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Rand Paul is the junior United States Senator from Kentucky and a member of the Republican Party. He is the chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and serves on several others, including the Committee on Foreign Relations. Paul is also a physician and the author of several books, the most recent of which is “Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up.” Look for it wherever books are sold. www.paul.senate.govwww.regnery.com/9781684515134/deception/https://rumble.com/c/RandPaul
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Nice to meet you, sir.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
Great to be in Austin, you know.
Have you been here?
You've been here before.
You know, I grew up in Texas, and so we used to come up here for live music.
I went to Baylor, and there was no music, no dancing.
If you wanted to hear some live music, you came to Austin.
So I've been here many times.
Nice. It's a great spot.
So here's your book, Deception, The Great Cover-Up.
You were a lone voice of reason during the pandemic that, you know, for me, you
were extremely valuable.
And I was cheering you on every step of the way when you were grilling Anthony
Fauci.
With all due respect, you do not know what you are talking about.
That guy was driving me fucking crazy.
It was mind-numbing how many people were going along with it and how many
people just accepted what he was saying, ignored all the evidence that pointed
to gain-of-function research, didn't freak out when it was quite obvious that
he was lying about gain-of-function research.
And I just thank God that you were grilling him.
And at least it was on the record.
And we could all watch it and see it.
One of the greatest tragedies, and we knew this within days, was that children
weren't getting sick.
But that should have been used to our advantage.
Children did not get sick.
No child without a health issue really died.
Well, they got sick.
But it wasn't dangerous for them.
My kids both got it.
Right.
But most of them had a very mild illness.
And the point is, is that we knew this in China in the first couple of weeks.
And we could have left the schools open.
And some countries left the schools open.
And for the most part, Sweden left their schools open and treated this
completely different and turned out with a similar – everybody wound up with
a similar death rate with primarily the people dying where people were older
and overweight or both.
Right.
And the argument was, you know, you're going to bring it home and you're going
to infect your grandma and she's going to die.
All right.
The argument didn't really hold water, though, because everybody got it anyway.
But we didn't know that in the beginning, right?
In the beginning, they were lying and they were saying that – although we now
know that there was no data that showed that the vaccine stopped infection and
stopped transmission.
But here's another thought.
You could have said, yeah, kids could take it to their grandparents.
So until the kid has gotten it and recovered for two weeks, tell them not to
visit their grandparents.
You know what I mean?
Well, the problem was people that live with their grandparents.
Yeah, I know.
And there would be the exceptions to the rule.
But most of the people – the death rate we already knew in China was very,
very small once you added in the kids.
Initially, they were saying it was a 3% death rate, which would have been –
instead of 1 million people, you know, would have been significantly more.
3 million people may have died.
But they knew the death rate was less than that in China early on.
But part of the reason they thought it was so high is they weren't counting all
the asymptomatic cases.
You know, they knew how many people were sick and how many people died, but the
denominator was the number of people who actually were sick or who actually got
the infection, but they weren't counting millions of people.
But Anthony Fauci denied this at every step.
He denied that natural immunity would protect you.
And one of my favorite quotes was from a guy named Martin Koldorf.
He was an epidemiologist at Harvard who ended up getting fired.
But recently he tweeted out – it was about a year or two ago – he said,
well, we knew about natural immunity from the time of the Athenian plague in 436
B.C.
And we knew that knowledge until 2020.
Then we lost all knowledge of natural immunity.
But the good news is in 2025, we're starting to get back that knowledge.
But this was – Anthony Fauci knew better.
You know, he couldn't even read his own basic immunology books about, you know,
the fact that you do develop immunity.
Is it perfect?
No.
Can you get COVID more than once?
Yes.
But I defy you to tell me – somebody who got it the second time who died the
second time.
You know what I mean?
People got it less severely so the second time they got it, if they got it at
all.
Much less severely so.
I got it twice.
And the second time, I couldn't even believe it was actually COVID.
It was back when we were testing every day.
We would test all the guests.
We would test all the staff before we did the show.
And I came in and I had the sniffles.
That's it.
And they said, do you have COVID?
And I was like, this is hilarious.
And I understand you did so well because your personal doctor was Sanjay Gupta.
That is – that clip of you and he on the program is my favorite clip of all
time.
I don't know what he thought was going to happen.
I think he just thought he was going to come in here and CNN was going to send
their medical mercenary in with all his knowledge.
But you can't argue with someone when you can't use facts.
Right.
So he didn't have any facts at his disposal.
And he was working for a network that was openly lying about me taking veterinary
medicine.
Like the whole thing was surreal.
And for someone who is, you know, up until 2020, I mean, I was reasonably distrustful
of mainstream news, but in a normal way.
Like I'm sure they bend things a little bit or twist things a little bit.
I would have never thought I would watch a campaign against me like that where
every night it was horse dewormer, horse dewormer, Joe Rogan, dangerous
conspiracy theories, COVID denier, vaccine denier.
I was like, this is fascinating.
I think it brings up a broader question, too, that when people tell you there's
a consensus and because the consensus exists, you cannot object.
I think that's a real danger to openness, to new ideas.
But it's also a danger in medicine and in medicine to say this is the consensus
and we're not going to do this.
So in the first month of this, maybe first or second month, Fauci comes in and
I said, you know, many people who die from the flesh eating bacteria,
which is not the same, but it's a serious illness.
What they give them to try to treat them to prevent death and loss of limbs is
high dose IV steroids.
And I had a friend whose life was saved.
He didn't lose any of his limbs and he had this terrible illness.
And so I asked Anthony Fauci, I said, do you think there's a chance as they're
getting very, very sick and their lungs are filling up with fluid that we could
try high dose IV steroids like we do in other infections?
And he said, oh, no, no, we've tried that.
Turns out, and we mentioned this in the book, the best treatment when you were
just about to go on the ventilator or on the ventilator when you have a 50%
chance of dying at that point was IV steroids, an old generic medicine that big
pharma doesn't make much money off of.
Which steroids in particular were they using?
It's called Solumedrol, but it's just IV steroids.
And it was a 36% reduction in death, which is pretty significant when you're in
the ICU.
The people in the ICU were very, very sick.
It was a third of them had a reduction in death by taking IV steroids.
But he was dismissing it from the very beginning and already acting like, oh, I
know it's not going to work and we're going to try remdesivir, which turned out
not to work very well.
Not only that, it gives people kidney failure.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, he has a history of using medicine that has already been through
the approval rating with, you know, what they did with AZT during the pandemic
of AIDS.
Right.
And that proved to be horrific, a terrible disaster.
It's just amazing that the same guy ran the same playbook, you know?
Yeah, no, and it was really sad.
And the other thing about natural immunity that needed to be brought up is, so
all the people that were declared essential kept working.
Like if you worked in a meat processing pack, these are hardworking people.
Many of them, you know, they're busting their butt all day long.
And there'd be like 296 people at a meatpacking place in Missouri.
All of them got COVID.
Most of them survived.
But what we should have been telling them is two weeks after you got it, come
back to work.
You don't have to wear a mask now.
You've had it.
You have immunity.
You won't spread it to your family.
And guess what?
All the unknown about whether you're going to die or not, you survived and you're
done.
But instead, we told people you might get it again and you still might die.
And you've got to wear a mask all day long when in reality, we should have been
celebrating the people who recovered and letting them have their freedom back.
Well, there was also this kooky thing where after you got over the disease,
they wanted you to get vaccinated, which was strange.
It was almost like they wanted you to join the team.
Like take the blood oath.
Yeah, I met a man in Orange County and his mom was like 83 and she was very
sick and she ultimately died from COVID probably.
But she went to the hospital with COVID.
They wouldn't admit her until she was vaccinated for COVID while she had COVID,
which is actually against all recommendations.
And this is the problem with the mass vaccination thing.
If you're going to Walgreens, do you think they ask you if you've had COVID
recently before they gave you a shot?
And so really the best medical recommendation for a young person is, one, you
don't need the COVID vaccine.
But you certainly shouldn't be taking it close to when you've had an infection
because you've got an immune response that's going against the disease.
Then you add in another stimulant to it that's actually related to an increase
in the rate of the heart inflammation that comes along with vaccinating some of
the young people.
Well, there's also the weirdness of what happened during the Reagan
administration with vaccines where they're no longer liable for any vaccine
injuries.
And when you call this a vaccine, it's very different than any vaccine that had
ever been used before.
But yet you have all of these injuries that people have no recourse.
My dad was in Congress at the time and voted against, you know, giving them the
liability protection.
And he also was there when they had the swine flu epidemic.
And in that, more people died from the swine flu vaccine.
And I think there were no deaths from swine flu.
They said, oh, it's going to take over the world and, you know, we're going to
lose, you know, 5% of our public.
Nobody died.
The epidemic quickly stopped.
But then several people got Guillain-Barre and a few people died from the
vaccine.
And I'm not against vaccines.
Look, there are many miracles to vaccines, but they should be used judiciously.
And the risk and benefit for each individual.
And it turns out COVID had an age differential that was more significant
probably than any disease we've ever seen.
It really was an old person's disease.
Yeah.
An old person and people with comorbidities.
Exactly.
It was really bad for obese people.
But, you know, the disease aside, what was it like for you to watch this play
being run?
Because that's essentially what it was.
It was like there was a play being run.
And you had to follow whatever their narrative was to the T or you'd be
attacked.
You, I mean, and you would see these people that were acting like soldiers for
the pharmaceutical drug complex.
I mean, they would go out there and just brutally attack anybody who deviated
from the narrative, say the most awful things, talk about how there's blood on
your hands.
Like it was very strange.
Well, the belief in the vaccines and the belief that you should do it was like
a religious belief.
And that's the way they treated it.
So if you didn't believe in it, you were someone to be demonized as a non-believer.
You were to be cast out and you weren't patriotic if you weren't wearing a mask.
And even if I've already had it, I'm walking down the hallway, you know,
between the office buildings in the Capitol and all those reporters.
They're 22 years old.
Most of them are journalist majors.
They never had a science course in their life.
And they're lecturing me about why I should be wearing a mask.
And it's like, I already had the disease.
I've been filled up three weeks.
I don't need to wear a mask.
I've got immunity.
Well, how do you know that?
But even in the beginning when they said they didn't know, they did know.
We had an outbreak in 2003.
It was a different coronavirus.
It was the first SARS virus.
But we knew that those people 17 years later still had T cells and still had
immunity to it.
One of my favorite stories, and we include this in the book, was there was a
woman and she was 102.
She goes to the hospital and they bring her family in.
They're talking to her daughter who's 85.
Says, we don't think your mom's going to make it.
And she said, have you met my mom?
And they said, well, and she survived.
But while she was there, they decided to test her for antibodies to the Spanish
flu.
Because when she was six months old, her mother was coming across the Atlantic.
Her mom died from the Spanish flu.
She got it, survived.
They tested her 100 years later.
She still had antibodies to the Spanish flu.
So immunity lasts a long damn time.
Wow.
That's crazy.
But what was it like being in the government and seeing all this play out and
that it was illogical?
It didn't make any sense.
But yet everyone was following the playbook.
Well, people without any kind of scientific background were lecturing people.
Sherrod Brown, Sherrod Brown from Ohio was a senator.
He was the worst.
He would stop the proceedings and start pointing and yelling at me for not
having a mask.
In the house, they made them wear the mask.
And so you got everybody in there with a mask.
I got the infection like in March of 2020.
So I got it just as it came over.
I'm all healed up.
I volunteered in the hospital when I was done because I had immunity.
And at that time, you're right, we didn't know everything.
And there were some risks to the orderlies and nurses.
So when they had to rotate patients that were on the ventilator, I would go in
and help them.
So one less person had to go in the room because I had immunity.
And everybody acknowledged that I did at my local hospital.
They didn't ask.
There was no vaccine at the time anyway.
And so but they all acknowledged that, oh, this is great.
He's coming in.
He has immunity.
And he can help take the place of someone else who's having to risk being in
the room when we move patients around.
One of my favorite scenes was there was a musical performance where there was a
bunch of flutists.
And they had masks on with a whole cutout so they could play their flute
through the mask.
I was like, this is wild.
I mean.
Well, yeah.
Explain to me the science of that.
I can eat my peanuts for 20 minutes on the plane.
And my favorite is the some of the flight attendants were great.
Some of them would actually come to me and pass messages.
I would get a little folded up message.
Thank you for what you're doing.
Thank you for challenging Fauci.
But then some of them were Karens.
And it brings out the worst in you.
A little bit of power can bring out the worst in people.
And some of them were, you know, sir, you're not eating your peanuts faster.
Eat your peanuts faster.
You need to put your mask on in between.
They don't really serve peanuts on planes anymore.
You're dating yourself.
Yeah, they still do have peanuts on the plane.
But are peanuts, don't they keep them off planes because people have severe
peanut allergies?
They do.
And that's a whole other story.
And have you ever had Marty McCary on?
I have not, but I'm trying to.
Yeah, he wrote a book called Blind Spots.
And in it he writes about the peanut allergy.
Right.
And you know how you prevent the peanut allergy?
Give kids peanuts when they're very young.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And now the recommendation, even from the American Pediatric Association, who
are terrible,
they're the worst people in the world on vaccine mythology and religiosity.
But they finally came around.
They said, don't get peanut butter for like a decade.
We've got all these allergies.
But now they've finally, I think, changed their official position.
And I think in three months you're supposed to start introducing peanut butter
to your kid.
Why do you think they're the worst when you said they're the worst on that?
It's a blind notion.
And it isn't based on risk-benefit analysis or anything.
It's this devotion that you're a good person, but you're also a smart person if
you believe.
But it's in all vaccines.
And they've made the mistake because sometimes they had the first rotavirus
vaccine 15 years ago they gave.
And they'd take it off the market because six months later they learned that
something called intussusception,
where the intestines go inside each other, which can be a real problem for a
child,
was happening more often with a vaccine.
They had to pull the vaccine.
But vaccines are like anything else.
It's like you and I would sit down and we'd talk about your drugs,
and I'd talk about the side effects of each one, what your disease is, and what
we can do.
Like I'm not completely – like, for example, with the COVID vaccine,
I don't think children should take it because I think the risk of the heart
inflammation
is greater than the chance of the disease.
Early on, they said for old people and overweight people that reduced hospitalization
and death.
But I've been talking to the CDC because I want to know is that still true.
So let's do a new study.
The virus has progressively gotten less dangerous.
The community has progressively gotten more immunity.
So what was true in 2020 may no longer be true.
I want to know if you're over 65 and I give 1,000 people the vaccine, the brand
new one, whatever it is,
and I can give 1,000 people no vaccine is a reduction in hospitalization and
death
because this isn't 2020 anymore.
Well, not only that, I mean, when was the last time you heard of someone dying
or being hospitalized?
That's what I mean.
It's not happening.
It's not happening.
And so –
But it's also because the strains, the variants have decreased in severity.
The variants have become less – they've become less dangerous, and we've also
increased our amount of immunity.
And so we should study this again.
Why?
Because big pharma is just making a gazillion dollars off of still scaring
everybody over 65.
And if it still works, I'll come on your show and say, take it if you're over
65.
But I don't know if it works.
And I doubt that it works because I don't hear of anybody dying from COVID
anymore.
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But it's also this weird binary thing where it's like there's one thing that
you could take
and that's it.
There's no talk about strengthening your immune system with vitamin supplementation.
And what are the other options that you could have once you actually get sick?
Right.
Like what can you do?
IV vitamins are fantastic.
Right.
There's a lot of different things that people can do that are never recommended.
And it's strange.
And really the two things that were controversial, at least among a lot of
things, but ivermectin
and hydroxychloroquine.
And people will ask me about it and I'll say, I don't know.
The government refused to study it.
And so it's very difficult because if you took in, let's say, 2020, the virus
was dangerous.
And let's say you took 5,000 people under the age of 50 and you gave them ivermectin
and you did 5,000 people and you gave them nothing.
Almost nobody died in either category.
So it was hard to prove.
But I don't think ivermectin was harmful.
I don't think hydroxychloroquine was harmful either.
But they wouldn't study it.
And you need a big study.
So to figure out since the death rate was so low for healthy people, you might
need 10,000
people in each arm of the study to figure out what works and didn't work.
There were some international studies showing ivermectin worked and hydroxychloroquine.
There weren't many here, but Fauci shut them all down.
You know, they started to study and then he shut it down.
How does one guy get that kind of power?
He was there forever.
You know, he was there about as long as I wrote an op-ed comparing him to J.
Edgar Hoover.
You know, Hoover was like there for 70 years, abused the civil liberties of
people protesting
for civil rights.
He abused the liberty and the privacy of people protesting the Vietnam War.
And so Hoover was a terrible person with his longevity.
I think Fauci ranks right up there with his disregard for people's privacy.
But even the stuff about the masks, you know that we studied pandemics for a
decade.
Bill Gates has been given gazillions of dollars.
He's gotten the government to spend money.
And when we studied pandemics all the way up until 2020, there was never a
recommendation
for masks among the public for respiratory virus.
He recommended against, Fauci recommended against masks in a very public
interview that was
a video where he was talking about, you know, it's not going to help you.
And worse, maybe you'll mess with your face.
And yeah, well, the good one was the, it was that Birdwell woman.
She was in the administration.
She writes him a letter in January.
She says, I have to go to a conference.
Should I wear a mask?
And he writes back to her, no, we've done all the studies and there's no
evidence that
for a respiratory virus, it works.
And it turns out almost all the masks, the cloth masks, you know, you've heard
all this.
The pores were bigger than the virus.
The virus goes through them.
The surgical mask a little better.
But if you have these big gaps on either side, you think the virus isn't going
around
the mask.
And it probably goes through that mask also.
The N95 mask, if you're a doctor or a nurse and you're going in and out of a
room and you
wash your hands and throw away the mask, there probably is some value.
So in the hospital, they recommended this.
But one of the reasons Anthony Fauci was such a danger is what he recommended
was actually
dangerous.
So he's wearing a Washington Nationals cloth mask to show people, or he's
wearing a Black
Lives Matter mask to show people he cares.
But if that's the advice and you're 75 years old and your wife has COVID and
you're going
in her room to take her food and you wear a cloth mask, you are risking getting
COVID and
dying yourself.
He gave us the wrong advice.
And then people thought they were safe with a cloth mask, so they're actually
doing something
they shouldn't do.
Or they're, you know, 85 years old and they're going to church, but they're
wearing a cloth mask.
Well, know that.
You probably shouldn't go to church, frankly.
You shouldn't be told you can't go to church.
But actually, the advice early on to avoid crowds and stay home if you were
older or vulnerable.
But the kids should have just gone to school and tried to stay away from, you
know, people.
But eventually, it happened anyway.
It went everywhere.
There was no stopping this virus.
Well, there's never been a respiratory virus.
It stopped with a vaccine anyway, right?
No, the flu vaccine doesn't really stop with it either.
And I'm trying to get more statistics on the flu vaccine as well to see if it's
accurate.
Because I think they lie to us every year about, you know, they say, oh, well,
it was, you know,
it wasn't even the same category or type.
But you're getting some crossover effect.
I think most of the time that is being inflated.
What they're telling you is not actually true.
And I'm trying to get them at the CDC to study all of this again because they
have the power
and the numbers to look at large numbers.
And let's be objective and tell people, you know, what is the odds next year
the flu vaccine
will work for you?
And we used to say, well, it may not work, but if you're at risk, go ahead and
take it.
So it used to be over 50 or over 65.
Now they want everybody to take the flu vaccine.
And it probably is probably better unless your child has an immunodeficiency
disease to go
ahead and get these and develop immunity over time.
And what do you think is going on?
Like why are they recommending this?
Is this purely a profit thing?
I think if they were here, they would argue that it's science and it isn't for
profit.
But they argue vigorously against revealing if they're receiving money from Big
Pharma.
So what I ask is if you're on the vaccine committee and you're going to
recommend that every child
get a COVID vaccine, shouldn't you have to release whether you get royalties,
you know,
from Big Pharma?
And Anthony Fauci in committee said, we don't have to do it.
The law, and he quoted the law, says we don't have to do it.
So for two, three, four years now, I'm still trying to get this passed.
I've gotten all the Republicans to agree to it.
And I've gotten all the Democrats, but two or three.
And I'm still trying to get it passed unanimously.
But it would say if you're a government scientist and you get royalties from
Pfizer or from one
of the big companies, you have to actually list it on a form.
And really, you should be then recused from voting.
Well, also, why are doctors allowed to be financially incentivized?
Yeah, that should be considered to be unethical or inappropriate.
We did change some of the things with pharma and gifts to doctors about 10
years ago.
It is better than it used to be as far as gifts to doctors, except that they
don't call this
a gift.
I think this should be under the gift ban.
You should not be getting paid to use certain things because I think it's
really, I think
it's actually malpractice to give children the COVID vaccine.
Are you aware of Mary Talley Bowden?
Yep.
Yeah.
You know her story?
Not a lot.
I've met her before, I think.
She told me that if, you know, she has a small practice that's in like a strip
mall, I believe,
outside of Houston.
She said that in her small practice, if she had vaccinated everyone, she would
have been
compensated $1.5 million.
It's a significant amount of money.
Yeah.
And that people have listed.
Yeah.
No, it's insane.
And it's the one sort of exception to we have all these things preventing kickbacks
to doctors,
except for vaccines, and that's somehow exempt.
So, yeah.
Now, we've looked at whether legislation could fix this, and I don't think we
found a good
answer.
But I have definitely looked to see if there's a way Congress can try to fix
this.
What's amazing to me is how many people in the general public are not skeptical.
How many people in the general public will hear this kind of conversation, and
immediately
their hackles get up, and they want to argue against this.
Vaccines have saved more.
Vaccines are so important.
And they have no information.
They've done no research.
They've never looked at it objectively.
They don't understand the whole history of compensation and what happened with
the immunity.
So, in the book, I tell the story of George Washington.
One, to let people know I'm not against.
And the smallpox vaccine was amazing.
And in George Washington's day, it was actually live.
So that what you did is, if you'd had smallpox, and you were doing pretty well,
and you survived,
and you didn't have a bad case, you had a minor case, you had four or five pox,
not a lot.
As you were recovering, they'd open a scab, take pus from your arm, stab
somebody else's arm,
and take the pus from your infection and stick it into someone else.
That's a live vaccine.
That's crazy.
But, and they did have some people die from it, but the death rate from smallpox
was one out of three.
And when it would show up in Boston, you'd have like 20,000 people die, and the
whole town would get it.
It was terrible.
And so people actually chose, but people weren't being forced to do it.
But the George Washington case is very instructive.
Martha wants to come visit him at the camps, at the war camps.
And there were more deaths in the Revolutionary War from disease than there
were from bullets.
He says, you can't come until you're vaccinated for smallpox.
It wasn't vaccinated.
It was called inoculated because you're getting stuck with a disease, not a
vaccine.
And, but people say, well, I guess Washington took it too, if he believes so
much in this.
Well, they know because he'd already had smallpox.
He got smallpox when he was 15 in Barbados.
They understood immunity.
We have understood immunity for thousands of years, and yet it just went out
the window with Anthony Fauci saying, well, we just don't know.
We just won't.
We just don't know.
We do know.
We don't always know how perfect it's going to be, but we do know that nobody
got COVID the second time around and had a worst case the second time around.
Well, one thing we do know is that when Biden left office, he was granted this
very bizarre pardon where he got a pardon that goes back to 2014 for crimes he
was never accused of, never convicted.
I mean, it's got to be one of the first times that anybody's ever been pardoned.
And I think it should be challenged.
And so we have, under the Biden administration, I sent criminal referrals for
Anthony Fauci to Merrick Garland twice, and I sent them evidence that he had
lied to Congress, which was a felony.
They just ignored me.
I've been working with Bobby Kennedy, and he's been very helpful on this.
I have good relationship with him.
He's given us a lot of information, and we've looked at the communications.
And in Anthony Fauci's communications, we now have evidence that he was telling
people like Francis Collins, read this and destroy it.
Well, you can't do that.
The executive branch, when they communicate, they're required to keep their
communications, and they're required to do it on government devices.
So we have this evidence, and I've summarized it again in a criminal referral
to Trump's attorney general, and I still haven't gotten action.
But there's a couple reasons we should do it.
One, he shouldn't get away with lying.
He shouldn't get away with destroying records.
But, too, we should check the pardon.
Is an auto-pin pardon valid, and is a pardon a retrospective pardon back 10
years that doesn't mention a crime?
Can you give people a pardon for everything they did in a 10-year period?
I can't imagine, and I think the court might narrow that, but it doesn't happen
unless the Trump Justice Department will do something.
And I've been sending them referrals, and I can't get them to do anything.
I can't guarantee they'll win.
They might lose, but they ought to go to court, take it to court.
When you were having that conversation with him about gain-of-function research,
which clearly gain-of-function research was being done at the Wuhan lab, and he
was just standing in front saying that under the definition of gain-of-function
research that that does not qualify.
But what was that like?
We all knew he was lying, and he was parsing words.
He was trying to have a semantics type of argument.
But one of the reasons we know he's lying, and one of the things that I
presented as evidence, is there was a group text chain on February 1st of 2020.
So you have all these virologists who were saying privately it came from the
lab, and publicly it didn't.
You have them all communicating.
But one of the things Anthony Fauci says about the Wuhan lab is, he says, we
know it's dangerous and possible because we know they're doing gain-of-function
research.
So we're funding them.
He would never admit we're funding them because we were funding EcoHealth, this
intermediary.
So he said, we're not funding them.
Well, we're funding them through EcoHealth.
It's not gain-of-function, except for then he says the experiments they're
doing are gain-of-function.
And so I think everything about it was dishonest.
He got away with it because people in the scientific community still to this
day defend him.
And people on the left made it a partisan.
I don't know why this is a Republican-Democrat issue, but all of the main
networks still defend him.
You know, he was given a million-dollar prize.
Some nonprofit gave him a million-dollar prize.
How does a bureaucrat get to accept a million-dollar prize while they're
working for the government?
You tell me.
You work for the government.
Then when he leaves the government, he gets 24-7 limo, service, and security.
He's got people in front of his home stopping traffic like you do for a
president getting in the car, which I'm okay for former presidents.
That's about it.
You know, Anthony Fauci should have never got this.
I will say that Trump ended it, you know, and everybody said, oh, he'll be
killed.
And it's like, you know, I guarantee a lot of us have more threats than Anthony
Fauci has, and none of us have a limo picking us up every day.
Well, I'm sure he has threats.
I'm sure Anthony Fauci has threats, and I think he probably, you know, should
be concerned.
But so, yeah.
Just based on what everybody knows.
Right, but the government doesn't, you know, you're a famous person.
Government doesn't pay for your limousine.
Right.
He shouldn't have a limousine paid for by the government with 24-7 security.
No, no, I agree.
Also, how much money did he make?
Do we know?
We know he got the million-dollar prize.
We know he made more than the president towards the end.
He was making $450,000 a year.
But his wife, if you ever had an ethical problem, you know he went to, his wife.
His wife was in charge of bioethics for the NIH.
So if there was a question of whether or not his royalties were a conflict, he
would ask
his wife to find out if he was acting unethically.
She made about $250,000.
So they're really making a combined $700,000, which I don't, I'm not against
money.
You work hard, people pay you money.
I'm all for it.
But I am against the government paying bureaucrats that kind of money.
And so, and he really, there should be term limits for people in those
positions.
You shouldn't be there for 40 years.
So he appointed all the people beneath him, and he stacked the deck.
And, you know, I asked the question, and this was an email from Francis Collins
to Anthony
Fauci, and he says, take them down, talking about Jay Bhattacharya, the head of
the NIH
now, talking about Martin Kulldorff, and then an epidemiologist from Oxford,
take them down.
And so when I have scientists come before my committee, I'll ask them the first
question.
Have you ever, or would you ever, send another scientist a note saying to take
down a fellow
scientist you disagreed with?
My goodness, what kind of, that sounds like the mafia or something.
It doesn't sound like someone who's supposed to be above the fray, objective
scientist.
Were there any other avenues for revenue for him because of the creation of the
vaccine or
any other medications that he profited from?
I don't think with this, with the current one, we don't know all of his royalties.
He would say, oh, I got $25 or something.
That's not, it might've been true for a year, but there are years in the past
that he was
getting more.
The, I think, Open the Books or the Open Secrets, that group has gone through
and through Freedom
of Information has gotten information that like 1,500 doctors got $1.5 billion
or 1,500
scientists got $1.5 billion in royalties.
So it's not an insignificant amount of money.
It's a lot of scientists.
And once again, I'm not even sure I'm forbidding it.
I just want to know if any of them are on a committee voting for the drug that
they got
money from that particular drug company.
The woman that was appointed for the NIH under Biden and never got approved,
you know, she
may well be an ethical person, but I think she's done research grants of $231
million from
Pfizer and it was listed.
And it doesn't mean she's a dishonest person, but I wonder how she could be
objective with
Pfizer if through her career and all that money didn't go to her, it was grants
that she oversaw
and some of the money went to her.
And that doesn't mean it's illegal or unethical, but I think it's hard for her
to judge objectively
a company that has been the main financer of her entire career.
Well, it certainly incentivizes her to be more favorable towards them, clearly.
Like you follow human nature.
I mean, it just makes sense.
Now, Bobby Kennedy has put, you know, and the left-wing people hate all the
people he's
put on there.
I think he's doing a good job of getting the people out who were so pro-vaccine
that it
was a religion for them.
And I think they have better people.
And I've noticed as they go around the room, I don't know if you've seen this
when they
vote, they start by saying before their vote, I have no conflicts of interest.
They are verbally announcing, I have no conflicts of interest, which is a big
improvement.
But I really want to see all the scientists, who they get it from, how much,
and then let,
you know, part of oversight is not just Congress.
It's the public.
It's people who analyze these issues, looking in and seeing how much they made
and what do
they oversee.
Is there a conflict of interest?
What is, like, what is the tone like in the government now in comparison to
when the pandemic
was going on?
Well, I'd say it's a calmer tone.
There was hysteria that sort of ruled the day.
And I think that, you know, and this was sort of the problem in how Anthony Fauci
became
so prominent.
You know, there was, you know, the president was out speaking, and the
president speaks
off the cuff and doesn't always say things that are always exactly accurate.
Right.
And so as he was saying stuff, many of these sort of establishment senators
were saying,
we need somebody else, we need a scientist at those press conferences.
So it was actually many of my colleagues who pushed Anthony Fauci, pushed them
through Pence
and pushed them through the president to accept him.
And one of the things that's still inexplicable to this day is that as Anthony
Fauci leaves
government, President Trump gives him a gold medal, a presidential medal of
honor, you
know, as he leaves, which, you know, knowing what we know, I think is should
have never
happened.
Yeah.
The people that were so vehemently opposed to your position and the people that
were so
pro-vaccine and pro-mat, like a lot of them are still in the government.
Yeah.
And a lot of them are still in the news media, too.
I was called all kinds of names by people.
And it turns out that almost everything I was complaining about, it turns out
in retrospect,
I was right about most of them.
The masks, really, most of them didn't work.
And even the ones that work, a lot of people don't realize this.
An N95 mask works to a certain degree.
But once you've touched it, you've contaminated it.
And also after you've worn it for four hours, the moisture from your breath
gets rid of the
electrostatic charge and it doesn't really work very well.
So the doctors don't reuse them.
They might use them a couple times.
You're breathing in your own bacteria.
Doctors throw them away and wash their hands after every, if you can do that,
there's maybe
some value or someone's sick in your house.
But for the general public, riding in a car, particularly when you ride by
yourself in a
car, an N95 mask does not help you.
I hate to tell the Democrats this.
I like when they do it.
Yeah.
I think it's important.
It's important when people drive with a mask on because it lets me know who's
out of their
fucking mind.
But it also, you don't have to ask them what party to register.
It's automatic.
Yeah.
I said it was a Democrat's MAGA hat.
Yeah.
If you're hiking the Appalachian Trail and you see someone out by themselves
and they have
an N95 mask on, you can probably guess their party registration.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
It was a strange time to go through.
It's interesting.
Most of the people that were at CNN are gone now, except Brian Stelter.
They got rid of him and then that's how bad the talent is out there.
They had to bring him back.
Well, yeah, one of them called me a bloviating ass and I haven't been back on
since then,
about four years ago, and said I was so awful to Anthony Fauci and that
everything I said
was dangerous and I was endangering lives.
But I was right about the masks.
I was right about natural immunity.
But I was also right about this six feet of distance.
It's actually the opposite of what they told you.
So let's say you were 80 years old and you and I were coming together in March
of 2020.
And, well, let's say even worse, we're going to go to choir practice, but we're
going to
spread out six feet apart.
Is that safe for an 85-year-old to go?
No, they should be staying at home.
That's the best advice for them.
Stay at home in March of 2020.
Because guess what?
The virus goes 30 feet, 40 feet.
You know, if you're in this room.
It was just made up.
Yeah, it was made up, but it was made up in the wrong direction.
So what it did is encourage people to stay six feet apart from people, go to a
crowded
room, go to choir practice and just stay away from people.
But if you're at risk, you shouldn't be at choir practice, not by law, but by
advice.
So he actually gave you unsafe advice on the masks.
Cloth masks don't work.
So he's giving you unsafe advice to go help and feed your wife or your husband
with a cloth
mask on.
Natural immunity does work.
And he told you it doesn't work.
It was the opposite of everything he told you, but he also never got, and I
kept saying
this in the hearings, he needed humility, humility to know that there's a
possibility
he's wrong in what he's saying and it should be advice.
And this is what they don't get about public.
If I were the public health doctor and a new pandemic came up, I should give
advice, not
mandates, advice based on the best things we know.
And other doctors should give advice because there might be other doctors that
disagree.
with me on it.
So you can choose.
That's sort of the idea of getting a second opinion.
You go to your doctor and you think something's not quite right and he or she
wants to operate
on my leg and maybe I want to wait another three weeks, see if my leg feels
better in three
weeks.
You get another opinion or you go home and wait three weeks and see if you get
better.
When you're an ophthalmologist, right?
Right.
When you're one of the rare people that's in the government that does have a
background in
medicine and at least in medical training and you're experiencing all this illogical
shit,
like what is, what is that like for you?
Did you, did you try to educate your family?
You, you, you try, but most of them aren't willing to listen and you wonder now
if they've
even gotten it.
But my favorite is sort of the response you get because the internet is full of
trolls.
And so one of the favorite insults, if you'll read insults of me, oh, you know,
he's just
a failed dental assistant.
And it's like, well, not quite, but.
How'd they come up with that one?
I don't know.
I don't know.
They somehow think I'm a dentist or an optometrist and I fit glasses or
something.
None of that's really true.
But the people, it takes a long time for people.
I think slowly some of them, like, I think half the Democrats actually think it
may have
come from the lab now.
They're not real outspoken about it.
But.
Only half.
Maybe.
What's going on with the other half.
Of the elected one.
Yeah.
This is maybe.
The other half still believe in a natural spillover.
Three years into this, the doctor of the Senate was still recommending there
are 16 year olds
that are pages.
They're 15, 16 years old that they get three vaccines.
And I absolutely steadfastly think that that's malpractice and a risk to them.
So I fought it and I would come to the floor.
And this is weird.
No one's ever done this.
I would ask on the floor of the Senate for unanimous consent to pass a rule of
the Senate
that they don't, they can, they can opt out of this program.
You know, they can listen, write, check something and opt out.
Because it turns out that the myocarditis increases in prevalence the more you
take.
So if you take one COVID vaccine, it's less likely you get myocarditis.
If you take a second one, it's a little more likely a third one.
So it's the opposite of what you should be telling children.
And the death rate for a healthy 16 year old really is essentially zero.
I mean, it is so close to zero.
Somebody might be able to find a healthy year old that died at 16.
Almost everybody that was on CNN, not to keep mentioning CNN, but they would
put these people
on there and they would hide the fact that they had terminal cancer.
And it is sad that a child dies anytime, but they were dying from their cancer
and they just
happened to have COVID, you know.
And it was dishonest because they were trying to scare regular people.
Don't send your kid to school.
That teacher's union is right.
We should never go back to school.
We need another year out, which was just crazy.
Well, it's also, there's a giant incentive that in this country and in New
Zealand, they're
the only two countries in the world where they allow pharmaceutical drug
companies to advertise.
And it's a problem.
I very rarely watch regular television, but every now and then I'll just go,
what are these
fucking crazy people up to?
And I'll watch MSNBC or CNN.
And see a million drug ads.
The number of drug ads is staggering and the weirdness in those ads, the calm
tone of their
voice as they list off these horrific side effects.
Well, and the thing that's hard to imagine is there's sometimes for a disease
that like
5,000 people in the country have a disease that as a physician, even though I
know the names
of most of the diseases, I'll be kind of uncertain.
Now, I don't remember seeing anybody ever with that disease and yet it's being
advertised
on MSNBC and then the question is, do you think that affects what the newscasters
are saying
on the news?
And it does.
That's why they're so all in with this.
But you're right.
But they're not trying to use those ads to sell those drugs.
They're using the money by putting those ads up to make sure that those pundits
don't
talk badly about the pharmaceutical drug companies.
It's probably more about shaping the news than it is getting sales.
Well, the proof is in the pudding.
There have absolutely been horrific side effects of a bunch of different
pharmaceutical drugs.
You don't hear a peep about any of that stuff on CNN.
And you wonder who's buying a drug when they say, well, you could die.
You could become paralyzed.
You could have a stroke.
You could have a blood clot.
Explosive bloody diarrhea.
You could have lost all your memory, suicidal ideation.
They just list them off.
And they list them off like this.
Consult your doctor.
They're protecting you so you can take Ambien.
But God forbid you take a hemp gummy.
They will put your ass in jail if you take a hemp gummy.
And they've just recently outlawed all the hemp stuff.
And I've been fighting this for the last two months.
But all the hemp products, I know Texas actually has a lot.
They're all going to be banned within one year now.
Now, how did that get passed?
Mitch McConnell.
How is that guy still around when he just freezes up every now and again?
He locks up like Windows 95.
He is very, very powerful.
And a lot of people owe him.
You know, he raised money for decades, hundreds of millions of dollars, passed
it out to the
lesser known senators and helped them get elected when they would get
challenges.
And so then they all owe him.
And so I forced an amendment.
And it's funny.
Then the people on the Internet go, why are you doing this?
The government shut down.
Why are you gumming up the works with a vote on hemp?
Because they stuck it on the bill to reopen the government.
It's not my choice to talk about hemp at that time.
That was my only choice.
And so I brought forward an amendment.
I got like 20-something votes and 70 of them voted.
But they voted to set the limit and to change the amount of THC in the plant.
So all the plants are illegal now.
All the seeds are illegal.
There's a real industry of farmers who grow this.
And the thing is, who are we to tell somebody who can't sleep at night that an
Ambien is better
for them than taking a hemp gummy to go to sleep at night?
Or a veteran who could take Percocet or some kind of psychotropic drug or who
has anxiety or post-traumatic stress.
And we're going to tell them they can't take a hemp gummy.
I think it's insane and very much, you know, this presumption that we know what's
best for everyone.
Is this the alcohol lobby?
Like, what is the motivation?
There was a little bit of the alcohol lobby and the cannabis lobby.
The cannabis people hate the hemp people.
The cannabis people hate the hemp people.
Well, it's complicated.
The cannabis industry developed state by state.
And you really can't make a marijuana product in Colorado and sell it in
Kentucky.
It can't go across state lines.
The hemp, because it was legalized nationally, they were selling it across
state lines.
So we have big companies now that sell the hemp gummies.
You can order them through the mail across state lines until this law came
about.
And McConnell always felt it was an unintended consequence.
And some of the growth might have been, but I don't think it was, there were
some bad products out there.
And all of us, including the hemp vendors, said, all right, let's, let's
regulate this.
Let's not have 100 milligram gummies.
The more traditional is sort of like five milligrams.
That's in a drink or in a gummy that people will take.
Reasonable.
Yeah.
And, and, and I think I haven't taken it.
I'm for the freedom to take it, but I just, I sleep pretty good.
But, so it's not really something I can attest to exactly how it works.
But people who do take it to me that have one of the drinks say it might be
like drinking a beer or maybe not even drinking a beer when you drink one of
these THC drinks.
So the cannabis businesses in the states where it's legal don't want it legal
nationally because then it would interfere with their business because you'd be
able to order it through the mail.
Well, they'd probably accept it if we'd legalize cannabis nationally and then
they would compete with hemp.
Right.
But what was going on is we haven't legalized cannabis nationally.
We've legalized it state by state.
But I don't think even if your state has legal adult use and another one does,
I don't think you can transfer it across the state.
You're saying hemp, but you really mean THC.
That's for marijuana.
CBD and THC, correct?
Yeah.
CBD has a little bit of THC in it and so do the hemp gummies have some THC in
it and then the drinks do.
It's about five milligrams in a lot of the different doses.
There are different doses.
And so all of those are going to be illegal?
Yeah.
The McConnell language says you can't have more than 0.4 milligrams, which is
such a low number that I don't think will have any effect.
I mean, frankly, the THC is the effect.
Yeah.
And so if you make the THC number so small, I don't think people will take them.
The CBD oil, people might still take some of that, but I assume the effect that
people are getting from the CBD oil, if they rub it on, has to be the THC.
No, no. CBD itself with no THC has a beneficial effect.
There's CBD balm that you can use for arthritis and things along those lines.
That may still be legal.
The plant, though, the definition of the plant that the CBD oil comes from, so
they're going to have to re-hybridize all these plants.
What I was going to say was my mom, not my mom, rather, my wife's mom, uses CBD
with THC.
And she's found that that's more effective for arthritis and aches and pains
than CBD without it.
She's done both.
And she says the CBD with THC is more effective.
And there are some people, and once again, I'm not here to tell you to take it
or not take it.
I'm for the freedom for people to make their own decision.
There are some people with children who have seizures who take medications and
the kid still has 100 seizures a day, which isn't good for your brain and for
the child.
And some of them have added some CBD drops they give to the child of CBD oil
with the THC.
Right.
And they think it slows the seizures down some.
Yeah, I have a friend whose child has severe autism and sometimes has seizures,
and the only thing that stops the seizures is CBD with THC.
And the best way to think about it is I'll never forget this.
This was in, I think, 2007 when Romney was running for president and my dad was.
In fact, I know somebody who was a supporter of my dad in 2007.
I love you, Dad.
But anyway, they go up to Romney, and it's a person in a wheelchair with MS.
And they said, are you in favor of making it illegal?
I take marijuana at night to sleep.
Are you in favor of making that illegal for me to take it?
I have MS.
Would you be for making it illegal?
Romney looked right at him and said, I sure would.
And I was like, what kind of person says that?
What kind of person is so presumptuous of their moral position that they're
going to tell you it's immoral to take that but fine to take some, you know,
antipsychotic drug or some kind of narcotic that the pharmaceutical companies
sell, but we're not going to let you use marijuana?
Well, it's ignorance.
You know, it's people that have never consumed it and have these preconceived
notions of what it actually does versus what it does.
I mean, you'd be surprised at how many, you know, little old ladies are taking
CBD with THC in it for, you know, to help with their aches and pains and help
them sleep.
My joke when I tell people who's opposed to this, like McConnell, you know, who's
older than Dirt, is that they all watched Reefer Madness in 1937 at the matinee.
And they'll never forget what happens if you get that Reefer Madness.
And some of them probably were alive in 1937, could have actually seen the
movie.
But that's it.
It's an irrational sort of fear.
But on the other side of this, we're on a program that a lot of people will
hear.
I don't want people at home thinking, I want everybody and every 15-year-old
out there smoking marijuana after school.
I think there are some side effects to smoking marijuana all the time,
particularly for the developing brain.
And also drinking alcohol as well.
Same thing.
I'm for personal choice for adults.
And the problem with the whole Reefer Madness thing, I'm glad you brought that
up.
Do you know the whole story behind it?
No.
William Randolph Hearst.
William Randolph Hearst was responsible for this whole terrifying craze of
people thinking that marijuana was driving people nuts and jumping out of
buildings.
In 1930-something, I forget the year, they came up with a new product called
the decorticator.
And it was in Popular Science magazine, hemp, the new billion-dollar crop,
because they had this new machine that allowed them to effectively process hemp
fiber.
William Randolph Hearst owned Hearst Publications, but he also owned paper mills.
Hemp was a far more effective and far more durable form of paper.
He was going to compete with hemp.
And he had forests that he was using for his paper, where they were, you know,
for paper mills.
And hemp was going to replace all that.
It was a competitor.
So they were arguing against it as a commodity.
Marijuana was never a name for cannabis.
Marijuana was a name for a wild Mexican tobacco.
And so they started saying in his newspapers, they started printing these fake
stories about how blacks and Mexicans were taking this new drug and raping
white women.
And that's where Reefer Bandits came from.
And they called this new drug marijuana.
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I know this is going to be shocking to you, but that's the story of government.
Yeah.
Most things that come out in government, if you look beneath the surface, they
all have pretty names.
They have acronyms that say patriotism, the Patriot Act.
You must be anti-patriotic if you're not for the Patriot Act.
But most of the things they say, it's the opposite.
Or someone has put something forward that really is about, like, let's say it's
a banking regulation.
You say, this is going to protect the poor people.
But it turns out the banking regulation is easier paid for and absorbed by big
banks.
And so what happens to your small local bank and you say, how come all the
small banks get gobbled up by big banks?
It's because you put regulations on that who favored?
The big banks favor the regulations because it puts the small bank out of
business.
They get absorbed by the big bank.
And then the new banks trying to come in can't afford the compliance cost.
Right now, one of the extraordinary things we're doing with banks, and I don't
think many people know this, the Federal Reserve is now paying interest to big
banks on keeping reserves at the Federal Reserve.
There's $3 trillion there.
Last year, the big banks, primarily the big banks in New York, got $187 billion
in interest.
Previously, that interest would go back to the Treasury to offset the debt.
That's about 10% of our debt.
So our debt is 10% worse because we're now paying, and we never did this before
2010.
We never paid interest on reserves.
And what it means to pay interest on reserves is that it's an incentive for the
Fed just to leave it there.
Why loan it to you if you're expanding a business when I can just leave it here
and get 4%?
It also keeps interest rates from going down because if the Fed pays the big
bank 4%, are they going to loan it to you for 3.5% when it can just sit at the
Fed and gain 4%?
So it's kind of, you know, President Trump always wants what he wants, and
sometimes he wants good things.
We, you know, may not go about it the best way.
He wants interest rates to be lower.
I think most people do.
But one way to make interest lower is tell the Fed they can't pay interest to
these big banks.
Have you ever had a conversation with him about this?
I've been trying for like three months to get out of conversation with Besant,
and I held up one of their, with the Secretary of Treasury,
I held up one of their appointees last week, which is one of the things you do
to get the attention of the people you want to talk to.
And they've agreed to meet with me, but we're already, you know, halfway into
January.
But I'm trying to get a meeting with Besant to talk to him about this idea of
paying interest because they said,
oh, it'll only take $30 billion to set up the system.
Then it was a trillion.
Now it's $3 trillion.
And I think it just keeps growing and growing.
But that money really isn't being productive.
And it's a gift to these big banks.
When it comes to this THC thing, what can be done?
Trump's been good on some things.
You know, the whole idea of changing it from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 is an
improvement.
It's still illegal without a prescription.
But a lot of the research with marijuana didn't happen because Schedule 1 is
just almost impossible.
You've got to have like safes and guards and everything to deal with a Schedule
1 drug.
And so very little research occurred on marijuana over time.
And so lowering the schedule is a good idea.
State by state has kind of worked in the sense that it's allowed people to see
what it's like and get used to it.
But some of the states have backtracked and some are worried that they went too
far.
It's harder to determine, I think, acute intoxication if someone's driving
under the influence to do a test.
I would guess the technology should be out there.
But I don't know that it's widely available.
I think it would have to be a blood test, right?
I don't know.
If you've consumed an edible, you're not going to be able to get something with
a breathalyzer.
I don't know that for certain.
Your breath is amazing what it actually has in it.
So I don't know the answer to that.
So maybe it's just the testing is not adequate.
Yeah, which reminds me, there's a guy in California I've met, just you meet
extraordinary people.
He's actually studying contents of what you exhale to look for cancer markers.
So, I mean, they're really minute, but he's going to try to diagnose things
like, you know, you'll hear of a friend, you know,
who's like 45 years old and has pancreatic cancer, or we actually have a former
senator right now, Ben Sasse,
who says he has stage four pancreatic cancer.
And the reason it spreads before you know you have it.
But he's trying to get a, and he has a test that measures markers just from
what you exhale to try to pick up on cancers before they'd be detected.
So there's a possibility that they'd come up with some sort of a detection
method to find out if you're intoxicated.
I think probably.
And I don't know the technology that well.
But it's either way, just for responsible use for adults,
it just doesn't make any sense that they would change it from what it is now
and make it more restrictive.
Right.
I don't think any states have gone backwards.
Most states have gone forward.
We find the, in Kentucky, we don't have adult use, but we have, I think we've
just legalized the medical.
But the way medical works, it's still strictly by state.
So you have to have physicians who decide to prescribe it, farmers who decide
to grow it.
And it's a little bit of a niche industry.
And, you know, like most industries in our country, one state gets really good
and they export it to other states.
And some climates are better for growing it, but that has been a hindrance to
the marijuana industry.
Well, it's also you're enabling the cartel to make money off of it.
That's the real problem.
I had a gentleman on my podcast named John Norris.
He was a game warden in California and, you know, just checking fishing
licenses and making sure that people are following the laws.
And wound up chasing down a dry creek and trying to find out, like, had a
farmer diverted the creek, like what had happened here.
Well, it turned out there was an illegal grow operation by the cartel.
Because when California made marijuana legal in the state for adult use, what
they did was make it a misdemeanor to grow it illegally.
So it's just a misdemeanor.
So the cartel just started growing it in state parks and forests.
And so they would find these heavily armed cartel operations in the middle of
national parks and national forests.
And, you know, his group became like he's got a great book called Hidden War
and his his organization became essentially a tactical group.
You know, they had Belgian Malinois and bulletproof vests and they were having
shootouts with the cartel in the forest because these guys were growing this
stuff.
And 90 percent of all the marijuana that's sold in these states where it's
illegal was being grown in a state where it's only a misdemeanor to grow it.
So they're growing it in California and they were using all sorts of horrific
pesticides and herbicides that are illegal everywhere else.
But they would use them.
And so you'd get pesticide poisoning, herbicide poisoning.
You know, it's crazy.
It's like we're it's just responsible adult use.
We're curtailing.
And the way we're doing this is by propping up these illegal drug cartels the
same way that during alcohol prohibition, they propped up the mob.
Right.
And this is what people don't understand about prohibition.
When you have prohibition, you get products that are more dangerous because
they're not openly regulated.
You also have more young people using it because it's already illegal.
What do I care if I'm selling out of the back of my car?
I'm not going to check your ID.
So we to get adult use and to get rules on those things.
It's better to actually have it legal.
So with the hemp thing, McConnell, I'm in the same state.
So he goes home and he tells everybody, yeah, Ron Paul wants your kids to use
hemp.
That's not true because Kentucky passed a state law that says you have to be 21,
regulates the amount.
His law is going to overturn that.
And there is no federal law on the age of hemp.
So he's actually the one who's going to overturn the law by prohibiting it all.
But most of the states have reasonably looked at this.
Now, Texas looked at it and then Texas was going to ban it.
And then Governor Abbott stepped up and vetoed it.
But Texas, the legislature was terrible.
They were going to they were going to they passed a ban on hemp here and then
Abbott's vetoed it.
It's sort of in limbo now.
So when this this national one, when does this go into effect?
It's one year from when we passed it.
And I think we passed it in probably November.
So this coming November, the entire hemp industry, we go bust.
This is a twenty five billion dollar industry.
This is not a small industry.
And there's a lot of jobs.
There's a lot of people using it.
Like you say, these aren't reefer madness people out there committing crimes.
It's your grandmother, your mother.
It's people have difficulty sleeping.
It's, you know, there's still hope.
And I'm trying to reverse it.
I have several bills that we're working on and going to introduce in the near
future to either try to extend the deadline and or change it.
I'd like to change it where if your state has regulated it, the federal
government would accede to your state regulation or allow your state to
regulate it.
It's got to be very bizarre being a rational person working for the government.
Yeah.
And I don't the people up there are of a different sort.
Many of them have never worked really outside of government.
So they really.
Fun.
Yeah.
They know nothing about writing checks.
Yeah, exactly.
We're telling you how to live your life.
And it's kind of when people come up to me and they say, you know, they're
young, smart kids, kids that have been interns in my office.
I want to run.
I want to be part of government.
And I say, go out and have a career first.
Work somewhere.
You know, I worked as a physician for about 20 years before I ended up running.
And really, you have to have a real career because politics, one, isn't that
great a career.
And two, there is no guarantee you can be the smartest person in the world and
not win.
It doesn't always.
You have to be in the right person, right time, right place, and a little bit
of luck.
Yeah, and, you know, it's like, how can someone effectively govern if you haven't
experienced life outside of the government?
It just doesn't seem even rational that you could be a person that would be a
good representation of all these hardworking people if you've never actually
had a job.
It just seems weird.
Yeah, that's why people thought one of the Bushes was out of touch.
I think it was the elder Bush when he went to the grocery store and he didn't
know what a scanner was.
He'd never seen grocery scan because he'd never been in a grocery store.
That's funny.
But what is it like, like, being, I mean, how, it's got to be incredibly
frustrating, but it's also got to be bizarre.
Yeah, and I'll give you an example of what I think is bizarre.
So we've been blowing up these people in boats off the coast of Venezuela.
They're accused of running drugs, but nobody knows their names and nobody's put
up any evidence.
When we've had them, September 2nd, two of them were still clinging to the
wreckage, they're shipwrecked.
They blew them up.
And so what I think is bizarre is I hear mostly my Republican colleagues say,
well, we shouldn't have to.
How do we know they're not armed?
And it's like, but there's this thing called presumption of innocence.
They say it doesn't apply.
Well, it actually always has applied on the oceans.
We have always, we've had drug interdiction, but we have always stopped boats
and asked to search them.
If they flee or shoot at the Coast Guard, they will get shot and blown up.
But it's usually an escalatory sort of steps.
We know that when the Coast Guard boards vessels off of Miami and off of
California, one in four of the boats they board don't have any drugs on them.
So I look at my colleagues who say they're pro-life and they value God's
inspiration in life, but they don't give a shit about these people in the boats.
And are they terrible people in the boats?
I don't know.
They're probably poor people in Venezuela and Colombia.
And really, they say, well, we're at war with them.
They're committing war by bringing drugs into America.
They're not even coming here.
They're going to these islands in the south part of the Caribbean and the
cocaine, and it's not fentanyl at all.
The cocaine's going to Europe.
Those little boats can't get here.
No one's even asked this common question.
Those boats have these four engines on them.
They're outboard boats.
You can probably go about 100 miles before you have to refuel.
They're 2,000 miles from us.
They have to refuel 20 times to get here.
They really, it was all a pretense and a false argument, but I guess what I don't
feel connected to my Republican colleagues is that those lives don't matter at
all, and we just blow them up.
And against all justice and against all laws of war, all laws of just war, we
never have blown up people who were shipwrecked.
It's against the military code of justice to do that, and we're doing it, and
everybody just says, oh, well, they're drug dealers.
Why do you think they were attacking those people?
Because I've heard a bunch of different theories, and one of the big theories
was they were trying to get the cartel upset at Maduro in order to get him out
of office.
It's all been a pretense for arresting Maduro, so we have to set up the predicate.
We've got to show you we care about drugs, but the weird thing about it is they
really care about drugs except for the former president of Honduras, Hernandez,
who was given a 40-year sentence, was tried, was found guilty.
He was given 40 years in a U.S. jail, and he's let go at the same time we're
arresting Maduro because he's attacking the United States with drugs.
And then I get this stuff.
I had this on air from a respectable journalist the other day.
She said, well, don't you care about the kids in our country dying from fentanyl?
I said, of course I do.
But, you know, no fentanyl comes from Venezuela, not a little bit, zero.
Yeah, if we were really interested, we'd be attacking Mexico.
Well, they want to do that next.
They want to bomb Mexico.
Well, do you think that this is like sort of a predicate?
Like we're trying to set that up?
I hope not.
That's why I've opposed it because, look, I have no love lost for Maduro.
I wrote another book called The Case Against Socialism.
I think the socialism, historically, there's been a link between socialism and
state-sponsored violence.
And so in the book, we talk about a 16-year-old girl who has a gang and her
gang's tariff or territory
are the dumpsters outside of restaurants to scavenge for food.
That's what Maduro and Chavez did to Venezuela.
And so I'm glad he's gone.
I'm glad, you know, I hope they choose wiser.
But at the same time, if the predicate is we're going to snatch people,
why don't we snatch da Silva from Brazil?
Some people say Bolsonaro is unfairly in prison.
May be true.
And they say da Silva cheated in the election.
May also be true.
But should the president of the United States, no matter who he or she is,
have the ability without a vote of Congress, the people's representatives,
just go snatch people out of jails in Brazil and put a new government in?
One, it doesn't usually work.
Yeah, I'm hoping it's successful here.
But, you know, we've tried it in other places.
It's one of the things I liked about Donald Trump.
He was against regime change in Iraq.
He was against regime change in Libya.
And it didn't work real well in Iraq or Libya.
So what do you think changed?
Why do you think they're so interested in Venezuela?
Do you think it's just because of the oil?
Influence.
Influence.
And I've jokingly said that there ought to be a
reoccurring issue that we thought was resolved with the software.
Right back?
Okay.
All right.
We're good.
Sorry, folks.
The program was interrupted by the NSA.
You know, they are spying on the show to see...
So here's the question.
The Biden administration had a $20 million.
Was it $20 or $22 million bounty on Maduro?
Right.
They've wanted Maduro out forever.
Why was that?
Because, you know, they don't have free elections.
It's an authoritarian government.
The people are suffering.
So it's this idea that that's wrong and government should.
And I think that's a noble concept to want better government, more freedom for
people.
But I could probably list for you a dozen different countries that have autocratic
rulers right now.
And we could go in and we could arrest them all and put people in place.
But it sometimes backfires.
For example, I think one of the things...
I think there's a good feeling towards America from a lot of Venezuelans right
now that are happy
that Maduro is gone.
But ask them again in six months if we're still controlling their oil
and we're doling out a little bit of money.
But the money's not going to the people.
It's going to the socialist government.
So you realize we've traded one socialist for another.
Right.
Maduro is gone.
But his second in charge who was elected with him and holds all of his beliefs
is there.
And if she graciously or fearfully decides to accept what they're telling her,
that we're going to confiscate all the oil and we're going to sell it on the
international market,
we're going to give her a little bit back if she behaves.
And let's say that austerity doesn't lead to a real vibrant economy.
I think six months from now, the people will be just as upset as they were.
And they'll still have the same government essentially.
Right.
So one of the things that I've read was one of the primary reasons why we went
in was because
Russia and China were also interested in Venezuela's oil.
And China had met with Maduro literally the day that he was kidnapped by the
United States, right?
Right.
Yeah.
I think China gets about 4% of their oil.
So it's a small amount of their oil.
The best way, I think, is not through war to keep China out of South America.
It's through trade, cooperation.
That's why threatening to bomb Colombia was a bad idea because we should
continue to trade.
We buy coffee from them.
We buy bananas from down there.
We should have trade.
So this Monday, I sent the president a text and he responded to him.
I said, "The ambassador called me and he said,
their president's been trying for several months to get a phone call through
and he'd love to talk
to President Trump."
And the good thing about President Trump, and this is something I always really
like about him,
he'll make decisions on the spot.
He didn't ask a committee to vote on whether he can talk to the president.
He said, "Of course I will."
And the president still has good instincts.
I disagreed with the bombing of the boats and the bombing of Maduro.
I'm not too unhappy with the result, but I don't want the chaos to spread to
Colombia.
And I think Colombia does cooperate with us, particularly on the drug trade.
It's not perfect, but they do cooperate.
But he did end up making a phone call to the president of Colombia.
And I think the setting is for less of a problem.
And you say, "Well, why have things changed from where he was
talking about regime change in the campaign?"
Some of it's the influence of the people around him.
I've jokingly said we ought to pass a law saying
Lindsey Graham shouldn't be allowed in the White House
because I think he is a bad influence.
And Lindsey and I are friends, you know, we do okay.
But he's much more for a different type of philosophy for me.
I say we fight when we have to.
We fight when attacked.
And that's about it.
I'm not too interested in fixing every problem around the world.
Look, we have a $2 trillion deficit.
We can't really go fix every problem in every country.
And sometimes when we try to change regime and put better people in,
it actually we get the opposite.
Right.
Well, this is your dad's philosophy as well.
Yep.
It's one of the things I really enjoyed about him.
When you see these things at play, like the kidnapping of Venezuela
and the bombing of the boats, how informed are you about why they're making
their decisions?
Are you – do you have conversations with the people that are making the
decisions?
We do.
But the reasoning is mostly public.
Like we'll get briefings.
We've had briefings on the boats.
You're like, what do they say in those briefings?
They say that – I'll ask, are they carrying arms?
Because it kind of makes a difference when they kill unarmed people to me.
Right.
And they'll say, yes, their arms are drugs and they're invading us with drugs.
OK.
But they're not really, right?
Because if they're – if you look at it geographically, like you were just
saying,
they're so far away from us.
They're in small boats and they're not bringing those drugs to the United
States.
And the only way they can make war with the drugs is if they're hitting you
over the head
with the drugs and then making you take the drugs, all right?
So I think that's ridiculous.
And I think that there is a difference between crime and war.
And the reason why they have to get it is it normally – like if – let's say
the boat
came all the way here.
That speedboat got all the way to Miami, offloaded it into a U-Haul truck,
and it's going down the road.
Do we stand on the side of the road and hit it with grenade launchers?
Nobody would be for that.
All of a sudden, we're going to believe that, well, gosh, that might be the
wrong –
we might blow up the wrong truck.
Or maybe we got the information wrong.
We would stop and search them.
But why don't we do the boats?
The Coast Guard actually still does.
Amidst all this, the Coast Guard is still stopping dozens of boats.
But they tell us we're only blowing up the ones that are
related to the terrorists, the trend de Aragua or whatever.
I don't know how they can know that with certainty.
I don't know how they can know with certainty that some of the –
I think most of these probably were drug loads.
So why do you think they're doing it then?
They wanted regime change.
And I think Rubio has wanted regime change.
He's been itching for it for 15 years.
And I think he has a great deal of influence with the president.
And they've convinced – and it's selling someone like the president that he
can use
his power for good is an argument that I think a lot of people would succumb to.
He believes that he's doing good.
And if it all works out and freedom rings true in Venezuela, people will say,
well, gosh,
yeah, I think he did.
And that's why now people think he did the right thing.
I think people don't know yet what's going to happen, whether or not people are
going to be happy
keeping the same socialist government, whether they'll have a free election and
somebody else to
win isn't known yet.
But I do think that while he's done that and it seems to have worked, it's my
job and others to
say that really invading Greenland is not a reasonable thing.
Invading Cuba, invading Colombia, that there has to be pushback.
But I get a lot of flack.
I mean, there are people that rally behind the president that are telling me I
need to
pipe down, that I need to be quiet.
So the threats –
Who tells him that?
Well, a lot of the mob, the internet mob is angry.
Oh, the internet.
Is angry.
Yeah, you can't read that.
Yeah.
You can't listen to those people.
You got to be a little bit wary also.
But I mean, there is a thought, and I don't think it's good for government
though.
I also don't even think it's good for the president, who I largely like on a
lot of issues.
It's not good for him to have no critics, for people to be afraid to criticize
him.
I agree.
So is the argument that they want regime change that these cartels are working
with Maduro?
And that's why we blow them up?
That's sort of the argument.
But I don't think the cartels and the drugs aren't really important.
It's about regime change.
If it's about regime change, why blow up the drug boat?
Because they need a drug predicate.
They want to say this isn't war.
It is kind of war.
And we're going to take people as if it's war.
But it's not really war.
It was an arrest warrant.
And they've actually persuaded some otherwise good people in my caucus to say,
well, normally I would be against bombing another nation's capital and removing
the leader.
Oh, but he was indicted for the indictment.
Most people don't know this.
Part of the indictment is for drugs.
He's breaking a U.S. law.
How do we indict foreigners in their country?
They haven't broken a law in our country for breaking law.
But other than drugs, they've also indicted Maduro for possessing or conspiring
to possess machine guns.
And it's like, what leader in the world doesn't have security guards with
machine guns?
We have machine guns.
Wait a minute.
Did Maduro personally have illegal machine guns?
And illegal how?
Is it legal internationally?
Like, what does that mean?
It means absolutely nothing.
That's crazy.
It's completely insane.
That means how many people in Texas have machine guns?
You could legally have them here.
I used to go to the machine gun fest and it was a machine gun shootout.
They'd have a line of 50 machine guns.
You have to have a special permit to get them, but you can get them.
But the thing is, what's ridiculous about it is our leaders, our soldiers have
machine guns.
Every country that has soldiers and security forces has machine guns.
But to indict him, but that's then their argument is it's okay to blow up Caracas.
It's okay to do something that looks like a war, but it's not a war because it
was just an arrest warrant.
It's a game.
It's gamesmanship for people who might succumb to, I think, a silly argument.
So what is the primary motivation for regime change?
It can't just be he's a bad guy because there's a lot of bad guys.
I think a country suffers and people justifiably want better stuff for the
people there.
I think they also do worry, as you mentioned earlier, they say there's too much
influence of
Russia and China there.
I think that's what I've been reading most that makes sense,
is that the concern was that China or Russia was going to ramp up oil
production.
Right.
But I don't know.
You know, the whole oil situation is an example of why socialism doesn't work
very well.
I mean, it's like 30 years old, everything's old, everything's rotting and rusting.
They do a million barrels a day.
They have more oil than Saudi Arabia, but they are just it's completely
incompetent.
And mainly because the one thing that capitalism does is it gives you supply
and demand and a price.
And they've controlled the price, not the oil price, because that's an
international price.
But they've controlled the price of all the things that go into the equipment
and who owns it.
So you have a bunch of people who studied in Marxism in Cuba running the
companies.
That's not what we do here.
You either make a profit here or you get fired.
Isn't the oil in a much more difficult form to extract than the oil in Saudi
Arabia?
So by saying they have more oil than Saudi Arabia, maybe.
That may be true.
That may be true.
There's a difference.
I think it's almost like asphalt.
It's either a lot of it's heavy, crude, I think.
I don't know the details of which kind of oil they have.
But I think there probably are some technological problems.
But I think it's easy to make the argument that they're not hitting their
maximum efficiency with, you know, the current socialist government.
Right.
I think that's a good argument.
But what I had read about the extraction was that the oil that is in Venezuela
is almost
like asphalt and that it requires all these chemicals to break it down.
And so there may be more difficulty than Saudi Arabia.
But I think also the system, you know, so when you look at Venezuela and you
look at
what happens under price controls, you need prices to go up and down based on
demand because
if you don't, you have shortages.
If you set the price too low and I'm a manufacturer, I'm not going to sell it
for that.
So you also get shortage.
If you set the price too high, then it just sits on the shelf and a black
market develops.
There was a story in Behind the Iron Current and I think it was in Poland.
I love this story.
Guy goes in a store and he says, oh, are you the store that doesn't have any
eggs?
And the shop owner said, no, no, no.
Well, the store doesn't have any toilet paper.
The store across the street's the one that doesn't have any eggs.
But it was so common that you always knew that your stores were always missing
something.
There were always shortages.
And this is the main thing about prices that is so incredibly important.
And people don't think about it, but it's incredibly important to let prices go
up and
down without the government getting involved.
That's why like it's a mistake.
It'll sound right.
But the president wants to ban interest rates above 10% for credit cards.
Well, part of the interest rate being much higher if you're going for a same
day loan is one,
you're a much higher risk.
You're more desperate.
But also by you having to pay 30%, it's going to teach you to be a better
planner the next time
because you can't keep borrowing at 30%.
But the marketplace demands the 30% is what the market will bear.
And if it was too much, then the interest rate will come down.
And no one should borrow 30%.
I mean, they should teach you in high school how people to plan their budget so
you don't do that.
Don't they sneak those in on college students?
Those kind of credit people that are a little bit more at risk?
We're talking about ignorant people.
Yeah.
College students, they're high up on the list of ignorant people or people
lacking common sense.
Yeah, it's that.
Well, they're also very young.
Yeah, people get into a gambling problem.
They get into some problem where they don't have money.
But if you say it can be 10%, what does that tell me about my behavior?
I just keep borrowing at 10%.
I might have to stop someday at 30%.
You know what I mean?
And so the marketplace develops these things.
But that price is sending signals back to people.
It's the same way with interest rates on houses.
The president's always like, we need lower interest rates.
Houses are so expensive.
Why don't we just fix the price at 2% and tell the banks they can't get more
than 2%.
The problem is this.
If there's a boom and everybody's buying houses and the demand goes up for
houses,
prices will go up.
The demand for the money goes up.
And as the interest rates rise, then the economy will slow down.
So in 2000, from 2000 to about 2007, the Federal Reserve kept the interest
rates low.
It's like 2%.
You could get money.
It was free.
And there was this boom in houses.
And there was some dishonesty, too, in the subprime market.
But the boom kept going.
If interest rates had risen to 4% or 5%, home sales would have gone down.
And people would have lamented that.
But you wouldn't have gotten such an enormous boom in the crash.
So the cycle of the economy going up and down is dictated by interest rates.
And you want interest rates.
You don't want high interest rates.
Nobody wants that.
But if you don't allow them to move, that sends a signal back that we're buying
too many houses
and we're building too many houses and will slow down.
If you just send the signal to keep interest rates at 2%,
you get the boom so high up here that the crash is devastating like it was in
2010.
What are your feelings about corporations buying up personal homes?
There's Blackstone and there's a bunch of different corporations that have
bought.
I don't know if it's Blackstone, but I heard that Blackstone there was a drop
in their stock price
because of this thing that Trump is trying to do now to stop corporations from
buying
individual family homes and then leasing them out to people.
Yeah.
So in a free market, in a free world where you can choose a hemp product,
you also make contracts with who you sell to.
So for me to tell you, to me it's a freedom issue.
If I tell you you can't sell your house to Blackstone, that's me limiting your
choices.
Maybe Blackstone is going to give you 5% more.
I'm stealing 5% from you.
Right.
And it's not a given that it's going to be bad.
It might be bad, but I think if you look at this carefully, for example,
what's one of the impediments or one of the costs of buying a house is the real
estate price.
So the realtor takes, you know, they used to take what, like 6%.
But, you know, now sometimes you can get 3% and you go through a bigger company.
So corporatization or making something bigger where a bigger entity owns
something
sometimes leads to lower costs because they can actually lower costs.
So to me, it's just a freedom issue.
I don't think actually probably, I think the price of homes has gone up because
the value of
dollar has gone down.
We are destroying the dollar.
It's like, is gold more precious?
No, people are freaking out about how many dollars have been printed
and how much debt we're incurring.
So the dollar loses its value and prices are home.
I don't, I'm not making light of the problem.
You know, I have kids of the age of trying to get into houses.
It's difficult.
Prices are extraordinarily high and interest rates are still high too.
Yeah.
I think the fear is like people are terrified that these enormous corporations
are going to buy
up all of the single family homes and you won't be able to get one and you'll
be forced to lease a
home and you'll never be able to own a home.
That's the fear.
Yeah, I know.
I think I would probably want to study it more thoroughly to find out if that's
actually the
result because some people talk about a fear of it happening.
You know, if I'm Blackstone, I'm not doing stuff just to hold them around.
I'm not like, you know, Mr. Potter, you know, It's a Wonderful Life and wringing
my hands together,
I'm going to wait.
They don't make any money holding onto a bunch of houses.
They're going to have to sell them.
And it may be, what if Blackstone does have 10,000 homes?
Maybe they'll do it with a reduced, you go directly to them by website.
Goldman Sachs owns homes.
There are entities like this, Buffett, Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway owns
homes as well.
So I don't think it's a brand new thing, but I would explore it.
I think it's a reaction to think big is bad and that these big players are
going to rip us off.
But if it's a free contract, I think more of whether or not I should infringe
on your
liberty until you can't sell your house to Blackstone.
I think that's me limiting your ability to contract with whoever you want.
That makes sense.
I think the fear is, well, the only reason why they would be doing it is that
they could make
more money leasing the homes out.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's the same way with buying apartments, too.
I'm guessing they bought apartments, too, because kids are staying in
apartments longer.
And the apartment business has been a really good business for, like, the last
10 years,
buying apartments.
But corporations own apartments.
I mean, the real disaster isn't stuff like that, the marketplace.
The disaster of, like, rent and homes and not having enough places, like, to
live in Manhattan,
which is very expensive, or New York in general.
And I'm positive the socialist is going to make it worse.
Rent control, what does that mean?
So if you're in the middle of Manhattan and you can get an apartment for $300,
you're like,
oh, that's great.
But if I'm the landlord and all the stuff's broken in there and there's holes
in the walls,
I'm not fixing it for $300 a month.
Right.
I need $3,000 a month to keep the place up.
So what happens is the apartments go to, you know, into ruin.
And also there's a shortage.
You need money and you need big people with money to build apartment complexes,
particularly in New York where you've got to tear something down and build
something new.
I'm not doing it if you're going to tell me what my rent's going to be.
So socialism doesn't work.
And the one thing people don't understand about it because they fear somebody
being ripped off
and how expensive something is, is there was an economist, Joseph Schumpeter,
and he put it this way.
He said, the miracle of capitalism is not that the queen can buy silk stockings,
but the factory girl can.
But in the beginning, the first person and the only person to buy them will be
queens
and kings and rich people.
So the story of calculators.
My dad had a calculator.
He was a doctor and we were well-to-do.
We weren't extraordinarily rich, but well-to-do.
He had a calculator for $300 in the 1970s.
All he could do was add, subtract, and multiply.
And it was about this thick and this big.
But you can go tour a condo and pretend to buy a condo,
and the real estate agent will give you a calculator now.
But in the beginning, only rich people got them.
But if you forbid rich people from getting them at a high price,
the only way it gets to a low price, like Tesla started with more expensive
cars at a high price.
They're coming down, but they only come down because rich people bought them
first.
So we can never be of the notion that we're going to make things better by
preventing prices
from being too high in something.
It's how products get started.
So the queen may have bought the first silk stockings,
but eventually capitalism brings the price down enough that you have mass
distribution
and actually a factory girl can buy them.
Trevor Burrus: Cell phones are a good argument about that.
Andrew Clark: Yep, exactly.
Trevor Burrus: In that defense.
So when it comes to the economy and when it comes to spending money, what do
you think can be done
differently? Like, say, if you had a magic wand and you could turn things
around, what would you do differently?
Andrew Clark: I think the first thing to acknowledge is both parties are
equally guilty.
The debt is the problem of both parties and the spending is both parties. And
there is a compromise.
I tell people it's a dirty little deal that's going on right in front of your
nose. The right, Lindsey
Graham and the Warhawks want more military money. The left, Chris Murphy and
Booker, they want more
welfare. What's the compromise? You scratch my back, I'll scratch you. I'll let
you have your military
money if you let me have the welfare money. So the compromise of the last 50
years is they've both grown
enormously. But the budget we vote on is only one third of the spending. Two
thirds of the spending
is mandatory spending that's just on autopilot. We never vote on it. The one
third that we vote on is
about $2 trillion. That's what the deficit is. So when I vote for spending and
I vote against most of it,
almost all of that is borrowed. What would be the compromise that would fix it?
The reverse.
I would go to, you know, the left, my buddy, Ron Wyden, who I am good friends
with. And I would say,
look, we're out of money. The interest is killing us. It's crowding everything
out.
What if we spend 1% less next year on welfare? And I'll tell my party they have
to spend 1% less
on military. If you do that across the board, you'd have to include the
mandatory programs.
You can balance your budget gradually over a five year period. And I've called
this the penny plan.
And I think it's a compromise because instead of what conservatives have
typically done is they've
said, it's Sesame Street. If we can get rid of public TV and Sesame Street, we'll
show those liberals
and we'll balance the budget. Well, it's not enough money. And I'm not against
doing it. I voted to reduce
the money. But there are some people on the left who live and die by public TV.
And they think it's the
greatest thing. And it's an offense to them. So rather than kind of 100% of it,
let's cut the
and you can balance the budget right now. If you cut 6% of the military, 6% of
Sesame Street,
6% of everything everybody wants. And I think you could actually do it. And I
try this message out
sometime. Everybody comes to Washington wants money. And there are usually
things that you can have
sympathy for. So one week they come and they wear the purple ribbons and it's
for Alzheimer's disease.
Well, I have family members who have Alzheimer's. I have a great deal of
sympathy,
but we're $2 trillion short. So what I usually say to them is we're a rich
country and we should be
able to spend some of our money on Alzheimer's research. But you got $100
million last year.
I'm making up the number. But let's say you got $100 million last year. And
because we're short of
money, everybody has to get less this year. Would it be okay if I only vote for
$94 million for you next year?
And when you put it that way, and they're usually in there with tears running
down their
face, talking about their mom and their grandmother and Alzheimer's and they're
worried they're going to
get it. To a person, you look around the table and they say, well, that sounds
kind of fair.
Everybody has to take a hit, right?
94%. Almost everything that is like, for example, food stamps. People say, well,
the people are going to starve without food stamps. Well, why don't we just get
rid of Coca-Cola
and Pepsi? No sugar drinks on food stamps. That's 10% of food stamps. That'd be
a 10% cut.
Well, we're going to spend 10% less. No one's going to starve.
Would you spend...hold on. But would you spend less? Or would you just limit
the purchasing to non...
We'll probably be lucky just to limit the purchase. But I would spend less.
But you couldn't spend...but how could you spend less? You would have to give
them less. And you say,
hey, not only can you not buy sugary drinks, but now you'll have less money to
buy healthy food,
which is more expensive. Well, what you would do is...
Do you know what I'm saying? Well, maybe. If you had a budget, let's say it's $100
million,
and next year the food stamp budget is going to be $94 million, and you say you
can't buy Coca-Cola
and Pepsi and sugar drinks, they would still have to make their decisions with
a little bit less,
but they, on average, are spending 6% or...yeah, I think it's about...no, I
think it's about 10%
of the dollars are going towards these sugar drinks. They would have to make
decisions to do it.
But I think even something like food stamps, there's a strong argument, oh,
people will be hungry.
Hunger's not a problem in our country. It really isn't.
Our problem is too much food. It frankly is. There is no one starving in our
country.
There is food everywhere. Right, but it's not too much food.
It's non-nutritious food. I mean, it's not... Too much bad food.
It's not even food. Well, you're right. It's things you eat that have no
nutrition
in it at all. Exactly. Like Coca-Cola. Yes, exactly.
Like candy and cookies and all the shit that you can buy on your food stamps.
And I've been talking...you can get candies. You know you can get a bag of
candy on your food stamps.
Right. There's no...that should...and so I've been talking about this for years.
And so I had a Democrat Senator who I can talk to. We're friends. We're walking
down the hall and I tell
him about it. He says, "That sounds reasonable, but I don't want to reduce the
dollars." So what you're
saying is the compromise is probably Democrats are never going to vote to
reduce the dollars. We should,
but we won't get it. But even when we got push came to shove, his staff piped
up and they said,
"Oh, I thought you were a libertarian. I thought you were for choice." And I
said, "I am with your money.
I'm in the taxpayer money. We don't let you buy alcohol." I think it's arguable
that sugar drinks
are as bad as buying alcohol. It's close. I mean, certainly in terms of health
consequences.
You know, diabetes and obesity and all the other comorbidities that come along
with more obesity.
But the thing is, it's like if you're asking them to buy healthy food, healthy
food is definitely more
expensive. Sometimes. If you want to go to Whole Foods... Sometimes. Well, if
you want to go to Whole Foods
and buy things there, it is more expensive to buy all the fresh fruits and
things. But there is a lot of
things that you can buy that really, frankly, aren't...you know, a head of
lettuce is not that expensive.
Right, but it's not going to fill you up. If you want calorie-rich food, if you
want to match
calorie per calorie... Beans aren't that expensive and they're healthier for
you than most of the
things we eat. But really, the thing is... You got to teach people how to cook
now?
Yeah. That's the problem. Actually, I would. Not me. I would have this in
schools. So I would have
the old concept of home economics in schools. And here's what I would teach.
Some of this comes from
a book. There's a book written by Charles Murray years ago called "Coming Apart."
And it compared
people and said, "These are the rich people in your society and these are the
poor people." It's just
divided into two groups. And the two main statistics that put you in either
rich group or poor group,
having kids before you're married, and education. Charles Murray, isn't that
the guy that had very
controversial ideas about race and IQ? Yep. Yeah. But this wasn't racial. This
was based on whether or
not you were in one of those two categories. But I would teach this in home
economics. I wouldn't
teach morality. I wouldn't teach people that it's evil to have sex. I would say
that the odds are,
the statistics are, if you have not had your children, you have a choice. The
statistics are
overwhelming that if you have your kids before you're married, you'll be poor.
And the thing is,
it is true. Why not teach that? But in that same class, I would teach how to go
to the grocery store,
what to buy, and also how to prepare it. I'd go to the grocery store. I would
do this for obese
people in our country. So Medicaid pays just gazillions of dollars for diabetes
and all that stuff.
I would pay for dietary training. But I actually think you need to go to the
grocery store with
people and show them all the crap they're putting in their cards that they
shouldn't be putting in.
That sounds like you're for another government program.
Damn, you got me. You got me. It sounds great on paper. But the reality is,
in order to change people's behavior, it takes a radical shift of your
perceptions. And that's very
difficult to do. You can't just teach people, like, this is how you make
spaghetti and meatballs.
And then now they're going to eat healthy. It's not that spaghetti and
meatballs is the most healthy.
You don't really have to teach people. People aren't as dumb as you think they
are.
It's not that they're dumb. It's just they're setting their ways.
I know. You're right.
To change people's behavior patterns is extraordinarily difficult.
I know. But that's why they have to make choices. They become smart very
quickly. If you give
somebody 96% or 94% of what they were getting for food stamps, they will be
smart within a week.
They will make these decisions.
I would argue against that. I think that there's a problem in that people are
very set in their ways
and they've developed a pattern of behavior over the course of decades. So you're
not just going to
shift with a change in policy and a reduction in their food stamps.
What about this? Do you think anybody has changed their lifestyle in America
since two people at McDonald's cost 20 bucks to eat now? A burger, a drink, and
fries is 20 bucks for
two people? Do you think anybody in America has shifted their buying patterns
for food
and are eating at home more? I guarantee you thousands and thousands of people
are eating
less out.
Probably.
I've seen Wendy's go to business, you know.
It's a bad example because McDonald's is fucking terrible for you too.
Like that doesn't make any sense.
The president eats it.
Well, I do too. But it's not good for you. Filet of fish is actually a
delicious little sandwich.
I agree with you to a certain extent. I don't think you can teach people to
make wiser decisions.
You can sort of encourage it as part of the educational model. And I wouldn't
spend more
money on this. We spend a lot of money on education. I would make this part of
the curriculum.
But I do think that if you aren't given a financial incentive to make these
decisions,
you won't do it. You could ban the foods. And I actually am for taking them off
the formulary.
We have something called WIC, which is women and children. It's for food during
pregnancy.
It only has healthy food on it. You can't get Coca-Cola with your WIC dollars.
But you can go through the line with your snap plus your WIC and all that stuff.
And but I'd get rid of the sugar drinks. I get rid of chips. I get rid of candy.
Yeah. Ding-dongs.
Well, I think that's a no-brainer. That's a no-brainer because that stuff's not
food.
But I don't have one Democrat sign on. I have yet to get a Democrat. No
reduction in money.
So my bill doesn't reduce money. I think we should.
Yeah, the problem is they're voters.
The Democrats won't vote.
They're held prisoner, but they're voters. Their voters want that. They don't
want you to
tell them what to do with that money. And a lot of people feel entitled to that
money,
which is also very odd.
But I don't do it because I dislike people on food stamps. I do it because I
want them to be healthier.
Yes.
And I actually don't want... You know, the goal is... See, people think the
goal is we need more Medicaid.
No, what we need is less people on Medicaid. The goal should be an economy
where
5% of the economy, really in a good functioning world, 5%, 6%, not much more
than that,
shouldn't be able to take care of themselves. There really should be health
care that almost
everybody can afford except for a small percentage of people. You know, once
you have kidney disease,
you're on dialysis, so almost everybody's on Medicaid. It's a little more
understandable.
Diabetes, if we fed people right, 80% of adult-onset diabetes is curable by
loss of weight.
Right. And I see where they're going to argue against what you're saying about
food stamps and,
you know, from this libertarian perspective. But I think you're absolutely
right in that you should
be allowed to do whatever you want with your own money. But if you're going to
get government assistance,
there should be some sort of a limitation to you getting food that's only
healthy. We shouldn't
be paying for you to kill yourself. Just like you can't buy cigarettes, right?
You can't buy alcohol.
And this is something Bobby Kennedy is changing. And they hate him, just hate
him.
Because they're voters. They're voters.
No, not the voters. The establishment hates him more. His own family hates him
more. But you know what?
If he only does one thing, and one thing he's remembered for is treating sugar
as a, not a sin,
as a bad food. Sugar added to convince us that adding sugar to cereals and all
these things we add
sugar to, that it's bad for your health, that will transform, you know, the
people who accept that.
It certainly will. And the education, the understanding of that. When I was a
kid,
and I talked about this the other day with my friend Whitney, we were doing a
podcast. Like,
we didn't think sugar was bad for you. We just thought it gave you cavities.
You know, and we would throw sugar on our cereal, and we would put sugar in
their coffee,
and sugar in this, and sugar. Nobody thought anything of it.
But since the government is responsible for so much food anyway, think about
how healthy. Well,
I don't think we should have sugar drinks in high schools. They have machines
in all the high
schools, and they say, "Oh, we get extra money for our football field." Let
them put non-sugar
drinks in if you really want their real advertising dollars.
I agree. I agree. I mean, look, but again, you know, if you're a kid, and you
work,
and you've got a job, you know, you're working at a corner store, and you're
making, you know,
whatever you make, 15 bucks an hour, whatever, not even. What's minimum wage?
Well, federal is different. Some states have $15 an hour.
What's federal now?
Federal is still like $7. It's inconsequential.
So if you're a kid, and you make $7 an hour, let's say, working at a store,
and you want to use that $7 to buy a Coca-Cola and a pack of ringdings, like,
who cares?
$7 is probably gone now.
Yeah. That's it. That's your whole paycheck for the hour.
Yeah.
But the point is, when the government is giving you money, I think it's very
reasonable to say,
this money cannot—like, we're supposed to be helping you get back on your
feet. This is the
problem with social safety nets, where I'm a big believer in it. When I was a
child, my family was
poor, and we were on welfare, and we were on food stamps, but they worked their
way out of it. And then,
when I was in high school, they were doing really well.
Right.
So it's like, it's a very valuable thing for families that are down on their
luck, and things aren't going
well. And I'm a big believer in—I think we should treat this country like a
community. And when you have
the downtrodden and the people that aren't doing so well, I think it's really
important to help them.
I think to let abject poverty and starvation exist in a country that has such
extreme wealth
is abhorrent. It doesn't make any sense to me. But I also think people get very
dependent
on social safety systems and social safety nets. And when you have people that
have generation after
generation have existed on welfare, then it becomes a problem. And it becomes a
problem where we have to
figure out how to motivate people or educate people as to choices that they can
make that'll be more
beneficial to their lives to provide for themselves and be outside of it.
Another thing that's going to
mess with that motivation is unhealthy food. Because one of the surest ways to
keep people
unmotivated and have no energy is to keep them unhealthy. Healthier people have
more vibrancy.
You have more energy to go pursue your dreams and do the things you want to do
in life. If you're
constantly dealing with type 2 diabetes because you've been eating sugar all
day and garbage all day and
you're morbidly obese, you're not going to have the same energy as a person who's
eating healthy food
and getting up early and drinking water. And it's just it's going to affect the
choices that you make
because it's more burdensome to carry around that body. Yeah, I think that and
I don't disagree with
what you're saying on having a safety net. But we have to have tough love
involved with it. And we have to
have the idea that it's temporary and we're trying to get you to another place.
So can enable people
to continue bad choices over and over and over again and say, well, we just
have to take care of
them. Right. So food stamps when they started were really primarily for mothers,
single mothers with
many kids who can't work. So mom can't work. We didn't want them all to starve.
She has four kids.
And once you've had the kids, I'm not against that. They're there and you got
to do some of the kids.
But we didn't give it to able bodied, you know, 21 year old men who are in
college didn't get it,
or able bodied men who are out of high school didn't get it. You didn't do that
because they
need to work and they still can work. There are jobs everywhere for able bodied
people. So we have
to look carefully at all these programs. And this is what some people on the
left complain about.
Able bodied people, if they get something, should be very, very temporary, if
at all.
Yes. And so then all the programs have to be reevaluated. Like when I first
moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky in 1993, one of my patients was head of the
local welfare,
and there was a local welfare department. And there was some real degree of the
people had
to come in on certain deadlines. They had to prove that they were looking for
work
or why they couldn't look for work. And there'd be some people that still have
four kids at home
will come back and won't be able to work again. But the able bodied people come
back in six weeks
and she would show them, "Here's the newspaper. Here's a job I want you to go
here tomorrow."
Right.
And she'd make them do that. And not because she hated them. She worked with
welfare because of the
beneficial part of it. But we've gotten away from that. And so if I propose
something like that,
it's like, "Oh, you don't like the poor." No, I want them to become rich. But
we also do have,
and this is a fallacy. People are moving up and down from rich to poor all the
time in our country.
20% of the people born in the bottom 20% make the top 20%. 60% of the people
who make a million
bucks this year will not make a million bucks next year. People are going up
and down. We have
great income mobility. And the reason you have to express that is otherwise you
lose hope. If you live
in a poor area of town and, you know, you're a single mom and everybody tells
you, you know,
you're just never going anywhere, that's when your reaction is, "I might as
well steal or sell drugs
or something." Instead, the message to our young people is it should be. There's
never been a better
time to be alive. I believe that so strongly and that we're doing a disservice
to our young people
by saying, "You're a victim. Your color of skin is dark. Nobody's going to want
to hire you." It's the
opposite. We live in a time where people are less likely to judge you based on
your color of the skin
than ever in the history of mankind. It doesn't mean there's no bigots out
there. People are less
likely to judge you on your sexuality than they ever have, on the color of your
skin, on your religion.
We are an incredible country. Are we perfect? No. But there's never
historically been a better time
to be alive and you can do it. I mean, you literally can do a manual job, earn
enough money to start your
own small business. If you're in high school and you're a decent student but
you're not a rocket
scientist and you don't love reading books and you don't love math but you're
pretty good and you're
intelligent enough, if you do HVAC, you'll have one hell of a career. You go to
a technical school in
Louisville, all of the people in the class, I went to one recently, there's 100
people in the class for HVAC,
fixing air conditioners. Every one of their tuition was paid for and they had a
job if they completed
the course. And HVAC, if you're an HVAC worker, I'm guessing, I'll bet you you
could make $80,000 to
$100,000 a year fixing air conditioners. But if you start your own HVAC company,
you'll be the richest man
or woman in town. In my town, the people in the HVAC companies are some of the
richest people in our
town. Well, it's a good argument also with automation and AI because automation
and AI is going to do a
lot of jobs that people are going to school for, unfortunately. A lot of people
are getting degrees
that are going to be irrelevant when automation and AI takes whatever
percentage of jobs it's
inevitably going to take. But trades, being a carpenter, being a plumber, those
are always
going to be valuable. I think things like that, you may have technical
assistance when you get there
that a computer helps diagnose the problem and helps fix the air conditioner,
but I don't think
the jobs... I talk to people every day and many of them are... Well, you're
going to have to carry
things and install things. You have to get in to open up walls. I think it's
still going to exist,
but I talk to everybody every day and they're scaring the world saying there'll
be no more jobs and
everybody will just sit around looking at each other. And I really, I don't, I
hope that's not
true. And I, you know, they're richer and smarter than I am maybe, but they all
say it's going to
happen. But I say, if it happens, what will also develop is secret societies
and they'll be like
speakeasies and you'll go down the stairs, you'll knock on the door and someone
will decide, you'll do
the password, you'll go inside and you'll be able to build shit in there. You'll
be able to like grout,
bricks and put them together. You'll be able to nail wood together, secret work,
because people will
still want to work. Even though there are no jobs, they will secretly want to
work.
Why would it be secret?
Because the government will make it illegal. The government's stupid.
The government will make work illegal? Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, I think this is a dystopian society. Here, bear me out.
So what novels are you reading?
This is, this is, I taught a course in this. So when we have AI, people saying
the jobs disappear,
work will become so foreign, but there'll be a small remnant that searches for
work,
but they'll do it secretly. And after you build stuff in the little speakeasy
down under with a
secret password, you'll have to destroy it before the government comes. So that's
just my theory
of what's, what's going to happen. I might be wrong. I could be wrong.
Have you ever had a conversation with Elon?
Yep.
He thinks that we're going to need universal basic income. And he thinks it won't
actually be
universal basic income. His rose colored glasses version of it is universal
high income.
Because he believes that AI is going to create so much wealth that there'll be
so much money that
people won't have to work anymore, which, so hear me out here. So the question
is like,
is it essential that the only way you take care of yourself and feed yourself
and house yourself is
through work? And can people find meaning outside of work? Can they find things
to do? Or will they
just be sitting around playing video games all day?
So the first thing that I'll probably just acknowledge is he may be smarter
than me,
and he's probably a little bit richer than me. So I don't discount his opinion,
Elon Musk,
but I hope he's wrong. And with regard to work, I think work is something so
necessary that the
problems we have in our society are with the people who aren't getting the
benefit of working. And so
I see work and I would mandate work for welfare programs. If you're able-bodied,
you would have
to work. I wouldn't give you a penny. Everybody would have to work. But I tell
people I don't,
I'm not in favor of that as punishment. That is reward. Work is a reward. I can
tell you that I've
never been unhappy. Maybe I'm lucky in the work I've had, but I've always
wanted to go to work. And
I've done hard jobs. I've roofed houses. I've worked on lawns. I've, I've done
every job that a kid
growing up in the seventies, but I was never unhappy to do it and always felt
better. If I sweat off five
pounds, 10 pounds in the hot sun, I felt great. And, but-
Okay. You and I are very different because my bad jobs that I had motivated me
to never
want to do those jobs. Well, yeah, I didn't want to do them forever. You're
right about that.
Well, it motivated me to find a thing in life that I didn't have to just work
as a laborer.
Yeah. And I noticed you don't really sweat too much in this current gig you've
got.
No, this is a pretty easy gig. But I mean, I did a lot of those kind of jobs
when I was younger.
What they did was teach me that I didn't want to do that forever.
Yeah. There has to be work. And I don't, I hope people won't preach too much
that AI is going to
be no work because that to me is a despairing future. It's a dystopian future
when there is no work.
Most of the time, and this is, well, I do respect Elon Musk and think he may
know more than I know
about this. The reason I would say is that from a historical perspective, every
bit of automation
has led to more jobs. This would be the first time in the entire history where
automation took jobs.
They feared that when the automated loom came, that all the weavers would go
out of business.
What they found instead is people had to make the sewing machines. People had
to fix the sewing
machines. And then clothing prices went down and people used to have one
wardrobe, maybe two shirts.
Now people have, even regular people can have dozens of shirts. You can get a
shirt for five bucks at
Target or eight bucks at Walmart. So it changed things. When electricity came
around, the candlestick
makers rioted. The Luddites in the 19th century broke the wombs with hammers
and protested against,
but we always got more jobs. Progress went on. So I guess from a historical
point of perspective,
I don't know that there's a good example of automation. It could lower
employment in a certain
industry, but overall employment, look, we have like 7 billion people on the
planet and we have less
poverty on the planet than we've ever had right now. Right. But it's not Luddites
that are concerned.
It's people that are aware that this is an unprecedented technology. Artificial
intelligence is an
unprecedented. And that's the question. They're positing that this is different
than it's ever been.
And I guess my argument, and I'm, like I say, I am willing to acknowledge these
people may know more
about this, but my argument is from a historical perspective, we've never had
any kind of invention
or automation that ultimately led to less jobs. It always led to more and led
to more prosperity.
Now they're arguing AI is going to get more prosperity and that's why then they'll
say artificial high
income. There'll be plenty of money, but there has to be work for the mental
well-being of people.
They cannot sit around and it...
No, I agree. But I mean, here's the question, can you find meaning in life
without it just being
for money? Can you find tasks and things and goals?
Which gets back to my speakeasy and it may or may not have to be secret, but
people are going to go
work even just to work. But...
Well, why does it have to be work? I mean, why can't it be art? Why can't it be,
you know, learning how to play music, something interesting?
It could be.
But I also think that the more leisure time you have, AI is going to give...I
grant them that AI
is going to give us more leisure time. And we also are progressing, and
progress is exponential at
this point. In 1820, before the Industrial Revolution, at the beginning of it,
98% of people lived on less
than $2 a day. And the World Bank does these statistics. Everybody. The only
people who didn't
were royalty. You know, the only obesity was among royalty. Regular people,
even in 1920,
there were no fat people.
Well, they didn't have processed food back then.
They didn't have an abundance of time and they didn't have an overabundance of
food. The reason
we're taller, everybody but me got more calories and got taller.
Protein.
Yeah. And so it's a food thing. But in 1820, 98% of people live in abject
poverty, less than $2 a day.
Today, not just the United States, the entire world is less than 10% live on $2
a day. Constant dollars,
controlling for inflation. We went from 98% to less than 10%.
AI is going to continue that. And maybe it's exponential. But when you have
more leisure time,
you have time to think of other stuff to do. We have time for our idle brains,
which are pretty big,
to come up with new ideas. So I think it's not yet known what we will think of,
what may pass as work. Maybe art is work at some point and everybody's an
artist. But maybe there also
are people who like to, you know, even now there's automation and we can grow
with pesticides and
fertilizers and stuff, just an enormous amount of food. And actually that's
been good for the most part
in supply and supplying more food for people. But there's still people have
organic farms who don't
use pesticides or any of this. There are people who have cattle with no
antibiotics and no vaccines,
chickens. And that's sort of labor intensive and not as cost effective. But the
only way that can exist
is you kind of let them charge more, you know, so that niche market, you know,
can still exist.
So it's the same with AI. There probably will be some things that maybe AI
could do it, but maybe you'd
rather a human do it. Even now with art, my wife Kelly has written a children's
book and she's looking
at art. She looked at the AI and it was pretty darn good, but she really wanted
an artist because she
wanted something to be, to have real meaning, you know, and to be something
that people connect with,
you know, for children's books, a lot of it is connecting with the pictures.
Well, I certainly think there's going to be a lot of value in art that's made
by humans,
just like there's value in music and even films. You know, that's the argument
that,
you know, I had Bradley Cooper in here the other day, and we were talking about
the concern that a lot of these
artists that create films, they're really worried that they're going to start
using digital actors and
doing everything through computer generated AI prompts and films even being
written by AI prompts.
My favorite Dilbert cartoon is this woman comes up to Dilbert and she says,
"I'm really worried about the robots. I'm worried about automation and I'm
worried my son won't get
work because of the robots." And Dilbert looks at her and he says, "Well, you
know, I've met your son and he
could be replaced by a hammer." Always has been this fear, but we have to have
innovation and get around it. There will be,
you know, technical jobs or other jobs. I don't know. I guess I'm not—I'm an
optimist just by nature.
And I—technology historically has not destroyed jobs. It's created jobs and
we're way better off.
You know, absent the industrial revolution, all those inventions, we'd still be
living 98% of us on $2 a day.
One of the things I want to talk to you about is what's going on in this
country right now.
Well, one of the big ones, one of the big things that's in the news is this
whole Minnesota thing.
Particularly a lot of things to cover, but particularly fraud and that they're
uncovering
a lot of fraud that it seems like not only was there a lot of fraud, but a lot
of these people
that were getting a lot of money from this fraud were donating to politicians.
There's, I believe,
$35 million by daycares was donated to Democrats in Minnesota last year. Is
that an accurate? Is that
an accurate number? Let's find out. That's extraordinary. That's one of the
best things for
AI. AI will give you good information. I saw a good cartoon yesterday. It was
an iceberg,
and the top of the iceberg was Minnesota fraud, but the iceberg beneath the
surface was California.
Yes. And can you imagine? Just be sheer size. Well, they're looking into
California
fraud now because of Minnesota fraud. And it's—look, just the homeless thing
alone,
just the fact that California spent $24 billion on the homeless can account for
where
the money went and the problem just got worse. Well, there's a couple things
about the refugee
thing. I don't think refugees should get welfare, and I have a bill to say they
shouldn't get it.
If you come to this country and your church sponsors somebody to come to it,
you support them. You sign up. You sponsor them. You support them. The
taxpayers shouldn't support
them. The other thing is, is we did a lot of the—a lot of these people came
on special visas.
They weren't part of the normal. It's part of this refugee program, but they
got special visas.
The smallies came because there's perpetual war in their country and famine.
No evidence Minnesota daycares gave millions to political campaigns. What is
this, Yahoo News?
I don't believe that. So I don't believe they haven't given any money.
This is where I got it from.
Okay. The figure appears to come from viral social media posts, widely shared
video alleging
that daycares. So here's the problem with this. If this fraud is as widespread
as it is, you're going
to get a lot of people that are covering their tracks right now. And so one of
the ways to cover
the tracks is to debunk things and to post stories. And I don't think we really
know how much money is
missing. I think part of the reform is we just shouldn't give out welfare. This
doesn't mean we
shouldn't help people. But if you're coming to this country and you want to
experience the greatness of
this country and someone sponsors you, they should take care of you. But what
happens is most of these
charities that work on bringing refugees in, they have a big heart. They're
bringing them in. But the
first paper work they fill out is signing up for welfare.
Okay. So according to our AI search, it says, "Fact checking organizations
review campaign finance
data and public records report no evidence that Minnesota daycare or childcare
operators donated
anything close to $35 million to political campaigns. One fact check notes that
the supposed
charge circulated online misrepresents or fabricates contribution totals and
far exceeds what small
childcare businesses would realistically give." But it depends on how much
money they're making.
When you say small, just I don't like the way they phrase that, small childcare
businesses,
because you're talking about a large number of these businesses. And so the
total, the all,
you know, all told, what is the number, especially compared to large corporate
donors? That's fact,
right? Also, they're listing Snopes as a source, which I don't like. It's a
very biased source.
So I had this debate for years with McCain. McCain said we should admit all
these people who were
interpreters in Afghanistan, all these people that are interpreters in Iraq.
And my response to him
was this. If they can speak English and they're pro-Western, they need to stay
in their country and
be the founding fathers of their country. If the people who speak English and
are pro-Western all leave,
then all the crazy jihadists are the ones going to run the government. So part
of the reason the Taliban
runs Afghanistan, again, is 80,000 of the best people probably came over here
that speak English
and have some kind of knowledge. They should have stayed in their country.
But isn't that kind of a simplistic perspective? Because a lot of those people
would be
dead. You know?
We won the war.
What war?
Well, we won what war?
Well, the war went on forever and ever.
We didn't win anything in Afghanistan.
I don't think saying we won the war in Afghanistan is even remotely.
They won and it immediately reverted to the Stone Age when we left. But for
many,
many years when they were coming over here...
But you can't say we won it.
What I'm saying is from the perspective of the people, the government that was
in place for the
20 years that we were there was a moderate government that was friendly to
these people.
I think them leaving was them. They should have been the founding fathers of
their country.
So, for example...
But wait a minute. Once we left, they had no protection and they were in grave
danger.
Right.
A lot of them became... Also, a lot of them were working with the Americans.
Yeah, no, in 18...
We left them there to die.
In 1812, the British came back and attacked us. If we would have all left and
said, "Oh,
well, damn, they're attacking us again. We're under attack." No, they should
have fought for their
country. And the thing is, is everybody... Sure, you can... It sounds like a
good thing. Bring them over here.
But we really didn't need another 80,000 people from Afghanistan. We didn't
need another 80,000
people from Iraq. And we certainly didn't need another 80,000 people from Somalia.
And if they're
coming, they should be ineligible for welfare. If you come as a legal immigrant,
you're not supposed
to get welfare for five years. And yet we know it's happening. The refugees can
get it immediately.
Right. That's the problem is the refugee status.
And then they've figured out, gosh, they are smart at one thing. That's those
learning centers,
those leering centers. Why are they smart at those?
Well, I mean, once you realize that you can get a lot of money doing that,
there was also
autism diagnoses and then they'd open up an autism center.
And, you know, all that money going overseas.
I don't fault people for taking advantage of a system that has giant loopholes
in it,
especially when you come over here from a war-torn country and there's a bunch
of people that are
already doing it. Like, "How do you make money? Let's do this."
Everybody's doing it.
Yeah. But somebody had to have helped them.
But, you know, there are people... Right?
There are people saying, and the whole thing needs to be audited. And I'm also
presenting a bill that
will audit the whole system everywhere. But there are people saying that there
are either Chinese
hackers as well as Russian hackers that are also stealing millions of dollars.
The Somalis were so
good at it. They were sending hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, back
overseas. So I think that
we're at the tip of the iceberg.
Has that been proven?
I don't know.
Because we read that as well.
We need to ask Snopes.
No, don't ask Snopes.
Put it in a perplexity. If Snopes gives it as an example, ignore it.
Well, they said it was $700 million the other day. The reports were $700
million. I think
you have to check off a box when it goes through the airport. And they weren't
even hiding that they were
sending it back. So the poor Somalis sent like $700 million over the last
couple of years.
So if they had $700 million to send back to Somalia, if that's true, where's
that coming from?
Well, they stole $9 billion.
Is that real?
Well, that's the number they're saying. That's why it all needs to be...
It's been in the press reports. I can't tell you exactly who. But the whole
thing needs to be audited.
Right. California and New York are going to be enormous problems with the same
kind of fraud.
Yeah.
And I think it's virtually a guarantee that we will find more. But why in the
world would
we run a government where we don't audit this stuff every year?
Right. How did it get to this point? That's the real question.
We don't audit the Pentagon. The Pentagon can't match their records either.
Right. Okay. But this is the TSA stuff.
This is just...
No, but this is you check it off in a box.
For a total of nearly $700 million over two years.
Okay. So this, we actually ran this through Perplexity, which is our sponsor.
It's an AI
program. It's always pretty accurate. Federal officials say that TSA flagged
nearly $700
million in cash and luggage leaving Minneapolis, St. Paul Airport.
So if you have more than $10,000, the law says you have to check a box.
Uh-huh.
And I think these people voluntarily checked a box. So they're looking through
data,
TSA forms. They just added them all up. So I think it's real.
So, but this is the same thing. This is this one weird website that we found
the other day,
Just the News. So this website, Just the News, published a report saying,
a report recently that revealed Transportation Security Administration has flagged
approximately $700 million in declared US cash. But the question is, like,
where is Just the News
getting this information from?
I think from TSA.
Why is it one weird right-wing website that is reporting this that everybody
refers to
when they're talking about this, the number attached to this fraud?
Because nobody's been looking. John Solomon is a good researcher, and he does
come up with stuff.
So have him on. Ask him where he came up with it. I'm pretty sure it comes from
TSA forms.
I don't think he's making the number up. I think this is-
That's an insane amount of money to send back to Somalia.
But this is also the gall. You're stealing welfare money, and you're taking it
out of the country,
and you are so in the belief that you won't get caught. You're not smuggling it
out. You're
putting on the form. I'm taking $20 million out of the country.
Well, they've been doing it, if it's true. And it seems to be true. They've
been doing it for decades.
And this is, I mean, when did we start mass immigrating people from Somalia
into this country?
You know what I think we should do? The next step would be, okay, we know how
much is going out of
Somalia. Let's look at every airport around the country and see who else is
shipping money out.
Yeah. We tried to find that the other day too, but we couldn't find any. We
tried looking at different
money that was like, how much does a TSA flag over the entire course of the
year all over the country?
We couldn't find that data, but that might just because nobody's published it.
Well, I'll ask. I can ask, and I'll have my staff. We'll look into it and see
if we can find that
answer for you. That would be great. One of the things I was reading recently
is interesting because
Minnesota has this one group of immigrants in the Somalis, but they also have
another group in the
Hmongs. And they have a completely different result in terms of the amount of
people that are on welfare,
the amount of people that graduate from college or high school, the amount of
people that are on Medicaid,
all of them are like radically different. It's much lower in the Hmong
community, which is interesting.
It's like, well, what is that? Is it education in their community? Is it they
don't come from a culture that
enables fraud? I mean, you have to realize Somalia is obviously where you get
an enormous amount of piracy.
Right. You know, I mean, this is that's the movie with Tom Hanks. Look at me. I'm
the captain now. Right.
That's Somalia. Right. And by the way, they were kind of forced into that
behavior.
You know, their original name, they didn't call themselves Somali pirates. They
called themselves the people's coast guard of
Somalia because the Europeans were dumping toxic waste off the coast and
killing all their fish. And they were fishermen.
So they started kidnapping the people that were in these boats and then, you
know, to try to get a ransom because
you've destroyed our fishing ground. And then they went, oh, well, you know
what? It's probably easier to
just kidnap people than it is to be a fisherman.
So the discussion reminds me of a story. So the Hamongs versus Somalis. Why are
86 percent of the Somalis
still on Medicaid? And why are the Hamongs doing better? So they used to always
make this argument
that Sweden is so great because it's socialist and that Swedes are all just
doing fine. They're all so
happy. Everybody's happy in Sweden. And so they're talking to Milton Friedman
about that. And he was over
there and they were bragging about the country, about how great Sweden was and
everything. And they were
attributing it to socialism. And he looked at them and he says, you know, the
Swedes are very happy.
They're also very happy in Minnesota. If you look at the statistics of people
from Sweden who immigrated
to Minnesota, they're kicking butt. They're in the top one percent. And it gets
back to what is the
argument? Why do Swedes do so well? Many people say it's this northern Scandinavian
work ethic. They brought it
with them and kept it in their families. And it's transmitted down. They're
also not fleeing a war,
right? I'm not saying it's more difficult. It's more difficult for refugees.
But they're not coming
over here as a refugee from a war. They're coming over here as an immigrant who
wants a better life.
Right. But I will tell you that, so for example, there are people who come and
in one generation
just kick ass. I'll tell you the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese came. I know a guy,
he came over here.
He was on an island for a year and he got one cup of rice. He lost like 60
pounds and he wasn't fat
to begin with. He was just nothing. He finally got here because he had fought
with us or his brothers
fought with us. He gets here, opens a transmission business. Three of his kids
are doctors, one's a
vet, one's a pharmacist. They just kick butt in one generation. There are Nigerians
that have come here.
They have dark skin. Everybody says, "Oh, America's racist." They kick ass.
They have the average Nigerian
income is higher than the average white income. They're also famously scammers
overseas in Nigeria.
Yeah, but what I'm saying... They do a great job in tricking people to give up
their money.
I think it is. It's not so simple as to say racism keeps people down. It's
ingenuity. It's your family.
Right. And Nigerians are particularly ingenious when they come into this
country.
They're hard workers. But it's also what we should, in an immigration system,
select for. Instead of
saying, "We're going to bring in 50,000 Somalis, why don't we look one at a
time?" And if you want
to sponsor a family or another Somali family wants to come, let's do it one at
a time. And then let's not
offer them any kind of welfare. And if they struggle, you take care of them
when they come over, whoever
sponsors them. What do you think they're going to uncover when they do a full
audit of the... Let's
just talk about Minnesota. What do you think is going to... I mean, what do you
envision the real
scope of this is? Well, I think it's going to be out-and-out fraud. It's not
going to be like just
some mistakes on forums or something. It's going to be these learning centers
that have nobody coming to
them. They just don't even exist. Food kitchens that aren't feeding anyone. But
I do believe the 700
million leaving Israel. They say it's only a few people, but I believe it's
real because I think
it's marked on the forums voluntarily by the people doing it. So this isn't...
700 million leaving
Israel. What do you mean? No, 700 million leaving Minnesota. The Somali money...
Okay, you said Israel.
I didn't mean to say it. I was like, what's going on? It's a new thing. Yeah,
the 700 million leaving,
I think, is voluntarily checked off on those forums by Somalis. Well, that has
to be fraud, right?
Yeah. So I think that's part of the fraud as well. But I think that if we audit
the system, we're going to
find organized gangs of Russians and Chinese doing the same thing. We know that
during COVID,
there were gangs of Russian hackers and Chinese hackers stealing stuff. There
were Americans
stealing stuff. But we have to have a tighter... Our problem is everybody's so
generous. Everybody
wants to help people. And you're a grumpy old terrible Scrooge if you don't
want to give refugees
more money. But ultimately, you have to give them less money or you won't get
to this. So let's say we gave
them $5 billion last year. If you give them $6 billion, do you think we're
going to do a better
job at rooting out the fraud or a worse job? If you give them more money, they'll
steal more money.
You have to give them less so everybody's looking harder at the money and you
do it. It's the same
way with the Pentagon. If you give the Pentagon, you know, $500 billion more,
do you think they're going
to be better with our money or worse? Right. So we've got to give less money.
So you've got to give less
money to the refugees and then you have to have more scrutiny of it. But the
interesting question is,
if I put forward a bill that says we're going to audit all the welfare, not
just the refugee program,
we're going to audit all the cash transfer programs for every state, do you
think any Democrats will
vote for that? Zero. I don't think one Democrat will vote for it. Yeah, I doubt
it. Well, also,
it would be terrible for their base, you know, if they found out that these are
the people that are
voting to audit... But you could argue you're actually making it better for
poor people because
I'm trying to get rid of the Somali stealing it so more of the dollars actually
go to people who are
poor. That's great to say. But most people think you're trying to reduce the
amount of money that
a hungry family gets. That's how they would frame it. And then people would
frame it as you being cruel.
Unfortunately, like this is just how... Right. And that's the problem with
having the debate.
Right. Because the debate is demagogued. Right. So speaking of which, so if you
like,
what do you... What was your take on the border being wide open for the last
four years? And not
just wide open, but they were encouraging people to come to America, telling
them how to do it,
and even helping them get across, giving them EBT cards, giving them cell
phones.
What was your take on all that? I do believe that they understand that most of
the people coming across
will ultimately be voters and that two out of three will vote Democrat. So it's
all power politics.
They say it's about, you know, humanity and being humane and all that. It isn't
that. It's all about
voting demographics and they want these people to come in because many of them
are suffering, you know,
through sex trafficking, all the other crap that went along with this mass
migration. So I don't think
it's necessarily a best place to be, but I'd say it's one of the most
extraordinary accomplishments.
You know, as you know, I occasioned him on the other side with Donald Trump. We
don't always
agree on everything, but on the border, I think he did a fabulous job by sheer
force of personality.
He fixed it before any money was allotted. He fixed it in the first three
months and it went from
whatever the number was down. He reduced it by 98%. He relocated some people
there. But by sheer force
of personality, before any money was even spent, he fixed the problem on the
border.
Well, it seemed like the Democrats wanted the problem to exist.
I think because they want more voters. They don't vote immediately.
And they were moving people to swing states and the idea being that the census
only counts human
beings. It doesn't count citizens. And so you get more congressional seats.
So California probably has a couple of congressional seats that are based on
illegal aliens. You know,
so there's such a large population that I think you have about, what is about
750,000 people
per congressional district. And there's got to be one or two congressional
districts that they have
that they probably don't, they shouldn't be allotted.
So then the problem becomes the people are here. And a lot of the people that
came across the border are
here illegally, illegally, even though they were encouraged to be here, they
are here illegally.
What do you do?
Well, this is going to shock you. I'm a moderate on this. I actually think that
most of the people that are here and working lawfully and can pass a background
check,
I would give them no welfare and I would give them no citizenship, no voting
privileges,
but you can work and we won't arrest you.
Yeah. Okay. No citizenship, but a potential path to citizenship?
I think it's better just to say the trade off is this, that you came illegally.
Right now,
the law says you got to go back and you'll never get in basically. So the
compromise is you came in
illegally, you just don't get to be a citizen your kids will be. Now, the new
ones, the 8 million that
might've come in last year, some of them need to go back and particularly any
of them committing crimes.
And I think people are very open and I think the Trump administration has sent
a lot of criminals back.
I think that's good.
There's no question they've sent a lot of criminals back. There's also no
question
they've arrested citizens that they thought were illegal aliens. They've sent
people back that were in
this country most of their lives. They came over here as infants and they don't
have birth certificates
and they don't have ID. They don't have citizenship.
See, the compromise I'm offering is different than anybody's ever talked about.
Everybody thinks the compromise
has to include voting and citizenship. If in Texas we gave amnesty and let, I
don't know,
a couple million people vote, immediately Texas becomes Democrat for the next
20 years. So that's
what it's all about. It's about voting. Right. Is the problem the census?
Because why are they
counting people and giving congressional seats based on people that aren't
citizens? If they change that
alone and made it so you're counting people, but you're only giving
congressional seats based on the
amount of citizens? We could change the law, but changing the law is difficult.
You know, I mean,
you have to end up getting 60 votes, which means we need seven Democrats. Right,
but it's not a crazy
law to begin with where you can get congressional seats based on the amount of
illegal aliens you have
in your area, which is crazy because then it encourages you to bring in illegals
so that you get
more congressional seats. Yeah. Kind of nuts. And then what do you do? You give
those people Medicaid,
you give those people food stamps, and then they're on your side. And it's part
of the answer to
immigration that makes it less of a burden on us is if we base our society on
work, we put a wall
around our welfare system, and we don't give it to people, refugees or
immigrants, legal or illegal,
nobody gets any, and you have to come for work. And what that does is you're
going to select out for
people who work. And that's why I try to say, and not many people on my side
would see this, say this,
I think some of the best Americans just got here, frankly. They have good work
ethic. They're
hardworking people. They work in our fields. They pick our tomatoes. They clean
fish. They work in
chicken houses. They do a lot of the dirty jobs in our country are done by
immigrants. So...
They also came here with ambition because they want a better life at great
peril and great risk.
And some of them here are here illegally. I would have a work program. I'd let
them sign up for a work
problem, pass a background check. But do you think that they should have to go
back home
in order to become a citizen? Like if some guy came over here 20 years ago,
started off as a laborer.
Now he's a carpenter. He's working for some construction company, but he's an
illegal.
Right. The trade is you don't get citizenship at all. Your kids will. I would
just say you don't get
citizenship. That's your trade-off. You know what? Here's an interesting survey.
Let's find a thousand
people who are in Texas illegally and do a poll and say, would you accept this?
Would you accept that
you don't get to vote during your lifetime, but your kids will get to vote if
they were born here
in exchange for not having to worry about being in a car accident or being sent
back to Mexico?
I'll bet you 80% of the people who are illegally would take work without
citizenship. But you know
who wants the citizenship and doesn't care about work? Democrats. All they care
about is the voting part.
See, what I'm trying to propose is something humane on the work part. Plus, I
think we need some workers.
Yeah. And I think the people would actually accept it, but they give up. They
don't have to give up
the country and leave and come back, which might never happen. They just give
up the voting. They're not
supposed to vote now anyway. They broke the law to come here. Well, that's the
really concerning thing
that some of them are voting. Yeah, and that shouldn't happen. And that's one
of the craziest things that
California has passed where you're not allowed to show ID when you vote, which
is just you're essentially
saying you're encouraging fraud. No, that's insane. It's insane. It's insane
that it passed. It's insane
that it's legal. It's insane that they could say that with a straight face and
have any sort of a weird,
you know, gaslighting answer as to why that would be a good thing.
Yeah, but it sort of shines a light on the gulf in our country between, you
know, one party and the
other that the gulf is so huge that they really don't want to verify who the
voters are. They come
up with arguments that just frankly aren't true. Oh, there's racism in the ID
and stuff. Almost all
the voter ID bills have said you can get an ID for free, you know, to make sure
there isn't some sort
of an air of racism. Also, you needed an ID to prove that you had a COVID
vaccine
just a few years ago. Not me. I didn't get a vaccine. Right. But you needed one
if you wanted
to fly just a few years ago and that was fine with them. Go to New York. The
hypocrisy is astounding.
You want to go to a restaurant, you had to have a COVID vaccine. You had to
have your ID. It was astounding.
But the weirdest one was the open shipping people to swing states. Just the
fact that that's okay
and that they spent tax dollars just flying people to these states.
Yeah. You start to think it's not a humanitarian project. It's a voting project.
Yeah. I mean, it does make sense. But how do you feel about the way the
government currently is going
about trying to round up illegals? Like, obviously, we have this terrible
tragedy in Minnesota where that
woman was shot, which was horrible. I mean, I don't know why I feel way worse
when a woman gets shot,
but I always do, especially in that situation. I understand that the officer
that shot her,
apparently he had been dragged by a car like really recently. Right. Which I
would imagine
also tensions very high, but it just seemed all kinds of wrong to me. Yeah. I
think there is
general consensus about getting rid of gang members, people committing crimes,
rapists, murderers.
Even among Democrats. I think when you go to Boston, you round up some of these
really bad people
in Boston that are committing crimes. I think some of the Democrats are quietly
okay with it.
I think when you get beyond the criminals to the next set of people who some of
them are just
working in our country, I think it's harder. I also think that the ICE agents
have a tough job.
So do the police. Police are trained in this, and there's a lot of training on
how you deal with
protesters, how you do things. It would be better if it were local police than
ICE.
But what do you do if it's Minnesota and the local mayor says we're a sanctuary
city? We're not asking
anybody whether they're here legally or not. Someone robs you. Someone rapes
somebody. Somebody
does, steals a car. We are a sanctuary city. We're not going to tell you. The
only way you can have police
is you're going to have to bring in the federal police. So one thing I would
tell these left-wing
cities is if you want less ICE in your city, why don't you police your city?
But they're not willing
to do it. Yeah, but they don't want to police their city. That's what I mean.
And if you can't force
them to do it, if they don't agree with it, and if the people in the state
largely, if they vote against
it, and if you have a large percentage of population of illegals, like, say,
California,
not just a large percentage of populations that are illegal, but a large
percentage of people that
think that those illegals are a part of the community. Right. I mean, L.A.
without Mexicans
would be crazy. I mean, it wouldn't be L.A. I mean, they are an integral part
of Los Angeles,
the both illegal and legal, but illegal as well. I mean, how many restaurants
employ, great restaurants
in Los Angeles employ illegal people from Mexico? Right. I think that local
police is better than
national police. But the only way we can have local police is the local police
have to enforce the law.
And so they are breaking the law and having an obscure, a bizarre way of
interpreting the law to say,
we are going to defy the national immigration laws. So I think it would be
better done by the local
cities. But if the local cities aren't going to do it, then you have to have
national agents going in.
And it is a tragedy. But like I say, I also have sympathy for the people that
are in law enforcement
trying to do a very difficult job. I do as well. But what was your take on the
actual shooting itself?
You know, I don't know that I want to go too much into the specifics of it
because I don't want to
pass judgment like a jury would, because really someone will have to go into
and look specifically
at every fact and every angle and every angle of camera. So I don't I don't
like to judge criminal
things that happen in our country and say, well, that person needs to go to
jail or that person's
innocent. I don't know that I can make that judgment. And then am I coloring
the situation for anybody who
will have to make that judgment someday on some kind of jury?
What? Let's see if we can find this out. How many people have been sent back
during the time of this
administration? So in the year now that this administration has been
operational, how many
illegals have been rounded up and sent back? I know a lot of people self deported,
right?
When Trump got into office, because I think they were probably worried about
being
sent somewhere that they didn't want to be, which was a thing.
I've seen somewhere that it doesn't greatly exceed some of the deportations
under Obama,
that the numbers aren't as big as you think they are.
Right. But I think the deportations under Obama, what they're counting is
people that
snuck across the border and were turned back, not people who were snatched up
at Home Depot,
and then, you know, brought to some country that they didn't even come from.
I don't know what the numbers are. The answer is...
Horrible prison. So we'll pull this up here. Public estimates indicate the
Trump administration
has removed on the order of a few hundred thousand people since returning to
office
January of 2025, not millions. So here's the problem with that. What was the
numbers of people
that were sneaking in every year? It was kind of crazy, right? Because it was
20 million over four
years, right? Isn't that what the number is on the high side?
Yeah. I don't know what the number is. The numbers are in the millions, but I
think it's hard to
estimate because some of them didn't get...you know, if you're not getting
caught, how do we estimate
how many there are? But I think millions of people came in, and I think it was
a tragedy.
And like I say, you know, it's one of the things Donald Trump has been an
absolute success on,
is controlling the southern border. Yes. And it should have been done a long
time ago. But the
question is, like, how effective is the removal process? And do they have a
quota that they have
to meet? Is this why they're being so aggressive about it? So it says here, "October
2025, Homeland
Security Update referenced in one overview stated, more than two million people
were removed from the
country in 2025." But that total combined formal deportations, which were 527,000,
with roughly
1.6 million people who voluntarily left or lost status rather than being
physically deported. Separate
NPR report described about 600,000 deportations in 2025, along with about 1.6
million immigrants. So,
similar off by, you know... Okay, let's see here, reflecting broader crackdown.
Okay, here's the
question. What is the estimate of the amount of people who came in illegally
between 2020 and 2024?
What would you guess? I think I've seen some guesses at 8 million. I think 20
is going to be high.
But then there's... So 20 million is the exaggeration?
Oh, I don't know. But there's also been reports through the years of how many
are here illegally.
They used to say 11. Now some people say 20. Some people say 30.
In the whole country?
Yeah. I don't know what the number is. But I mean, that's...
We don't know.
The estimates vary widely.
If 20 million people got in in a year, that's crazy.
Well, that would be insane.
That would be crazy. That means we doubled what was here and then made a triple.
And even 8 million in a year would be a lot. I would guess that at least
millions came in under
the Biden administration.
Certainly millions, but how many? Okay. It says, "From 2020 to 2024, government
data shows roughly 11 to 12
million encounters," in italics, "with people crossing the U.S. border illegal
and mainly at the southwest
border because many people try to cross multiple times, the number of
individuals is slightly lower
than the number of encounters." And also, that's... But then you have to factor
in the people that
they didn't encounter, which were numerous, right? So by saying the number of
encounters is the
accurate representation of the amount of people that got in illegally is kind
of crazy.
Yeah.
That doesn't make any sense. U.S. Customs and Border Protection counts
encounters, which includes
apprehensions between ports of entry and people deemed inadmissible at ports of
entry.
Okay. So we don't know. But that number was 10.8 million encounters nationwide
between 2021 and 2024
alone. That's just encounters. I think it'd be safe to say that whatever the
encounters are, the actual
number is probably higher, even if you have people getting caught multiple
times. It's a lot of
people, whatever it is. Let's say it's 5 million. Let's say it's 8 million.
That's way bigger than the
city of Austin snuck in illegally in four years because they wanted them to be
here. And they didn't
want to enforce it.
Yeah. So they say Austin is kind of a liberal city.
It is very liberal.
Do you have any of the sanctuary city kind of policies here or not?
I don't believe so. I don't think they do. I mean, there's certainly a lot of
ICE protests.
There's a lot of people that protest ICE. I mean, there was some arrests here,
I guess,
yesterday or the day before. I mean, after that woman was shot, I think,
unfortunately,
well, everything's unfortunate about it, right? But one of the real problems is
now ICE are villains.
And now people are looking at them like murderous military people that are on
the streets of our
city and they're masked up, which is also a problem, right? Because if you get
arrested by a cop,
you're allowed to ask the cop, what is your name and badge number? And you
could film that cop. If you
get arrested by an ICE agent, you have no such right. They're wearing a mask.
They don't have to
tell you shit. That's a problem. That's a problem on our city streets, right?
Because you could also
pretend to be an ICE agent. So I saw this terrible story about this family that
was killed where these
guys pretended to be a UPS driver and they showed up and they made their way
into the house and killed
people because they were dressed up as a UPS driver. If you could pretend to be
a UPS driver,
for sure, you could pretend to be an ICE agent, especially since they're
completely anonymous.
So think about how many people can get arrested or robbed or by criminals,
right? Because you could
just have people pretending. It's not like it's impossible to fake their logo,
right? It's pretty
easy. It just says ICE. You know, how hard is that? You could easily imagine
armed gangs pretending to be
ICE agents robbing people.
Yeah. I think you could make an argument when you're working right along the
border or at night
with large groups that there's a lawlessness to the cartels that hiding the
identities of ICE
along the border. It's a little harder to make the argument. And I saw this
image in a courthouse in
Chicago where it's a big elevator and the ICE agents all have masks on and they're
arresting people and
it's all women and children in a big elevator in a courthouse. It's like,
really? I don't think you
really need to be wearing a mask.
Well, they're worried about being doxxed and, you know, they're finding that
happening.
But our local police have to do that and they don't wear masks. You see what I
mean? The local police
go to the courthouse to arrest somebody or on the bright lights of the city
during or during the day.
But again, the local police have to state their name and badge number. The
local police have always been
here. The ICE element is completely new, or at least at this scale.
I'm saying that for most of the regular arrests, you probably don't need to
have them wearing masks.
That's what I'm saying.
The problem is once they don't wear a mask, then they're going to get doxxed
and people have
actively doxxed them and threatened their families.
Well, they do that to the local police too, though. I mean, that's what I'm
saying. The local police don't wear masks.
Right, but the police have always been there and police are there for a reason.
If you call the police,
if someone's breaking into your house, you're assuming the police are going to
come.
You don't call ICE because you don't self-report. You don't say, "Oh, I'm
having an issue with some
immigrants," and we call ICE. No, they're a new factor in the community and
they're wearing masks.
That's a big difference. It's not the same comparison. Like most people, except
the kooky
people that went nutty during 2020 after the George Floyd riots that were like,
defund the police.
Right.
And boy, did they change their tune as soon as they started getting riots and
their buildings burned
down. They're like, where's the police? Well, you fucking defunded them, stupid.
Like people, most people believe that police are necessary. Most people believe
that crime is
awful and you can't have murderers and armed robbers roaming the street. You
should arrest them and you're
going to need police officers to do that. But those same people that believe
that might also believe
that once someone is here, they should be able to stay in this country and ICE
is operating illegally
and we shouldn't have militarized groups of people roaming the streets, just
showing up with masks on,
snatching people up, some of them U.S. citizens, and shipping them to countries
they didn't even
come from. So that's why they have to wear a mask. If you want them to do that
job, if you want them to
be able to deport 500,000 people over a year, which is a lot of people, if that's
the real number,
you know, they're going to be...their life's going to be at stake. You're not
going to be able to get
people to do the job unless you allow them to be anonymous. And then again,
allowing them to be
anonymous creates a whole host of other problems where you could have people
pretend to be them.
And how would you know who's who and who's not? Some people have offered sort
of an in-between
where they wear badges that have a number or a first name on them such that
when you're arrested,
if I think you've abused my rights in arresting me, Steve, you know, and a
number, three, two, four.
People are going to dox them instantaneously. Their face will be on the
internet instantaneously.
They'll make lists. They'll put it on social media sites.
It's complicated, obviously, but it's also very ugly. To watch someone shoot a
U.S. citizen,
especially a woman, in the face, where it's like, I'm not that guy. I don't
know what he thought. And
again, this is a guy who had almost been run over. But it just looked horrific
to me. I mean,
when people say it's justifiable because the car hit him, it seemed like she
was kind of turning the
car away. It seemed like she was out of her fucking mind to begin with. That
lady seemed crazy, right?
And she didn't she move there specifically to get involved in all this. Yeah, I
don't know.
She didn't seem mentally healthy. But does that mean she should be shot in the
head? Is there no
other way to handle this? But and then you got these people that are showing up
at these ICE people
and they're blocking traffic. And she was one of them that was doing those kind
of things where they
think they're an activist and they're an agitator. Right. But I get back to my
my my initial sort of
argument about having local police do it. They're not doing it. But in an ideal
world, the way we fix
this and have less ICE agents in cities where they're having a very difficult
job is the local people do
their job and they're not sanctuary cities. Well, how did you stop sanctuary
cities?
Well, I'm not sure I can. I'm saying but what I'm saying is that some of the
blame for ICE being
there is the left and their policies of sanctuary cities. Right. So when they
want to just say,
oh, we hate ICE and we don't want ICE in our city, maybe they should be
reflecting that ICE is in your
city because you're disobeying the law. And when someone is arrested and they're
clearly not a citizen,
you're not reporting them to ICE. See, it's defiance. It's nullification. They
have been nullifying
our laws on deportation for years and years. And so now there's something they
really dislike.
But who brought it upon? My point is the left brought this. It's not an answer,
but it's an explanation that the left is bringing this to their cities because
they're refusing to
enforce the laws. Right. And they don't want those laws. They don't like those
laws. They think that once
people are here, they should be able to stay. And, you know, this is what my
friend Gad Saad calls
suicidal empathy. And I think there's a balance to be achieved. I just don't
know how it gets done
because I see both perspectives. I see the perspective of the people that say,
hey,
there was an illegal program moving people in here to get votes, moving people
in here to get congressional
seats. And we've got to change that. We've got to take those people that got in
and send them
back to where they came from or do something. Because if we don't, they're
going to keep doing
it if they get in office again in 2028, and it's going to accelerate. And you're
going to have to
take away some of the damage that's been done to a true democratic system
because you've kind of
hijacked it. And they kind of have. And then I can also see the point of view
of the people who say,
yeah, but you don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around,
snatching people up,
many of which turn out to actually be US citizens. They just don't have their
papers on them. Are
we really going to be the Gestapo? Where's your papers? Is that what we've come
to? So it's
more complicated than I think people want to admit. You know, people want to
look at this as a black
and white issue, you know, if you're a compassionate person or if you're a
pragmatic person. And
I don't think that's true. I think it's both.
But I think the argument needs to be made again and again, and the left needs
to hear
that they have created this situation by disobeying the immigration laws, by
ignoring the deportation
orders, by not reporting people who are committing crimes. Now, we're not
talking about some guy mowing
lawns. We're talking about somebody who stole a car, somebody who raped
somebody. They are in jail.
So this isn't the ordinary working person who's jury illegally. We're talking
about the criminal
illegals in our country.
I think most people were in favor of getting rid of gang members, criminals,
murderers, rapists.
Most people were in favor of getting rid of those people.
But the thing is, is that the left-wing cities that are sanctuary cities are
not reporting that.
That's part of the reason why ICE is in Minnesota is the local people are
resisting.
And a good example of that is Aurora, right? Aurora, Colorado, where Trenda Agua
was taking over
apartment buildings and they were a sanctuary city. So the police literally
could do nothing about it,
which is just pure insanity. It's a lot of problems.
But we solved at least half of them today, right?
I think we did. Rand, thank you so much. I've been a big fan of yours for a
long time.
And thank you again for being a voice of reason and for holding him to the fire
during the whole
COVID thing, because you were really one of the only people that was asking
informed,
tough questions of him. And I really, really appreciate that you did that.
We think he needs to come in one more time. And I have asked him to come in
voluntarily for testimony. We're negotiating with his attorneys. If he comes in
voluntarily,
we can get him to testify. If he resists, I have subpoena power,
but it would probably require a court case to get him to come in. But I think
he needs to fully
explain why this wasn't gain of function and why it was destroying federal
records.
: Oh, what was the destroying of federal records?
: Emails back and forth saying, "Destroy this after you've read it."
: That's illegal. And we have evidence of that.
: I'm sure all that's in the book.
: Deception. Now, did you do the audio version of it?
: No, somebody else did. And I wanted my wife to do it because she's a great
reader,
and she helped me write the book. But no, but my wife and I wrote it together.
This is our second
book together. We wrote "The Case Against Socialism" a few years ago, and then
she and I
collaborated. And I jokingly say the boring, dry, scientific part is mine. If
there's anything
really interesting to read, that's my wife.
: All right. Well, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much.
: Thanks for being here. All right. Bye, everybody.