Senator Rand Paul: Tariffs, Debt, China, and a Warning for America

(0:00) David Friedberg welcomes Senator Rand Paul: background, family, what led him to medicine first (3:56) Career Change: Medicine to Politics (7:03) Political Philosophy (10:55) Trade Policy & Economic Impact (15:52) Consequences of Tariffs (20:43) Voting Against the One Big Beautiful Bill (27:52) AI & the Economy (35:10) Our Fragile Financial System (41:22) Government Employment & Appropriate Spending (48:18) COVID Cover Up & Dangers of Gain-of-function Research (1:01:00) Relations with China (1:05:52) Political Future Follow Senator Paul: https://x.com/senrandpaul Check out Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up: https://www.amazon.com/Deception-Great-Cover-Up-Rand-Paul/dp/1684515130 Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We live on a house of cards because, and most people don't know this, and I don't want to scare your audience. Does this scare your audience if I tell too much? Go ahead. I voted to raise the age of Social Security, but it's not going to be around unless you raise the age to 70. It's only way it sticks around.

• 0:13David Friedberg?

  We really need American primacy.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  He said, "When you go back to Washington, make sure they know that wars with China is not inevitable." But I think it's overstated how great AI is going to be. The left, you know, has this modern monetary theory, and it sounds ridiculous, and it is, except that it kind of worked for 10 or 15 years.

• 0:31David Friedberg?

  If 40 to 50% of Americans are employed directly or indirectly by a federal, state, or local government or government contractor, or earn their income from a government check, can we actually reduce spending?

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Here's the bottom line. I voted against the big, beautiful bill because of the debt ceiling, but also here's the projections.

• 0:52David Friedberg?

  What was at the heart of the cover-up?

• 0:54Speaker 00

  There's never been a more extraordinary cover-up in the sense that these people were saying in public the opposite of what they were saying in private.

• 1:05David Friedberg?

  All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions, admit it. We are giving people round-truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What'd you guys think? That was fun. That was great.

• 1:21David Friedberg?

  Senator, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me in your office.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Sure, I did.

• 1:24David Friedberg?

  For the conversation today. I'm really excited for this. You grew up in Texas with a well-known father, 12-term congressman, three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul. However, you became a doctor after residency at Duke Medical. And I'd love to hear a little bit about how you chose that path instead of politics at the beginning of your career.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Now, that was sort of following father also. You know, my dad's a physician too. So I went to medical school. In fact, I went to the same medical school as my dad. My dad is in OB-GYN. He's retired now. We have a family of several doctors. My little sister's in OB-GYN. My brother's a family doctor. I got two nieces, three nieces that are doctors. So a lot of doctors. But as a kid, you know, I have distinct memories of laying on the Shag carpet, because we have had Shag carpet in the 70s and listening to him in, I don't know, Missoula, Montana on the radio. I'd hear the one end of him answering questions. I went to lots and lots of his speeches. I was interested in the books he recommended

• 2:26Speaker 00

  other people to read, and I read many of those. He gave me a full set of Ayn Rand's novels when I was 15 and said, "There's a lot of good stuff in here, but you know, there's some of the stuff we don't agree with either." So, and, but to be open-minded, to take the good, the good with the bad and to be able to filter through, but that there was something there about individualism. And I still believe that to this day, that there is something, you know, all the critics hate Ayn Rand. It's, "Oh, she's, you know, she's so simplistic, this and that." But there is something that connected with the American spirit, the spirit of ingenuity, the spirit of being heroes. You know, it's the idea that, you know, you know, it's, I think, why people are fascinated with Elon

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Musk and capturing those rockets from space, that it's like, "Wow, we can have somebody who really does cool things once again in our country."

• 3:15David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Ayn Rand's writings seem to be coming more prescient than I think we realized early on.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  I think that's why the people thought it was simplistic, because the characters were character types. Nobody could believe they could ever exist, that there'd be, there would be middle management, there'd be the Ellsworth Tuohy, or the Peter Keating, in the middle of these corporations. And nobody believed that their whole purpose would be mediocrity.

• 3:37David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  And that they purposely would try to choose people based on the color of their skin or their ethnicity over their merit. Nobody believed that could ever happen. That was such a dystopian sort of Harrison Bergeron. That was all farce. That was dystopian farce. Until now, you're right. It looks a lot like reality.

• 3:55David Friedberg?

  Here we are. Why did you make the career shift into politics after being a doctor for some time?

• 4:00Speaker 00

  I practiced, private practice for about 20 years, was a physician for 20, 25 years. And you're right, it's a lot of work. You go through an internship, medical school, residency. I was about 30 when I finished. And so... When my dad ran in 2008, really the campaigns are a year in advance. So when he ran in 2007 into 2008 for the Republican nomination, I decided I'd go out and help. I sort of volunteered and said, Dad, I'll give some speeches. And went out and gave a lot of speeches on my own. Not really introductory speeches, but actually my own thing. And kind of felt, wow, this is great to be able to sort of express yourself and have an opinion. I always had an opinion, but now I could find somebody to listen. And so I did that in 2008, got the bug.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  And then some of us being in the right place at the right time. Jim Bunning had been in the Senate two terms. He was a Hall of Fame pitcher, but he wasn't raising any money. It looked like he might not run. And so one day I'm at the office and this guy I knew from a property rights group, you know, too many, you know, lower property taxes kind of stuff, keep the government off our land kind of stuff. He called me up and he says, hey, I know this reporter, this AP reporter, and we think he leans kind of conservative and he's from the Republican area of the state. Well, you just call him up and tell him you're interested. So I hadn't even talked to my wife about it or anything. I said, oh, what the hell? So I called him up and said, yeah, I'm thinking about running. And I got a statewide story, then I got a national story. I was like, wow, this is not that hard.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  And so then I had a sort of a come to Jesus moment. I had to talk to my wife about this and she wasn't very happy that, you know, we'd been married 20 something years that I hadn't bothered to mention it to her. I said, look, there's no way I can get elected. I'm just going to be honest and I'm going to tell them we're out of money. I'm not going to offer them something for nothing. I said, I'm never bringing home any bacon. We don't have any bacon. Nobody will ever vote for that. And she gradually got over it. Now she's my biggest champion. We've written a couple of books together and we, you know, we work together well. But it's almost being in the right place at the right time, maybe having something to say. The Tea Party movement, which I think my dad is responsible, at least partly for getting started, that movement was burgeoning in 2010.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  The big radio talk hosts were Limbaugh and Hannity, and Hannity's still big on the radio. These hosts were out there hosting rallies. They were talking about the Constitution and the debt. And it was an exciting time. I don't know if I had announced yet, I was thinking about it. My town's fairly small, 50,000 at the time, and we have an old square built in the 19th century. I went down to the square, somebody was having a Tea Party rally, I didn't know what it was, and it was an open mic, I wasn't even invited to speak really. And I spoke and there were 800 people there, I'd never been to a political rally in my town, Republican or otherwise, with 800 people, there was a real movement. And so that kind of makes me sad now that it's a movement that came and, you know...

• 6:52David Friedberg?

  Did it go?

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Came, conquered, and nothing happened because some of the people left and some of the people decided that debts were okay if you had a Republican in charge and were bad if a Democrat was.

• 7:03David Friedberg?

  That's really interesting, because I wanted to get to your core philosophy and identity. On Wikipedia, it says Libertarian, Constitutional Conservative, Tea Party Movement, Republican. How do you describe yourself, your identity, Senator?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  All of those things are true to a certain extent. I like to say that I'm part of the "Leave Me Alone" coalition. And then sometimes I'll say, you know, really I'm part of the "Leave Me the Hell Alone" coalition. And that means in all sort of aspects, personal, private, my contracts, my business, what I do, my family, just leave me alone. And that encompasses a bigger group than just conservatives, a bigger group than just libertarians. And I would say, there was a long time ago, there was a guy named Frank Myers, and Frank Myers, they called a fusionist. He was a guy who was going to be somewhere in between Buckley and Murray Rothbard.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Murray Rothbard's not as well-known, but he was a student of Von Mises and he was a libertarian writer. And Buckley, everybody knows who Buckley is. And that became the more traditional conservative movement. And the libertarians sort of said, "Well, we like all that capitalism and everything, but we're worried if so much money goes into the military that maybe the military will become the state also." And they were really against the state in all facets, we want a small state. We're for defending the country, don't get us wrong, but... And so, but somewhere in between those two, some of the libertarians would have no military, some of them would have open borders. And then there was the conservatives, that somewhere in the middle was a fusion, and Frank Myers was a part of that. It was one of the cool things, when I first came up here, they invited me to the Frank Myers Society, like eight guys that were like 80 and 90 years old, it was such a great

• 8:42Speaker 00

  dinner club, but anyway.

• 8:45David Friedberg?

  Does that make it hard to operate in DC to be fusion? Because the kind of mechanism, the operating model in DC seems to be policy by party. You have to be a member of a party and then leadership sets the agenda and everyone falls in line.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think that's really disappointing about it. And I think a lot of the public doesn't necessarily like that. And that's why a lot of the public says they don't like either party. I'm of the belief that like, right now, there's a great danger in our country to losing a movement that represents the free market, trade and capitalism and all of those things. Because I think we're moving towards a movement that backs a person. And I feel the wrath all the time. I don't back Donald Trump enough. And so I'm to be, you know, I get along with Donald Trump, actually, on a personal level better than some of his supporters who've gone crazy. And they don't seem to remember, I've supported a lot of, I've supported his nominees, I voted against his impeachments, I was one of the loudest voices against them. And yet they can't stand if I oppose him on one thing.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  That's not good. And also, there is something, trade is not an incidental issue. Trade is sort of a fundamental aspect of capitalism. And Adam Smith wrote about it. In fact, one of Adam Smith's sort of great nuggets that he gave to the world was the idea that the division of labor makes us richer. So if you don't have to sit around making your shoes, your clothes, your tie, you can do something out, you have time to think and your innovation is going to create more great things. But he's also said that the division of labor and the prosperity that it creates is only limited by how far it extends. And I think what he meant by that is by trade. So we, you know, I'm richer in my town because I don't make my shoes, maybe somebody else in the town makes them. Then I'm even richer when somebody in another state makes them. But guess what?

• 10:31Speaker 00

  I got even richer when they were made in Vietnam. We all did. And that is being now, the fallacy is being promoted that trade is bad, which really essentially means capitalism is bad. And we've got people promoting that we should own the companies, the government should be involved with the ownership of the companies, all that stuff. It worries me that people are going to forget what we once were for and what really is important to be for, what made America great, and that is capitalism.

• 10:55David Friedberg?

  Some would argue... That this idea of what they call the globalist agenda, which is to outsource our jobs versus reducing our costs and increasing availability of goods and services that we can benefit from, has hollowed out America and has caused a great economic depression for many Americans. And they can't seem to find their way out of it unless we create a more protectionist trade environment.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  There's a lot to dislike about globalism and what that represents. And to many people, and to many even libertarians, if it means big, huge treaty organizations that have labor rules and environmental rules and all these anti-capitalist rules in them, that's not really free trade or free market. But I will say that there is a fallacy, and it's repeated ad nauseam, and it just is absolutely untrue, and the facts will bear this out. Most people who are for the protectionism say the middle class is being hollowed out and we're being ripped off. They're both absolutely and unequivocally untrue. So if you look at household income, and there's a good website that does this, humanprogress.org, will look at this. Steve Linsacomet, Cato, is great on this.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Look at household income for the last 70 or 80 years. And you look at what percentage is middle class, what are lower class, and what is upper class? The middle class, 50 years ago, about 54% of the people were in the middle class, and now it's 51. Everybody's like, aha, the middle class is shrinking. Well, the lower class was like 37%. It's now 33%. It's like, where did they go? They're being hollowed out? Yes, they're becoming rich. They're in the upper class. The upper class has grown. It's the one segment, and you have to do constant dollars and call the upper class above $100,000, and the middle class 50 to 100. But really, there's been a great increase in wealth. If you look further at things like clothing, you can buy, you know, people, oh, hey,

• 12:45Speaker 00

  we lost the textile industry. Well, I think that's sad in a way. But you can get 10 times as many clothes as a person in 1900 could. We live twice as long. We are, uh, by historical standards, one of the best charts is prosperity per unit of GDP or something. And you look at it, people have called it, I think Jonathan Haidt called it the greatest, you know, graph in the history of the world.

• 13:08David Friedberg?

  Steven Pinker highlights this.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Same thing, Pinker does, he's, he's, Pinker does it as well, and he's great. His book Enlightenment Now is an amazing book. But anyway, this chart is, for all of human history, if this is prosperity and this is time, for all of human history, we lived on the X-axis. It's just an amazing chart. In about 1820, when the division of labor allowed the industrial revolution, people to think about doing other stuff, you just have this, it, it, it really is this curve that, that just is, is extraordinary. That's the history, but nobody wants to hear this, like, oh, we're being hollowed out and trade's bad. But then the second fallacies were being ripped off on trade. And this one, I think, is pretty easy to debunk. A million people go to Walmart, last week, next week, and they all buy TVs.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  At the end of the year, you say, they all bought Chinese TVs. Let's put a circle around all of these trades and the country they came for. Chinese didn't buy crap from us, we bought all these TVs. But a million people went in and made a voluntary trade, where when they left, their 600 bucks, they wanted less than the TV, and Walmart wanted their 600 dollars. Every volunteer, voluntary trade ever made in humanity, every second of the day, is all mutually beneficial or it doesn't occur. It's not even an equal trade. It's mutually beneficial, we both think we got it. So how can a million people all think they got a great deal and make a trade? And I draw a circle around them and have this false accounting that says, oh, we all got ripped off by China. It's just not true.

• 14:34David Friedberg?

  So what is the origin of the fallacy? Is it a political tactic to drive votes?

• 14:39Speaker 00

  It's, it's pride, and that's why I have such difficulty counteracting this. Now, what amazes me is though for 100 years economists, right, left, and center, all decided that trade was making everybody wealthy. It's more visible if you look at the trade of the people who were poor. So the poor people got astronomically, they got, uh, their, their, their multiple is much bigger because they were much poorer to start with. But if you look at China and us, from 1975 on, we both got richer. But China was so poor that their richness is more available. They didn't rip us off. You know, this isn't love of China. I wrote a book called The Case Against Socialism. I hate socialism. I hate communism. I wish the people there didn't have to live under that authoritarianism. But they didn't rip us off. And it's easy to sell because nationalism

• 15:25Speaker 00

  is easy to sell, patriotism is easy to sell, we hate the other country, we're good, they're bad. And also, anybody down their luck, and I'm not saying, well, the historical trend is great for the society, middle, lower, and upper. It's not great for everybody. So there's always being people aren't doing well. Those people are attracted by nationalism and they're protected by blame somebody, don't blame myself, or don't blame anybody else. It's somebody else's fault.

• 15:52David Friedberg?

  So walk me through the consequences of tariffs. Where do they take us? Where do they take the economy? Where do they take us from inflation perspective, from a job creation perspective, onshoring, which has been argued as another piece? Like, what's your view on where this is going?

• 16:06Speaker 00

  You know, one of my favorite sort of people complain, I got a lot of complainers right now by the tariffs because they love the president and they don't love my position so much. And really, 75, 80% of Republicans, he's sold on this issue that tariffs are good. But there's a, I guess I'd start at the macro level. So you have 7 billion in spending for our federal government, 5 billion in revenue. So we're $2 billion short.

• 16:29David Friedberg?

  Two trillion.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, two trillion. It used to differentiate conservatives and Republicans and Democrats. We as Republicans would say, yeah, deficits are bad, and let's close it by lowering spending. Democrats will say, well, just tax the rich people. Well, you know, rich people don't pay enough in taxes, which is also untrue. But then we'll do it that way. That was what differentiated us. But now everybody's like, oh, gosh, tariffs are so good. We're going to balance the budget. We're bringing in revenue. One, it's really a pittance. It's a, I think it's about 100 billion, 150 billion more than last year is what's going to come in this year. And that over 10 years might be 1.5, $2 trillion. But we're going to borrow like $15 trillion over the next 10 years. But when you look at it and you say, from a global point of view, is it good to raise taxes? Most Republicans always said we didn't

• 17:15Speaker 00

  like more taxes. We were taxed, that was part of the Tea Party acronym, is taxed enough. Already, we don't want more taxes. Now, everybody wants more taxes. It's inconsistent with who we are. But it also, the other one I love is that we're going to do it and we're going to eliminate the income tax. And I say, come to me with that. I don't like tariffs very much, but I'll vote for a 20% tariff. You know, I take a sale, it's a sales tax. I'll take a sales tax over an income tax. This is being presented in addition. So, everybody needs to forget what they think they're saying and understand the tariffs are in addition. But there's also an argument on the separation of powers. One of the things our, our founders really struggled with was they worried about tyranny of one person and tyranny of the majority.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  And so, the way our government is structured is to try to, as Madison said, pit ambition against ambition. And, but I think they never imagined that we'd have a Congress without any ambition. We just basically said, oh, President Trump, go ahead, just do what you want. And there's a problem with that. He's declared an emergency to raise taxes. And so, we don't pay the taxes, bullshit. We pay the taxes, but you know, there are people analyze, is a little bit done by the foreigners, a little bit done by the importer, a little bit, yes, but it is a tax. It's a fee and we collect it here in our country. It is a tax. The Constitution says taxes originate in the House. And, you know, this one just originated with the President with not even a confirmation by the House or the Senate. When we get an AOC as a President, which I hope never happens, she's going to declare

• 18:42Speaker 00

  an emergency and we'll, she'll say, no more gasoline powered cars or lawn mowers or whatever else. And they'll send police to your house, says, I'm just doing an emergency, just like your President did. So, there is the danger and people need to think about it. And this is where- The President. The President. Well, this is the problem with only being tribal and only being for your tribe when your tribe is in power. You have to think beyond this. So, for example, when Biden was in power, there were two dozen Republicans, and I was one of them, who had a reform of the emergency power that said, when a President declares an emergency, it expires in 30 days unless affirmed. Right now, it's the opposite. The President's declared an emergency on tariffs. If we wanted to stop him, we could vote by simple majority. He would then veto it and then it would take two thirds.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  So, right now, the way the law is set up is presidential emergencies can only be stopped by two thirds of Congress. Well, I mean, that's so dramatic, it almost never happens. We'd like to reverse it. But all those Republicans who supported reform of the emergency under Biden have all bailed on me. And so, when we recently had a vote- Directly on whether or not there was an emergency with Canada, I was one of four Republicans. And most of the people who had signed on to the emergency reform all of a sudden didn't care that there was an emergency under a Republican president. And none of this is to say I dislike Donald Trump. I actually like him very much as a person, play golf with him, support probably 80% of what he's doing. Do I think he's better than Harris? Oh, gosh, just a million times. I mean, I would do anything to stop socialism and the redistributionist.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  But it doesn't mean I should just roll over and no longer have a thought.

• 20:14David Friedberg?

  Have you tried to align with the Democrats to try and get this emergency?

• 20:17Speaker 00

  It's not trying to align with them, but when they're right, I vote with them. They had an emergency to overturn the emergency and I voted with them. It's a privileged vote and very rarely can people who object to the majority will of either party get votes. The only way you get votes is by using special procedures. So the emergency vote to overturn an emergency has a privilege, meaning that it has to come to the floor. So I voted with them and there were four of us, four Republicans who voted with them.

• 20:43David Friedberg?

  You were also pretty well-known recently for being one of three Republicans to vote against the big, beautiful bill.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:49David Friedberg?

  Maybe you can just share the parts of the bill that you were opposed to.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Increase the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. This is not only extraordinary, but unheard of. No conservative in their right mind would ever vote for this under Biden. In fact, when Biden did propose stuff like this, all the conservatives voted no. So we sort of lose who we are if we don't keep the same standard under the same presidents. $5 trillion. But a lot of people don't know this, but up until the last moment, my vote was still in play because I told them I don't like a lot about it. It's also going to add to the debt and I think that is true and we can go through that in a minute. But up until that morning, I met with Vance that morning, Lisa Murkowski was demanding more stuff for Alaska. I didn't want anything for me or for my state in a parochial way. I wanted something for the country was not add so much debt. So I said, I'll vote to increase it 500 billion.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  And even that's like sticking a dagger in my heart. 500 billion used to be a year or two years. Now that's three months and they said they didn't want it. I had long conversations with the president. I spoke with him for 59 minutes the week before. I noted, I looked at my phone, my wife's standing in the kitchen and he spoke for 58 minutes and 45 seconds and he just didn't, the debt ceiling, the Democrats will never vote for it. I don't want to do it again. It's inconvenient, you know? I don't want to talk about the debt ceiling. But I won't talk about it. I'd vote on it every three months. Not that I want us to default, but because every three months we need to talk about how we're out of whack, we need to talk about why, you know, why are these credit agencies downgrading the dollar? What happens if there is a dramatic flight from the dollar?

• 22:22Speaker 00

  The thing about economics, I don't claim to know even a tenth of what smart people know, but things don't always happen gradually. You know, if you think in your lifetime or my lifetime of the different corrections in the market, they came in one or two days, you know, 2007, 2008 came in like a day or two, right? There was one in the 90s, there was 1929. I think somebody told me almost all the losses in the stock market, if you take like seven days of the last century, it's like 95% of all the losses are in like seven days. But it could be worse. If there's ever a flight from the dollar, and people are talking about that, they have bond sales, you know, they talk about how many people show up, there's some kind of ratio, and it usually it's like, I don't know, 2.5 to 1 or something, it was in the low 2s, 2 to 1 of not many people showing up.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Interest rates are still, you know, pretty, pretty high. But what I'm always fascinated by is people say, well, the interest rates are so high. But I was always taught historically that the interest rates are inflation or expectations of inflation plus the historic rate, which is about two or three points. If I take money from you for 30 years, you're not giving it to me for less than two or three points. But you also want inflation too, so you want three points for inflation and two, which that's about what interest rates are. So I don't think anybody knows whether interest rates are too high or too low. I think that's a silly question. But if you looked at it in historic terms, they're about probably, you know, the market's judging them to be expected inflation plus about three points.

• 23:42David Friedberg?

  Right. But just going back to the big, beautiful bill and your vote against it.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:47David Friedberg?

  I just want to understand how we got here, or your view on how we got here. So you've read a lot of history, a lot of philosophy. I've interviewed Ray Dalio twice.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  I've met him, he's a fascinating guy.

• 23:59David Friedberg?

  Talking about his cycle of empires and, you know, where it, his kind of thesis is we're one of six cycles.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:06David Friedberg?

  Over the last 500 years, and we're kind of at the tipping point here.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:11David Friedberg?

  And there's a set of trends that are very common. He says, you know, different characters, same act, you know, like it happens over and over again, and we take on too much debt, when we, the country gets wealthy, it grows, the economy expands. We start to get offered free money. We take it, we spend it, all of a sudden.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  And one of the things he, I, we, we had a dinner, a bipartisan dinner with him recently. And one of the things he's saying is the way to get out of this, what we have to do is we have to get, and this isn't even Drac, I think draconian, we have to get 3% of our debt, our, our annual

• 24:39David Friedberg?

  Deficit to GDP.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Deficit needs to be 3% of GDP. Well, it's 6% now, so it'd have to be cut in half. And I think it's very reasonable and a lot of people nodded their heads, but it takes a tough vote. Like, I voted to raise the age of social security. And people said, "God, do you hate old people?" I say, "No, I aspire to be an old person. I want my social security and I want the system to be around for ordinary people." But it's not going to be around unless you raise the age to 70. That's the only way it sticks around.

• 25:02David Friedberg?

  Is it that in order to get reelected, you have to offer your voters something that they don't have today, and therefore every election cycle, you have to show up with something else? No one ever gets elected by saying, "I'm going to cut back half, or cut back a quarter, or 10% of what you're getting today." You might. But is, what, is that the dynamic, or is this?

• 25:21Speaker 00

  I'm proof positive that you don't have to say, "I'm going to bring, I'm the bacon, I'm going to bring you your freedom, I'm going to keep the government out of your lives, and I'm going to allow you to become richer, because freedom and capitalism makes us all richer, and I'm going to allow you, and it's going to be mostly on merit, which is better than the government deciding that." So I think you can say that. And I've said it explicitly, I will never go home with a check saying, "We brought you this to your community because we don't have it, and it has to be borrowed, and that makes us all poorer through inflation." It is that fear, though, and the president has bought into this. The president says, "Social Security, we can't talk about. Medicare, we can't talk about." And really on Medicaid, he severely limited what could be talked about. Food stamps, they, they nibbled at it. They talked about some good things, but most of it's in the distant

• 26:06Speaker 00

  future. And, and here's the bottom line. I, I voted against the big, beautiful bill because of the debt ceiling, but also here's the projections. The CBO had a projection that was going to add 3 trillion. All the Republicans said, "Oh, CBO has too low a grade, we can't believe the CBO." Well, the authors of the bill did something I agreed with. They said, "We're doing it based on policy and this is what we project." That the taxes will go on and that they aren't really, we're not giving a tax cut. Most of that is just keeping the same policy. And I said, "I accept that." So what are your numbers? The authors of the bill, the Republican supporters of it, said, "Well, the first 10 years, no, the first 5 years, it's going to lose 500 billion. So it'll be more, 500 billion more in the hole.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  The second 5 years, we'll make that up and we'll go a trillion positive, so we'll be plus 500." I believe the first 5 years, I don't believe the second 5 years. And this is from the authors, admitting. And the reason you know it's going to lose 500 billion is this. Many tax cuts will pay for themselves over time, but almost all of them have a little bit of dip in revenue in the beginning. It's not a reason to be opposed to tax cuts, it's a reason to at least be wary. Even if you don't count the tax cuts that we already had, that we continue, and you count the new ones, there's going to be a little dip in revenue, and maybe some of these weren't that growth-related. Tips and things like that may not be that growth-related to reduce tax on tips. So that's going to be a dip down. But the other reason why you know the deficits came better, they put $500 billion of new spending. So from the very beginning, this was Lindsey Graham and the military-industrial complex.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  They wanted more money for the military. They already got an increase in the military last time. This is 150 billion for the military and 150 billion for the border, which I'm for controlling the border. I applaud the president for controlling the border. He didn't need the 150 billion. He made, you know, 20 billion would have probably been enough to secure the border, but nobody's conservative when it comes to this.

• 27:52David Friedberg?

  I saw your hearing where I think you challenged the bill, the amount.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  The wall.

• 27:56David Friedberg?

  Yeah, the wall, because you kind of went through the numbers and it was pretty striking that.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  It was on their website. The next week, they changed their website because they didn't like me reciting their website back to them.

• 28:06David Friedberg?

  Right. So where are we headed? 37 trillion of debt. If the debt gets financed at 5%, 6%, which is kind of where interest rates are trending, we're talking about an incremental trillion dollars a year of interest expense. Interest expense will probably become 2 trillion a year.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:22David Friedberg?

  We don't seem to be cutting the budget much. Everyone wants more. Everyone wants more budget for their particular interests and their states and whatnot. What's your view on where we're headed over the next 10 years, barring a lot of Rand Pauls getting elected to Congress?

• 28:36Speaker 00

  The left, you know, has this modern monetary theory, and it sounds ridiculous, and it is, except that it kind of worked for 10 or 15 years. So Bush doubled the debt from 5 trillion to 10 trillion, but the interest rates went in half, so his interest payments, the same. You know, we went from 5 to 10 trillion with the same interest rate. We've played a lot of games to do something similar. So for the last 10 years or so, or maybe 8 years, we averaged our payment was like 1.5% for the debt. That's what we were paying. Now it's 3.5. That's a pretty significant jump, but I think if they stay where they are, it's going to be even more. So we're at a trillion in interest now. Could we go to 2, and what happens? All of these things are fixable. America is a great place because of capitalism.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  We just need to start fixing them, and it's not even draconian, just a little bit at a time. You know, for 12 years, I've been saying, just raise the age 3 months a year for the next 20 years, and you'll be at 70. You may eventually have to go higher, depending on longevity. The other thing you have to do is the age doesn't fix Social Security anymore. You've got to means test it. And the only difference we have with the Democrats on the means testing, well, on all of it, if they would agree to any reform, they just want to tax rich people in the beginning. So there's a limit. Your Social Security taxes go up to about 160,000, and they're indexed to kind of keep creeping up a little bit, which I can live with that. But if there's a choice, whether rich people will get less Social Security in the end, or we tax them up to 10 million dollars, I'd rather do it in the end, because somebody

• 30:05Speaker 00

  making 10 million dollars is investing and creating a lot of jobs, and I'd rather not stop that. But I don't care if rich people, including me, and I'm not that rich, but I'm an upper-middle class, and I would get less Social Security also. You can fix the system that way. And I think we are so dependent on it that it's hard to go back to a pure system where we developed, it would be worked on charity and private pensions. But we've got to get started on it. The longer you wait, the more difficult it is to fix.

• 30:31David Friedberg?

  Is there a point of no return that you view as there a year or a debt amount to GDP, a debt ratio?

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Well, there's never, well, there is a point of return of no return for a catastrophe and I don't know that. If I would, I'd be predicting the day and then I'd be fine and everybody else would get, you know, killed by the calamity. I don't know, you gotta be really smart or lucky to predict those calamities. Like the people who saw the housing crisis were really smart, you know, and they they figured that happening. So I don't know that. It is going to happen, but I think what's important, and I tell people this all the time. You will always get your social security check. You will always get your Medicare. It will never end. But it just may not be worth anything. So there will be a point in time when we cut you your check and there are colas.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  But what happens when, if you're, if you're in 1923 in Germany and you get annual colas? It didn't work so well because the money was losing 30% an hour. You know, there were times when the German workers, and it was in 22 or 23. They want to be paid at noon because they didn't wait till the end of the day because it was depreciating so fast. Colas worked for a while, but the cost of living increases. But they are somewhat of a game. You have a problem. You're creating this inflation. You you hate to punish people, so you give them a cola. But the cola comes once a year. Part of the breaking point for all this stuff that has colas on is when you need to do it every month.

• 31:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  So that's much higher inflation. And we've been extraordinarily lucky. And I've never really seen anybody write this as accurate, as, as I think detailed as that could be. I think we've exported our inflation. I think we've created so much more inflation than we have. But because we import more than we export, we pay them in the dollars. Some of them find their way back into our stock market, bid our stock market up. But you can go to two dozen countries around the world and they're trading in your dollars. So the actual physical dollar never comes back on some of these trades. And so I think if you took what the M1 is going up and what the money is going up, and I think you looked at it, some of it disappeared. Then they play the games with paying interest to keep it in the Fed, which I've got a bill to eliminate that right now. And that bill is co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  We paid 188 billion, the Fed did, in interest to banks not to loan money. Most of it went to five banks in New York, the big five, but 40% of it went to foreign banks. So the Fed's buying our interest with fake money. The taxpayer still has to pay the interest back to the Fed. The Fed used to use it as profit and give it back to the Treasury. And it's a weird game. But now, instead of at least playing the weird game, they're giving it to rich people. So this is something reminiscent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where you got right and left coming together.

• 33:12David Friedberg?

  The free market is not dumb to this, it seems, right? So the global free market, dollar reserves, according to the IMF report, on central bank holdings have declined in the last decade. So it's been shown the dollar reserves have declined from 60% to 40% in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, gold has doubled from 10% to 20% of central bank holdings. And as a result, we're seeing gold prices, I think, $3,600 an ounce as of yesterday. What do you think is the path here for the dollar? Like, maybe we can just kind of talk to the average person listening. Where's this taking us? Because the market wakes up to this, and they're saying, "These dollars aren't really what they used to be."

• 33:54Speaker 00

  I think there are two scenarios. One is the one we're used to, and that's the gradual scenario. Then the Fed tries to intervene to try to control inflation. I think they can. But I've always asked this question to very smart bankers and things. Is there a point in time at which the Fed doesn't control interest rates? And many times, they'll say, "Well, the Fed doesn't really control the long-term interest rates after the daily stuff, that it's really controlled by the marketplace." But when is there a time in which it just becomes out of control? So you have the government shows up and says they want to sell $20 billion of the debt, and nobody shows up, and the Fed has to buy all of it. I think, right now, of our $36 trillion debt, the Fed has about a third of it.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Foreign governments have about a third, and then the marketplace has about a third. What happens when the private marketplace doesn't show up? Is there a time in which you have a Friday? They do this on Fridays, I think. You do a Friday sale, and nobody shows up, and the Fed buys the whole thing. What do you think happens to that Monday? Do you think you'd be trying to prepare to sell some stock overnight before Monday opens? And then I think you could have a calamity. And some of it can be fixed. And some of it, we live on a house of cards because, and most people don't know this, and I don't want to scare your audience, will I scare your audience if I tell too much?

• 35:14David Friedberg?

  It's great. It's gonna get clicks and views.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, this is, this is, this is very scary. So you have a thousand dollars in your checking account, and you go to the bank and you want all of it. That only works if a few of you go. Because the bank, I think, only holds 10% of your checking account. Now, I want the bank to loan money, so I give them a thousand dollars in a CD. They pay me 2%, and they loan it out for 3%. That's how banks traditionally make money. But they, they have a game. I have a racket. It's called fractional reserve system, and it works until it doesn't work. And once a bunch of people go crazy, a bank run, and we've had bank runs even back in the 19th century.

• 35:50David Friedberg?

  We nearly had one with Silicon Valley Bank two years ago.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. But it's really based on that. And I haven't been as involved exactly with what the rate should be, but I, I think lining out 90% of your checking account is a recipe for a bank run. We don't have it because we just print more, and we flood the system with liquidity when, when people get, get skittish. But there's a time at which they can't control that, and it's coming. But I try to get back to simple things, because I don't know when that's gonna happen, and maybe it's not gonna happen. The simple thing is, you spend what comes in. Most people do. You borrow if you have an asset that the bank can hold, like your house or something. This is what normal people do. And they spend what comes in. Your government should behave that way. In the same way there are ramifications to you personally, if you overspend, you'll ultimately be punished.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  It's going to happen to us. And so the first thing we do, we don't even need to think about the 36 trillion. We need to think about the 2 trillion we're borrowing next, and that number needs to be smaller. But I can tell you, people aren't getting it. I, I went, you know, I asked the Secretary, Treasury Secretary Besen about this. I said, "You guys are spouting all these numbers, the big, beautiful bill, and it's gonna be great, and there'll be no more debt, and all the Saudis are gonna invest 20 trillion dollars in our country, and we'll all be rich." And he said, "But the number I'm concerned about is, will the deficit be bigger or smaller next year?" And he said, "Well, um, in terms of the GDP, it will." But even that's not going to be true. The deficit next year's, this year, the one we're in, that's going to end in about three

• 37:17Speaker 00

  weeks, is going to be about 1.9 something trillion. And it's going to be about 150, 160 billion worse than last year. And as a percentage of GDP, I think it's going from 6 to about 6.2. So we are getting worse. And it isn't, I don't say this because I, you know, want to be mean and get the wrath of Donald Trump. I say this because as Republicans, we need to be for balanced budgets, less spending, no matter who's in the White House. And it's going to take some, some back and forth with the president to get there.

• 37:46David Friedberg?

  Well, I want to introduce another kind of frightening metric and statistic. So by my estimate, and this is not reported by anyone, this is just me doing some addition in an Excel spreadsheet, somewhere around 40 to 50% of the American workforce age population earn their income from, directly from a government or a government contractor. If 40 to 50% of Americans are employed directly or indirectly by a federal, state, or local government or government contractor, or earn their income from a government check, can we actually reduce spending?

• 38:25Speaker 00

  And this is a real problem. When you look at our spending as a percentage of GDP, the spending part, the 7 trillion, the average over the last five years is about 26%. Right now, we're at 23 or 24% of GDP. And I love it because the people say, well, we'll just have tariffs and we'll run the government off tariffs. And I say, well, when they did that, the 19th century government was 3% of GDP. I'm for that. You bring me spending bills and I'll vote for all of them to make us a 19th century government of 3% of GDP, and I'll vote for all your tariffs. But that's a, that's a big change. And it is a problem. And it's sort of a twofold problem. The people actually working for government, you got to make government smaller so we don't have as many government jobs. But the other segment is worrisome, if not more, and that is the people not participating in the workforce. They're getting money, but they're not participating.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  And it's like 38, 40%, 42%, depending on the state. So 40% of the people...

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Eligible to work, able to work, and not working. And this is, you know, libertarians had this debate, like, what do you do? They don't, some of them don't want any border controls. And they say, and my dad used to say this, and I kind of agree with this part. You need to build a wall around the welfare state and don't give any people coming into the country illegal any access to your welfare state. And I still agree with that part. I think you still have to have border security too, and you have to push back on millions of people coming all at once. But there is a problem. If you had, like, for example, and people will tell you this, in that have tomatoes or anything else, the things that require handpicking, you won't have enough people. But you would have enough people if Americans worked, but a whole chunk, forty percent of them aren't working you should.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  But if you want to, if you, if you want to expel twenty million people from the country and do that, you have to simultaneously quit paying the people not to work, or you won't have enough workers. There is also this argument, there was an economist by the name of Julian Simon, who is a big promoter of this, population's actually proportional to wealth. So is trade. You look at big, large charts over decades and decades, the more trade you have, the wealthier you have, the more people you have, the wealthier you have. And there was a famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon about five different commodities, and whether they'd be more, more rare after like a ten-year period. Julian Simon, the libertarian economist, wins this bet because, basically, the real,

• 40:46Speaker 00

  he said, the real resource, the real ultimate resource is the mind. It's ingenuity. Nobody would have imagined, even in my lifetime, the whole concept of AI, we didn't imagine smartphones or cell phones, we didn't imagine all of these things. And we're going to have these big debates, maybe bigger than everything we've discussed, is whether or not we're going to succumb to the Luddite philosophy, or whether we're going to believe that we will over, not only overcome, but technology, we will succeed in technology. It doesn't mean you can just sit there and do nothing. You have to adapt with the times and move forward. But we've, you know, the people breaking the looms were wrong.

• 41:22David Friedberg?

  You think this transition with AI in our economy and our society will actually create such significant productivity gains that jobs will proliferate, that we can get people off of the welfare, off of government jobs and into the private workforce because they're...

• 41:37Speaker 00

  I don't know if it fixes that problem, but I am of the opinion that I don't fear technology in general. And I was having this conversation really with one of the world's richest men, and he told me, "Yeah, that's fine, and I've been with you, and I'm not for the Luddites, except for..." And I said, "Well, the humans, you gotta have humans to make the robots." He says, "The first generation. The second generation of robots will be made by the robots." And I guess it doesn't resonate with me because I have such a profound belief in the ingenuity of mankind that I think it is limitless. And I don't think that we need to smash the computers. I don't think we have to break, you know, somehow shut down the chip companies and say, "We're all going to be out of work."

• 42:21Speaker 00

  I do think, though, there'll be a time that we will have such great leisure that we will actually choose to work. And I always tell people this anyway, "I want everybody in America to work, not as punishment, but as reward." There is a reward to working. And I think even if all jobs were eliminated, you'd have sort of like secret societies where you can go someplace, and it'll be underground, and you have to do it under threat of death, but you can go and work.

• 42:44David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  You know, even if we have no work.

• 42:46David Friedberg?

  We didn't used to have yoga classes and Pilates classes and massage therapists, and many of the luxuries that we take for granted today that simply didn't exist 100 years ago when the Industrial Revolution, the Second Industrial Revolution was underway.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:00David Friedberg?

  And as we fast forward the next few decades, I think our life, and this is one of Pinkler's points, is just labor per capita, like labor hours, has gone down steadily. We've given ourselves more free time with the leverage we've created on human time.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  He does this, and so does Marion Toopie at Human Progress. They talk about time hours. And so did William Nordhaus, was the famous example, maybe one of the first from Yale. He was the economist who wrote about how many hours of work it takes to get light for a year to read by. And it was like in the 19th century because you had to have candles. It was like 10,000 hours of work or maybe it was the thousand hours of work to have nighttime light to read by. It's 10 seconds of work gives you an entire years with a light. That productivity increase, nobody could fathom.

• 43:48David Friedberg?

  Extraordinary.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  And all the Luddites, you know, hate that kind of stuff. And it's like, it's not going to happen and we need to take the pitchfork and the axe to the computers. No, we'll, we'll figure it out. I do think though, that the, the AI people, and once again, I'm not a genius on AI. I don't write code. I don't know any of that. But I think it's overstated that, uh, how great AI is going to be. I think it's going to be a lot of cool things. And I think some people are going to get caught. We're going to have too many data centers at one point. And I don't care how much electricity they're sucking. But at the same time, I think we're going to have too many of them because people will say, well, the one thing I see they do really well now is they, they are great adjacent to things. You know, I've looked up political questions even today on what happens if we hand the

• 44:32Speaker 00

  reverse repos, you know, at the Federal Reserve. And it gives a, a pretty good explanation. It's a faster, it isn't smarter than humans. It's much faster at doing the search that I could have done manually by using the Google search engine. But these things just kill. And I wonder whether that's, you know, everybody, oh, we got to break up Google because they have a monopoly on search engines. I wonder how long it will take until, and maybe it's already happening, that AI will make Google less of a dominant search engine.

• 45:00David Friedberg?

  This was actually in the court ruling yesterday. The judge that decided to not break up Google, there was a write-up on the rise of AI showing a, a point on this.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  And that I'm in favor of on multiple levels, but I think it's also cool. Nobody would have predicted, oh, Google's going to have everything in the whole world.

• 45:16David Friedberg?

  Let markets work.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  All of a sudden something comes in new.

• 45:19David Friedberg?

  Right, right. AI, like any other technology prior, provides leverage on human time and therefore leverage on human capital. And when you get a higher ROI on capital, you generally have more capital flow in, not less. So people will invest more in people. They will pay more to people. They will hire more people. As AI tools are utilized, they're just going to increase productivity for every person.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  That's a great way of putting it, and I hadn't thought of that because that fits with my sort of Adam Smith model, that the extent of our prosperity is the extent of the division of labor. And so if AI gives me more free time, you know, then I'm going to be smarter and I'm going to think up other ideas and maybe we will get to Mars, you know?

• 45:56David Friedberg?

  I just want to ask your point on Doge. There was a lot of proclamations at the start of this administration about the importance of Doge, Elon Musk's role in the administration. The president and others in the administration declared Doge such an important part of the efforts and all the cabinet members were incorporating Doge team members into their work. Today, is Doge dead?

• 46:16Speaker 00

  No, I still meet with people in government who I think are part of Doge, were probably colleagues and friends of Elon Musk and brought into the situation. I think they've been a great addition because, one, they're people who know about profit and loss and they're people who have been successful in business. And the fact that they've been selected by the marketplace as being successful people means they're good people to have in government. Is it everything I'd wished? No, but that's not the Doge people's fault. That's the people resisting Doge and resisting the cuts. I like the fact that the president pushed on with another round of foreign aid cuts and he's doing this pocket rescission. And you know, I am a stickler for the rules and for the Constitution. The Constitution's very explicit on how you spend it, but it's pretty silent on not spending up. And I think the

• 46:59Speaker 00

  best way for people who have their doubts about whether they should do it is, imagine we need an aircraft carrier and we hire somebody who looks at every nut and bolt, like Elon Musk and his rockets, all right? We hire Elon Musk and we give him a billion dollars and he says, this is crazy, I can do this for 800 million like this. And he probably can. And that's probably true of every aircraft carrier we have. So he does it for 800 million. Should we be forced to spend the 200 million that this person found in savings? Should we go to Las Vegas and have a big convention for all the GSA people with champagne and everything? No, it's ridiculous. The money should go back to the Treasury. Now, the appropriators on both sides now say, no, it's been appropriated, it should be spent. But sort of... ignores the fact that we're $2 trillion over budget.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  If you had a balanced budget, you could argue, well, we want it to be spent. If you have $2 trillion in the hole, if you don't spend it, we should be applauding the savings and the money should go back to the Treasury. So I'm with them on the rescission stuff. I want more of the Doge cuts. I'm all for it, but the pushback, and it's bipartisan, the pushback. It's the spenders, it's the big spenders in both parties that have pushed back on Doge. But I still wish them success and still, and for them.

• 48:06David Friedberg?

  I was struck by how many Senate confirmation hearings I watched where senators blatantly spoke on camera about the need to keep dollars flowing to their state. And that was the motivation. It just drove me nuts. Anyway, we'll move on. I want to talk about your new book, Deception, The Great Covid Cover-Up. What was at the heart of the cover-up from your point of view?

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Some people get nervous when you talk about cover-up or conspiracy. They're like, oh, you're one of those crazy people. And I think the best way to think of a conspiracy is the way George Carlin put it. George Carlin said that it's not necessary to have a cabal of people, you know, that are all evil, that get together in a room to have a conspiracy. All that's necessary is to have a convergence of interest. The convergence of interest in Covid was, holy crap, we funded this. And so if you are Anthony Fauci and you know that you've made a deal to do very dangerous research in China, one, because there's less oversight in China and there's complaints beginning to circulate in America, let's outsource this to China. What's your first thought? We've got to cover this up. And that's exactly what he was doing.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  The phone calls went on in our, in my book, my wife helped me write it. We go on in vivid detail of the minute by minute of him going till 3:00 in the morning that first night, emails going back and forth and back and forth. Jeremy Farrar is his counterpart at Welcome Trust in England.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  “He is saying, “I didn’t know what a burner phone was. I had to buy a burner phone. My wife said I should talk to my brother, bring him in, in case something happens to me.” And then he goes on to say, “It was no big deal. It turns out it just came from animals.” It’s like, “Well, you think the animals are gonna kill you? Why are you getting a burner phone? Why are you giving your last rights to your brother?” These people were very concerned, maybe not that they were gonna be killed by foreign agents, but that the public was gonna find out that they had been funding this very dangerous research, and that millions of people die because of lack of oversight. But I go through the emails, there’s never been a more extraordinary cover-up in the sense that these people were saying in public the opposite of what they were saying in private. So freedom of

• 50:16Speaker 00

  information became the tool that uncovered a lot of this, and thousands of people, you know, helped to get this done. But in private, Anthony Fauci is saying, “I’m 50/50, whether this came from the lab or animals,” and publicly saying, “You’re a conspiracy theorist, and you should be treated as crazy,” and that “we should expunge you, or we should expose you, we should bring you down.” Him and Francis Collins are talking back and forth about bringing down Jay Bhattacharya, and all of the others that were exposing this stuff. This is extraordinary. We have the proof.

• 50:52David Friedberg?

  You’re saying they knew that their funded research, which was done in China because there was less oversight, is what ultimately led to the development of SARS-CoV-2, and it escaped from the lab?

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Right. They knew there was a high—everything’s a proportion, everything is a percentage. They knew there was a high chance it was, and they chose to cover it up because, in the book I say, it’s about the business of science. This isn’t about science, it’s about the business of science. And people have to realize, there are some good people in this world, there are good scientists who wanna cure cancer, but there are many people getting millions of dollars. And there’s nothing against money, I’m all for money, and good people should be paid for important discoveries. But they shouldn’t be paid not to tell us the truth, and it should be exposed. I think all the scientists should have to reveal their royalties. Not one scientist in government reveals their royalties. Some of them are now getting millions of dollars in this stuff. Pfizer paid 800 million and Moderna paid 400 million. And they've taken that money.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  And now they put it in a foundation that I have no oversight in government over. Government has no oversight of. There's an NIH foundation that has 1.2 trillion dollars in it. Given from Big Pharma for their share of the COVID vaccine. So, no, it's an extraordinary thing where in private, they were very open to the fact, leaning towards and in favor of the fact that the virus came from a lab. In public, they were disdainful. They got Facebook to take all our crap down. They got Facebook to take down the discussion of it as a conspiracy. That's an evil thing to do. And it's dishonest. It's not just you're a bad person. If you were in the government and you were leading people astray as to the cause of something because you find it, you deserve to be punished, really in a criminal way.

• 52:30David Friedberg?

  I saw your heated exchange with Fauci. There was a video, it's about nine minutes long, went viral, you and questioning Fauci about gain-of-function research. And I just want to talk about the origin of gain-of-function research because it's a term of art that's got different definitions.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:47David Friedberg?

  Depending on who you ask, Fauci obviously disagreed with the definition. What's your view as a doctor, as someone who's worked in science and as a political leader about the role that government should play in researching ahead of the curve? So that understanding what may come next, which I think is part of the argument for some of this research, that we need to understand how viruses can evolve so that we can prepare for the next pandemic. Because if we don't, there will be a congressional hearing saying, why didn't you prepare enough?

• 53:19Speaker 00

  So there's different aspects to this. Should we know how viruses evolve? Absolutely. Should we test viruses and infections from different natural sources? Yes. Gain-of-function is different than that. Gain-of-function is forcing evolution in a direction. So gain-of-function is I take a rat and I put human lungs in it. Not literally human lungs, but I have a, they will express receptors that make cells think that they're invading a human. So I give it a virus and I run it through and nine rats. Survive and one's sick as shit. What I do is I take the really sick one. I culture the virus out and I do it again. And every time I just keep culturing it till I get a virus that really attaches to human cells. We believe COVID is that because most animal viruses, the avian flu right now.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  If the avian flu is not manipulated in a lab, it can infect a human but doesn't go human to human. It has trouble. That's the way animal viruses are. When COVID started, it hit humans and went everywhere. It just, there was nothing stopping it, which made us think it was pre-adapted. There are many other reasons why we think this happens. But as far as gain of function, what should be regulated, what shouldn't? One, it's very dangerous. Viruses are more dangerous than bacteria if they're aerosolized. Something can spread through the air can be incredibly dangerous. Lethality. Should you increase the lethality of it? Some of these viruses start with 50% lethality. And if you want to know what that's like, read Barbara Tuchman's about the 14th century calamity and the black plague. When a third of Europe died, I mean, we're talking about setting back civilization hundreds of years. We're talking about entering the Stone Age.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  We, we, some people think we could lose 10% of our population and we wouldn't get chlorine in the water. We'd no longer have potable water and we would have riots like you've never seen and just a disaster. So aerosolization, increasing the lethality, increasing the transmissibility are all dangerous things. They did all of that and yet he argued, oh, well, you can't have gain of function unless it was intentional. And it's like, well, if you're running it through human, humanized mice or rats, you're pushing it. You're pushing its evolution to be infectious in humans. And, uh, you know, he, he basically lied. One day he came and they'd actually changed the, the definition on his website the day before.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  So they knew I'd been arguing that it was gain of function. They actually literally changed the definition on the website to say, oh, it doesn't match the definition.

• 55:35David Friedberg?

  You would still support research into where viruses are headed and protecting the population and doing this, this research, but not in this directed engineered way?

• 55:44Speaker 00

  So there's a, there's a big difference and even many, some of the people who support Fauci actually support me on this. Identifying viruses.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Mostly a good idea, but still you have to think about it. A lot of these viruses are 300 feet underground in these enormous bat caves in South China. So should you go down 300 feet underground and just randomly get as many as you can and take them back to a lab in Wuhan? Well, there's the danger that one you got is the one that's going to kill all of mankind, but maybe it was never getting up and other viruses would dominate it and never was getting up to service. You should check the humans who live around the cave. You should check viruses that get up into our world. I'm not sure you should bring viruses from very remote areas to big cities. But then it's worse than that. The big virus identification, which sounds benign, they were taking the coronaviruses, they were taking a backbone of it, and they have a new one they found in a cave.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  They were taking the S protein off a new one and sticking it on a backbone. The backbone is infectious, and they're wanting to know, does it make it more or less infectious? Well, that's really a recipe for discovering something that maybe is a disaster. It isn't helping. And most of the people who follow this that oppose gain-of-function say no gain-of-function research has developed any vaccines. But here's further, I think, a compromise in a moderation of this. I don't want to ban it. I want to set up a presidential commission of scientists who are not currently employed by NIH, don't have grants that I can give them bigger grants if they agree with me, and I want them to evaluate this. But not only do they need to evaluate the civilian side of this, they need to evaluate the classified side.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Because here's what happens in our government, and I only know this much because they won't tell me either. They say, well, the Chinese are doing this. Well, then we need to do it. You have to, oh, the Chinese are doing this. They're working with Norberg virus. I'm just making this part up of which virus. They're dealing with this very dangerous virus. Well, we should too. That is the, basically, the logic and what it takes to get a research grant in the classified area, that the Chinese are doing it. Well, you know, we might have an accident doing something the Chinese are doing that the Chinese shouldn't be doing, and we should be trying to stop them from doing. But we could kill the world also through an accident.

• 57:48David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Even the safest labs in our country have dozens of accidents every year.

• 57:53David Friedberg?

  Fair enough. Do you feel like there's been an erosion of public trust in science and scientific institutions in this country? And importantly, when people lose faith in science, which is meant to be the source for objective truth, a process by which we discover the truth through testing and experimentation, hypothesizing, testing and experimentation, and looking at the results objectively, does it not create space for people to come in with untruths and convince the public of untruths being truth?

• 58:23Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And so the biggest one they're talking about now is vaccine hesitancy. So, and people say, oh, it's all the right wing. It's people crazy on the right wing that are creating this vaccine hesitancy. And I say, well, if you tell people things that aren't true, they become distrustful of all science. So I'll, I'll tell you one right now. I've had this back and forth with Bill Cassidy, the senator from Louisiana, and with other members of the establishment medical community. Does your two-day-old need a hepatitis B vaccine?

• 58:52David Friedberg?

  I just went through this personally. And we, we opted not to, and we have to deal with it in the schools. And we've been having this debate about how.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  We did the same thing. We did it later on in school.

• 59:01David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  But here's the thing. Does your two-day-old need it? There's one indication for your two-day-old get it. Mom has hepatitis B, and you have to, within 12 hours, give them the vaccine, and you have to give them immunoglobulin, which is like a monoclonal antibody against hepatitis. But they tested already. So if the mom does not have hepatitis B, is there any indication of hepatitis B? No. In fact, you know what the honest people will tell you? They'll say, oh, no, but we have you there, and we can get much better compliance by forcing it and pushing it in the hospital. The other problem is this. There's so many problems on so many levels. The hepatitis B vaccine wears off. When does it wear off? About 10 to 12 years. When might you want to inoculate your kid for hepatitis B? If you are worried about your teenager getting involved in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and IV drugs?

• 59:45Speaker 00

  That's when it's going to happen, and you might consider the hepatitis B vaccine. Plus, he's 12 years old at that point, and much bigger, stronger, and able to take whatever you give him. But they are creating vaccine hesitancy on this because they're lying to us. They're absolutely lying to us. COVID vaccine, the same. People think I'm anti-vaccine. My age, I'm 62. I probably would have taken it. I'm still a little iffy on some of the details, but I, the reason I didn't take it is I got infected. In March of 2020, I had it, and I didn't take the vaccine. But would I give it to my five-year-old right now? Hell, no, I wouldn't have. Would I have given it to him in March of 2020? No, because all of the initial evidence out of China was children, they weren't even sure if they were getting sick. When they started doing the testing, they found out they were all getting it and they weren't getting sick.

• 1:00:27David Friedberg?

  It's like a lot of social discourse and politics. It's become so binary. There's no nuance and there's no gray area for a conversation about some of these make sense, some of them do not. Why can't we agree that we can each have a different point of view on that?

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Most of Europe doesn't do the COVID vaccine or push it on kids. So I think I blame them and actually do want people to believe in science. I come from a scientific background. I've had papers published in scientific journals, you know, I come from that background. But you have to be honest with people and I also believe people are smarter. You don't have to have a PhD to know people are lying to you about the B vaccine.

• 1:01:00David Friedberg?

  Just today, Putin, Xi and Kim Jong-un stood together in Beijing. Very dramatic show of strength and unity as a group. What does it mean for America to be in competition with China? Is this going to evolve into a conflict from your point of view? Or is there a way to carry the world forward where we all have prosperity, where we all progress, where all societies succeed, where they cooperate and we have a multipolar world that doesn't dictate a winner and a loser? Do we really need American primacy?

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  The shorter answer is yes. The longer answer is more complicated. Graham Allison wrote a book, The Thucydides Trap.

• 1:01:36David Friedberg?

  We interviewed him at our show last week.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  He's an amazing guy, really, really bright guy and a guy I'm fond of. He, you know, talks about up and coming powers and is war inevitable? And interesting, and I don't know if this commander, but I met with one of the Pacific Fleet commanders, I don't want to name him because I don't want to, this conversation, but he said, when you go back to Washington, make sure they know that wars with China is not inevitable. And I thought it's a profound statement from a guy who's going to be in charge of the war and out there fighting on the front lines. And I think it is very possible and I think, but it gets back to fallacies. Can you trade with China where you both get rich and it's not they're ripping us off? I think yes, and I think that is the truth of the matter since 1975 on. We've had a trade deficit every year and we got richer and so did they. Are there problems and dislocations in industry? Yeah, but I would actually argue what

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Killed the steel industry or hurt the steel industry the most in this in this country was actually protectionism. They've been protected for a long, well, one, antitrust killed them first when they broke up US Steel and that became them less competitive with foreigners because they were smaller. But then the second thing that went after them is we did try to protect them. This isn't the first time we tried to protect steel. We've been trying to protect steel. As we protected steel, what did it do? Did it preed better and more profound market decisions or worse decisions? So if you're selling me chairs and I tell you, you sell them for $50, I say, well, we'll put a tariff on you. You can sell them for $100. Are you going to be more efficient or less? You know, you won't make as wise a decision because you're being protective of the competition. And so all of that happened with with steel industry. But I think we can, we have to get through

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  the fallacy part, but we also have to understand that I think we're pushing in the wrong direction. There's a possibility, people think we're going to defeat them and we're going to come out on top because we're so, you know, great and protectionism is going to show how great we are. But them all meeting together, to me, shows one other possibility. And I don't know what will happen. Nobody does. But there's one possibility that it finally unites them enough that they do everything in their power not to use the dollar and maybe they can displace the dollar. They already try in their transactions. And so I think we, we use the stick in foreign policy and you have to have it, but we should have a carrot offered as well. I just met with some Syrian Americans today, physicians mostly and intellectuals

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  and engineers and things, and they want to get rid of the sanctions on Syria. And I say, finally. Now, they did like that. I think this group liked the sanctions before, but they want to get rid of them. Finally, somebody wants to get rid of sanctions because there has to be a reward. And so even with countries we find distasteful and often are distasteful, Iran, there has to be an offer somehow to get rid of the sanctions. I would send my diplomats to China. I'll give you a great example. Blinken and Yellen went to China and they were screaming, pitching a fit and telling the Chinese how bad they were. One, that's not very good diplomacy, but they wanted them to stop selling dual-use parts to Ukraine, I mean, to Russia in the Ukraine war. And so I said, well, it's a

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  reasonable goal, but had I been in charge, I would send my diplomats to China and I would say, look, the Chinese don't like to lose face. They don't like you insulting them in their own country. Quietly say, you know, this sanction, I think, is costing you about $50 billion worth of wealth. We'll remove it, but you got to quit selling them the dual use. They would never admit that we pushed them into doing it. It's a trade. And it's transactional, and diplomacy sometimes needs to be that. We have a lot of people, both in Congress and involved administrations, who are much more black and white, that there are good and bad people in the world, and the bad people need to die, and we need to defeat them utterly. And I wish they would die and go away, but you know, I can't. That kind of attitude, we're gonna be waiting a long time if we think sanctions is gonna

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  get rid of the Communist Party in China. Capitalism might someday, and everybody complain, well, Deng Xiaoping opened it up, and they still have repression and capitalism. It's true, but I think you might argue, and this isn't a great argument for current China, but that China may be a better place than it was under Mao. I mean, people who've been there tell me that it definitely is.

• 1:05:33David Friedberg?

  10x improvement in GDP per capita. You visit a modern Chinese city, it's like living in the future.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:05:38David Friedberg?

  People are very happy, it seems, despite the...

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  But not an argument for socialism, but an argument that most of that's actually due to the amount of capitalism they've allowed to come in.

• 1:05:46David Friedberg?

  There's a interview with the guys from the, I think it was the Hoover Institution, that it was actually the entrepreneurism in the country. Political future for you, Senator? Are you thinking maybe you could run for president again in the future?

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  You know, I think it depends on what happens in the next year or two. I think there needs to be a voice within our party that is more libertarian, free market. I think we have populism and protectionism covered, and I think there will be many heirs and many people competing to be heirs of Donald Trump in the protectionist front. I don't think it's good for our country, and I think it will make us less wealthy, and ultimately could really lead to a calamity. If things are rosy in three or four years, and the economy's percolating along, and it is a possibility, there's a possibility that the tariffs, as bad as I think they are, are not a big enough percentage of the overall GDP to slow things down, and that capitalism is still vibrant enough to overcome the tariffs. There's a distinct possibility.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  If that's true, we'll get more tariffs, and we'll get another protectionist populist president. I wanna be that voice, whether it's in the Senate or running for the presidency, I don't know. I think right now, all things given...

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Free markets and free trade isn't very popular right now. People are all making excuses for why we should own Intel. Howard Lutnick thinks that's capitalism and that tariffs are lowering taxes and all the gobbledygook. It makes no sense. If the economy is still percolating on, people may still accept that nonsense as truth.

• 1:07:12David Friedberg?

  I've been to DC a number of times in the last year or two. I always tell people I'm disappointed when I meet with members of Congress when I come back from DC because I hear the same thing over and over. I don't see a progressive voice that actually speaks to where this nation needs to go. I often consider myself a libertarian, so I want to thank you for your service, for your leadership, for your voice. Thank you for being here today.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  Thank you.