If Biden Wins In 2024, This Happens! | Dave Rubin PT 1

Summary

Podcast Summary: “If Biden Wins In 2024, This Happens!” | Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory ft. Dave Rubin (PT 1)

Release Date: July 9, 2024
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Guest: Dave Rubin

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Overview

This episode of Impact Theory, hosted by Tom Bilyeu, features political commentator Dave Rubin for a candid, in-depth discussion on the potential consequences of Joe Biden winning the 2024 US presidential election. The conversation explores the current state of political narrative, Biden’s cognitive health, the impact of “the system” and deep state on governance, the divisive nature of tribalism and identity politics, and the dynamics of third-party candidates like RFK Jr. The podcast also delves into critical social issues such as immigration, American values, national unity versus “national divorce,” and the philosophical underpinnings of the American experiment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Aftermath of Biden’s Debate | Systemic Narrative Shifts

• Biden’s Cognitive Decline in the Public Eye
  • The debate performance revealed Biden’s significant cognitive degradation—something insiders suspected, but which the public could no longer ignore.
  • Media outlets could not manage the narrative as they historically have with other issues; “the truth was so freaking obvious to everyone in real time. The system didn’t know how to lie about it.” (Dave Rubin, 06:50)
  • Sympathy is expressed for Biden as a human being dealing with cognitive decline, but frustration at the charade maintained by political and media apparatus.
• The Question of Who’s Really Governing
  • Neither Rubin nor Bilyeu believe Biden is truly leading; there’s speculation about a “managerial class,” deep state influences, or other figures (e.g., Jill Biden or Barack Obama) running things behind the scenes.
  • “He is the ultimate avatar of what a deep state or managerial class would want.” (Rubin, 06:40)
• The Role of the System vs. the Individual
  • There’s broad agreement that much of what happens politically is determined by managed narratives and not authentic leadership.
  • Tom presents an entrepreneur’s lens: looking for utility and measurable outcomes, baffled by a populace willing to vote for someone so clearly “muddled.”

Timestamp: 02:08–09:33

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Why Do People Support Biden Despite Concerns?

• A “Fake Binary Choice”
  • America is caught with two choices—both aged candidates that many feel do not fit today’s challenges.
  • Support for Biden is not enthusiastic; rather, it’s driven by fear of Trump. The Democrats’ campaign is based on scaring voters about the alternative rather than offering a compelling, positive agenda.
  • “The answer is if you can scare the hell out of half the people about the other guy, that’s why they’ll vote for the guy who is completely mind muddled. That’s it.” (Rubin, 12:05)
• Policy Failings as Motivation
  • Immigration, inflation, interest rates, and other traditional metrics are flagged as failures of the Biden administration.
• Tribalism and Identity Politics
  • Tom identifies social media as amplifying tribalism, noting that both parties—DNC with intentional identitarianism, Trump via his own personality—have leaned into division because it energizes their bases.

Timestamp: 09:33–14:01; 38:46–40:35

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Trump as Counter-Candidate | Systemic Scapegoating & Emotional Politics

• System & Media Demonization of Trump
  • Rubin argues that Trump is unfairly treated as a “racist/Hitler” figure, with media ignoring facts (e.g., Trump’s Jewish family).
  • “He represents the individual in a system that is mostly collective. And what does the collective hate the most? The individual.” (Rubin, 15:30)
• Trump’s Policy Legacy vs. Personality
  • Trump’s presidency, especially pre-COVID, is discussed as economically robust and geopolitically stable (low unemployment, Abraham Accords, no new wars).
  • “If you just look at the results… before COVID, the economy was seriously sharp…There was an order to the world because of a strong America.” (Rubin, 14:01)
  • Critique of Trump’s style remains, and yet Tom and Dave agree he appeared more disciplined in recent debates.

Timestamp: 13:48–18:41

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The Culture of Hopelessness & Aspirational Politics

• Loss of Inspiration in Modern Politics
  • Both guests express nostalgia for a time when America, especially for Gen X, inspired hope and a belief in equality and opportunity.
  • Tom looks for a vision where people are shown a clear path to personal improvement and national greatness—something missing from both Biden and Trump in 2024.
  • “Where is all the hope, the excitement, the vision for America that will make people today feel the way that I felt as a teenager?” (Bilyeu, 18:41)

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The RFK Jr. Factor: Spoiler or Savior?

• RFK Jr.’s Appeal and Limitations
  • Rubin shares his high personal regard for RFK—they’ve debated policy differences respectfully.
  • RFK is seen as sincere but perhaps lacking the fully-formed political backbone on some issues; potentially more valuable as a reformer of governmental agencies than as President.
  • “I would love to see him…become czar of destroying the agencies…all of the deep state, all the eternal state stuff.” (Rubin, 23:13)
• Spoiler Effect: Who Is Helped or Hurt?
  • RFK’s impact is debated: does he pull anti-establishment votes from Trump (esp. on COVID and vaccine skepticism) or lure disaffected moderate/liberal Democrats?
  • Tom cites polling: RFK does well in head-to-heads, but in a three-way race, his support tanks—likely pulling more from independent voters.

Timestamps: 19:39–24:28; 35:15–38:46

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The “Evil vs. Stupid” Party Paradigm & Retention of Power

• Systemic Corruption
  • Dave laments the Democratic Party’s willingness to do “anything to attain and retain power,” contrasting it with the Republican Party’s procedural openness—however “stupid.”
  • “The evil party has become the Democrats. And the Republicans are just kind of stupid, but stupid you can work with…” (Rubin, 24:30)
• Potential “Evil Genius” Tactics
  • To retain power, Democrats might manufacture crises (foreign wars, domestic terror) to frame Trump as “an agent of chaos” and present Biden as “the steady hand.”
  • Manipulation of “forever wars” is discussed as a tool for funneling wealth to the military-industrial complex via money-printing, impoverishing the average American and simultaneously consolidating power.

Timestamps: 27:12–33:05

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Deep State, Money Printing, and the Military-Industrial Complex

• Tom’s PSA: How Printing Money Funds Wars
  • Bilyeu unpacks how inflation via money printing is a stealth tax on every American, used to fund war and benefit defense contractors.
  • “It is a way to tax the American people without actually having to ask their permission.” (Bilyeu, 29:07)
  • Even US allies (Israel) are harmed by dependency; foreign aid is a boomerang for US interests.

Timestamps: 29:07–35:15

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Immigration, National Cohesion, and American Values

• Rubin’s Immigration Argument
  • Border security is promoted as the first duty of government.
  • Large-scale, undocumented migration is seen as both a direct logistics/cost challenge and as an existential threat to shared American values.
  • “You don’t have a country if you don’t know who’s in your country. You have something… but you do not have a country.” (Rubin, 64:53)
• Tom’s Values-Centric View of America
  • America’s foundation is not ethnicity or geography, but shared ideas: “America is an idea. It is a story that attracts a certain kind of person… entrepreneurial, hardworking, industrious.” (Bilyeu, 77:49)
  • National health depends on assimilation and a unifying work ethic; unchecked immigration without shared values, or intentionally divisive curricula/politics, is a recipe for division and decline.
  • “Not sharing values? Hyper dangerous… I want homogeneity of values.” (Bilyeu, 87:09)
• Diversity vs. Unity
  • Both Tom and Dave stress: diversity of approach is valuable, but diversity without shared core values is a “disaster.”
  • “Diversity is the thing we must overcome to have this beautiful thing called America.” (Bilyeu, paraphrasing Thomas Sowell, 87:09)

Timestamps: 64:53–90:07

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National Divorce: Cultural & Political Balkanization

• Possible Paths Forward
  • Rubin is reluctant to talk about “national divorce” but sees it as an “emergency option” if irreconcilable cultural/political differences persist.
  • Predicts blue states would block red states’ secession due to the left’s tendency toward centralization and control.

“If Biden wins again, then I don’t see how America gets out of any of these problems… at that point, I would be very bullish on Florida, and very bearish on the rest of the country.” (Rubin, 61:09)

• State Experiments: Florida vs. California
  • Rubin extols Florida as working closer to “founders’ intent”; California is used as a cautionary tale of overtaxed, over-regulated decline.

Timestamps: 56:51–64:42

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Biden’s March Toward Re-nomination:
  “It’s obvious to everyone that he has been degraded cognitively, very significantly… The machine, the system, the matrix… can no longer control the narrative as it relates to Biden.” (Rubin, 02:29)
• On the Nature of Political Choices:
  “If you can scare the hell out of half the people about the other guy, that’s why they’ll vote for the guy who is completely mind muddled.” (Rubin, 12:05)
• On Utility Over Ideology:
  “I do not understand people not being obsessed with utility. I have an outcome that I desire, and these are the things that lead me to that outcome.” (Bilyeu, 89:16)
• On American Values:
  “America is an idea. It is a story that attracts a certain kind of person... entrepreneurial, hardworking, industrious.” (Bilyeu, 77:49)
• On Diversity:
  “Diversity is the thing we must overcome to have this beautiful thing called America.” (Bilyeu quoting/paraphrasing Sowell, 87:09)
• On the Deep State:
  “Wouldn’t then a mind-muddled 80-year-old career politician for 50 years be the perfect person to be ushering in this managerial class deep state situation.” (Rubin, 33:05)
• On the Future of America:
  “Maybe the only way we can get back [to American values] is personally, individually, community-wise, maybe a little bit on the state side. Maybe the national thing now is so big, it’s so broken, it’s such a Godzilla that cannot be managed.” (Rubin, 43:24)

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Segment Timestamps

• Biden’s Cognitive Decline and Debate Fallout: 02:08 – 09:33
• Why Vote for Biden? Fear of Trump, Binary Choices: 09:33 – 14:01
• Trump’s Gravitational Pull & Personality: 13:48 – 18:41
• The ‘Hope’ Deficit in US Politics: 18:35 – 19:39
• RFK’s Third-Party Impact: 19:39 – 24:28, 35:15 – 38:46
• Evil vs. Stupid Party, Deep State Maneuvers: 24:30 – 33:05
• Money Printing, Perpetual War, Deep State Mechanics: 29:07 – 35:15
• Immigration and Border Security: 64:53 – 77:14
• American Values, Assimilation, Diversity: 77:15 – 90:07
• National Divorce, States’ Rights, and American Experiment: 56:51 – 64:42

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Conclusion

This episode is a sweeping, opinionated, and at times bleak exploration of American political culture and the structures underlying current electoral dynamics. Rubin and Bilyeu blend realpolitik with entrepreneurial rationality, critiquing both parties and focusing on the necessity of shared values, individual responsibility, and system-level transparency. Listeners come away with a sense of both the systemic crises at play and of the need for a renewed focus on American ideals if the nation is to thrive amidst its many challenges.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

Do you think the system has scared people or has Trump himself scared people?

[B]

He has now seen the evil of the Democrat party and we're watching the evil of the Democrat party burst forth right now in everything that's going on.

[A]

You had money taken, buying power robbed from your bank account, sent technically overseas, but the money comes back to American contractors. So if you're one of those American contractors, you just got richer.

[B]

Florida man. Florida man does this, Florida man does that. Florida man smokes meth and wrestles an alligator and saves a child. And Florida man was right about a lot of something.

[A]

Dave Rubin, welcome back to the show.

[B]

Tom, it's good to be with you. I gotta tell you, I have seen a lot of operations. I'm OG podcaster over here. I've built a couple studios in my day. You're doing all right, man.

[A]

Thank you, Sarah. We definitely.

[B]

It's quite an operation you have going on over here.

[A]

That's pretty cool.

[B]

I'm.

[A]

I'm excited to see how far we can take it. For sure.

[B]

This is the Batcave, right? Like, somewhere there's a Batman thing. You are Batman. Is that what's happening here? Obviously, yeah, obviously.

[A]

I don't usually talk about that on camera, but, yes, I just blew your spot.

[B]

That's it.

[A]

Yeah, it's fine.

[B]

That's how it all ends for Batman. Going on a podcast, Bruce Wayne, like, yeah, I'm Batman. Well, what can I do?

[A]

Yeah. I suppose if I really were Batman, I never would have owned it. So. Alas, Alas. But trying to help my boy out by throwing people off the scent, you see.

[B]

Clever. Clever.

[A]

I thought so.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Let me ask. Yeah. Biden has just announced that despite his performance in the debate, he is going to be the 2024 nominee. What happens if Biden wins?

[B]

What happens if Biden wins? Wow. Do you want to jump right to that, or should we talk a little bit about his mental state first? Like, truly, if that's part of your

[A]

answer, give it to me.

[B]

Well, I. I would say it. It's obvious to everyone, everyone watching this, listening to this, everyone in this country, everyone in the world that pays any remote attention to politics, it is obvious to them that he has been degraded cognitively, very significantly. I think what maybe wasn't obvious to people was how significantly he was degraded, but it was obvious even five years ago. What's interesting that has happened in the last, say, 10 days post debate is that the machine, the system, the matrix, whatever you want to call it, it can no longer control the narrative as it relates to Biden. So for years, literally before he was president, when he was on the campaign trail and even when he was vp, the slips were starting to happen. The flubs, the confusions, the slurring, all of that was happening. And by the way, we should all have sympathy. I think it goes without saying, but I always think it's worth saying at least once in an interview, we should have sympathy for anyone dealing with all of these things. Everyone will either be hit by it personally, have a grandparent or parent or somebody that they love will be hit by this. I had two grandmothers that both had dementia, one into Alzheimer's at the end, one of whom, because I was doing standup in New York, so I was only working at night, I was spending a lot of time with her during the day, going to the doctor. So I've been around a lot of this, a lot of the stiffness that he has. Like, you know, there's just. There's a lot there that anyone, and I'm obviously not a doctor, can see, and something is not right. What happened at that debate was that for all of the ways the media can lie about it or confuse you or play the shell game, just get you to look at something else while he's kind of falling apart. It was so obvious to everyone watching that split screen, not just the confusions. You know, there was that moment about six or seven minutes into the debate where he just completely lost his train of thought and he flubbed out that sentence and Jake Tapper kind of saved him. And everyone watching was thinking the same thing, like, holy cow, how bad is this going to be for the next hour and a half? And then for an hour and a half, we watched a split screen of his jaw gape. The confusion, the sort of blank look in his eyes, everything else. The point, the reason that I'm reiterating all that is that it was so obvious to everyone that they could not hold in the lie anymore. So that's why immediately the debate ends. Cnn, msnbc, Fox, every online pundit or whatever we all are, everybody was saying the same thing, like, there's just no doubt about this now. I think one of the ways the system has worked over the years is that it's able to launder the lies, to kind of slow down the lies. So, for example, you know, very fine people on both sides that Donald Trump went to Charlottesville and saw the protesters and said, they're very fine people on both sides, somehow meaning that they're. That the white supremacists were very fine people and that the other people there were very fine. No, Donald Trump said the next sentence, which was, I'm not talking about the neo Nazis or the white supremacists, blah, blah, blah. But the system allowed that lie to exist for years, right? The system allowed the lies of COVID to exist for years. The system allowed the lies of Brett Kavanaugh as a serial rapist to exist for years. It let the lies of the Covington kids are racist. Jesse Smollett was going to be, was, was lynched, all of these things. But what happened that night is something that very rarely happens, that the truth was so freaking obvious to everyone in real time. The system didn' know how to lie about it. And that's why all these pundits that have no problem lying, the Joe Scarboroughs, all of these people that are in essence, paid to lie at these corporate news organizations, they simply did not know what to do. So now what has burst forth is that we're watching a system that is completely in flux right now because it really, it genuinely, I believe, is as out of control as it seems right now. He now for whatever's left in his brain, or whether it's Jill Biden running it or it's, you know, Barack Obama behind the scenes, whatever he is running his own operation to see if they can push him over the finish line. Kamala has her own agenda. The media has their own agenda. They have to cover their tracks for the obvious lies that they've been doing over the last couple years. So anyone, literally anyone that you could have in this chair that you ask that question to or asked to make the prediction of what will happen or how this is going to happen or what would that second term look like, has genuinely no idea. Because by the time I finish this sentence, he could be incapacitated. We have no idea. Well, I'll ask you a question? I mean, do you honestly believe he has been running this administration? Do you think he has been functioning as the chief executive for the last four years? To me the answer is very obviously no. And in a weird way I would say he is the ultimate avatar of what a deep state or managerial class would want. You'd want sort of a mind muddled 50 year career politician to just be in there and just keep the show going. And that's why I thought that Barack Obama's tweet about it two or three days later was so insanely ridiculous. Where he was like, you know, everyone has a bad day but Joe Biden's in charge and blah blah. It's like Barack Obama, you came in with hope and change and here you are running cover for a man that we know is cognitively declined who's a 50 year politician. Like that is not hope and change. But let me throw the question back to you because I occasionally host a podcast. Do you think he's been running the show? Cuz that's what I think is the main issue that we all have to sort out beyond whether he's a complete vegetable or not. Like who's running the show. And I just don't know. I mean probably Obama ish, but I

[A]

don't know, I don't think that he is. And I wonder how much ability a president has to actually run the country. So I. Man, I just can't. We were discussing this before we started rolling. I have come to looking at politics, caring about politics so late in my life. So I have a very different view upon this, which is I'm obsessed with getting people to understand that everything has utility or a lack of utility. Why does that matter? So I look at everything through the lens of an entrepreneur. So you have a goal, you know, where you're trying to get to and then you say what's going to be the thing that gets me there? The idea, the policy, the whatever. And then you try it and you see if it shows signs through a measurable metric of whether or not it's moving you towards that. So when I look at this, the question I ask myself is why does the public want a president that is, I think you said brain muddled. Why would they want that? So when I look at it, I feel like an alien watching a civilization that, that.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I just don't quite yet understand. I'm not even saying that my way is the right way. I'm just saying it feels very confusing to me. So I would love an answer to that question, why do you think the American public, some percentage, seemingly close to half, would consider voting for somebody who is muddled?

[B]

Okay. So that I can answer a little more clearly, because I think there's a very clear answer to it, which is that whatever percentage of people are going to vote for Joe Biden, let's just assume he's the nominee by come November, which, by the way, I think is 50. 50 at best. best. I mean, they're trying to figure out how to get him out. Everyone understands that now he may just not leave. Why does a certain amount of people want that? The answer to that is, well, first off, we have a fake binary choice. It's like, it's very obvious that what should be happening in this country 20 years post social media and sort of a flourishing Internet, and how much the world has changed, you know, since World War II, it should not be two guys who are basically 80 who came from a different world. It should actually, we mentioned it right before we started. We have like three months between us. We're both 48. It should be someone about our age, roughly. It should be a Gen X person, someone that actually came before the Internet grew up, before the Internet, remembers that world, has now become an adult in that, let's say, last two decades, still is young enough to be strong enough and have our faculties enough and our body to be out there fighting, have all sorts of other reasons to be fighting for the future. Future because we're going to be part of it, as opposed to being geriatric people. And I say that as someone that is definitely voting for Trump and largely likes Trump. I don't like all of his behaviors. I was for DeSantis in the primary, so I can criticize him too, obviously. But if you only have a binary choice, if a system exists that just gives you these two, that's where we're at. We may not like that. We may want to change that. Okay, fine. But if the system only gives you these two, and now you see one guy who's completely broken mentally, I mean, to the point where he really can't say a full sentence anymore. I don't know if you saw the interview with George Stephanopoulos, but they did that as a softball to him. Like, dude, can you just for 22 minutes say anything remotely sane? And he can't. He really cannot. Well, what do you do then? If you. If you take a guy, he's mind muddled. And then if you just quickly. If we were to look at the policies. Has immigration been good? Well, about 7 to 10. Some people are saying 12 million illegals have come in under him. So I think you can objectively say that's not good. Interest rates, inflation, not good. I always say the only things that I think I mentioned this to you when you were on my show. The only two things that I really, because I'm not an economics guy per se, that I really look at in terms of economics are when you go to the grocery store, are things just exploding in price or are they kind of where you think they're supposed to be? Well, if you look at a pound of beef that used to be like 5.99, now it's 9.99 or 11.99, all trash.

[A]

Why are people voting for him? There's no.

[B]

So I'll get to it. I'll get to it. So I just wanted to run through a couple of the bad things. So if we're let. And interest rates are the other ones and those are very high right now. So. Okay, so now I'll answer your question. The answer is if you can scare the hell out of half the people about the other guy, that's why they'll vote for the guy who is completely mind muddled. That's it. And that's all they've been running on. There is no positive message coming from the Democrats right now that Joe Biden, 81 year old Joe Biden has the wherewithal and the policies to fix things. He has largely, you like outcomes. Well, unless your intention was destroy the country. Why else would you allow 7 to 10 million people in the country in three years? We can have an honest debate about immigration and maybe we would agree largely, maybe we wouldn't. It would. I'd be happy to have that conversation. But no one in their right mind in the history of the world ever thought you create a nation state and then you just say to everybody, come on in, let's see what happens. Especially in a time when we have political strife post October 7th, like there's a lot of weird energy in the system right now. You might want to know who's in your country. So if you're, if your result, if the result you wanted to get was to largely hamper the United States, you might usher in all of the policies that he has. So the direct answer to your question is why would people vote for it? Because the system has scared them about the guy that's actually trying, I would say largely to save the system that has offered more, more opportunity for 350 million Americans that live in this country and all of our predecessors in 250 years. It's incredible and scary and wild and nuts.

[A]

Do you think the system has scared people or has Trump himself scared people?

[B]

Well, it's a little bit of both. Look, it's a little bit of both in that he speaks loosely, by the way. He's gotten a lot better, if you noticed during the debate. He was extremely measured and controlled.

[A]

Never interrupt your enemy while they're destroying themselves.

[B]

His answer on abortion, and I always consider myself begrudgingly pro choice, I want it to be safe and rare, which by the way, was the Democrat position always for decades and decades. Unfortunately, the Democrat position has largely become eight month abortions are fine. I mean, we're in California where there's in essence no limits on abortion. Trump gave the most thoughtful answer, a five minute answer on abortion that I thought was the most honest, thoughtful thing he has ever said. It was clear, it was cogent. He even acknowledged that it might not be safe electorally what he's saying, because it would get some of his own base upset, meaning that he is not for a national ban or anything else. It's a little bit of both with Trump. So he's done some of the exaggerations, he's coddled some weird people, he's done all of that stuff. But if you just look at the results, and again, you're a results guy, if you just look at the results of Trump and let's just do it till Covid and then we can talk about COVID if you want. But if you just look at basically the two years of the Trump presidency before COVID the economy was seriously sharp, as Trump said at the State of the Union, we had lowest all time black unemployment and Latino unemployment and the Congressional Black Caucus, if you remember AOC and the rest of them sat there like this when he said that we had the Abraham Accord 7 peace deal signed in the Middle east and Saudi Arabia was about to happen too. The world was pretty good. Putin did not go into Ukraine. There was an order to the world because of a strong America. Now we looked at Covid just change everything, obviously. And did he get rolled in many ways by the deep state and he, you know, his own base has to grapple with the fact that they hate the, the vaccine and he pushed warp speed and he allowed Fauci to do a lot of stuff and all of those things, I think they've largely forgave him for that. I think it would be worth always remembering it so it doesn't happen again. If he becomes president, but you could probably argue it a little bit of both ways. Has the system, you know, he's not a racist. He's not a racist. He's not. The New Republic has a out this week where they have him as Hitler, you know, basically with the Hitler mustache and everything. And it's like his daughter converted to Judaism to marry Jared Kushner. And he has three Jewish grandchildren who all go to Jewish day school. Like, he's not Hitler. He does not hate black people. He does not hate people based on the color of their skin. I think largely what he represents, he represents the. The individual in a system that is mostly collective. And what does the collective hate the most? The individual. So that really is what the fight is sort of politically at the moment, I would say. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Granger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[A]

What do you think about.

[B]

And that's not to dismiss some of the errors in speaking, let's say, or the exaggerations or any of those things, obviously.

[A]

Yeah. I have a feeling that Trump creates the atmosphere in which he can be turned into a weapon with which he can be bludgeoned himself.

[B]

So, yes, he's not winning an award for discipline, but again, he's. It's gotten. Would you. Would you agree that it seemingly has gotten much better in the last couple months?

[A]

Yes. The. The debate to me went like this. So one, I was at an RFK event in the audience there. So it was very interesting. So I saw it as if it were a super cool.

[B]

With three people. Yeah.

[A]

Really brilliant.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so I'm. I'm watching Biden and I have just this mix of emotions, same as you, where I'm very sad that this is happening to any human. My wife's grandmother had dementia. That was brutal to watch. So all those emotions mixed with this sense of. When I was a teenager, I just could not have been more America's amazing. It made me feel like I could do anything. I did not grow up with money, but it made me believe that I could go anywhere, do anything. I heard you once say, if you're a Gen Xer, the following statement will ring true. And when you said it, it rang true to me. It just wasn't cool to be racist. Like, nobody. You didn't think about it. It was just very much like my mom, from the time I was born was like spouting Martin Luther King Jr. So that's just the vibe that we

[B]

grew up with or hate gays or any of that. We actually were there. We really were.

[A]

So watching the debate, I was like, okay, hold on a second. Where. Where is all the hope, the excitement, the vision for America that will make people today feel the way that I felt as a teenager? Like, hey, you can do this. Here is the path. This is what you need to go do. That was the thing that was missing for me from both Biden and Trump. Trump was disciplined. And so it was, yeah, like watching a kid who is historically throwing temper tantrums, like, actually keep it reined in. And I was like, hey, well done, Donnie. You're learning. Like, that was, you know, from that perspective, very sweet. But with rfk, at least that was. He has a message, which was like, this is the America we want to get back to. I want people to feel inspired. I want them to understand how to go forward. I want them to see how my policies are going to make their life better. Anyway, that resonated way more with me. Now, do you think that RFK is mathematically electable or is this just like a Ross Perot haha, funny thing that we'll remember in 20 years?

[B]

Well, it's funny because Ross Perot, for as haha as it was, and I remember it, it well at the time and watching those debates and that moment with what was his name? Walter Stockdale was his vp. And he gets up there and he's like, none of you know me or should know me. Like, there was some funny, weird things happening back then, but the guy got what, 16% of the vote and in essence caused Bill Clinton to win. So for as silly as that whole thing was, there was really something there. And he was echoing a lot of the things that ultimately Ron Paul ended up echoing and things that Trump ended up echoing and everything else. First, let me just say I really personally like rfk. I've interviewed him a couple times. We've done public events together. We've had private meals together. He's met my family. He is a good, decent, nice man. He loves this country. I don't agree with him on all the policies. Even when I've interviewed him where we've debated some of the things, like, he was not for The Supreme Court decision that reversed affirmative action at colleges. And we got into it, and I have to give him credit, after about seven minutes of kind of going back and forth totally respectfully, he kind of more came around to my position, which obviously in a debate I'm happy to see, but in another way I saw as a little bit of a weakness. Because I was like, you should have thought that through before you're talking to somebody about it. You know, in essence that you don't solve past discrimination or past perceived discrimination with current discrimination. I don't want to discriminate against an Asian kid who studies hard just because someone else was discriminated against. It just that will only per. That will only perpetuate racism. But he kind of came around on that, which was, again, I think it was nice. And it also showed a little bit of weakness.

[A]

Let me push on that for a second.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

So is that what you think is necessary to be elected, to have fully formed thoughts, or you actually don't like it when a candidate doesn't have fully formed thoughts?

[B]

That one I thought was. It was so obvious to me. I would say if you truly believe in the classically liberal values that I believe he believes that are so associated with his family name, it would be a very obvious one to me that you cannot solve discrimination with discrimination. That you would never want Harvard to be looking at all of the applications they got and be like, okay, we have to have these quotas. We used to all agree quotas are bad, but certainly. And it was particularly against Asian students, but it was against Jewish students too, and it was also against white students, but Asians particularly, you would not want. So some kid. Why would you punish a kid? In essence, a 16 year old kid whose parents, first or second generation, maybe owned a bodega or something, as a lot of them did where I grew up in Long Island. Why would you punish that kid? Because his parents came to America, worked really hard, taught him the right things. Instead of going to summer camp, he went to math class. And now you're going to punish him. Guess what you're going to do? You're going to make him racist. How do you think he will feel now? He gets into a lesser school. He says he sees someone with lesser grades get into that school based on the color of their skin. Now they're both 25. The other guy, by the way, he also got a mortgage at a better rate because of it. Because DEI then got built into all of the systems. You're going to create a level of racism in the future that, again, that our generation had largely eliminated. So it's not that I needed him to agree with me on that. If his principle was just like, you know, what discrimination was so horrible in the past, and we have to just. We have to discriminate in essence to move forward, I would disagree. But I would be like, all right, he fully thought it through. What I thought was interesting. And again, I really like the guy. So I don't even like saying this in a certain respect.

[A]

Do you like him for president, or do you just like him as a guy?

[B]

I don't think president would be the best position. What I would love to see him do, actually, would be that Trump would become president, and he could become. I don't know, it would be attorney general, but he would basically be czar of destroying the agencies. He should be the one that goes in and blows apart the CDC and close apart the NIH and maybe even things that he holds closely, like, you know, the epa, things like that. Like all of the deep state, all of the eternal state stuff. I don't always like to say CIA. CIA too. I mean, he's got some issues with the CIA, but if anyone. So if anyone was gonna go in and knows these systems and has lived through these systems, I think he would be unbelievably good at that. Does he have the right temperament to work with Trump, or does Trump have the right temperament to actually select him? Who knows? I would say this if he was. If it was not Joe Biden right now, and it was. And it was Kennedy, who, by the way, was running as a Democrat at the beginning. And, you know, the first day he announced, I said it on my show. You can find it. I said, he will not be a Republican by the end of this thing, but he will not be a Democrat. I promise you that. And I even said that to his face, and he was like, I should have known that. He has now seen the evil of the Democrat Party. And we're watching the evil of the Democrat Party burst forth right now, and everything that's going on with Joe Biden.

[A]

Name the evil.

[B]

The evil. I would say the simplest way to bumper stick, it would be something like, it will do anything to attain and retain power, period. And I would contrast that with the Republican Party, who, by the way, you know, it's. I always say it's like the giant made from spaceballs. The Republicans blow and the. And the Democrats suck. But, like, the Republican. Or Peter Thiel has a great line on this. He always says, we have a Stupid party and an evil party. The evil party has become the Democrats. And the Republicans are just kind of stupid, but stupid. You can work with the Republicans. When Trump was the insurgent in 2015 and everybody was like, he's racist. He's a white supremacist. When that thing was really on steroids, the Republicans had a primary process. Nobody in the party did anything to stop Trump or change rules or anything else. Remember, it could have been Marco Rubio, it could have been Ted Cruz, it could have been Mike Huckabee. But they just ran their primary properly. And it was shocking to the party elite. The Bushes, it was shocking to all of the people that were, you know, the Romney types and all of that. But they just ran their thing and Trump won and they played their game fair and square. The Democrats don't do that. Ask Bernie Sanders that same year how it went when he went against Hillary. They made sure the superdelegates and everybody else cut their deals to cut Bernie at the hip. Now I despise Bernie and, and the socialist ideas that he's ushered in and the fact that he's made it seem like being that jealousy is a virtue and all of the, the bad ideas of collectivism and all that that Bernie ushered in, but he did that through the Democrat Party and they showed him what they care about and they care about power. And I think what, what you're seeing right now now, because the lies of what's going on in Biden's mind can't be covered up right now because it's so damn obvious and the system hasn't figured out a way to, to respond to it yet. You're seeing a party that, that there is nothing they won't do to retain power. So whether that means they have to push Biden out or they have to get him to the end, or they have to push out the first black female vice president, they will do what they have to do to attain power. And I think that that is much more. That's why culturally things generally lean left. Like, if you, if you go in that direction, you will just keep going for power where, where conservative leaning people and classically liberal leaning people and libertarians, certainly you lean more to the individual. You lean more to what I would say is innate human nature, that it's a little bit messy, that you and I think different things about the world, but we agree, like, I can't have your stuff, you can't have my stuff. We want to live in roughly the same place. And the Democrats, it's A much more hegemonic, authoritarian type rule. And the amount of destruction they can do over the next couple months to retain that power, I think is going to be quite shocking.

[A]

Do you have a, like, if you were going to put your evil genius hat on and say, okay, this is what I would do if I want to ensure that I retain power. I'm the dnc. What, what advice would you give them?

[B]

There's horrible things you can do. There's horrible. You could make. You could make the. Let's say there's two major wars happening in the world right now. There's a war with Israel and Gaza. And now, unfortunately, Hezbollah, which Lebanon's not a functioning country, so Hezbollah, which is an Iranian proxy, is basically at war with Israel and North. You could just encourage more war. And then during wartime, and then of course, Ukraine and Russia, you could just encourage. You could create all of the conditions to basically be like, Ukraine, keep going as far as you can. We're gonna keep giving you as much weapons here. There's an odd asymptote. There's a. Not an asymmetry. There's a disconnect between the way Ukraine and the Israel thing are working out, because Ukraine, we can give them all the weapons in the world. They most likely cannot beat Russia because Russia has nukes. So unless you're going to nuke Russia, which by the way, would have a nuclear response like that thing's terrible. I think the count. Israel has their wor. The reverse situation, which is they just need more weapons to end a war that actually could end. It's a finite war. But let's put that aside for a second. You could basically make those wars and maybe even a China, Taiwan situation very hot. And then it's now, it's the end of October and people are like, holy shit, there's this war here. There's this war here. Oh, and by the way, suddenly there were two terrorists in the tax in the United States. And just there will be so much chaos that the whole narrative will be, you cannot let evil chaos agent Donald Trump back in. We need old, steady, old man Joe Biden, because we know what it is. It would be something like that. You just like sort of unleash lunacy. And then people will be like, please stay, please stay. Something. I think it would be something like that. What?

[A]

What do you

[B]

like? I don't think it's. I don't think it's as simple as just make the economy better, let's put it that way.

[A]

If I'm putting on My evil genius hat.

[B]

Oh right, that was the evil hat. Right.

[A]

So the idea of continuing the forever wars, that feels like a totally different game to me. So if you want to steal from the poor and give to the rich, you keep doing that. So the. In fact, while we're here, let me do a quick PSA for people. This is utterly fascinating. I forget now who I heard this from. It's not me making this up. I have a feeling this is well trod territory. But this is so fascinating once you understand how money printing works in conjunction with foreign wars and one little caveat, you understand why money printing is absolutely devastating to the poor and middle class far more than it is to wealthy people. So here's how it goes. I think this is utterly fascinating and this is why the, the reason that I have such a hard time with Biden having diminished cognitive capacity is I already think that the deep state, and I do think that is the right word, managerial class does not get at what's really, what I fear is really happening. I am always open to disconfirming evidence, but my gut instinct now with a little bit of research I've done, so the way that this works is that you're going to effectively allow the deep state to grow more powerful by doing the following. You are going to print money to fund these forever wars. The reason you do it by printing money is it is a way to tax the American people without actually having to ask their permission. It's a way to get involved in a war without having to go to Congress and ask for their permission. So now all of a sudden these people who you did not elect are able to do things, AKA print the money which, which is such. It's ultimately very simple, but it's hard for people to wrap their minds around, including me. But the way printing money works goes like this. You are counterfeiting money, but the government is doing it so we don't prosecute them. But it is the same act, the same reason that you would hate it if your neighbor were printing a billion dollars in his backyard is exactly why you should hate it when the government does it. Because you are devaluing what the dollar does. Now explaining why that's true, why is it, why it isn't one for one is where the complexity comes from. But if you will accept that when you print more money, you devalue the money that already exists. So I'm not take. If you have a hundred dollars in your bank account, I'm not taking any of the 100. But through this Sort of magic trick. I am causing the hundred dollars to only buy you $90 worth of goods or $80 worth of goods, depending on how fast I'm going at this. Then what I do with that buying power that I just siphoned from the American people without having to ask for their permission is I go and I fund these wars. Now when I fund the wars, I'm going to say, hey, I'm going to give you dear country, whatever country we may be talking about. I'm going to give you this money. But you have to buy your munitions, your weapons from American manufacturers. Now watch how that sleight of hand just worked everybody. You had money taken, buying power robbed from your bank account, sent technically overseas. But the money comes back to American contractors. So if you're one of those American contractors, you just got richer. If you own a, if you own stock in one of those companies, you just got richer. So you siphon from the entire taxable citizenry, but only benefit a few. It is insane. Now who's the person in that apparatus that you can point to? You can't. It's next to impossible to point to a single person. If you really want to get freaked out and shout out to RFK Jr. He's the one that told me to read this book.

[B]

Book.

[A]

There's a book called JFK and the Unspeakable and it's a very dense book about how and why JFK was assassinated. Now if somebody can show me that this book is total hogwash, I'm here for it. Because you might actually be able to restore my faith that the deep state doesn't control as much as I fear. But reading that book I was like, oh my God, there are people just up and down everywhere where the incentives are just aligned.

[B]

Yes. And so that's what a conspiracy is. It's, it's aligned. Well that's why I said earlier that's that it wouldn't then a, a mind muddled 80 year old career politician for 50 years be the perfect person to be ushering in this managerial class deep state situation. He's not really anything. It's governing by committee, which now they're saying, oh, at five o' clock other people do things and he's around great people, so the buck stops with nobody. It's just an endless thing for the system. I'll add another layer of what you just described that I think is ultimately also deeply, deeply disturbing. Which is so we print the money, so now the money is worth less. So the average person now is just Able to buy less groceries, let's say, okay, that's fine, that's one thing. But now, as you said, we give it to these countries. So Israel is really interesting. I'm a huge Israel supporter. But what we are doing to Israel is actually evil. We have made them completely dependent on us. So every dollar that we give them, we don't give them for the. It's exactly what you just described. They have to spend that money on our weapon systems here. Some of them, they helped design, but basically it's a subsidy for the military industrial complex. But then what we've done is we've taken an independent country and made them less independent. They are. And now we are. We have a actual incentive to keep them in war forever, which I think is actually what's happening right now. They can end this war if they have the proper weapons and they basically have some cover for the United. Not troops or anything like that, but just some cover from the US but instead we've. The system itself basically has realized, oh, we can actually keep them in perpetual war. Why wouldn't we keep them in perpetual war? How is it that we went from wrapping up Afghanistan, which was the longest war in United States history, that no one was really sure why we were there in the first place? Because Afghanistan had largely nothing to do with 9, 11. And then basically within months, Ukraine started, and then when everyone started getting frustrated with Ukraine, and next thing you know, there's a war in the Middle East. So I'm completely with you on that, all of that, but I would. The part that I'm adding is that it's also destroying the sovereignty of other nations when they basically are completely reliant on us for defense. Every nation should be reliant on itself, I think. I think a lot of countries are learning that right now.

[A]

Yeah. Okay, so who do you think ultimately RFK benefits or hurts?

[B]

So that's a great question, and I think you can probably argue it both ways. I would say that he mostly. I'll try to do it both ways, and then maybe you can be the judge of what you think. So I think the. The way he hurts Trump is that because he's been particularly good on Covid, meaning really, you know, for your own choice. And he's been anti vax and all that stuff. The base of Maga hates all that stuff. Their. Their main gripe with Trump is warp speed, handing too much power to Fauci Burks, blah, blah, blah. So if. If that segment of people, whatever percentage that is, if they're just really pissed at Trump over that and still willing to vote on that. Then they'll vote jfk. They're certainly not voting for Biden. Right. Biden was worse on all of those things and Biden did mandates and, and was far worse on Covid and wanted, you know, literally was trying to force people to get a vaccine that was not a vaccine and all that. So whatever percentage of that Trump base is still seriously pissed about COVID they could go to rfk. My gut feeling is it hurts Biden more because since RFK is a little bit more of a traditional liberal, say a liberal of 30 years ago that we used to know of Ed Koch and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Mario Cuomo and the list goes on and on. They used to call them Blue dog Democrats in the middle of the country, just more moderate Democrats. And that's what RFK at least partially represent. You could see a lot of that type. It's probably our parents generation more than us. That type of Democrat being like, you know what, the progressives are kind of nuts. They, you know, the AOCs and everybody else. We voted for Biden because Biden was supposed to be the firewall against them. And that's really how they sold us Biden. If you remember when everybody dropped out, it was like, they're not going to hand it to the crazies right now. Bernie and, and Elizabeth, Elizabeth Warren and all the socialists. Biden is just old trusty Joe Biden. Well, I think a lot of people with the immigration thing particularly could be like, you know what? Biden clearly failed on that. We're looking at the, the cognitive stuff, dementia or whatever, Parkinson's, whatever it might be. So we're going to vote for rfk. So my gut feeling is he hurts RFK more. And by the way, I would also say that the Democrats knew that, which is exactly why they made it impossible for him to run as a Democrat at. And then have in essence tried to destroy him through media hit pieces and everything else.

[A]

Yeah, it's interesting to.

[B]

What do you think?

[A]

Well, so I don't know if I know enough about the polling to have an official answer, but what I found interesting is the polling numbers that RFK put out there. He said in a head to head, Trump beats Biden in a three way. He wins over both of them. Sorry, you know, if he goes against Trump, he wins. If he goes against Biden, he wins. It's only when all three of them are there that he starts then being polling really low. And so I have a feeling that he is going to steal from your independent voters, depending on where Biden is pulling. I mean, right now, I think Biden's so low, it's, it's just effectively assured that Trump would win. So the question becomes, who's he a bigger spoiler for Almost certainly Trump. If, if Biden is either replaced or he gets his numbers back up, that would be my gut instinct. Because if, if it were closer like it was before between Biden and Trump, now you have to win over the independence. And I think RFK pulls independence. Just pure gut instinct.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If people want to feel like me in terms of, I want a vision of optimism, I want to see somebody talk about the debt. Like I'm effectively a single issue voter.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so he's the only one that I hear talking about the debt, talking about the need to balance the, the deficit, talking about, I, I, this is probably a bit Pollyanna, but I like the vibe of it where he says, if somebody is caught lying to the American people, somebody in government is caught lying to the American people, I'll have them fired. Just adjudicating what is a lie. But, but directionally, yeah, I get the sentiment. And so that is one of those where, okay, again, just an outsider. I'm an alien. I come down, I visit, I don't, I would have to really stop. In fact, let me steal men this and see if I can figure it out. Because my instinct is to not understand why Trump and Biden are so popular. Okay. So looking at it, it goes like this. This is my off the cuff assessment of what I think is going on, but I am literally thinking through this for the first time. Social media and algorithms fuel an innate desire that we all have for tribalism. So don't blame social media. That's a mistake. Social media simply responding to the incentives that the human animal has. Humans want to be tribal and the more like as an on air personality, you become very aware that the more aggressive and in one camp you can be, the more views and clicks you get. And so for me, it is this constant. Like I have to remind myself what, what is my actual value system and gravitate around that, even though I know, hey, if I just skewed one direction

[B]

or the other, it's honorable and it's hard. I tried the best I can and I have no doubt I have blind spots in that, but all you can do is try for sure.

[A]

So the dnc though, does appear to have leaned way, way, way into that. So tribalism all day, every day. Now Trump Is do I think he intentionally leans into tribalism? I'm not familiar with Trump enough to know if the answer to that could question is yes or no. From the things that I've seen, his personality makes him a lightning rod. I don't know if he's trying, though. I think there's just something about the way that he acts that drives people nuts. So there is a reaction to him that amplifies the already sort of tribal vibes over here. So you've got the DNC who actively pursues breaking people up into these identitarian groups. You've got Trump who just exacerbates that, who talks fast and loose and who is. It's interesting, I, I don't know enough about Trump to understand the positive reaction to Trump, but it's the, I feel seen the system is rigged, it's all against me, Things are bad. He finally stands up for me, that thing. But then when I look at rfk, that feels more like an accurate representation of, of, hey, let me show you what's actually broken. Let me show you a positive way to get out of this. Let's talk about the fiscal debt. Okay, so now I actually understand Trump. Thank you all for letting me talk. Trump is doing what RFK is doing, but from an emotional place. And so I can be all limbic. That makes sense. DNC tribes, Trump, limbic. The system is broken and I'm here to save you. I'm your asshole. And then RFK is reasoned. RFK is that. That will never work.

[B]

Well, I don't know that it'll never work, but I don't think that within, within what we, within what we have right now, it doesn't work.

[A]

Right.

[B]

We need something more to break. I don't know exactly what that is

[A]

before meaning more suffering.

[B]

Well, hopefully not more suffering, but what

[A]

do you mean by break?

[B]

I would say we need more of the system as we've described it so far, to not be working properly or be properly exposed until people can get to the more reasonable size of things.

[A]

How do we break it without suffering?

[B]

No, so I, I, you probably can't, right? Like, so if people would say, like, what would really get America to reset? Well, it's, you sort of asked this already, but in essence it would be like, it's probably only horrible things. Like there's, it's, it seems very unlikely, short of aliens coming down and offering us something that is unknown, maybe that'll happen. But short of that happening, it seems very unlikely that any reset to realizing how good it is Here how precious and rare it is and everything else. It seems like it could only happen after a horrific tragedy. I lived in New York City during 9 11. I was 21. I was there for it. My dad saw the second plane hit from his office in Midtown. Like I was around all that. And there was something that was happening in New York City, but not just New York City. There was something that was happening in the entire country at that time. Realizing why America is so precious and what freedom means and all of those things for all of her flaws and all the stuff that you always have to say with that. I don't know that something good could happen that would unite us again. Like we're not going to the moon anymore. I don't know, maybe Elon will get us to Mars and something so spectacular will happen that we'll all be like, put aside all of this nonsense. We found other life out there. But it usually we seem unfortunately now to respond only to horrific tragedies. And by the way, even those tragedies, partly because of the way we behave with social media, even the tragedies rip us apart now. So, you know, a horrific perfect shooting will happen. And you know, like the Uvalde Texas shooting. 20 kids shot in a school, elementary school, and immediately on social media we're all going to our own corners on that. And it's like, man, for a second can we realize that, that 27 year olds were killed before. We're screaming about, you know, you have AOC on one hand, get the guns and the other people on the other side. Like so I don't know that we can ever be reset out of this thing without something horrible happening, which is of. You don't even want to speak that. But I completely agree with your, with your overriding premise, which is that J. RFK he's talking about something that we need to get back to one way or another. Maybe we can't get back to it nationally. You know, maybe the only way we can get back to it is personally, individually, community wise, maybe a little bit on the state side. Again, Florida is doing a lot of those things, right? But maybe the national thing now, now is so big, it's so broken. It's. It's such a Godzilla that cannot be managed. Managed. It's, it's, you know, it's just a giant Godzilla standing in a china shop and if it moves any way, it's going to break everything that all you can want out of it is for it to have less power. Which by the way would be something that the. The founders would be pretty into the idea that if the founders were looking at this thing right now, being like first off, seeing the two personalities, seeing the cognitive stuff and everything else, but that's not even it. If they were looking at it going, look at what these idiots did with this incredible setup that we gave them, the setup that would free all of them. And look what they are debating about and the amount of control they have given over their autonomy and over the economic system and everything else. They would all be rolling over in their graves.

[A]

What would they point out? What would be the thing that they said, Oof, I can't believe you messed that one up.

[B]

I mean, there's so much. First off, the whole purpose of the founding of the country was we did not want to be ruled by a king. Like that's the most simple bumper sticker version. We didn't want taxation without representation. They wanted people basically to live their lives as they saw fit. You would have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We're going to have some property laws. We're going to make sure the states aren't warring with each other. But they wanted the states to be very, very different. That was the beauty of federalism. It's again why I can always sing the praises of Florida. Because I feel like I live in a place that still is abiding by much of what America. It was set up by him. That's. That's so different than when I land here. Just last night, I land in Los Angeles and I in some ways feel like I'm landing in another country. I really do, which is a very weird thing. And it's funny. My producer, who's sitting right here, we landed. He turns his phone off airplane mode and it said we landed in Mexico. He had the roaming rate for Mexico, which I just thought was like kind of hilarious. Like in. In it. Weird. Yeah. Mexico has a lot more freedom, by the way, for the most part, than California. Although Mexico does have. Have some of its own problems. But hold on.

[A]

Are you saying you would rather, from a freedom perspective, you'd rather be in Mexico than California?

[B]

Certain parts of Mexico, let's say, get specific.

[A]

Which parts?

[B]

I think you could probably be in a lot of parts of like Jalisco where they're mostly making tequila, which I was just at where that are. It's kind of like the gangs aren't. I'm not, I listen, I'm not sitting here telling you everything's great in Mexico, but there's a lot of places in Mexico that You can live and not be, like, taxed into oblivion and have some land and be okay, but.

[A]

Is that the grasses?

[B]

But that. That really wasn't where I was going with this.

[A]

Yes, I know, but I don't want to live.

[B]

I don't want to live anywhere than the United States. Like, I'm not going anywhere. You know, I know. I know a lot of people that are closer to your level of wealth than my level of the world, that are always, like, trying to figure out, where can I go after this, or it's going to collapse and I have to be on an island or in a secret bunker. I'm not going anywhere. I love this country. I. You know, I fought very hard when I lived in California, especially during the COVID years, to get rid of Gavin Newsom and for the recall and everything else. I got audited by the state three days after the recall. Like, think about that. And that was the day I put my house for sale. I was gone in two months. What I realized was, in those two years, I fought very hard, but I was fighting against the system. What I love about being in Florida now, this is a little bit of a jump from where we started here, but what I love about being in Florida now is I'm fighting for something. Every day in Florida, I feel like I'm fighting for something, and I see the results, Results of it. When you go around and you see businesses opening everywhere, you see roads being built everywhere, you don't see homelessness or drugs anywhere, really. Anywhere. It's not to say that it's nowhere. Of course there are things. There's no perfect system, but when you see a place that it functions properly, you know that the police department is funded properly, and, you know they're allowed to do their work. Did you see in Tampa a couple months ago, I think this is, like, my favorite Florida story. Some guy broke into somebody's house somewhere in Tampa, and the guy shot him. And it was as simple as that. He shot him. He was breaking in. He was there to just rob the home. He shot him. That was it. The police chief goes on tv, given the press conference, and he's like, I just want to thank Mr. Whatever for shooting him. Because he not only did the right thing protecting himself and his family, but he made our job easier. And it was like, whoa. That was it. It wasn't that complex. The guy. You have the Second Amendment. You have a right to protect your life, liberty, pursuit, and happiness, and you have a right to protect your family and all that. That and. And Then and it was like, so you made you actually by doing your job as an individual, protecting yourself, you actually strengthened the system because then the police officer did not have to do something. And then that makes more people. One of the other things that's happened as the red and blue have gone their own ways. You know all these police officers in New York City Police Department, which would have been I think the world's third largest army at one time a couple years ago, all of these guys now, and I know many of them from living in New York, they've retired early. So you got the old guys, the old New York City police officers, like from the sitcom or from the dramas of 1980s and 90s, they've retired because they don't want anything to do with it anymore because the administration doesn't back them. And then some of the ones that are a little closer to our age, not quite at retirement age, they're moving down to Florida because they're like, oh wait, I could be a police officer in Florida where the administration will back me and I'm not to going to be told I'm a racist. Oh, and if I get, if some antifa thug hits me in the head with a bat or throws a Molotov cocktail at me, I'm actually not going to get in trouble. They'll get in trouble. So the, the system is sorting itself right now, which is quite good and I think the founders would be very happy about that.

[A]

It's interesting and I would like to get back to some of the things that the founders would care deeply about because I think that we're, we're playing with some things there that we don't necessarily understand the second and third order consequences. But, but first, yeah, I want to talk about. So you've got, I saw that press conference or whatever that they put out where the guy was like, thank you for shooting him. There is something in the reputation that Florida is gaining, I think probably for good reason. It just feels callous. So while I get it, and let me tell you, if you break into my house with ill intent, yeah, a thousand percent, you should be able to shoot that person and shoot to kill. I let, let me be abundantly clear, but if I got put in that position, I would be crestfallen that I had to do that now. I would not hesitate. I would not be the person who's like, I couldn't pull the trigger.

[B]

I don't think most people, if you're

[A]

coming up to my family, bro, guns a blazing. Yeah. But at the end of that, I'm not going to give a cocky John Wayne speech. I'm going to be like, buck, this sucked. Like, I am. I am mortified that I had to take a human life. And so for them to be like, thanks, you did our job. It's like, that's the kind of shit that winds people up where they're like, dude, I could be with you if you could take a sensible approach. But when it. It almost feels like trolling.

[B]

Okay, so I think that's probably our first, like, fundamental disagreement here, which is good. Let's. Yeah, let's dive into that. See, See, first off, I understand your. Where that's coming from with you. Like, that's coming from, like, deep inside your heart. You don't want a human to die. You weren't happy about that and all that. I think all of that goes without saying. Like, it's true. It's real. It's everything else. Like, if God forbid, that happened to me and I had to do that to another human being and all of that stuff, I certainly would not be thrilled in anything else, but I would be happy that the system acknowledged someone is allowed to protect themselves and do the right thing. And if it has to flaunt it a little bit, I think a little bit of the flaunting is part of the defense mechanism. Florida has just made it clear you are not. You know, when we had even two. Was it two months ago, a bunch of the Hamas people ran out and they were blocking the roads in Orlando to. To Disney, which made absolutely no sense. But nothing they're really doing is making sense. They were there for 11 minutes and then within 11 minutes, Florida state troopers, Orlando local police dispersed. Everybody has not happened again. Now, you might say, but they. They're impeding on their free speech and all that. Well, you can't close roads. People get confused about a lot of that stuff. You know, you might have cause someone's grandma to die because an ambulance can't get by and all that stuff. But the point is, I am will for the. Whatever percentage you want to put on that, for the cockiness about it or that maybe DeSantis occasionally came off as a little cold as it related to reversing dei. I don't. I'm not taking that position. But if that would be your position or someone else's position, that simply doesn't matter to me. I think, I think some of that is probably like, you either are ruled by the heart or the brain. And I think the best way to be ruled is by like, the tightest combination of. Of both. And none of us are perfect at that. But when things are working, you want people to know that they're working. And if you need to strut it a little bit, if you have to show the peacock in his full feathers a little bit, I actually think that's okay. Because the other version of that is we're just kind of weak. You know, we walked by. Just today here in la, we walked by cvs, and I was like, it would be funny. I could actually walk into CVS. We could live stream it on YouTube. I'm my phone right now. I could walk into CVS and just steal deodorant. Just one stick of deodorant, not $800 worth of stuff. But I could just live stream it and just say, hey, hey, everybody. I'm here in Los Angeles and I needed a deodorant. So here I am. I'm stealing Old Spice or degree or whatever, and nobody's going to stop me. Can't do anything. Have a nice day. Nothing would happen. That is not right. That is not right. But they will not do anything about it here. Guess what? It does not happen in Florida. You walk into a Lululemon, Lemon, and try to steal a Lululemon, which I'm specifically saying because the owner at one time, or the CEO basically was like, yeah, if you steal stuff from our store, it's okay, because we'll. We'll work it out or we'll write it off or whatever. It's like, no, no one's going to do that in Florida. Because you know what? You try to do that in Florida, and maybe you get out of the store, but maybe someone right outside shoots you because of concealed carry. So there is something to be said about a place that not only is doing it right. Right. But kind of shows that it's doing it right. Not. I'm not talking Wild west, start blowing everybody's brains out, but I think you need a little. I think what you're expressing maybe is a little bit of, like, the. The empathy. Maybe it's the empathy part that's, like, going a little bit above the. What I would say is the necessary reality part. And by the way, I'm empathetic to that, too, because I want the world to be nice and decent and everything else, but I think there's a lot of people ready to take advantage of that.

[A]

Yeah. So this is my temperament, so I get it. I understand that this is great marketing, but this is also the kind of thing that pushes people into tribes. So if I might, I'm going to speech right here for said gentleman. And I would just say, hey, totally get the vibe we're going for here. Captain or chief.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But let's just tweak one sentence and say we stand by our citizens. Right. To protect their homes and we will always stand by people that defend themselves, even if it means a fatal shooting. But every shooting is a tragic loss of life and our hearts go out to the. The suspect's parents or whatever the right word is at that point.

[B]

I bet you probably got that. I bet if we watch the full unedited thing. I can't.

[A]

Yeah. I'm reacting to what I heard.

[B]

The bumpers. Thicker version. Yeah, correct.

[A]

So, yeah, I get it. And look, there was. I think it was somebody in Texas where the guy has. He stands out front and all of his guys are flanking behind him in a V formation, all holding weapons. And they've got some speech about, hey, we heard about these guys that are planning to roll up or whatever with their guns. And if you want to do that in our town, I'm just telling you right now, you're going to get shot. That because it isn't in reference to somebody who actually died. It's a warning. It's true. True. Just marketing. That one doesn't bother me. And so I'm not a prude on this. I'm just saying, hey, I'm. I would really like to see people dial the temperature down on the division. Now, I'm curious because I know you won just in this exchange. You see it slightly differently. And then two, I. While I love that states can all run their own experiment, I am legitimately concerned about national divorce. That does not strike me as the path we want to go down. But I'm curious, do you think national divorce solves a lot of our problems? And hey, everybody, don't worry. Just like run to the state that best represents you and call it a day.

[B]

So I've only discussed this on my show a couple times and I think in one or two other interviews off my show. Because this is one of those things that I don't like talking about yet because I don't want to speak it into existence. You know what I mean? It's one of those things. You start. We all start having this conversation and the next thing you know, legislatures and states. States are doing different things and everything else. I would prefer so my bumper sticker. I would prefer that the United States remain the United States of America. The problem we're having right now is what unites us. What unites California and Florida. Now, not much. First off, we got about 3,000 miles between us. But then ideologically and how the states function is wildly different. It would be one thing if this was again, sort of where we grew up. Or just think back to 1995. That's the year I always wanted to take everything back to. It would be one thing if it was like, ah, you know, this state has a marginal tax rate of 7%. This one has two. This one has legalized marijuana, this one doesn't. Or this one has recreational in this. Like, if it was basics, you know, sort of simple stuff that we were disagreeing on, then I think the, the system could operate properly. And that's how it operated for a long time. Right. Colorado had legalized weed earlier than I think it was the first state to have legalized weed, if I'm not mistaken. And they got to see the results of that. By the way, a lot of people in Colorado aren't so thrilled with the results of that. And I'm, I'm for. I'm largely for the legalization of marijuana, but it does come with secondary effects. I mean, go to New York City right now and every single street corner smells like weed. That I actually think over time that's not great for a society. But what's happened now is it's not just about tax rates or what happens whether weed should be legal. It's become about completely opposing diametrically opposite ideas. The idea that DEI should be in the system. So I would argue that DEI is institutional racism. I don't want it in the system. So here in California, it is in the system. The state can hire people based on color of skin, based on gender identity and everything else. Florida, we have obliterated that. We have gone back to a meritocracy in terms of hiring our professionals and our police and educators and all that thing. That idea alone is so profoundly different in these two places that I don't know how you bring those things together. So I'm not for national divorce. Well, let's put it this way. If Joe Biden or the managerial class that he represents or that whole thing that we did in the first half of this conversation, if that thing wins again, then I don't see how America gets out of any of these problems that we have right now. I think we are in it. It will keep getting worse and worse and worse. They'll print high hell out of it. The wars will continue. All of the, the woke stuff, as far as Racism that will be just pushed into the system and the gender confusion. It will all get worse and worse. Not everywhere. There will be some. It will be a little bit better into Florida. It'll be a little bit better in Texas. But I would say largely at that point, I would be very bullish on Florida and very bearish on the rest of the country. I would say Florida, you know what? I live in a state that is a peninsula that is, you know, we have our own coast guard. We can make sure that people can't just show up on board boats. And we have a border with Georgia and a little border with Louisiana, I think. And it's like, we can protect that pretty easily. And maybe that is what we should do. So that's basically where I would be at that. It's not national. The real problem with national divorce is that let's say 15 red states all align together. The blue states will never let them go. That's the problem because the ideology that we talked about earlier, this collectivist, socialist ideology that has taken over the Democrat Party, it wants total control. If you said to the average Texan, hey, you could just have nothing to do with greater America anymore, you could still visit, you can get on a plane and go and whatever. But that's kind of it. You know, I think the average Texan would be for that. I think the average Floridian would be for that. At least ideologically, Maybe not in terms of how exactly you're going to break the thing or anything thing. I don't like the idea of this, but I think at some point it is the break in case of emergency thing that we have in the states. It's the last thing that we have to protect anything that's somewhat normal.

[A]

Are you saying that if Biden got elected in 24, that you would campaign for the cessation of Florida?

[B]

I would be on that side of the argument if the argument presented itself. Yeah.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I don't know that I want to lead that movement, but I would be for it. It would present itself, let's put it that way. If Biden wins again and suddenly they're just like, yes, now 10 more million people will come in over the next four years and all of these bad ideas will just keep pushing and the Department of Education will get bigger and keep teaching kids the wrong thing. It's not tenable. You can't teach generations of kids that America's evil and founded on racism and all of these things. You can't teach it. We're seeing the results of that, you know, on July 4th, when you see at the steps of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, that should be the most proud place on July 4th to celebrate the 248 years. And we're 48 years old, so we were. It was 200. America turned 200 on our, on our birthing year. It should be the most proud place in the world that day. And they're burning American flags and waving Palestinian flags. That can't last for very long. So I would be for a movement that would want nothing to do with that.

[A]

That. Okay, so what is the. What are the big things you're trying to protect Florida from in that case that you couldn't already do with states rights?

[B]

Well, the big one would be immigration. The big one would be immigration. And there might be ways that you wouldn't have to secede. And again, I, I'm very leery of talking about this. It's just. I just think there's a weird energy thing around it. But if, if the governor of Florida was given, not given, given. He has the right, if any particular governor of a state would then do what they have to do to either expand their National Guard or create some new vertical or whatever to make sure that their border. I. Border, to me, is number one. That is the number one thing. Biden should be impeached or at least not be president for the border. If nothing else. Forget all the cognitive stuff. His. There's very few responsibilities that the executive branch has. You know what I mean? Mean, like to do the basic stuff like the Congress writes the laws and the president signs them into law, and then the judicial branch decides if they're legal. That's basically how it works. The president isn't supposed to be, you know, striking the pen with all these executive actions all day, figuring out what the laws are. We've just outsourced all of it to the executive branch. It's again, the founders would be extremely disappointed by that because this is exactly what they left in the first place. Right. So I would be for the states having. You don't want. Look, you don't want closed borders. Of course, in a functioning society, you want to be able to drive through a. I've driven across the country. You've probably driven across the country at some point, not the whole time. Have you never done it? It's wonderful. It's one of the things I recommend to everybody. You should do it once in your life. Just drive across this country once, 3,000 miles, do it in five or six days and just see the expanse and the natural beauty of this country and hear the difference, different, you know, dialects and accents and all that. It's just one of the most wonderful things you could do. So it's not like I like the idea of that when you cross over from Florida to Georgia, you're gonna have to go through a border like you were going through to Canada. But I think the states have a right to make sure that the. That the things that they believe in are protected. The people of Florida have basically. OG Florida guy. It was the. It was the joke of 20 years ago on the Internet. It was like one of the first meme jokes. Florida man. Florida man does this. Florida man does that. Florida man smokes meth and wrestles an alligator and, you know, saves a child. And Florida man was right about a lot of something. And. And I think the people of Florida have every right to protect that. So you'd have to do what you need to do to protect that. And by the way, I would say that California has well within its right to do that, too.

[A]

Yeah, of course.

[B]

Of course. I mean, I think that goes without saying.

[A]

Okay, so, one.

[B]

What.

[A]

What is the specific problem with unchecked immigration? What does it do? Boots on the ground?

[B]

I mean, the simple answer to that is like, you don't have a country if you don't know who's in your country. You have something. You have some kind of amorphous blob, but you do not have a country.

[A]

Would it solve your problem then if we documented everybody coming across?

[B]

Well, I. I still would be. For limiting it. You have to pick an. There's a couple problems. I mean, first off, we have probably. They tell us we have about 12 million illegals before the last three years. So if it's about 7 that have come in now, there's about 20 million people that are undocumented right now. Right. That's a problem in and of itself. If you have people that kind of exist outside of the system but are in the system or like ancillarily touching the system, it's just not how a system could work, because then you have, obviously the people who are in the system paying for those people and all of the services. We now see what's happening in sanctuary cities. I mean, you should go next time. I don't recommend anyone go to New York City, but next time you go to New York City, go to Roosevelt Hotel. I was there a couple weeks ago. It was one of the most iconic hotels in New York City. Kind of like the other Waldorf Astoria. You go there It's a migrant shelter. There's just children. There's just children out on the streets in front of the hotel. And then there's a lot of people in hoodies, and everyone looks kind of shady. It's like, what. What is going on there? It's barricaded. It's not a hotel anymore. It's a refugee center. In essence. That's not how it's supposed to be. Again, again, it's the same thing as why you can walk into CVS in LA and just steal whatever you want. You can't do that in Florida. They've just decided rules and things don't matter, so you don't. The other part of this is, you know the line Andrew Breitbart used to say that politics is downstream from culture. Right? So I would say that everything is downstream from immigration. If you just don't know who is in your country, what do they roughly believe? Why are they here? Like, are they obi. Obeying laws? Are they here to upend everything, to commit crime, to create gangs and all that? You won't have a country for very long. So, ironically, for all of the stuff that we think is the problem with the border right now, I think it could all be far worse. And we have no idea. We have no idea who's in this country. It only took about, what, 21 men and three masterminds to do nine, 11. Like, I don't know if about 10 million people are in this country right now in the last couple years. I think a couple of them have bad ideas. So. So, yes, you should have. Closed countries. Should have. Hungary has a closed border. Closed border, period. It is extremely hard to become hungry.

[A]

A lot of people think that the president of Hungary sounds like a lunatic.

[B]

I mean, I simply don't. Yes, a lot of people do think that. I've met him. I met him at the Presidential Palace. We talked for about 20 minutes. What he repeatedly said over and over was that he loves his country, he loves his country, and he loves his people. Now, I'm not gonna tell you that I know everything about him, but I don't think he's a racist. You know, ironically, I met the Chief Rabbi of Hungary, of Budapest. There's about, I think, 100 or maybe 150,000 Jews in Hungary. They will be the safest Jews in all of Europe. It's not going to be in France or in the UK where they're going to let the Islamists and jihadists just rampage through the streets all the time. It's going to be in the place that is thought of as the most far right and like Nazi, white supremacist something. That's where the Jews of Europe will be able to live. Because he believes that Jews, Jews should be Hungarians like everything else. He just doesn't want his borders to be overrun by people who are not Hungarians. And until we. Until all of us realize that, that, that is, that is how we have to behave. These are serious problems. Why is it that everyone still wants to come here and nobody leaves? Nobody leaves America. Everyone still wants to come. There is a reason. But at some point, if you let everyone in, then you're not America. You're just.

[A]

What do you think the reason the rest of the world. Why. Why do people want to come to America? America?

[B]

Because believe it or not, we still have opportunity. We still have that dream.

[A]

So it's economic.

[B]

It's largely economic, but it's economic. But then it's connected to something, I would say existential. So it's economic in the most literal sense. So if you live somewhere, that's not great. You look at America and you still see the flashiness of America and you still see the movies of America and the TV of America and all the cool and the sports of America and all that cool stuff. That's like the initial thing, but then it's much deeper than that once you realize what creates that. What creates that is the engine of freedom. What creates that is that our founders set up a system that anyone could come here as long as you did it legally and you have a chance. And what, what better system could there be than that? But you can't let everyone in to partake in that because some people will not be for that. Some people will gladly shred that. And I think we actually have now members of Congress that are largely against that, that don't like the founding documents in the first place and everything else. So I don't know what the. It would be a waste of time for us to sit here and be like, well, how many people can come in? And what does the exact border look like? And all of that kind of stuff.

[A]

Why would that be a waste of time?

[B]

Well, I mean, it would be a waste of time for the two of us to just. I guess we could, because we don't

[A]

know what we're talking about.

[B]

Yeah, well, yeah, I don't think we have enough information, like how many border crossings there are a day and everything else. Like, but if a, if a serious politician here, rfk, who you obviously like a lot, one of the most amazing things that's happen, happened in the last year is that rfk, if you look at most of his career, rarely talked about immigration at all. Then he went to the border. Did you see that video that he did where he's basically with the selfie video doing. He goes down. I think it was in Arizona maybe, maybe it was in Texas. I'm not sure. So someone can fact check me on this, and I have no doubt the Internet will, but he's standing there doing a selfie video, and he's at a broken spot at the border wall, and he's like, I didn't know what I was coming down here to see, but I am absolutely shocked. He said there are people, and he listed like 20 countries that people were coming from. And he could not believe it. And then he noted, and I've discussed this with him after that. Why is it all men? It's Basically all men, 25 to 40, fighting age. Where are the women? Where are the huddled masses? Where are the grandmas, your. Your grandparents or great grandparents that came here? It wasn't just dudes that were 25 that came here. So there is something else happening, happening right now. And. And the more of us that realize that, if we just realize it, it's not racist to realize that that has nothing to do with race. I simply don't. I don't. I would. It's just so nonsensical to talk about within the prism of race, but they've made. They've made it so that immigration is all about race. I'll tell you, I live in Miami. It's largely a Hispanic population, and there's Miami's largely Cuban and Venezuela and everything else. I play basketball a couple times a week with. I think it's about 25 guys. I'm pretty sure 23 of them are Hispanic of some version. There's probably me and one other white guy that play, and there's one black guy. They are all Trump supporters. And not only are they all Trump supporters, they're all rabid Trump supporters. They don't want illegal immigration. Their parents came here again, many from Cuba. They did it right. They've made a good life for themselves. They don't want to just give that away. So. And by the way, you're also seeing that in a lot of the Texas border towns that they are now becoming. They're Hispanic, but they are becoming the most stringent on the border because the media doesn't care when the Texas El Paso airport gets overrun with illegal immigrants. But Suddenly you send 20 of them up to Martha's Vineyard and Barack Obama's 30 acre estate might have been illegal on it. Well, we better do something about that.

[A]

Can you steel man the people that want the open border.

[B]

So I think there's two types of people that want an open. Well, probably three types. So the, the easiest type is just, there's just some people that it's not that they want it or don't want it, they just don't think about things seriously. And they're just like, oh, it's America, anyone can come. That's like. And I don't know what percentage that is, that's like the person that's not thinking. I think the two types that are, that are thinking about it are. One is partly, probably a lot of type of people that you've been around in, in tech and everything else is like the more libertarian person, the, that in general doesn't really believe in borders, believes that economics kind of drives everything and we just need more workforce. So you hear a lot of this from like the big tech guys. They just kind of want more people that I, I'm somewhat sympathetic to that argument. The problem is you need skilled people to fill a certain set of jobs. You can't just have, you can't just have like, you know, 50 Chinese nationalists just come in and you have no idea what they know or what they believe or why they're here. So I think something with the libertarian version of this I just find as generally naivete. It's like, yes, it would be nice if everyone could come here and make a good life for themselves, but it's kind of not how the world, it's not how human nature works. That's one version. And then I would say the other version is the much scarier version. The other version is what I would say at this point, the Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar version is. Or some of the more nefarious members of Congress and the media, I would say, which is that they genuinely are trying to upend the United States, that they are not proud of this country. I mean, you just have to listen to them. You don't have to listen to me read the 1619 project that this country was founded on racism. It's not good that we're an imperialist project. You know, Israel is the appetizer for these guys, but the US is the big fish. So those are the ones that I'm really concerned about. The libertarians who, you know, and libertarians generally don't have that much Power. And by the way, I'm almost all libertarian in ideas. It's just that I believe in some level of. Of guardrails around that, like just some level. Otherwise we'd all be in Mad Max, which is kind of fun intellectually. And I really did. Yeah, it's fun to think about. Could we really just like shred every freaking thing and have Thunderdome to solve all our problems? Yes, I can get on board that, but like, horrifying idea. I just could get on it for my like fun 80s fun movie. But I'm very glad we should not be living in barter town. Although I did like Tina Turner running that city was pretty awesome back then. So I. So it's some combination of like the. The libertarians. We just want workforce here, which by the way ends up keeping like a constant underclass. So I think there's some. Some weird issue there.

[A]

It's interesting. Do you think that that is a. The permanent underclass is a result of people just cannot get out of it, or is there something broken in a system that should otherwise help people up a level?

[B]

Well, I mean, I think the easiest example which we could connect to this administration is, as I said before, the two things that I. Because I'm not as economically versed as you are, and I'm not an economist and everything else, the two things I always look at are price of groceries and interest rates. To me, interest rates. So everyone understands if eggs are more, eggs are more, okay, and you can buy less eggs. But interest rates, the idea that at one time in America, not too long ago, only about seven years ago, you could get a mortgage rate for seven, say 2.75%. In essence, that allowed me. And I bought two houses in that period, right? That allowed me to basically go to the bank and say, hey, I'd like to buy something. You will lend me some money, and then I'll pay you a little something every month. And then hopefully the thing that I bought will raise in value and then I'll be able to move on. And it worked. I bought one house, stayed in it for a couple years. Then LA got really bad. I was living off Ventura in Sherman Oaks. I real. The riots were going by my house. I wanted to leave altogether, but I was like, you know, we'll just move to a nicer house up the hill. We moved to Encino. The most beautiful house that I could have died in. I. I loved, loved, loved that house. It wasn't quite like this, but like, it was like a mini one of these, right? Loved It, New construction, the whole thing. I, I thought we were going to raise our family there, live there forever. We lived there for a year and then I, what I saw was that the crime and all the stuff wasn't going away and I just. And then everything with Newsom and the recall and all, all that. But in both houses, I got low interest rates on both houses and I made money on both houses. And then I rolled that over into something in Florida. And now in Florida I have no income tax. If the system was working to empower people, what would you want people to do? You would want people to own something for themselves. When you own something for yourself, whether it's a little piece of land or a house or a car or something, you're more inclined to take care of it and you're more inclined to grow it and nurture it and everything else. We all, all know that with everything, you care more about your bedroom than you do about a hotel room. Right. Like, these are obvious things. It's why when you have an ever growing government, like the government doesn't do anything. Well, because nobody's really in charge, nobody's really accountable. It is that, that thing that you mentioned before. So for me, if, if the government was responsible and wanted to empower people to do the right thing, it would constantly. Well, a. You'd be taxing people less and less. It would constantly be reigning itself in. That's what a responsible government and the way it was set up was supposed to be. That way that the government would not go beyond what its basic duties are.

[A]

I do want to talk about that government growth, but I want to stay on the border for a second. So where, where I'm driving is. If I were going to steel man, the sides, the one that you dismissed, I think is, is the most compelling because this to me ultimately comes down to. This is a values question which the

[B]

libertarian one or the.

[A]

No, the one you dismissed recently said, yeah, people just aren't thinking, give me your tired huddled masses. But they're. They're not thinking. And I agree with you that they're not thinking intellectually. This is going back to now. My just raw fear about why RFK is really in trouble is that he's being sensible versus being emotional. But the way that I see it is we had a national identity around this idea of give me your poor tired huddle masses and that yearn to be free and they will come here and assimilate.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And we'll do something amazing.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And my complete hypothesis is very simple that America is an idea. It is a story that attracts a certain kind of person. That certain kind of person I'll round to. They are entrepreneurial. Not every one of them is going to start a company, but there's a sense of like, be hardworking, be industrious. One of the most brilliant things I ever heard was everybody talks about the industrial revolution, but they don't talk about the industrious revolution of America. And America being founded on this puritan work ethic of, you're going to come here, you are going to grind, you are going to toil, you are going to build something with your own two hands, nobody is coming to save you and you are going to make something of yourselves. And look there, this country for sure required a ton of bloodshed said in order to become what it is. I, I'm not dismissing that. And whoa, will we derail if we want to go into that at some point I should hold myself accountable to doing an episode on that. But the reality is that we came in and we created what is currently the most powerful country in the world. And it, it is from where I'm sitting on the back of a set of ideas which we will call values. On the back of a set of values which will round to, to puritan values of hard work, self reliance, industriousness, get it done, don't complain, work around the clock, reap what you sow, all of that. Nobody's going to give you anything. And don't tread on me, nobody should take anything from me. Small government, as much as we can. Boom. Okay, that sets forth with these incredible documents which you and I moved off of very quickly, but a set of documents created by slaveholders, evil slaveholders. It's a whole thing. We have to talk about context because that was evil. But to be born into a system which literally enslaved humans, it's so crazy to me. But to be born into that system and say, okay, no one person is going to be able to get rid of this system, but we're going to create documents that will over time, actually, we saw it happen, actually get rid of this system.

[B]

They were aspirational documents. That was the idea.

[A]

But people don't understand context. You're born into context. You can't just overthrow the whole. It doesn't work like that anyway, we will derail. So I'm just going to say values. America was a, America is a set of values. The thing that freaks me out, dear boys and girls, we are all controlled by ideas. It's what I call your frame of Reference. Your frame of reference is a distorted set of all life beer goggles that completely warp and distort everything that you see. They are created by your beliefs, your values, and your biology. And they are going to determine not what you look at, but what you see. So we can all look at the same thing and see something very different. Now, when I was a kid, Americans, roughly on average, were looking at this, going, whoa, this is amazing. American dream. I can have whatever I wanted. That set me up to go gung ho, build businesses, and, and end up changing the course of my entire family's life.

[B]

To just think that you could do it.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

That was it.

[A]

It's what I call the only belief that matters. If you believe that you can do it, then your behaviors will follow that. If you believe that that will be fruitless, then your behaviors will follow that. Now, the set of ideas that we are. Because you asked earlier, I don't know what holds us together anymore. And I don't either. Because we are letting the values atrophy. We are letting the ideas atrophy. This is why politicians, politics is downstream of culture. Culture is simply the transmission of ideas. Okay, so we've now started transmitting a whole host of wacky fucking ideas. Now, I love new ideas. I love when people test and try things. I'm just saying look at the data. And so we are. I would put forth moving in the wrong direction on a lot of metrics that people should really care about if, if they're interested in human thriving, which is my North Star, we for sure could lose a lot of time defining that. But that to me is where immigration becomes a problem. If you're going to pour into this country and assimilate like mad, and you're all going to, if I'm right, adopt the Puritan mindset, no one's coming to save me. I have to do this by myself. I'm going to work very hard. I'm not going to expect anybody to give me anything saying, I want to contribute meaningfully to society. I want to make sure that what I build is honorable, meaning that it lifts not only me, but other people as well, that I'm going to keep the majority of what I take. But I'm nested in a government. This is not a no government place. And of course there's going to be some degree of social safety net, blah, blah, blah. But if you had people really wanting to be here for American reasons, because we are the melting pot. But if people understand looking at the external surface of somebody, skin is moronic. In terms of determining whether or not they're going to be able to contribute meaningfully. The thing you have to look at is values. And then this is rough and I'm not sure what you do with this. I have ideas, but you have to accept that intellect is going to play a role. Yes. So my advice to build a country that I want to keep living in would be to be hyper selective around values and intellect. But if we are not going to do that, at a minimum. Values.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because when you have a country that does not share values, you will. We talk about this in Africa. You always hear this. Oh, well, it's crazy that the. These two groups were slaughtering each other, but that's because some stupid colonialists just drew these circles around areas that don't make any sense. I am not a scholar of that, but I'm going to hazard a guess. It wasn't that you already had people living in proximity that just didn't share values. And when they were small and tribal and not, not under any sort of unifying government, it was fine. They could just sort of avoid each other and go their own way. We seem to be rushing towards that right now in America.

[B]

Yeah. Well, first off, that was beautifully said. I agree with actually every single word you said right there. And that's why I said it would be a waste of time for us to like figure out what the numbers on are all of that. But the basic premise of what you laid out there is absolutely right. And again, we just don't know now because. And, and the twisted part, the really twisted part, Twisted part.

[A]

We just don't know what.

[B]

Well, we just don't know who's coming in and why they're coming in. And do they want to be part of that and everything else that.

[A]

Because we don't know. That's easy to solve.

[B]

If we had a. If we had a border and there was a door.

[A]

We don't know what the people coming in believe.

[B]

Yeah, we don't know what they believe.

[A]

Those feel very different to me, which. We don't know who's coming in. Meh. Solvable. But I don't think actually helps anything. We don't know what the people coming in believe.

[B]

No, but those are both true things. If you become a citizen of the United States, you have to say.

[A]

You all say this one. You always say we don't know. And I just, I'm. I'm confused as I don't know what that means.

[B]

No, well, meaning if, if we're to believe the numbers that we're being told right now that it's somewhere between 7 to 10 to 12 million people that have come in in three years. That's what everyone is saying. Right?

[A]

And are you saying if I knew they were all from Paraguay, I would be fine. If I knew they were all from China, I'd be no, I would still

[B]

want to have the first conversation, which is how many people should be allowed to come in? How many people do you let in per day? Do these people have families here? Are they just going to immediately come in and be on the dole? Or are, or, or are they coming in with the next great idea and invention and everything else? So all of the things that you said, I completely agree with. You can't just let everybody in without knowing who they are, where they are, what they're thinking, what they want to do and everything else. But I will add even the more nefarious part which would connect us to the Democrat party again, which is not only are, it's the same party right now that is telling people that America is evil and it was founded on race, racism and it's a colonialist project and all of the horrible things that they say about America that are also the same party that wants the open borders and also the same party that wants the big government programs to put these people into the system and become dependent on the system. That is a seriously toxic, completely counter to what you just said. Vision for America. Right? You want people to come here with a dream and then come into the system and provide something for the system. This provide something for themselves, thus providing for the system and bottom up building. The way that it's being presented right now is the Democrats, in essence, whether they're fully saying this, I'm just talking about their behavior. Their behavior is the border is basically open. Come in. We're going to teach you all of the wrong things at public school. You're going to be taught again that America was founded on slavery, that we're a systemically racist country, that we're all of these terrible things. So now you're going to hate, we're going to teach you to hate the place that you're coming to. And we're not going to teach you about that American dream or American exceptionalism or what the founders were fighting or anything else. And we're going to also give you services. We're going to put you on the dole of other people, thus increasing the resentment of other people towards you. That is completely unsustainable.

[A]

Yep. I couldn't agree More. I just don't hear people often talking about assimilation, value, values. There's a great Thomas Soul quote. I think you like him at least as much as I do. I'll paraphrase it because it'd take me too long to look it up, but the rough quote goes like this. In fact, Drew is going to search this up while I give you the paraphrase. There is no word that has ever been repeated more times with no evidence as to its efficacy. And that word is diversity. Diversity is the thing we must overcome to have this beautiful thing called America.

[B]

And that's pretty damn close.

[A]

When I read that, I was like, holy. Holy shit. That is actually really true. We. Diversity of approach. Super powerful. Seeing a problem from a new angle. Very powerful. Not sharing values. Hyper dangerous. And I'm talking just. I see everything through the lens of an entrepreneur. And I'm like, bro, I want homogeneity of values in my company. Company. Because I do not want to be, of course, war with the people in my own company. It's like, let me lay out for you what we are from a values perspective. If you think that's dope and you can absolutely commit manslaughter because you're so good at your job, you're.

[B]

You're a killer.

[A]

That's gonna clip out weird. But you're just an absolute murderer at your job, then now we've got something. But if that happens to mean that we are staffed entirely by black lesbians, I'm here for.

[B]

For it. But I completely agree.

[A]

If it gives me a mix, great. If it doesn't, literally, I don't care.

[B]

Well, that's.

[A]

People to be good.

[B]

One of the things that I say on my show all the time is that if you just sort of peel back the thin veneer of tolerance that the left talks about, what you will find is something very nasty underneath it. When they say diversity is our strength, it doesn't. It doesn't mean anything. Right? For the reasons that you just illustrated. If you have all of these people that have been com. Horrific ideas and terrible ideas and all this stuff, but their skin colors are all different, everything else that. How is that strong? That's not strong. It's just messy. It's messy and most likely toxic and probably horrible and is going to end in an untold disaster. But if you have what you just laid out there, which is you don't care about their genitals or their skin color or anything else, but you're like, damn, I want the best engineers. The. And then it turns out you ended up with all black lesbian. And I'll add midgets into it. That's a. That's a very niche thing. You got a whole bunch of black, black lesbian midget engineers. Kind of an Oompa Loompa situation. You've saved them from the animals and from their country, and things were falling apart, and you've done that. That is pretty great.

[A]

Yeah, I. I do not understand people not being obsessed with utility. I have an outcome that I desire, and these are the things that lead me to that outcome. This is why I think people really should take the time. Time to lay out their philosophy. I haven't read Bin Laden's manifesto letter to America, whatever it was, but from what I hear, he actually says, this is why we hate you. This is the problem. Cool. At least now we know. But when you have people that don't take the time to lay out their own philosophy, they don't know what they believe. They're steering entirely by emotion. This is where you run into trouble. And if you don't know what outcome you're trying to achieve, you don't know whether you're a marching truth towards it. So we have all these policies, but we don't have KPIs by which we're holding these things accountable to. It's pretty nuts.

[B]

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[A]

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