. You know, you're calling a
Jewish man a Nazi. You can,
an Orthodox Jewish guy wears a yarmulke. You're calling him a Nazi. Right. The
bananas. It just
doesn't make any sense. Yeah. And we just, and they were shameless about it.
The shameless about
these accusations. I don't understand it. Here's something we're probably going
to disagree about.
Uh, recreational marijuana. You, you're apparently not in favor. I really
thought we're going to do a whole
show at Joe Rogan and you weren't going to bring up marijuana. Like what are
the chances?
You're not in favor of recreational marijuana. No, I can, I could be convinced,
but I'm not there
yet. I'll convince you right now. Well, spark one up. I, I don't like it. What
do you like?
I just, I just don't like it. I like, I like scotch. Okay. I like that too. We
got some of that.
We've had scotch this whole time. Well, you gave me this amazing, you gave me
this amazing coffee.
That's Laird Hamilton superfood coffee. It's pretty damn good, right? It made
me, it made me so coherent.
Like I love it. The clarity good. Well, it's got turmeric. It's, it reduces
inflammation. It's
why it gives you a yellow lips though. So I, I'm definitely, I'm definitely
more open to just
the federal legalization of medical marijuana and all the benefits that come
with that. I think the
science backs that up pretty well. Sure. The, um, on the recreational side, I'm
happy to leave that to
the States. Okay. And then there's the argument of, well, the States are having
trouble with some
things, the banking laws, et cetera, because the federal government doesn't may
still makes it illegal.
My, my, my issue with recreational marijuana still is it's, it's, and again,
this is not a
strong opinion I have. This is not a hill I'm dying on by any means. Um, but if
we're going to change it,
I want to understand what the point is and like what the benefits are of it
recreationally. I understand
the benefits medically very well. Uh, but I want to understand the recreational
benefits and I want to
see how this data plays out in places like California and Colorado. You know, I
want to see if there's an
increased use among young people because there's, there's, there's very good
science that says if
you use marijuana a lot under the age of 26, you're going to have cognitive
issues for the rest of your
life. Along with alcohol. Yes. Yeah. But it is legal and people compare those
things, but I, and my
counter isn't that my counter is simply this, the alcohol issue is out of the
bag. Like it just is,
you know, we're never going to put that back in. Um, and so you think they're
going to put pot back in the
bag? Well, not necessarily. My point is this, there's a normalization that
occurs when you
legalize something you're telling. Okay. So let's say you make the age 21 or
not. What is it in
California? Um, I think it's 21, is it? So let's say I want to think it's the
same as alcohol. So
let's say you make it 21. What you've done though, is you've normalized it for
teenagers. Cause you said,
well, yeah, it's 21, but it's legal. So there's nothing, there's no issues with
it. Okay. That's what you're,
I think that's what you're telling people. And there's a lot of people who can
just live their
lives extremely productively and smoke pot a lot. And there's a lot of people
who can't. Okay. And
there's a lot of people who don't. Those people are lazy bitches. Well, yeah,
let me help you out.
You can live your life. You just listen, pot's not for everybody. And I have a
lot of friends who
don't smoke pot, but pot is a tool, just like a hammer. You could build a house
with a hammer,
or you can hit yourself in the dick. If you're fucking crazy, like scotch, you
could drink scotch
recreationally. You can have a couple of glasses with some friends and have a
great conversation.
And it's a social lubricant and people enjoy it. And I enjoy it. And that's why
we've got a bunch
of bottles of it over there. Uh, look, but, but don't you have to drink way
more scotch to get even
close to the, to the basically cognitive incoherence that you'd be with just
one bite of a brownie?
You, you would, but not me. I smoke pot all the time. I could smoke pot. I
could have smoked pot
before this podcast and had the exact same podcast. I could have had several
hits. If I gave you several
hits, you'd be obliterated and you'd be so paranoid. You'd be freaking out and
you'd think
the government's coming to get you and you're going to close down Congress. And
oh my God,
it's, it's, um, a lot of it is based on our own ideas and perceptions. And I
had a lot of these
misconceptions in my own head. I didn't really, I smoked pot maybe six times or
so, seven times
before I was 30 years old. And then when I was 30, I started hanging around
with a guy who smoked a lot,
my friend, Eddie Bravo. We started smoking pot together. And I realized like,
oh, this is an incredible
tool for creativity. Like if you use it correctly and yeah, it makes you
paranoid. But I think a lot
of what that paranoia is, is you being acutely aware of your vulnerability and
your actual real
place in the cosmos and your real place in society and the real dangers of
driving cars and the real
dangers of being in crowds of people. Yeah. It's not, it's a weird,
uncomfortable feeling, but ultimately
you get through that and you're going to be okay. In a culture that I just don't
really have a problem
with what you're saying. You know, like it's, I'm just, I'm not cultural, I
guess on a personal
level, I'm just not opposed to what you're saying at all. Uh, from a policy
level though,
I just look at things differently. Like when I extract myself from the personal
situations I've had with pot and I look at it from a policy perspective, what
personal
situations? I've tried it, you know, and it's paranoid. I don't like it. I just,
I really don't
freak out. I don't know. No, no. I'm not a freak out. I'm not a freak out kind
of person.
What happened? What didn't you like? Uh, it just, it's just the sensation that
just in general, I just really didn't like it. Um, I, I don't know. How much
did you smoke?
Too much? What? Sorry. I think there's something going on with my headphones.
Okay. We can gloss over this. Uh, there's so. But here's the problem with
keeping it illegal.
Criminals sell it. I mean, this is the same problem we had during prohibition.
This is what propped up the
mob, right? We all know this. And this is a, this is the number one problem we
have with the Mexican
drug cartels. The number one problem is that there's a goddamn customer base in
the United States
and they're making billions and billions of dollars selling illegal drugs. And
what's the solution to
that? I don't know. I mean, look, I don't, I have kids. I don't want fucking
heroin to be something you
could buy at 7-Eleven. I don't want you to be able to go to a store and buy
meth, you know,
but that gets into a whole other conversation about all drugs, right?
Drugs. All drugs. Yeah. But those are the real dangerous ones. Pot's not that.
And when you lie
to kids and tell them that pot's the real, real danger and you shouldn't do it,
then they start
going, well, maybe you're lying about heroin. Maybe you're lying about meth.
Maybe you're just square.
Maybe you're just some loser who just wants to be stuck in a cubicle all day
and you want me to be
living like, like you. But it does reduce, I mean, it does reduce like
productivity,
I think more than alcohol does. Entirely dependent upon the person. I get
paranoid
and I want to do more things because I don't want to be a loser. That's what
happens to me when I
smoke pot. I think it accentuates many aspects of people that are already lazy.
If you are already
lazy and you have a problem with discipline, which I don't, if you have a
problem with discipline and
you smoke pot, yeah. You're going to just want to veg out, lie in the grass and
stare at the clouds.
I want to get going. I smoke pot and go to the gym. I mean, I do it all the
time.
And again, as a policymaker though, I have to look at the whole situation. So I
see people like you
and you're like, yeah, you'd be fine. Why not? But I, but I do have to take
into account the
entirety of the situation and ask myself, well, what is the benefit of society
to society doing
this? Like, what is the people nicer? It enhances the sense of community. It
makes people more aware
of their surroundings. I actually, I mean, I don't know. I think alcohol is
much more of a social
lubricant. It definitely makes it meaner too. But I mean, as far as getting
along with people and going
out and interacting with human beings, it's different, but yes, it inhibits
your inhibitions.
It lowers your inhibition. So it allows you to talk more freely with people.
Definitely encourages
more sex and more terrible decision-making and driving too. But the thing about
marijuana is
another policy problem because like, how do you test for it? You know, we have
a very kind of clear
standards on alcohol. It's just those, again, it's like, again, I'm not, I'm
not just, I'm not dying
on this hill. I just, I have questions and those questions are unanswered. I
understand, but these
questions oftentimes are coming from a place of propaganda. Like people have
this idea of what it
is versus what it really is. I don't know. I like, I have personal experience
with this and I'm 35.
So like growing up around this my entire life, this isn't, so it's, I'm not, I'm
not, I'm not some,
what? Again, did you do it right? But here's the thing, it's the same thing
with alcohol though.
You could have driven drunk and crashed your car and go, well, alcohol is bad.
Look,
I drove my car into a fucking tree and I go, well, hey man, I just had a couple
of beers with my
friends. We had a great old time. We laughed it up and nobody got hurt. The
difference is again,
again, the way to measure how much too alcohol, too much alcohol is, is well-defined.
And we also have
just hundreds of years of experience with like, as a culture with how to figure
out alcohol and how
to deal with it. Well, we used to have thousands of years of experience of how
to use cannabis,
but it was suppressed in the 1930s by William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger.
And it's more of an
economic decision than it was a public health decision. Yeah. And I've heard, I've
heard your
podcast on that. Not just me. It's interesting. Yeah. There's many, many
documentaries and books
written on it, but I think that the real problem is when you make drugs illegal,
only outlaws sell drugs,
you prop up illegal enterprises. I have a guy coming in next month or next week,
rather, John Norris,
who is a guy who works for the state. He's one of those guys that has to go
around and find these
illegal grow ops on public land. And it's fucking extremely dangerous. Yeah. I
mean,
bottom line is my position is that's a state decision. You know, it's a state
decision.
But why not federally? Why wouldn't it be federally legal if alcohol is federally
legal? If we'd know that no one's dying from it, no one, I can't overdose. I
just want to see what
the data comes out is from Colorado. It's mixed right now, frankly. I think we
need a strong
education program to let people know, first of all, if you have a problem with
reality,
if you have schizophrenia in your family, if your reality is already slippery,
marijuana is not for
you. And I've personally seen people that have struggled that, that do have an
adverse reaction to
marijuana and then go off the fucking rails. It does happen. Yeah. It's
particularly with edibles,
edibles in particular to knocks people for a loop. But then there's other
people that it doesn't do
that too. And I think we do the way to study that is to have actual funding and
make it legal where you
could, you could look at things across the board and figure out why. Yeah. I
think, I think as far as
the battles we should fight at the federal level, we got to start with the
medical side. I think this,
I think the science is clear there. And like, so, you know, let's start. I mean,
I just, I just, CBD is the gateway, right? CBD is non-psychoactive and helps so
many old people
with arthritis and so many people with anxiety. It's fantastic. Exactly. And it
just, just, again,
another reason I'm a Republican is because I believe in somewhat slower policymaking
too. Like
these, these conversations have to play out in society and they, we don't
always need to, to, to
solve the problem right away. Like there's a reason for that things must happen.
So, so I think,
I think the medical conversation is the one we should be fighting for. I think
the recreational
side is, is a few steps beyond that. And then we get to that and we'll, we'll
know more. And I, and I
think, and that's, that's, that's why generally when people ask me that, I'm
like, this is the,
the medical thing is the thing to be talking about right now. I appreciate that
conservative
perspective and the slow approach to things. And I understand what you're
saying. What, what bothers
me more than anything is that American citizens are not doing any harm to
anyone could be criminals
for something that's been used by human beings for thousands of years and doesn't
show any real
problems. I don't think young people should drink, but I drank when I was young.
I mean,
I didn't drink a lot, but I did occasionally. I don't think young people should
smoke pot. I
definitely don't encourage it. As a matter of fact, I deeply discourage it. And
I tell people,
look, there's a reason, one of the reasons why I enjoy it is I didn't start
smoking really until I was 30.
And, you know, I take time off all the time. It's not an addictive substance to
me. It's
psychologically addictive to some people. And there might be some evidence that
a very, very small
percentage of people, it's physically addictive, but not like alcohol is or not
like a lot of the
things that we can just buy anywhere are. Yeah. Those are all fair arguments.
It's a good
discussion to have. I'm not, you know, we sort of disagree on it, but, but only
because I just think
more due diligence needs to be done. It's not, this is not a something I'm vehemently
opposed to.
Well, I think anything for young kids could be a real problem, especially for
young kids
where their brain is still developing and they're trying to find their way
through life and you give
them something that severely distorts reality, whatever it is. I wish we had
that same due diligence
to the way they prescribe psychotropic drugs to kids because we don't, you know,
it's up to parents'
discretion. And so many parents are putting their kids on Ritalin and Prozac
and Adderall and, you
know, you're making kids speed freaks as opposed to relying on like cognitive
behavioral therapy,
which is proven to work much better because you're getting at the problem. You're
questioning,
you're questioning the untruths that you're telling yourself. That's
effectively what CBT is.
Um, you know, it's good practice kids have exorbitant amounts of energy and you
can call that
hyperactive or you could just say, well, that kid's got a fucking great engine,
got a lot of
gas, like just figure out a way to get this kid engaged in what they like. I
guarantee you take
that kid, put him in front of a video game. He doesn't have any problem
focusing. What he has
a problem with is shitty classes with boring subjects and teachers that are
uninterested.
And so many people are being labeled as being problems because of this.
We want to blame something else besides reality. And that's, that's, that's,
that's problematic.
Um, and, uh, you talk about looking into certain drugs. I mean, you know,
the opioid epidemic is an issue too, and that's a bipartisan issue. It's just,
again,
it's not exactly clear. How do you solve this? Right. How do you solve this? I
have a ton of
experience with opioids because I've been injured so many times. Did you ever
have a problem getting
off of them once you? Oh yeah. It's devastating. It's absolutely devastating.
And I didn't,
I never knew this was in 2012. So I didn't know how devastating it would be
because I just stopped
taking them. I don't think I'm in pain anymore. I should probably just not take
these. And then I was in,
pain. I didn't know I was sick. I didn't know what was wrong with me. What was
the experience like?
Uh, it's, it's a nosh. You just, you can't move. You're sick. I don't know how
to describe it.
You're just really sick. And is your body craving the pills? Yeah, but, but I
didn't know that,
I think. So you're just feeling the sickness. Just feeling the sickness. It
wasn't, I didn't,
I didn't quite know where it was coming from. Um, and then, you know, you tell
your doctor,
I'm like, Oh yeah, you got to wean off of that. We didn't tell you that. No,
you didn't tell me that. Um, it was very, I was 28 when this happened. So I, my
body can get over
it. You're also 28 with a strong mind. Who's a seal. Right. But the, but the
age matters just
like it matters with pot and just like it matters with addiction. You're my,
when, when teenagers
are hooked on opioids, when that one dealer gets into the system, like you, you
change that person's
brain forever. And they're always addicted to it really bad ways. And like, it's
different the way
the way I always remember it, like it's ingrained in my brain too, but it's
different because I was
older. Like if you got an injury today, would you be res, would you be
reluctant to take them?
No, no. I, I have faith in my ability to, to just act responsibly. Like I, yeah,
I, you know,
and so that requires a lot of things, but, but when you, when, and this is,
this gets cut,
this a little bit gets to the war on drugs philosophy. Like, do you just not do
it because
we're losing all the time? And I actually disagree with that pretty strongly
because the, the, yeah,
you might be feel like you're losing all the time, but you are mitigating it.
And supply does create
demand, especially with something like opioids. If that one dealer gets into
that one high school
and, and, and gets those kids addicted at one party, like those, and those kids
die 10, 12 years
later. And I've watched this happen. I've been to the funerals and it's, it's
devastating.
And that supply that, that demand was created by supply. So like, again, no,
there's no, there's
never a black and white to anything. And so when we say, oh, war on drugs is
stupid or it's not
stupid. Like, no, it's complicated. It's complicated. And the opioid epidemic
is, I think a good indication
of that. What could be done to mitigate that other than sawing Florida off and
selling it to the Russians?
Well, what did Florida do here? Florida was a problem. You know, the whole deal
with the pill mills,
did you ever, there's a great documentary called, uh, the Oxy Oxycontin express.
It detailed how they
had pain management centers in Florida set up right next to the doctor was next
door to the pharmacy
that only sold opioids. Yeah. And they, I didn't realize that was a Florida and
they didn't have
a database. They didn't have a database. So there's no computer database. So
you could, if you were a
doctor, I could go to you, I could get my opioids. Then I'd go over, Jamie, he's
a doctor. He could hook me
up and then I'd go down the street and get more. And then people started
selling them. And there was
an express from Florida that went up into Kentucky and Ohio and all these
different states that were
having giant problems. And they found out the pills were all coming from this
one area. It was a
vanguard documentary. Yeah. And that stuff's been slammed down pretty hard ever
since. And so,
and the pendulum maybe has swung a little too far because now pain patients are
having trouble
getting the opioids they want. They're like, ah, here's two pills for your
surgery. And you're like,
really? Right. So some, some people legitimately need this stuff. And so we've
got to find that
correct balance. And again, you've always got to know why there's a problem.
And there's a general
policy approach. We should always really question why the problem exists in the
first place and what
the characteristics of that problem are. So a lot of people are dying, not
necessarily, they're not
like, they're not overdosing on Oxycontin. They're overdosing from illegal
forms of it or
heroin that is laced with fentanyl. So like, how do you tackle that? Well, fentanyl
is coming
through the Southern border. That's where it's coming from. You know, we could
talk about immigration
too, but what happens a lot is, you know, these massive waves of immigrants who
are turning
themselves in to border patrol, they're allowed to cross because the drug cartels
say they can cross.
Okay. That's why they come across in organized groups and then they turn
themselves into border
patrol and they, and they claim asylum. They always bring a kid with them so
that they know they can stay.
But what's also happening is just down the road, the drug cartels are moving
the fentanyl and other
or other drugs across, especially the bulky drugs, mostly like marijuana,
things like that.
Fentanyl is so small, they can just bring it through trucks, through ports of
entry. So
and so we need sensors to actually detect that. And we're getting those,
getting those put in place
more. And we need to secure the border because this is where it's coming from.
And we need to deal
with where it's coming from south of the border, which is China. And so the
administration actually
did that. We got the Chinese to say at least that they'll do it. You never know
how much they're
enforcing that. So we'll see. It's so interesting when you play people clips of
Obama talking about
about the importance of securing the border. I like to play those clips. Sounds
just like
Trump. And you play the statistics of how many people they sent back and
telling people to not
come over with their children. They'll be separated from their children. It's
one of those things where
people like don't like that. They don't like to see that. It really is deeply
disturbing to them that
Obama campaigned on this idea of protecting our border.
Because we all used to agree on it. Yeah. You know, it became a racial issue
with Trump.
Yeah. I mean, he's definitely said some things where you can. He fucked up.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
He fucked up with the whole "Someone's raping. Someone's murdering."
Not going to defend. Not going to defend Trump's rhetoric on your show or on
any show.
They contributed to it. Sure. But again, as a pretty unemotional person, I tend
to look at what is the
policy. Right. And so I have tried my hardest to move the debate towards when
it comes to immigration
towards a matter of sustainability, a matter of sovereignty, and a matter of
rule of law. Like,
do we have standards or do we not? You know, do we believe in this idea of a
managed border or do we
not? And, you know, and Trump has made the Democrats so crazy that they've
moved radically to the left.
Hmm. And it's interesting to watch. People always say, like, both sides have
gotten so extreme.
I always find that interesting. And I say there's two ways to measure extremism.
One is our voting
record. Like, how often do you really vote with the other side? And you can
measure that pretty
carefully, actually. And you've probably seen a YouTube video, maybe, where you
watch all over time,
all the red dots and the blue dots, and they sort of mingle together in their
voting records,
and then they slowly over time move to the sides. So both sides are responsible
for that. Like,
a lack of actual compromise, a lack of deal-making, where we say, okay, I'll
vote for your stuff,
you vote for my stuff. That doesn't happen anymore. And there's reasons for
that we could get into.
But there's another way to measure extremism, and it's the actual policy
changes. And so that we can
observe that. And I think, and in that respect, I don't think the right and
conservatives have really
changed our policies. I don't think we've gotten more extreme. I think the left
has gotten vastly more
extreme. They've changed their policies radically. Medicare for all, open
borders. I mean, effectively
open borders. They don't like to use the word, but when you're saying decriminalize
it, when you're
saying no infrastructure at all on the border, when you're saying no more ice
detention beds,
you're effectively saying open borders, because you don't want to enforce it,
and you don't want
to stop it. So I don't, I don't know what else to call it. You know, and those
are just some
examples. The Green New Deal. I mean, socialism is a good word now. So I think
there's, I think that on that,
on that measure, only one side has really moved to an extreme, as far as policy
positions go. And
to your point, look at Barack Obama, and he's not the only one, you can look at
Chuck Schumer's old
comments on this stuff. I mean, it's, you, Trump could have written those
statements for them.
Yeah. What can be done? The real issue is not people coming over here seeking
work,
good people that just want to do better for their life. The real issue is drugs
and crime.
What can be done to mitigate the effect of the Mexican drug cartels? Because
that seems
to be our biggest worry. Our biggest worry is the cartels and cartel violence.
No, our, well, our biggest worry, that is a worry, but, but there's a, there's
a, again,
I go back to a matter of sustainability and sovereignty in terms of the amount
of people
that we can sustain. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I, I, I never, I actually never, when
I talk about the
immigration issue, I actually never talk about the drugs and the crime, because
I don't want to label
these good people as criminals, drug dealers, you know, that, that's the wrong,
that's the wrong,
and most the best majority are. But that just because you're a good person and
you want nice things,
doesn't mean you get to move to the front of the line on our immigration policy.
It's also an important point to note for people that don't know, and it's kind
of a shocking
statistic. We let in more legal immigrants than any other country. Yeah. We,
yeah, over a million a
year, um, I think become citizens and, and much more than that granted visas.
So, and there's a,
there's a perfectly reasonable debate to have about how many work visas should
we have? Should we
increase it or should we decrease it? And how does someone get over here and
how do we know that they
don't have a history of violent crime? Sure. Like, and I, you know, I advocate
for a merit-based
system. What the president proposed, I think is absolutely right. We, we, we
have the opportunity
to choose the best people from the world to come here. And if you're a refugee,
we have a system
for that. And if you're an actual asylum seeker, we have a system for that. But
what we should be
totally opposed to is this idea that just because you made it to walk across
the border,
that all of a sudden you get to cut to the front of the line. And that's
exactly what's happening right now,
um, because of the loopholes we have. If you bring a child with you, our laws
are written
so that we basically can't enforce it. We cannot enforce these laws. Um, and
this is for a couple
of reasons. One, the Flores settlement, you might have heard that a lot. What
it means is you can't
detain, uh, a child past 20 days. So if a family comes across or it's usually,
it's usually just a part
of a family. Cause what they actually do is they split up. Uh, they split their
own families up because
they don't want to deport one of the parents. Does that make sense? Okay. So
the Flores settlement
says you have to, you can't detain children, which effectively means we can
never adjudicate
these claims in time, whether it's an illegal crossing issue, like a criminal
act of 1320,
U S code 1325, illegal crossing, or just they're claiming asylum. Either one,
we can't, we can't
adjudicate it in time. So what ends up happening is a catch and release when
they say, okay, show up for a
court date and then what incentive did they have to show up for that court date?
You know, and they
just don't. So, and, and we're talking, you know, geez, in the earlier part of
this year, we had over
a hundred thousand a month. And so it gets to a question of sustainability. Let's
say all, let's say
all a hundred thousand people are perfectly good people, but it's a stain. It's
a sustainability
question. And it's also a fairness question. Like why do they get to cut in
front of the legal
immigrants? Why do they get so much more priority over all of the other people
who want to be in our
country around the world? I mean, they don't have that opportunity to just walk
across the border.
So it's just, it's just complete, it's utterly unsustainable. And if we value a
sense of sovereignty
and rule of law, which I think we should, and we value the idea of having a
managed system,
then we have to put a stop to that and then have a good conversation about,
well, maybe we need more
workers. Okay. Well then let's increase worker visas. If that's true. Well, I
think we show sympathy
about on them because they're poor people that are trying to do better for
their life. Whereas we look
at people that are coming over from Canada and if we had a hundred thousand
people from Canada illegally
immigrating into our country every year, we would go, Hey, you fucks, get back
over where you are.
Like you guys have a great country already. You don't have the problem of a
lack of opportunity in
Canada the way people do in Mexico. There's a giant disparity between North
America in terms of like
United States of America and Mexico, the economic possibilities, the drug
violence.
But our laws, our laws have to be written blind to those subjective terminologies.
Sure.
You know, and that's, that's really important because otherwise why have them?
Like why,
why even have a system at all? If you just, if you, if it's enforced based on
feelings,
the best case scenario would be Mexico becomes like Canada, right? Wouldn't
that be the best
case scenario? Mexicans are not the ones that are actually, we're having an
issue. You know,
it's, it's vastly central Americans. So again, this stems from loopholes in our
laws. Okay. So
because a Mexican too, because they're actually border us, our laws work where
we can actually
just put them right back for the most part, a single adults too. We can, our
system works okay with that.
The problem is if you bring a child and so every, so everybody tends to bring a
child and what this
also causes is human trafficking. A lot of these children don't belong to these
parents. Okay.
So now we have to look at DNA testing to try and, to try and thwart this. And
that is what's
happening now. And we find that good amount of kids don't belong to these
parents.
So they bring over a kid in order for them to stay.
And what will happen is then they'll recycle that kid. So border patrol often
sees the same kid
coming through with different adults, you know, and it's, it's terrible.
And what other, I mean, if it's not Mexico, what are the main countries where
these people are coming from?
Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. And again, it seems like the only way that
anyone could
really truly fix that is if those countries could rise up to the level of
Canada, so they could be
commensurate with the United States. And this is what the left says we need to
do. And I don't
disagree with it at all. The problem with what the left is suggesting is that's
the only thing we need
to do. And that's just not true. We also have to enforce our actual laws, but
that, but it's,
but it is a bipartisan, I think agreement that we, we want to develop the
countries closest to us.
I'm on a, I'm a co-sponsor on a bill that does, does just that. It's a
bipartisan bill.
And I think it encourages a more creative look at development in Central
America.
The Bush Institute is talks about this a lot. And I think it's a really good
idea,
which is basically economic empowerment through, through digital infrastructure.
So here in America,
I mean, we make a lot of money just based on the gig economy. Every individual
can empower
themselves and, and work towards that. And that's really cool. They don't have
that opportunity down
there and it's a lack of digital infrastructure, whether it's broadband or
whatever. So working
towards investing in the right things, as opposed to just, Hey, here's some aid
that, that your,
your corrupt politicians can line their pockets with. And we can feel good
about ourselves and pat
ourselves in the back and think like we're doing good for other countries, but
we're really not again,
feel good or do good. It's always a good question to ask. And so I think, I
think we're, I think
we're working towards those solutions in Congress now. Well, Dan, we got to get
you on your flight.
So I'm going to let you go. So it's already three 20 here. Oh, it's sad. That's
sad. But it's been fun.
It was a great conversation. I really appreciate it. And thank you very much
for your time, man.
Thank you. Thank you. Dan Crenshaw, ladies and gentlemen, goodbye.
Bye.