498: Bill Whittle—Communism for Dummies

What exactly is communism—and why has it failed so spectacularly everywhere it's been tried? Bill Whittle https://billwhittle.com/ has spent years answering those questions, and in this episode, he makes the case in a way that's hard to misunderstand. Bill is a writer, filmmaker, and political commentator whose work includes Empire of Terror https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM4FoHmSArs, a detailed examination of the history and ideology of communism. Here, he breaks down the fundamental differences between individualism and collectivism, explains how free markets actually work, and makes the case for capitalism and the constitutional republic that makes it possible. Using simple analogies, memorable examples, and plenty of common sense, Bill tackles some very complicated ideas without burying them in complicated language. Why does individual freedom matter? Why do markets work without a central planner telling everyone what to do? And what happens when a government decides that the collective is more important than the individual? If you've ever wondered why capitalism works, why communism doesn't, or how the two systems actually differ in practice, Bill Whittle has a few answers—and he makes them surprisingly easy to understand. Big thanks to our terrific sponsors PureTalk.com/ROWE https://bit.ly/PureTalkRowe—Switch your phone service today and enjoy your first three months of talk, text, and data for just $15 a month regardless of which plan you choose. NetSuite. AI/MIKE https://netsuite.ai/mike—The #1 Cloud ER. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, try NetSuite Nextfor FREE. AuraFrames.com https://bit.ly/TWIHIAuraFrames—Named the #1 digital picture frame by Wirecutter. Use code MIKE to get $35 off select frames plus FREE shipping. Digs.com/MIKE https://bit.ly/DigsMikeRowe—Less rework. Less confusion. And a much smoother build experience for homeowners. Get 40% offyour first 3 months

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

• 0:03Mike Rowe?

  Hey guys, it's The Way I Heard It. My guest today is Bill Whittle. If you're a longtime listener, you've heard Bill on here before. He's a historian. I don't know exactly what his qualifications are in the traditional sense of being an historian. I just don't know anybody, Chuck, who's better read and more well-versed and more committed to understanding our history and in particular Russian history, sidebar communism, comma socialism. And since these things are in the headlines today like never before, and since I just kind of blew up last week on the social media is writing about it, I thought we might introduce a little segment called Communism for Dummies.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 0:47Mike Rowe?

  That has turned into a whole episode.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, it has.

• 0:50Mike Rowe?

  And boy, oh, boy, Bill feels deeply.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  He does. He really does. And he's got a lot to say. This is a guy who produced and starred in a series called...

• 1:03Mike Rowe?

  Empire of Terror.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:06Mike Rowe?

  You're welcome.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Empire of Terror. I saw it. It's crazy. You just won't believe all of this. I highly recommend it because you won't believe how cruel and inhuman people can be to one another.

• 1:18Mike Rowe?

  Well, I currently am having a hard time believing how the word communist can exist in 2026 as anything other than a profound pejorative and insult.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it should be right up there with Nazi.

• 1:34Mike Rowe?

  Absolutely.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35Mike Rowe?

  But it's not.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:36Mike Rowe?

  It's not. The DSA right now, just by way of backstory, and maybe it's too much information, but I shared a clip that Bill Maher put up a week or so ago where he shared lots and lots of quotes from members of the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, who were self-proclaimed communists, who were talking about the need to elect more communists. And it just seems like socialism and communism are both on the march. This is an uncharacteristically political episode, but it's not really coming from a political place, for me, anyway. It's

• 2:16Mike Rowe?

  just coming from a sudden realization that I think K-12 has failed in so many ways, but I think we have a lot of people, decent people, our fellow citizens and our neighbors, who just truly don't have any historical reference.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and communism sounds real good on paper. Socialism sounds really good on paper. It's just never works. And socialism always leads to communism.

• 2:44Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know, reasonable people spend a lot of time arguing about that very thing. I don't know the truth of it. I just know that in general communism has never ever worked anywhere.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 3:00Mike Rowe?

  It's never been realized anywhere. And its defenders often say that, well, then how can you condemn it if it's never been fully realized in its utopian form, the way it's supposed to be? It's this thing that just keeps calling people back to give it another shot.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Because we're not robots, is the answer to that question. Because we're humans who have free will and who are petty and are greedy.

• 3:27Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Well, we have ourselves a pretty interesting national moment, I think. And it's an opportunity, I believe, for enlightenment, or at least a conversation. I get it. Nobody wants a lecture. Nobody wants a sermon. But we need to start talking about the reality of what these ideologies have meant historically and what they could mean again. And look, as I said in my post, which by the way, not that anybody cares, but this thing's been shared hundreds of thousands of times. It's a topic. It's in the headlines.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:02Mike Rowe?

  People are truly talking about it. And people are getting elected. And people in positions of power are literally tweeting things like, "Elect more communists."

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:14Mike Rowe?

  So I thought we ought to have a conversation. And Bill Whittle starts, as he always does, but things get heated. And he cares deeply. And I do, too. And I hope you will as well. We're calling it Communism for Dummies, with great respect to everyone, really. But you know the title of that series. And if there was ever time for a compendium, a helpful guide, perhaps it's now. And perhaps Bill Whittle can help us in our journey toward enlightenment, right after this.

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• 6:26Mike Rowe?

  So for those of you watching on YouTube who missed the preamble properly introducing Bill Whittle and the reason for his presence here on this episode of The Way I Heard It, let me just say, first of all, thanks for doing this.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 6:39Mike Rowe?

  I think it's only a matter of national security, freedom, justice for all, and our collective future.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And happiness.

• 6:47Mike Rowe?

  And happiness. Yeah.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Let's put that at the top of the list.

• 6:51Mike Rowe?

  The episode is called Communism for Dummies. And I mean no disrespect, but everybody knows what that title means. And as I said in the preamble, I just feel, Bill, like, do you remember in Saving Private Ryan, the scene where it's hand to hand, it's toward the end, and the American Jewish soldier, right? It's a knife fight.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:18Mike Rowe?

  It's one of those moments. To me, it's the most chilling moment in the whole film. But beyond just the intensity of it, it's where things get hyper-real, right? And there's something where it's like, okay, okay, okay.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Stop, stop, stop.

• 7:34Mike Rowe?

  Let's just stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Like, we...

• 7:36Speaker 01

  It's what I'd be saying, too, if somebody was about to drive a dagger into my heart.

• 7:39Mike Rowe?

  Right. So I'm looking at the elections. I'm looking at the conversations that are swirling around, not just my social media, but every major headline in every major newspaper is trying to understand what is happening with the... Is it the DSA or the DSM? Democratic Socialist?

• 7:58Speaker 01

  I think it's the DSA.

• 7:58Mike Rowe?

  DSA. DSA, okay. Movement of Amer... Whatever it is, it seems like this lurch toward socialism and communism is being supported by two groups of people. One group are the people who completely understand what it is, what's at stake, and have a vision for transforming the country. The other group, which I suspect is probably a larger cohort, at least I hope they are, are just people who... We failed them in K-12. We didn't educate them. We're not teaching history. And I think maybe they just don't know. So without being lecher-y, nobody wants a lecture. Nobody wants a sermon.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 8:40Mike Rowe?

  You and I have known each other a long time. I know where you're coming from personally, but I also know, just from and as a source of accurate information, can you give us some kind of compendium as to what's going on in our country, beginning with, why is free stuff bad?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Well, let's start off with what you said about having failed them in education.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  From the people who are in charge of education, they haven't failed them at all. They've succeeded perfectly. They've succeeded in exactly what it is they set out to do in the beginning. And that is make sure people know as little about the two systems as possible. So it's not a failure in terms of like, gee, Cosmic Ray came in and they missed a socialism day that day at school. They were sick with the flu. The entire purpose of it is to make sure that you know as little about both of these systems as possible, but especially about the history of socialism.

• 9:31Mike Rowe?

  Sounds a little conspiratorial.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  No, it's not.

• 9:33Mike Rowe?

  Like, okay, who? Who sat down and said, "I know what we're gonna do. We're just gonna pretend the 30s and the 40s didn't happen."

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Or the 50s, or the 60s, or the 70s?

• 9:44Mike Rowe?

  No, we'll take part of the 50s and then we'll focus on the McCarthyism. And we'll make sure people know there was a terrible prosecution in the country, but we won't quite connect the dots.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 9:56Mike Rowe?

  In other words, from a marketing standpoint, it's awfully bad these days to be called a Nazi or a fascist.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 10:03Mike Rowe?

  Communist?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 10:05Mike Rowe?

  Maybe, what's that all about?

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Well, we want to be fair. And if we want to convince people, we want to be fair, which means being intellectually honest, which means presenting both sides of the, of the argument the way that somebody who, who would believe that would say, yes, that's a fair way of looking at it. So let's put the communists aside for the time being, and we'll just start with, with socialism and, and the whole idea of socialism. So, you asked me, you know, what's the matter with free stuff? I'm a, I've become over my life a rock rib conservative, but my first vote was for Walter Mondale. I voted for him because he said he was gonna raise taxes. And the reason I voted for him because he said he was gonna raise taxes is because I wasn't paying any taxes at the time. Now, I'm not trying to be flip here, but that has a, a big, pretty big significant aspect to this. So when I go to colleges and I debate people on this subject, somebody will often say

• 10:52Speaker 02

  to me, "Why are you against free healthcare?" And my response is, "I'm not against free healthcare. I'm 100% in favor of free healthcare. I think everybody should have free healthcare. What kind of a dick would I be if I was to sit there and say, 'No, no free healthcare for you. I don't like the way you look. No free healthcare.'"

• 11:09Mike Rowe?

  I believe you'd be the rapacious capitalist dick.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. So I'm 100% in favor of free healthcare. The problem is, healthcare isn't free. If you have an operating room where they're doing open-heart surgery on somebody, it's hard to imagine a more expensive little square patch of earth than having the best cardiologists in the world, anesthesiologists, you've got the nurses, you've got all of the equipment, you've got all the gear. It is a fabulously incredibly expensive operation to perform. It's not free. If it were free, I'd be in favor of it. What kind of a jerk would I be to say, "No free stuff for you"?

• 11:44Mike Rowe?

  Okay, but why do I have to pay for it? Why, it's not my fault that I'm sick.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  So, now we're down to an entirely different argument. We're no longer talking about, "Why can't I have free stuff?" Because if it was free, I'd say, "Take all the free stuff you want." It's not free. It's expensive. So now we have to start talking about how we're gonna pay for it. So in a socialist system, the healthcare is administered by the government. They take a lot more of your taxes. They take a lot of ours as well here, but they take more of your taxes. You are prepaying for your healthcare. You're paying for your healthcare whether you need it or not. It's coming out of your paycheck, it's coming out of your taxes, it's coming out of whatever the case may be, okay? But in a socialized system, where there's one source of failure, this is one thing we're gonna come back to a lot during this hour, and that's single point of failure.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  In a socialized system, a socialized healthcare system, if the system decides that you're either not worth the money, or you're too old, or you're too whatever, you're done. You don't get to go to, to another national health service. I had a chance to speak in Ottawa, Canada, and a guy who brought me up there was a Canadian doctor, Canadian oncologist. And he said, "Look, I get calls every day from friends who know me, and they say, 'My wife has been diagnosed with stage four cancer. They call it terminal. She went to the healthcare system, national healthcare system in Canada. They said, 'We're gonna give you some pain medication so you can go home and die peacefully.'" And he said, "I'm calling you to see, is there anything that we can do to keep her alive?"

• 13:11Speaker 02

  And this guy told me, he said, "Well, the University of Alabama's running a test that's showing 63% reduction in, in tumor size over the course of two years, and there's this program." He said, he said to me specifically, he said, "In Canada, when the government decides you're dead, you're dead. In America, you're not dead until you're in the ground." And that's because there are many different areas that you can go to that are in competition with each other often, so that if you get a point of failure in one area, you've got options for other ones. This is the fundamental problem with having one person decide your future. I'm pro-immigration, pro-legal immigration. I married an immigrant. And I was in the office of Immigration and Naturalization Services. And I was sitting there with my wife, and it was our first interview since she'd arrived.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  We'd applied for the green card, and we walked into this man's office, and the first things out of his mouth, I'm sorry, the last things out of his mouth after the interview, was he said, "I've decided to approve your application." He didn't say, "You have met the requirements for the application." He said, "I've decided to say that you can stay with this woman that you're married to. I've decided, because I have the power of the state behind me, I've decided that, yes, we're gonna approve her, her application for a green card." And I remember coming out of there thinking, "What if this guy had had a really crummy day? What if this guy had had some sort of horrible, what if this guy didn't like blondes, or Russians, or, or, or guys with great hair, let's say? Well, what happened in a case like that, right?

• 14:40Speaker 02

  You're, no." So, so the problem with socialism is, is actually pretty simple. By the way, let's start by defining some terms, okay? Because there's been left-wing, right-wing, conservative liberals. I'm a conservative because I'm fighting for traditional liberal values. It's all a mess and it changes all the time. There's only two terms I've found that are consistent throughout the entire argument and throughout history, and that is the individualists and the collectivists. The individualists believe that the individual takes precedent over the state. The collectivist believes that the state takes precedence over the individual. I think that's a fair definition that people who are collectivists would agree with. They would say that the common welfare is more important than your individual welfare. That's a collectivist argument.

• 15:21Mike Rowe?

  But the obvious contradiction is, we're an elective representative republic, constitutional republic, so we're electing a government to make sure we can be individuals.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  To be honest with you, we have established a republic that, in principle, if we followed the letter of the law of the Constitution, we have created a government that has built an impenetrable wall of security around every individual that the government cannot penetrate. Now, a collectivist government will say, "Here is a protected group. You can fill in the blank on whatever that protected group will be, but we all know, this is a preferred group, this is a preferred group, this is not a preferred group, and so on." But if they decide to change that, then, too bad for you. The idea of a republic is, is that there are inviolable laws that protect you as an individual. Your right to free speech is not given to you by the government. The First Amendment doesn't say you have the right to free speech.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  The First Amendment says, "The government can't take away your God-given, natural, born right to free speech that comes with you into the planet when you're born."

• 16:25Mike Rowe?

  Inalienable.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. It is an inalienable right. So, all a democracy can really do is vote away your freedoms, really, when you get right down to the bottom line of that. But what I want to do is go back to the collectivist argument about how whatever is better for the group is better, it's a better way to live. That's fine unless you are a person who has been decided that, for example, "No, we're not gonna treat your cancer. It's too expensive, Mike. You're too old. You're 78 years old, not you, whoever the person is in question. You're 78, those resources could be better spent on young women's, you know, prenatal care, or whatever this case may be. So go off and die." The fundamental aspect about collectivist societies and collectivist thinking is that

• 17:08Speaker 02

  individual human rights are not even really the point. It's individual human life is at the whim of the state. And I don't like having my life, or my wife's lives, or our lives, or anybody else's lives in the hands of anybody other than myself.

• 17:25Mike Rowe?

  I don't either, but isn't part of the argument from the other side to say, "Okay, but what's the difference between a person who the state determines can't have access to life-saving care, and an individual who has access but no funds to pay for it and is therefore similarly denied?"

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Well, it is a common belief throughout Europe and throughout many countries in the world that if you get hit by a bus in America and you don't have insurance, you're just left on the street to die. And that doesn't happen. If you don't have money to pay for your treatment, then you get the treatment for free. Now, they can put a lien against your holdings, put a lien against your salary, they can ask for their money back, they'll never get it. If it's a $100,000 operation from somebody, they'll never see it. It's not like you don't get treated. Okay? So this idea that in the capitalist system, even the lowest people are just left out on the street to die, it's just, it's just not true. No one has ever driven past a hospital, ever, in this country and seen 15 or 20 people lined up on cots outside the building waiting to die.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  No one has ever seen that, because whether people have insurance or not, they get treated. And the cost of treating them is passed on to the people who do have insurance, which raises everybody's insurance rates and so on, you have all of that. Look, the American healthcare system's kind of a mess, and I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, but what I am saying is, if you're paying for your own healthcare, you get to do what you want to. Here's where we get to where socialism gets to be very, very subtly pernicious.

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• 20:24Speaker 02

  Let's take an example. Let's say I like to ride a motorcycle, okay? And let's say you like to ride a motorcycle. Riding a motorcycle is dangerous. It's not 100 times more dangerous. I think it's something like 600 times more dangerous than driving in a car. Okay, so if everybody is paying for everybody else's healthcare, if I'm paying for your healthcare and you're a motorcycle rider, I have the right to say, "I don't think you should be riding a motorcycle, Mike, because it's dangerous. And if you get hurt, I have to pay for your healthcare. You're making all of the healthcare more expensive with you and your damn motorcycle."

• 20:57Mike Rowe?

  I'm paying for the risk you're assuming for yourself.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Precisely correct. And so therefore, Mike, we've decided as a society, it's best if we just simply ban motorcycles. And you can go without a motorcycle. It's not gonna kill you. It's not gonna be the end of the world, okay? That's how the system works when there is a government's central control over the pot of money. Now, if you have your own healthcare and you pay for your own healthcare, you can go off and do whatever the hell you want to. It doesn't matter to me. I don't care. The risk you take is gonna be paid for by you. It's not gonna be paid for by me. So I'm not in a position of envy or control. I have no moral stake in telling you how to behave. And once you realize that that one example applies to everything in life under a socialist government, you begin to realize

• 21:42Speaker 02

  that everybody's life eventually boils down to, whatever is not forbidden is mandatory.

• 21:48Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  That's the rule, right? Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory.

• 21:54Mike Rowe?

  By default.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  By default.

• 21:56Mike Rowe?

  Okay, so just to say the same thing in a slightly broader way, the motorcycle thing is a great analogy, but most people don't ride motorcycles.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:05Mike Rowe?

  How about sugar?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:08Mike Rowe?

  How about cigarettes not so long ago, right? If the argument, and there seems to be a growing awareness, that sugar might be responsible for more overall healthcare problems than...

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Nicotine, almost, yeah.

• 22:24Mike Rowe?

  And fentanyl.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:25Mike Rowe?

  And all the drugs, all the drugs. So would you rather be in a world where you have to pay for the sugar junkie? And I say this, I think just watched a guy put three Splendids in his coffee.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Only three.

• 22:39Mike Rowe?

  But, I mean, suddenly, every single thing becomes, well, how much risk? Why am I paying for his lifestyle choices?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  So let's take an example that young people talk about a lot today, the body positivity movement, right? There are a lot of people out there that say that being heavy, being overweight is not a health problem, or whatever the case may be. If you're one of those people out there who believe in socialism and believe socialism is a good thing, and you also believe the body positivity movement, you believe if you want to weigh 300 pounds, it's your business. Well, in a socialist government, I get to say, "Look, I'm physically fit. I'm not costing us any extra. You're the one that's gonna have to lose the damn weight, not me. You're gonna have to lose the weight. You're the one that's at risk for diabetes. You're the one that's at risk for health disease. You're the one that's at risk for all these other things that I have to pay for." So you can't be in favor of both of these things at the same time. It just doesn't work that way.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  If we are collectively responsible for each other, then everybody has a say over everybody else's behavior. And I don't want to live that way. And the people that believe in socialism don't want to live that way either. They don't want people telling them that they can or cannot ride a motorcycle or a jet ski. They can't or cannot eat an extra doughnut or an extra case of doughnuts, or whatever the case may be. So many young people have been told that socialism just means free things, but they don't realize the strings that come attached with these free things means control over those things. And you won't like what the logical outcome of this is.

• 24:08Mike Rowe?

  Because if the thing isn't free, then it doesn't exist.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Well, nothing...

• 24:12Mike Rowe?

  Because all that's forbidden is mandatory.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Right, and nothing is free. Actually, I take that back. Your right to free speech is free. My right to free speech imposes no cost on anybody else. Nobody else has to work harder or do anything or pay any money because I get to say what I want to say. But if you say that healthcare is a guaranteed right for everybody, that everybody has a right to free healthcare, state-run healthcare, that means that I have to work harder, pay taxes. That means that doctors have to work at whatever rate the state sets for them, and so on, and so on, and so on. It imposes an obligation on people that they are required by law to meet. And now we come to the real problem with socialism, and that is that socialism, nowhere, in the best-case scenarios,

• 24:59Speaker 02

  we're starting off at the top. We're gonna work our way down. In the best-case scenarios, you cannot have socialism and volition at the same time. You cannot have socialism and choice because your choice has to be removed, your individual choice has to be removed for the greater good of the collective. And that's simply just a logical truth. There's no real discussion or debate about it. And when you start climbing down the ladder from ideal socialism that many young people think would be swell, you start walking your way all the way down to what happened with the communists, and we'll get to them in a minute, because it is not... You don't get to stop anywhere on this line. Sooner or later, you're gonna get all the way down to the bottom, but I'll get to that in a minute.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  You have a question of control over other people's lives that nobody really wants. And there's two main problems with socialism that are human nature problems. And the first one is, the idea is that everybody is going to be generous, and everybody's gonna be giving, and everybody's gonna work harder, and everybody's gonna do for the common good. Let me simplify this. Socialism is the belief that you will work as hard for somebody else as you will work for yourself, okay? You will get up in the morning and do the same amount of work that you would do for yourself to get extra overtime, to go on that vacation. No, you're gonna work that hard for somebody else as you would for yourself. I had a chance to go, and when I was first talking about this,

• 26:28Speaker 02

  had a chance to speak at Oberlin College. Oberlin is where reason and logic go to die.

• 26:32Mike Rowe?

  What are you doing in Oberlin?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  I was doing this. And we were talking about socialism. We were talking about capitalism. And I asked people in the room, "Do you consider yourself a socialist?" And this was 12 years ago. And four out of five people raised their hands. So here's what I said. I said, "Okay, socialist, just a socialist. What I'd like you to do is, what kind of phone do you have? Just hold up your phone. What have you got? You have iPhones?" They're basically saying, "Why do you want to know what kind of phones they have?" I said, "Look, I'm not a socialist. I'm not gonna take them from you. I'm just curious. What kind of phones do you have?" "I only got iPhones, all this other stuff." "Okay, socialist only. Come on down to the front of the room. Bring your iPhones with you. And what we'll do is, we'll put them in a basket. We'll put them in a big basket. And then all of us together, not me, I'm not gonna walk away with your phones.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  All of us together are gonna go downtown Cleveland, I guess would be the closest town, I think. We'll go to downtown Cleveland. We'll find a pawn shop. We've easily got $2,000 worth of electronics here. We've probably got $10,000 worth of electronics here. So what we'll do, if we got $2,000 worth of electronics, is we'll get $120 bills, and then we'll drive through the streets of Cleveland, and we'll start handing them out to people from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. So bring them down." And guess what? Nobody brings them down. Because people like the idea of having wealth redistributed to them, but when it comes time for them to redistribute their wealth to other people, all of a sudden, they're William F. Buckley. And that is human nature. I would say to them,

• 28:02Speaker 02

  "Why don't you bring your phones down so we can give these to people who are in greater need than you?" And they would say, but... They'd be like, brainlocked, be like, "But this is my phone." Well, technically, it's your dad's phone. But that's not split hairs, okay? Yes, yes, this is yours. When somebody said to me at the same event, they said, "Well, you can't possibly defend the idea that somebody could have two homes when there are so many homeless people. You can't possibly defend it." And I said to this person, "How many songs do you have on your iPhone right now? Just take a quick look." He said, "Oh, 300 or something." This is back before Apple Music, right? I said, "300 songs, so that's roughly a buck each. So you've spent $300 on music. How many songs do you listen to at any given time? Of the 300 songs that you own, couldn't you get by with 10?

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Could you get by with 10 songs, 20? Why did you have to have 300 songs? Why didn't you just have 50 songs and give $250 to poor people in need?" And they said, "Well, I like to listen to music." I said, "In other words, you like spending your own money on what you want to do with your own money. You and I are exactly the same. There's no philosophical difference between us whatsoever. Of course, it's your business if you want to spend $300 on 300 songs. Who am I to stand here and tell you you can't do that?"

• 29:15Mike Rowe?

  Is it possible, though, then, maybe you can find instances, lots of instances, where we are asked to behave as one? Like, we can all drive different makes of cars, right? And we can spend a little or a lot on transportation, but you can't legally go over 55 on the highway. And, you know, that's the rule. You just can't do it. We're all subject to the same rule. And I think we would agree... That that makes sense. You have to have rules. You have to have laws. Otherwise, there's chaos. And I wonder if the other side looks at that and goes, well,

• 29:59Mike Rowe?

  that's what we're saying here. We all have to drive the same speed. We all should have the same this. And so maybe nuance goes out the window?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Well, this brings us to the second inherent flaw in socialism. And that is socialism means that everybody has to run the race at the speed of the slowest runner. So let's assume we take 10 people off the street and let's assume that we're talking about a footrace. And by the footrace, we're using this as an analogy for how well you do in life financially, and so on and so forth. Okay, we take 10 people off the street and we line them up on the end zone on a football field. And we say, okay, ready, on your mark, get set, go. And it's a race to get to the other end zone. That's 100 yard dash, right? Two or three of these people are going to be more athletic than other people. So most people are going to fall in the middle. This is how bell curve works. Most people are going to just jog their way through. There's going to be one or two people who are going to have trouble walking and so on.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  And so somebody is going to get to that finish line first. And then there's somebody going to come in second. And then there are some people that are going to take better part of a half an hour to do this. Well, if we all have to be in the same place at the same time, that means we all have to run at the speed of the slowest runner, because the slowest runner can't run any faster than their fastest speed. And so you're telling me that this is fair. You're telling me that this is fair if we all cross the finish line equally with the same amount of money in the same exact house in the same car. But how is that fair for the guy who's a faster runner? How is that fair to him to be shackled to the slowest runner? Or the laziest person, or whatever the case may be?

• 31:31Mike Rowe?

  We're not going to shackle them. We're just going to make him start further back. How's that?

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Well, is that fair to him?

• 31:37Mike Rowe?

  Well, no, it's not fair. But it's no one's fault that they didn't get the genes that he got.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  So we end up with the fundamental question now. And the question is, which really drives the entire argument is, are we in favor of equality of opportunity? Or are we in favor of equality of result? Equality of opportunity means that we all start on the same line. Now, look, there's no question that there are people who have privileged starts in life. These people start on the 30 yard line or the 40 yard line. Now, I'm not talking about being in favor of that. I don't think anybody should have. I'm not saying you take away their money. I'm just saying, look, those are the way the cards are drawn. That's the person's birth. But the point is equality of opportunity means if everybody starts at the start line the same way, they're going to end up in different positions. First guy's going to come in first, last guy's going to come in last. That's equality of opportunity.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Equality of result means everybody has to cross the finish line at the same time, which means that you have to slow down nine out of those 10 runners. And how is that fair to them? How is it fair to a guy who gives up his youth, right? I went to the University of Florida, which was a professional party school. I was a theater major. Did I have to work hard? No, it was a piece of cake. It was nothing to it. But how is it fair for me to go out and have a beer with my friends and talk about theater and all life and all this other stuff? While there's a guy who's back in the dorm studying to be a brain surgeon, who's throwing away essentially all of the fun he's going to have in his 20s and is working on doing this extremely difficult thing. If you're talking about equality of output, how is it fair that a brain surgeon makes the same amount of money

• 33:07Speaker 02

  as a guy who sleeps till 3:00 in the afternoon, smokes doobies and plays video games, and has a night job at 7-Eleven? How is that fair to the brain surgeon?

• 33:20Mike Rowe?

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• 34:00Mike Rowe?

  You get free unlimited storage. There's no hidden fees, no monthly subscriptions, none of that stuff. You can text photos straight to the frame. You can use their app, which actually hit number one in the App Store on Christmas Day this year. And you can preload your favorite photos before it even ships, which makes it a tremendous, truly personalized gift, named number one by Wirecutter. You can save right now by visiting AuraFrames.com. For a limited time, listeners get $35 off select frames, including the Carver Mat, the Aspen, and the Walden, plus free shipping with code MIKE. That's A U R A Frames.com, promo code MIKE.

• 34:39Mike Rowe?

  A U R A Frames.com/Mike.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  If you can explain to me how that is a just cause, how it's a just outcome for that person who's worked so hard, then I'll buy your system. But if you tell me that you're going to enforce the system on top of people, what it means is you're not going to have the slack or going to be a brain surgeon. That's not going to happen. It's not capable of doing it. All that's going to happen is, is the brain surgeon is going to realize, look, I'm going to make the same amount of money whether I go out and party and get drunk every night or whether I stay home and study, which means you're going to have a lot fewer brain surgeons. You're going to have a lot more 7-Eleven clerks. And I have no disrespect for 7-Eleven clerks. Anybody with an honest job has my undying respect. But this is what I'm talking about. You can't raise the bottom. You can only bring the top down.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  And which brings us to the central, what I think is the central driving emotional motor of socialism. And people aren't going to like to hear this, but I'm going to paint this in a way that can make everybody connect to it. And that's envy. Okay, it's envy. They don't like the fact that some people have more than they do. Now, let's take a look at Elon Musk. He's a trillionaire, right? He just became a trillionaire. So you would say, well, that's not fair. He's got trillion dollars. And some people have some, let's just say you've got a regular standard income. Okay, let's just say you're making 50 grand a year. Does Elon Musk live a trillion times better than I do? Does he live, I'm not a wealthy person by any means. Does Elon Musk live a trillion times better than I do?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Does he have, is his car a trillion times better than my car? No, he has a nice car. I've got a decent car. He's got a bunch of cars. I've got one car, but a decent car. He's got air conditioning. I've got air conditioning. He's got a bigger house than I do, but I've got a big enough house for me that I rent, right? He's not a trillion times more comfortable than I am. It's nuts. It's nuts. But here's the envy argument, and I love this. So stay with me on this, folks. This is a capitalist argument, okay, about envy. Let's say that you work for an insurance company and you're on the top floor. And there's 200 people there and they're all in their cubicles. And it's a Friday afternoon. And just before you clock out for the weekend, Mike, a guy comes over and taps you on the shoulder and he says, Mike, hey, it's me. I'm Jim Johnson. I'm the president of the company that you work for. And I just want a few moments of your time.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Listen, Mike, we've been watching you. You've been here for 20 years. You've done extraordinary work. You've stayed late. You've done above and beyond the call of duty. And we wanted to let you know that we've been keeping our eye on you. And we want you to have this check for $100,000. Absolutely taken, we paid the taxes on it and everything. It's $100,000 for you, for your hard work. And we just want to let you know how much it means to you.

• 37:33Mike Rowe?

  Got it.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  And how do you feel now?

• 37:35Mike Rowe?

  Well, my heart, three sizes. I feel appreciated. I value the gratitude. I feel rewarded. I feel seen. I am literally bursting with affirmation.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  And you start thinking about what you're going to do with the $100,000 that just fell out of the sky. Maybe I can get my roof fixed. Maybe I can go on vacation. Maybe college kids, fun, all of this stuff. You're $100,000 better off than you were 30 seconds ago. So in your joy and your excitement, you grab your check and you walk into the middle of the room and you go, everybody, you won't believe this. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to rub this in or anything. But the president of the company just came by. And because of the hard work I've done here, he gave me this check for $100,000. And everybody else in the room looks at you and they said, he came to all of us and he gave us a check for $250,000.

• 38:26Mike Rowe?

  And all of my gratitude turns to ashes in my mouth.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  It turns to ashes in your mouth. You are $100,000 better off than you were 10 seconds ago. But now you are no longer thinking about what you could do with $100,000. You're thinking about what you could do with $250,000, which is what you should be getting, because Mary's an alcoholic and we know she does nothing to anything. She comes in at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and I cover for her. And then Jim, Jim is doing nothing but playing fantasy football all day. I have to finish his reports and all of this other stuff. And so people look at that and they go from gratitude to envy at the snap of a fingers. But now let's take the same exact situation. And you say, instead of the other people getting $250,000, let's say they say, you've got $100,000 and over there Joyce Turner got $250,000. And you think, well, Joyce never goes home.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Joyce is here over the weekend. Joyce works her tail off. I've never, Joyce, I've never come to the office where Joyce wasn't already here, never left when she didn't stay. She deserves the money. She earned it. You're not wanting to throttle Joyce because she got more money than you. She got more money than you because she did more work than you did and you're fine with it. And that envy, that sense of envy is built into the human heart. And it's not something that can go away. I just used a perfectly capitalist example to show you that any rock rip capitalist would be filled with burning envy if that situation were to occur to them.

• 39:56Mike Rowe?

  Is it just that? Or is there something, is there justice in this as well? Like, right now, I think a lot of what's happening in the country, and I'm not sure it's bang on to the topic we're at, but... Something horrible happens when you believe the fraud is not being corrected, when the justice isn't being meted out. It offends us, and the more it goes on, the more offended we become. That's not quite envy, but in your example, Janet Turner, it's just that she would get more than I did because I don't dispute that she works harder and she accomplishes more. So therefore, the envy doesn't sink in.

• 40:40Mike Rowe?

  But if I see her as a slacker,

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:44Mike Rowe?

  Then the envy's there, but it's really a symptom of something fundamentally unjust. Something unfair has transpired right in front of me. And that needs to be corrected. Otherwise, I'll mope.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  You'll mope.

• 40:59Mike Rowe?

  Forever.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  But the big issue, and the reason I use that example is this. How is it possible to all of a sudden go from joy to rage? You are a hundred thousand dollars better off. And I'll tell you something, Mike. If you made this analogy and you took it to it's, and you added one more clause at the bottom, and the clause at the bottom was, everybody has to accept the check or nobody gets the check. There are people out there who would turn off, they would turn down a hundred thousand dollars rather than see somebody else get two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

• 41:32Mike Rowe?

  Absolutely.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  And that is the root of capitalism envy. It's the root of what drives socialism. It's a sense of, I am more busy looking at what somebody else is doing than what I'm doing. It's a great joke that the Russians tell all the time, and it's about this guy who's a peasant, and he's very, very devout. He gets up every day. It's just a, just a dirt village, just a mud trail. There's these two little puny little farms. They go these little grape-sized potatoes, you know? It's just raw poverty. But this one peasant gets up every day and he prays to God every day. Praise him, praise him, praise, praise for a cow. He says, my Lord, please, if I had a cow, I could provide cheese for the village. I could feed my kids. I could, I could use, you know, to pull the plow. Please, please.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  All of a sudden, one day, bing, golden light comes down. There's a cow. And his neighbor looks at this and sees that over the course of the next several days, this guy is doing that. He's pulling a plow. He's growing better crops. Everybody's getting milk. Everybody in the village is getting better vegetables. Everybody's succeeding. Everybody's benefiting. And this guy gets down on his knees. He prays to God, prays to God. Finally, this golden light comes down and says, what do you want? And the guy says, I want you to kill my neighbor's damn cow.

• 42:46Mike Rowe?

  Right, and that's the fault in our stars.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  That's the fault in our stars.

• 42:49Mike Rowe?

  But why don't we come at it the other way too?

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 42:52Mike Rowe?

  Before we transition to communism, which I think seems to be the pressing matter. But I get it. Envy is a vice. The vice is the fault in our stars. And a socialistic approach to managing and governing the species brings out the worst in us.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:17Mike Rowe?

  Which is envy. What's the virtue? Maybe, is it initiative? And if so, which ideology best encourages initiative? A willingness to take risk? A desire to show up early? To stay late? To volunteer for the crappy task?

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:37Mike Rowe?

  To become indispensable? Right? To win that race? It almost seems like incentives versus disincentives. Right? Socialism is dangerous because it promotes envy. Capitalism is different because it maybe inspires initiative?

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Well, capitalism leaves you alone. What capitalism does is it basically says, look, if you want to make just enough money to have a one-bedroom apartment and play video games all day, and you just need to work a couple of shifts at 7-Eleven or whatever, that's your business. If you're comfortable on eighteen thousand dollars a year and eating ramen noodles or whatever, that's your business. Right? It's not saying that everybody has to do that. It's not saying that no one is allowed to do any better. It's not saying that no one's allowed to work harder. Let's take something really concrete and simple. Let's just say that you're out on a vacation someplace. You're on at a beach and you get a chance to ride a jet ski, and you decide, I really want a jet ski. I would like to be doing this all the time. That's a nice, simple objective, right? That's not a, it's not, I want a, a private jet. That's something that every working man can pretty much get their hands on.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  So if you want the jet ski, you come in early, you stay late, you put in overtime, you put in extra hours. You produce more work than you would do if you didn't want this extra thing. And you work, maybe you'll work a second job and so on. What you have actually done is you have created more value in society by working longer than you would have otherwise. You've made society richer, and you have gotten the reward of extra money that you then spend on a jet ski. Now, if you live in a society where people say, no, jet skis are dangerous, not only can you not have a jet ski, you are forbidden from having a jet ski, that is a miserable life. And I don't want to live a miserable life. I want to live a happy life. I want to live a life where I get to do what I want to do so long as I don't hurt other people doing it.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  And I had a friend who was a huge influence on me. He was a Bulgarian poet. He escaped from Bulgaria during the communist era. And he was really kind of like underneath the river with, you know, with a straw and hearing the guard and see his cigarette bouncing around. They're coming out to shoot him, right? He was an intellectual, so he got to see Western libraries, and he got to see what the West was really like. So he decided to risk his life to, to get the freedom. And he said, the worst part about living under socialism is this. It's not the secret police. It's not all the enforcement, although that's always there. We'll get to that in a minute. He said, the worst of it is, is that every second of every day, you're reminded of how unimportant you are,

• 46:01Speaker 02

  of just how absolutely unremarkable, unimportant, undeserving you are. You have to wait for everything. One of the pithiest things I ever heard about the difference between capitalism and communism or socialism is for that matter, is that in socialism, you line up for bread, and in capitalism, bread lines up for you. If you go to the, you go to a supermarket and you look at the bread section, I mean, my God, man, it goes on for half a mile practically, right? Why? Because we produce more. We produce more because we have a reason to produce more. I want something. And since I want something, I am willing to give up my time and effort in exchange for money to get that. And I should be allowed to do that. So let's say you've got a kid who's mowing lawns, right?

• 46:44Speaker 02

  And let's say he gets fifty bucks to mow a lawn. Now, if this kid all of a sudden wants a four hundred dollar pair of Nikes, right? He's gonna have to mow more lawns. And under capitalism, he's allowed to do that. Not only does that benefit the kid, because he eventually gets enough money to buy the shoes that he wants, it benefits society because more mows, more lawns are being mowed. It's a win-win-win for everybody. The essence of capitalism is, is that it's a voluntary trade. The miracle of wealth creation that capitalism creates is, and this is the thing that most people will, will not get until I'm finished, and then you'll get it perfectly. But when two people trade things, if I trade something you want with something I want, and we both go our own way, which one of us goes away richer?

• 47:30Mike Rowe?

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• 48:14Mike Rowe?

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• 49:01Mike Rowe?

  We go away equal.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Both of us go away, Richard.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  You'd rather have the hamburger, McDonald would rather have the 350. They've got lots of hamburgers, you've got 350. Everybody wins. So, let's take an example. We've got two different tribes of people. We've got the people that live in the lowlands, and there's not a whole lot of stuff to be hunted down there, so they're mostly gatherers. So they have a lot of practice weaving baskets. They're very, very good at baskets. In fact, their baskets are so good, they practically hold water. So they're master basket weavers, and they've all got good baskets in that village down there. Meanwhile, up in the mountains are the hairy-browed mountain people, and they don't do much gathering because there's not a lot up there. But there are the occasional mammoths, so they make excellent spears, solid spears. The spears that the gatherers make are just twigs, they hardly know how to make a spear. The baskets that the people up in the mountains make look like bird's nests, they're essentially useless.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  So now, two people meet halfway through, and one guy is from the mountain and the other guy's from the lowlands. And the guy with the spear says, "That is an excellent basket." And the guy with the basket says, "I've never seen the spear quite the like of that before. Want to trade?" And they trade. So now they both go back to their respective villages. Now, the guy who took the good spear down to his village has the most valuable object in the village. Likewise, the guy who took the basket up to his village has the most valuable object in the village. And then, if one of them is a socialist, they'll say, "We'll use the basket until it falls to pieces." But if he's a capitalist, they'll say, "Now, wait a minute.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  I need to make two spears a week, that's how many I lose and break. But if I get up early and I stay up late, I bet you I could make five spears a week. I bet you I could. If I stay up early, get up early, stay up late, I bet I could make five spears a week." So he does. So now he's got three extra spears that he doesn't need. He goes back down and meets the same guy who had the exact same idea about the baskets. So now we've got three baskets going down, three spears going up. And now what happens? Well, the people down in the lowlands, all of a sudden, all of them have better spears than they had before. The people up in the highlands now have better baskets than they did before. Who loses here? Nobody loses. Nobody loses.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Both societies are infinitely better because they have better things that are made by experts. But, but, the guy who made the extra spears has more seashells, or whatever you're using for money, and people will look at that and say, "Hey, this guy's got more than I do." Yes, he's got more than you do because he got you this incredible village full of these baskets that were never available to us before. Of course he has more than you do. We're back to the envy thing again. Voluntary trade, nobody trades down. Anytime two people make a voluntary trade, as in capitalism, so capitalism is, it's free market economy. "I'll give you this for this?" Yeah, fantastic. "I'm happy, you happy?" Great. That creates wealth for both parties because it gives both parties something they didn't have before that they value.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  And you can't take that part of it away. That's what makes the whole machine work. And when you say, "No, you are not allowed to have more seashells than the other guy, even though you made those extra spears, even though you stayed up late, even though you went trekking down there, all the way down there hauling these spears, bringing them back, even though you did all those things, you don't get to have more than anybody else, then why am I going to get up early and make some more spears? Why? Why would I do that? What reason would I have?"

• 52:26Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, incentive, initiative, envy. That's my only point. I think no matter what direction you come at it from, you still wind up wrestling with, "How are we wired? And what really do we..." Like, the wealth tax. There's a big push for this in California as we speak. And a lot of people are looking at it as sort of the canary in the coal mine. "We'll see what we can do with the rest of the country." I would imagine you would say that all of that is indicative of, "We just have to take from them because it's..."

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Because they got more than I do.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Okay, there's nothing more transportable in the world than a rich person. That is the easiest thing in the world to transport. If you put a wealth tax in here, all the wealthy people who are already paying a lot of taxes into California will simply leave California. The way that Tesla did, the way that SpaceX is going, the way that Boeing left Washington. All of these ideas to tax these businesses that provide thousands of jobs and give thousands of people the money to buy their own video games or buy their own cars or buy their own DoorDash or whatever they spend their money on. All of these people are leaving because of the policies that these socialists are imposing on them. It's not like you can get away with it. You still get to vote in this country, you still get to vote with your feet.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  You can mandate a $20 an hour minimum wage, right? And if you do, what you find is, the cafes go out of business. Because the margins are thin. People will have to, if you mandate a $20 minimum wage, and your coffee used to sell for $5, now it's going to sell for $8. And some people don't want to pay $8, you're going to put people out of business. Whenever you raise the minimum wage, people lose money. They lose their jobs, they lose their income. You can have an idea, but that doesn't mean reality has to obey your philosophy. And by the way, let's get into some of the juicier parts of this whole socialism thing. Because it's sold to people as fairness, but Fidel Castro, for example,

• 54:26Speaker 02

  came to power in 1959, he came into the world, same time I came into the world. He came into power in 1959, and he put his people through 65 years of poverty. All right? In the name of this idea, we're all poor together, right? Castro always dressed in that simple outfit, never wore anything ostentatious, claimed to live in a fisherman's hut. You know how much money Fidel Castro had in his personal account when he died?

• 54:52Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, do tell.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  $800 million. $800 million is how much money Fidel Castro had in his personal account when he died. $800 million. Hugo Chavez comes to Venezuela and says, "It's not fair that some people are richer than others, we have all of the oil resources of the country. What we're going to do is, we're going to make all of this and share it with everybody." What happens when he's finished? Well, first of all, the people are so hungry because these economic policies are so poor that they're eating the animals out of the zoo. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen a starving tiger before, but you don't want to, it's not a pretty thing to see a tiger that is dying of starvation with its ribs showing. But guess what? You know what, how much money Hugo Chavez's daughter is worth?

• 55:38Speaker 02

  $4 billion. $4,000 million is what Chavez's daughter has right now because of the people who are generally speaking, good-hearted people who want things to be fair. It's a sucker's game, Mike. It's what people use to amass wealth and power when they don't want to go out and work for it.

• 56:00Mike Rowe?

  So then the argument becomes, "Well, you know, it's not the ideology's fault, it's the individual's fault who had assumed the power." Right? Can we have a look at socialism implemented through decent people? Or do decent people simply not exist? Are they all the person in the cubicle whose gratitude turns to ashes in their mouth?

• 56:21Speaker 02

  I will direct that question to any person, or especially any young person who is watching this who's in favor of socialism. Okay, I'm not going to make it about some mythical person, can we have a good person, can we not have a good person? I'm going to direct it to you, okay? Are you willing to give up your Xbox in order to feed a family in Africa for a year? What are you willing to give to other people in order to achieve this? Are you willing to work Saturdays for the common good, which was required in the Soviet Union? Every other Saturday or every third Saturday, you just had to go in and provide free work. Hooray for the people. Are you willing to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning on your Saturdays? Not some mythical person, not some...

• 57:05Speaker 02

  You, a good, virtuous person who wants equality, who wants fairness, who wants everybody to be the same and equal and so on. Are you willing to get up and do that work for somebody other than yourself? And if you say you are, I'm going to have to call you on it because one out of 100 of you will be the kind of person that will do that. Most people will say they like this because it sounds good and it sounds fair. And most people think that wealth redistribution means, "I'm getting a check." What they don't realize is, is that the average American lives so much better than anybody else in the rest of the world. The same people who are calling for open borders. If there is no such thing as open borders, then if you are a poor American, you're richer than 93% of the rest of the planet.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  What personal wealth of you, I'm talking to you out there on YouTube land, what do you own that you're willing to sell to give money to people in greater need than yourself? I want a list of the things that you're willing to sell right now so that you can send the money to people who are in greater need than you. And I'm telling you, there are people who will say, "I will do it," but they don't, and they won't. And I'm also here to tell you, there's nothing wrong with you for that. That doesn't mean you're a bad person. All it means is, is that you want to hold on to the fruits of the work that you've been... Work is life. Work, when you go to work, you're giving up your time. We only have so much time in this world. And when I work for eight hours a day for somebody else in exchange for a check,

• 58:34Speaker 02

  I'm giving them eight hours of my life that I don't get back. And if I get that eight hours and I get a check for it, and I want to buy a video game console, then I should be able to keep that video game console. I earned it, it's mine. No one has the right to tell me I have to give that up to somebody else. Life isn't fair. It's not fair, it's not fair, it's clearly not fair. People are born millionaires, other people are born in dirt poverty, and that's just the way it is. And nobody's going to change that. The essence of life, lived happily, I think, is to accept the fact that no two people on the planet are born into the exact same circumstances. Everybody gets a hand of cards dealt to them at birth, and some hands are much better than others.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Some people are born with four aces and a king, some people don't have a pair, right? But the purpose of life is, and the beauty of life is, and the beauty of capitalism is, you get to play the hand. You get to play the hand. You don't have to have the hand that you were born with. You get to play the hand, you get to discard, you pick up a card, you discard, you pick up a card. Your hand is getting stronger, you get a stronger hand now, you can bet a little harder. Now you get to continue to improve the hand. If we lived in a perfect world of equality, then we'd all go completely mad. We talk about equality in this case because we want people to make the same amount of money. But what if everybody was exactly the same height? And what if everybody was exactly the same skin color?

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  And what if everybody was exactly the same this and exactly the same that, and exactly this and that, and so on? Should basketball players be allowed to get paid more money?

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  Than much more money, much, much more money than a regular, average person? How many socialists, not a whole lot of them tend to be sports fans, been my general observation. But if you are a socialist and a sports fan, how can you argue that LeBron James is allowed to be so much richer than the people that go and see his games? Well, your obvious answer would be, well, he's the best player in the league, he may be the best player of all time. Well, yeah, but that, why does that mean he gets more than other people? Shouldn't he get the exact same amount? Shouldn't everybody in the NBA get the exact same amount? Shouldn't LeBron James get the exact same salary as the worst player in the NBA? And by the way, how come the NBA only lets in people who are good at basketball? That's not fair to people who aren't any good at basketball.

• 1:00:54Mike Rowe?

  What about the short people?

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, what about the short people?

• 1:00:56Mike Rowe?

  That's not right.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  Or what about the people who don't like to play basketball or can't play basketball? What about the klutzes and the, and the uncoordinated dweebs?

• 1:01:02Mike Rowe?

  Look, you're preaching to the choir. But back to healthcare, real quick.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:01:08Mike Rowe?

  It's not a jet ski. It's not an indulgence. It's a, I'm still not clear, in a capitalistic society, I mean, I agree with you, we don't turn people away. If you're sick, you get treatment.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:24Mike Rowe?

  Right? But who ultimately pays for it? Who should pay for it? In that world?

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  I'm gonna come, come right out and admit this openly. The US healthcare system is an absolute catastrophe. And it's a catastrophe because of the lack of volition. It's a catastrophe because of state control. So basically, here's what happens. Old, old, old timers like you and me can remember a time when we had a family doctor, and that family doctor would often come to our house if we were feeling sick, and that was called a house call, and he had a little black bag, and he'd, uh, say, uh, here's two aspirins, drink plenty of fluids, you've got the flu, you'll be fine in three days. Okay? That was when you gave, if you gave a dollar, if, let's say you gave the, uh, fifty dollars to the doctor, you gave fifty dollars to the doctor, the doctor gained fifty dollars.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  The situation we're in today is, if I've got a problem, I go to the doctor, well, first of all, of that fifty dollars that I'm gonna pay, you know, thirty of it goes to the insurance company, twenty of it goes to, or fifteen of it goes to the government oversight committees, the doctor gets six dollars, or twelve, or whatever, which means he has to may see three or four times as many patients just to stay afloat. He's got malpractice insurance that he has, he's got two-hundred-and-fifty, three-hundred-thousand dollars every single year that he has to cover before he even treats his first patient. That's just what it's gonna cost for him to stay in business. It's a mess. It's a complete mess, and I'm not defending it in any way. There are plenty of solutions to the healthcare system, and the simplest one, really, would be to treat healthcare the same way you treat automotive care.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  All of these people that are in favor of national healthcare, why is it that they want me to have one choice, but my car gets to have a hundred choices? My car gets to choose between a hundred different people that wanna insure my car. I get to decide exactly how much coverage I want, I get to decide my deductibles, all these people are in competition, the prices are going down on everything. Why does my car have a hundred choices and I only have one? Why don't we let people compete for the healthcare dollar? Why don't we do that? Well, because the government, the insurance companies, and the doctors are locked in this iron triangle of a dependency, and doctors are no longer able to run their own businesses. Used to be you'd hang out a shingle, you're your own corporation, Dr. Michael. I am a corporation, I pay my taxes and people pay me, and that's it.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  Now, more and more doctors are going to work for these healthcare centers, and they check in at eight and they check out at eight, and if somebody's coming in with a broken leg at eight oh five, it's not your problem. This is not the way to run a society. It's just not. Why don't we just go back to giving the dollars directly to the doctor? Well, a lot of it is, is the legal system. So for example, another example, back when you had doctor friendly, back when we were kids and so on, you'd go into his office because you sprained your ankle. You'd go into the doctor's office, and he would put you on the table, and he would examine your ankle, and he'd move your foot around a little bit, and he'd feel it here, and a little tender there, and move this, and he'd say, you got a sprained ankle, Mike, um, we're gonna bandage it up, just stay off it for two weeks, you should start feeling better in about two weeks. That'll be fifty dollars, please. What happens now?

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Same exact thing, you got a sprained ankle, you think you got a sore ankle, you go into the doctor's office, he manipulates your foot, does all these other things, he says, Mike, I'm pretty sure you got a sprained ankle, but, we're gonna have to get an MRI for this, and, um, and we're gonna maybe have to run another couple of tests as well, but we definitely need to do an MRI. Why do you need to do an MRI, doctor? You know it's a sprained ankle. I need to do an MRI because if somebody decides to sue me because of my ankle not healing the way they want to, now I have to have the evidence that I exhausted every possibility. So now, it's not, here's fifty dollars, doctor, thank you, now here's fifty thousand dollars, or five thousand dollars, or whatever the case may be, in order to avoid the legal consequences

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  of, of a society that rewards this kind of predatory lawsuit kind of thing.

• 1:05:11Mike Rowe?

  I get that. But go back to, I don't have fifty dollars. What I have is a broken ankle.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:05:18Mike Rowe?

  Now, will you fix it for me?

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:20Mike Rowe?

  Okay. Thank you, have a nice day. Doctor doesn't get fifty dollars. He can't run a business that way. Who compensates the doctor for his service?

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, if you don't have any money, you don't go to a doctor, go to an emergency room. And that's why most people's healthcare comes, most people without health insurance, the emergency room is there, is their doctor of choice. So let me just change the conditions to match reality a little bit. You got a broken ankle, you go to the emergency room at the hospital. Will you be treated? Yes, you'll be treated. Who pays for this? Is it free? No, it's not free. The cost of treating you for free, you will get treated and you will go, they'll send you a bill, but you won't pay it because you don't have the money. Okay? So yes, you got treated for free, didn't cost you anything, but it's going to be paid for by the person who came in before you and after you with broken ankles, who have health insurance, who do pay the hospital, they're gonna raise the rates on those people to cover their losses for the people that aren't insured.

• 1:06:13Mike Rowe?

  Hmm. Now I'm starting to feel like the guy whose bonus wasn't that big. Why am I paying for that guy's broken ankle? Because he, he didn't have the initiative I had. He had, why doesn't he have fifty dollars? What kind of person doesn't have fifty dollars?

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  It's kind of an interesting question to ask.

• 1:06:28Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  I'll give you one more quick example, because analogies usually really help with things like this. Let's say, society consists of a hundred people. Okay? And this is the argument against socialism. Let's say that society consists of, of a hundred people. And let's say that there's a giant cart that'll seat a hundred people, and the cart is pulled by people. So, in a society, a healthy society, let's take, say a free market society or something, you got ten people out of the hundred who can't pull the cart. They just can't. They're too old, they're too weak, maybe they, maybe they're born without legs, maybe they've got some kind of horrible diseases, they're sick, they're whatever.

• 1:07:05Mike Rowe?

  Broken ankle? No fifty dollars?

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Whatever it is, that's right. Ten people get in the cart. We got ninety people pulling, we got ten people in the cart, no problem. Right? No problem. Now what happens when somebody starts getting a little bit tired? You know, I'm feeling a little winded, well, you know, I guess maybe I'll just go ride in the cart for a while. Now you got twenty people in the cart, you got eighty people pulling. But that's not where the danger is. The danger is, what happens when one guy comes along and says, you know, goes all the way through the line of people pulling the cart, he says, you know, if you vote for me, I can get you in the cart. If you vote for me, you don't have to pull anymore, I'll get you a spot in the cart. And he starts walking his way up and down that line, and more and more people decide they'd rather ride than pull. So now you got ten people pulling ninety people in the cart. What's gonna happen?

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Well, it's not even a, it's not even gonna get to the point where the cart stops. The ten people doing the pulling are just gonna walk away. They're just gonna leave. There's nothing in it for them, there's, you're just a sucker at that point. You're like the poor Cuban peasants who had to live under sixty years of Castro so he could retire with eight-hundred million dollars in his bank account. It's just, no, the cart stops moving. And what happens? Then the people who are genuinely sick, the ten people who genuinely needed the help, who needed to be in the cart and, and who should be in the cart, who, who have a moral right to be in the cart, in a just society, the society I believe in as a capitalist, of course there has to be room for people who cannot do whatever they need to do to survive.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Of course I'm in favor of aid and, and resources for people who are not capable of pulling the cart. I, I have no problem with the safety net. It's the safety hammock I have a problem with. And, and the bigger that hammock gets, the harder the rest of us have to work, and suddenly the situation flips when it's no longer the right thing or the smart thing to do by pulling the cart, now you're a chump. And that's when society breaks down.

• 1:08:55Mike Rowe?

  Well, I'll tell you what else might break it.

• 1:09:00Mike Rowe?

  I can't even say this without sounding ridiculous. I've had a wonderful life and I've worked hard and I feel like I've prospered and I pay an awful lot of taxes and I don't cheat. And I can live with that.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:15Mike Rowe?

  I can live with it. Right up into the point where I see how it's been squandered and how badly it's been administered and how the train to LA barely made it out of the gate and-

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Sixteen miles of track or something they laid.

• 1:09:35Mike Rowe?

  Right. So it's not just the guy who suddenly is, you know, I'm, I'm fine. I still feel and am fundamentally grateful. But I'm not a billionaire either and I don't, I don't want to leave California, but I understand why Rogan did and I understand why Musk did and I understand why a hundred billionaires have already left.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:58Mike Rowe?

  And I see all of this happening. And I guess the question is, will it get better when it goes splat? Can we come back from a splat? What does a splat look like in this right now? Because, look, we haven't even talked about communism. But a lot of people in the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, are outright saying, "No, I am a communist. I want communist things." And I'm quoting from the Communist Manifesto. So in the time we have left, draw some sort of line between socialism and communism and suggest whatever you want to suggest.

• 1:10:38Mike Rowe?

  What can we do to somehow amplify the awareness that it sure feels like we need to amplify?

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  You mentioned earlier that it's one thing if you get called a Nazi and it's another thing if you get called a communist. And the reason that it's not reprehensible to be called a communist is because there's no photos. It's just, just that simple. There's no photos. We have photos and we have films of what the Nazis did to people. We have films from the death camps. We have films of bulldozers piling up bodies like cordwood dumping them into a pit. We have photos of all these things. We have Auschwitz, we have, we have, we have evidence. We have a lot of evidence. There's a place in, in the Soviet Union called Kolyma. Kolyma was one of the gulags. There are 430 of these working to death camps.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  Nobody's taken any pictures in Kolyma, but the number of people killed in Kolyma is somewhat disputed, but generally the low estimate is probably around 750,000 and the high estimate might be as high as one and a half, two, maybe even two million people worked to death in this gulag. Now, if the high number is true, that means that Kolyma is a deadlier place than Auschwitz. But if the low number is true, it means Kolyma is the second deadliest place in the world. The communists killed the second number of people. The Nazis killed the most people at Auschwitz, then came the communists at Kolyma, then came the Germans again at Treblinka. Right? So these two philosophies are both identical. And I might point out to the people who, who are big fans of socialism, that the Nazis and the communists both named themselves very carefully for a reason.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  The Nazis, Nazi's an acronym, and it's an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. When you call somebody a Nazi, you are calling them a socialist worker. National Socialist German Workers' Party, NASDAP is what it stood for. So they called themselves socialist because they wanted to grease their road to power and authority and ambition with words that sounded friendly. Now, let's look at the communists. What was that country called? It was the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They didn't call themselves the Union of Soviet Communist Republics because communism has a bit of a bad flavor to it. Now, I didn't name the USSR and I didn't name the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Adolf Hitler and Lenin did that. They did it because they knew that it had a nice sound to it. It sounded fair, but that's never what the intention was. The intention was always absolute power over other people's lives. The Nazis never had a majority. The communists, at the time of the revolution, the communists, the Bolsheviks, I should say, before they became known as the communists, Lenin's party never got more than 30% of the vote. And the second they got 30% of the vote, they outlawed all the other political parties, shut down all of the other newspapers and basically shot anybody who decided to get in their way. And the Nazis did the same thing. These people use the word socialism to cover their totalitarianism.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  It's not like communism and social, I don't, who was it? It might have been Jonah Goldberg, I think, who said this. He said, "The difference between the Nazis and the communists is, is the difference between Coke and Pepsi. They're both totalitarian states. They're both colas. They both believe in a single leader. They both had secret police. They both had extermination camps. They both had all of these things." Because you cannot force people into something as unnatural as getting up to work for other people without murdering several million of them. And so when you get to the communists, you end up in a world where the power is everything. It's the worship of power. And there are people that have this genetic defect of having to tell other people what to do.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  These people used to be known as aristocrats. They would be poshes or they'd be sultans or they'd be emirs or they'd be kings or earls or dukes or barons or counts or whatever the case may be. 250 years ago, here comes this country where all of a sudden we're going to try letting individuals run their own lives, see how that works. We produce more wealth and more, and more health and more happiness than in the history of the world. And we've produced so much happiness, so much wealth, so much success, so much, so much ease and leisure. And we are so far away from the wolf at the door that we can now speculate about what it would be like to make something better. Because the thing about socialists and communists is, they always compare societies to perfection. They never compare them to other exacting societies that exist on the earth.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  They always compare them to perfection. Perfection where everybody works as hard for the collective as, as they work for themselves. Perfection where all of the leaders are absolutely uncorruptible. Perfection where everybody is equally happy, equally, no. The world doesn't look like that. That's why they can never produce an example that works. I've heard people say many times, and so have you, "Well, they didn't do communism the right way. That's the problem with communism, just didn't do it the right way." Well, my answer to that is this, I've studied communism, I know communism very well. It's not that they did communism the right way, it's not that they did communism the wrong way. They did it the only way. And the only way to do communism is to enforce your will on the people by being ruthless enough to murder enough of them so that the rest of them will do whatever you tell them

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  to do. And you don't get to go to another government, you don't get to do any of that. You live in a state of perpetual fear. And the communists in Russia killed 20 million of their own people. The communists in China killed 50 million of their own people, starved them to death on purpose. What are they going to do? They're going to go get another government? They're going to walk down to the corner and, and try a new government? You don't get to try a new government. You don't get to go to, if you don't like what the, the prices are at Macy's, you can go to Marshalls. When you have one government that has all of the power, there's no escape. It's you versus them. Somebody asked, Stalin was trying to break a guy, he was trying to break a guy who was resisting torture and they couldn't get a confession out of him and he said, "What does the Soviet Union weigh?" "Well, what do you mean, comrade?"

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  "What does it weigh? What does the Soviet Union weigh?" "Well, it's immeasurable." "Well, then why is it that the weight of the Soviet Union cannot break this man?" "Get back to work." So they beat him to death. And these bodies are there. The bodies are there. In downtown Moscow, there is a place called the Lubyanka.

• 1:17:03Mike Rowe?

  The basement.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  The Lubyanka is right next to a toy store. It's a bright yellow building, very cheery looking. There's a toy store 20 yards away, kid's paradise. In the basement of the Lubyanka, they said the Lubyanka is the tallest building in the world because you can see Siberia from the basement. But the Lubyanka, for 40 years or so, would start at sunset and they would bring people in and they would be six of them, they'd strip them of all their clothes, they'd line them up against wooden doors. They gave them hope that they were just going to go through some sort of doors, but the wooden doors didn't lead anywhere, they didn't open, they didn't even have hinges. The wooden doors were there to stop ricocheting bullets from coming back from the people that were doing the shooting. Six Czechists, that was the first name of the secret police, they changed their name

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  six or seven times, but the original name was the Czechists, would, would lower their revolvers and a guy would drop a stick and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, six people dead, they go down into the ground, there's water on the ground. Other Czechists come and put them on a trolley, there's a little mini rail set up in there, put them on a trolley, haul them to the back, somebody's pulling them up on ropes, putting them in a truck. Six more naked, crying, weeping people come in, bang, bang, bang, in the back of the head, "You're an enemy of the state, we can't take chances, we don't know whether you're guilty or not." When Stalin launched the Great Terror, he said, "There must be 70,000 people in Murmansk who are enemies of the state. So I want 70,000 people in Murmansk killed." He didn't say, "Find the enemies of the state."

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  He said, "Kill 70,000 people in Murmansk because that's what we think the number of enemies of the state in Murmansk is." And so you know what happened? The people who are executing the people in Murmansk don't want to be executed themselves, so they write a letter back to Stalin, they say, "Comrade Stalin, you won't believe it, we didn't find 70,000 people in Murmansk, we found 320,000 people in Murmansk and we executed all of them too. Aren't we doing a great job?" And this is how entire populations were eliminated. People would have family photographs and as time went on in the Soviet Union, you would see their faces disappear. They would literally take a pencil eraser and they would erase the face of an enemy of the state because they didn't want anybody coming into their apartment thinking they still cared about this person.

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  "Oh, God, no, no, no, no, we, we knew it was a bad egg from the beginning." And of all the stories that I had and all of the stories I had to work with when I did this Empire of Terror on the Soviet police state, I think the one that was the clearest to me, just because it's the one that's easiest to imagine, was that in these apartment complexes, the secret police would come in at about two or three in the morning at your biological low, right when you're at your most emotionally vulnerable and most likely to be asleep. So around two or three o'clock in the morning, these black Marias, these black police vans with bars on the, on the windows, would pull up outside the building. And then you'd hear the front door and then you'd hear the footsteps below and then this creaky, creaky old elevator. And you'd hear it start coming up. And you are lying in bed, every single night of your life, you are shivering in terror.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  It's getting louder and louder and louder and louder. And then maybe it would pass your floor and keep going and keep going and keep going and then stop. And then you could sleep for three or four hours until six o'clock when you had to get up and work for the, for the motherland again. But these people would find out who had been killed that night because they would find out what apartments were available. "Hey, new apartment opened up, it's nicer one than I have, let's move over there. We've got one bathroom for the entire floor." News spreads quickly. But that sound- That image of lying in bed with your wife and your kids in the next room and wondering if that elevator is going to stop on your floor and take you and maybe your family away, never to be seen again. You can end up in the basement of the Lubyanka, or maybe you'll go to La Forte or whatever.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  They're all buried in Moscow, by the way. They've got parks in Moscow where there's 60,000 people buried in this park.

• 1:20:46Mike Rowe?

  Show me the man, I'll show you the crime.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Mike Rowe?

  Would you put that quote back up real quick?

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:20:52Mike Rowe?

  From C. Weaver? This is what I was thinking about when I said earlier, I know we got to wrap this up, but that was the moment in Saving Private Ryan, right? Where it's like, oh my God, this is just getting so, in light of everything you just said. This woman is running the mayor's office for, what, home development or something?

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, she's, I forget her title, hang on.

• 1:21:21Mike Rowe?

  Look, she's important, and she works for a guy who just got elected, running as, certainly as a socialist.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:30Mike Rowe?

  And that's her tweet, "Elect more communists."

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  I wonder how many illegal aliens she has living in her house.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  She's the director of the New York City Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  I wonder how many low-income tenants she has living in her apartment. I wonder how much communism she is willing to partake of. If she's got, I'll bet you she's got a rather nice apartment. I'll bet you she's got more room than she needs for herself. How many homeless people off the streets of New York is she housing today? I want to know. Because if she's not housing any, then communism is a lie. And she's a liar. And she's a damn liar. If she has an apartment to herself and there's room for other people in there and they're not in her apartment, then she's a damn liar. And she is trying to enforce a morality and an ethics that has killed more people than anything on this earth, including war, than disease. Other than disease, communism has killed more human beings than anybody else, and she's

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  proud of it. She should receive the same kind of treatment as somebody walking down the streets of New York with a big giant swastika on their T-shirt.

• 1:22:37Mike Rowe?

  Well, I don't disagree. I just think that we've entered into this weird place where you can put a giant swastika on your chest and walk bare-chested down the street and have people go, oh, yeah, maybe there's something there.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  Well, I don't-

• 1:22:57Mike Rowe?

  Because for whatever reason, for whatever reason, the C-word does not have the mark of Cain.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Well, the reason that the C-word doesn't have the mark of Cain is because most of the people in the entertainment business are left-leaning. So they don't want to make movies about Khalilah. I do. I want to make a movie about Khalilah. I very much want to make a movie about Khalilah.

• 1:23:16Mike Rowe?

  Can we make it a musical?

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  We can make anything a musical, it's springtime for Gulags and his, but the people that are in charge of our news media and our entertainment industry all lean left, and they know it's embarrassing to them that their philosophy has killed so many people. You know what the greatest thing about being a conservative is for me? This is my personal experiences. My personal experience is, the best thing about being a conservative is, I get to say one thing and then do the same thing. That's a really nice feeling.

• 1:23:42Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, for me, this dust-up, you're here because last week I shared a video from Bill Maher. And Bill Maher, I think, spoke the truth to his tribe. He said, he put up that same quote, and many others like it, and just said, "Look, if this is what's happening in my Democratic Party, then my vote is in play." Because that's not who we are. Now, at the same time, Gavin Newsom is saying, "This Democratic Party needs to be a big tent, and we have to have room for the DSA, otherwise the midterms are going to be a problem."

• 1:24:23Mike Rowe?

  What I wrote when I shared that clip and made reference to those things was that America is a big tent. We have room for the DSA in America. We have room for the Green Party. We have room for the Constitution Party, the American Freedom Party. We even have room for Fringe. We have room for the Proud Boys and the KKK.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:24:46Mike Rowe?

  We have room for the American Nazi Party, because that's the tent of America. But does the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, are their tents so big? What would happen if the Republicans welcomed in the Oath Keepers? Or the Proud Boys? Or the American Freedom Party? So I have no idea how to handicap this. I don't know what's coming, but those quotes, and by the way, it's not me either, and the thing that Bill did that I thought was interesting, and I wound up going on his show as a result of this, he's like, "I'm not accusing them. I'm quoting them."

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:24Mike Rowe?

  "These aren't my words. These are quotes from people who have been elected or who are about to be, who have somehow secured a wild amount of support from the masses." And I just, I'll just end it where we started by saying, look, I don't know if anything we just did or said was persuasive, but the evidence does demand a verdict. And I appreciate you prosecuting the case.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  The problem with the evidence of the jury in this particular case is that my witnesses are all dead, buried underneath the tundra. I didn't get to present my witnesses. I didn't get to present my witnesses because they're all dead. That's the problem with my case. I made the point, when you talk about 20 million people being killed, let's say there's 100,000 people in a Super Bowl. So imagine that you're sitting there and you are at the entrance to the Super Bowl and there's only one exit, okay? Everybody has to go through that exit. So imagine a Super Bowl full of people, and you have to stand there, and you have to look at the face of every single person that comes out of that Super Bowl. Every little girl, every man, every woman, every child, you got to look them in the eyes as they walk past.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  Once they walk past, it's 100,000 people. You only have 199 more Super Bowls to go before you find the number of people that have been killed by this ideology. So you think about that for a minute. You think about how much time it would take for you to see 100,000 faces walk past you and realize you need 199 more Super Bowls to show the number of people that have been murdered by this philosophy that this idiot is tweeting about as if it's no big deal. I can't show you those people. I can only tell you about them. I can't show you the faces. I can show you some of them. The largest photo archive in the world belongs to the KGB. There are thousands and thousands of faces. You know what the main expression on those faces is, Mike? It's not fear, although there's a lot of fear, and sometimes people are crying, it's shock.

• 1:27:24Mike Rowe?

  Confusion.

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  It's surprise. It's like, I'm a good communist. Why am I being singled out for execution? Why me? I don't, because there's 70,000 enemies of the state in Murmansk, and it's just tough luck for you, buddy, you know? Maybe you have a relative who lived in the West, or maybe you're a physicist or a musician who's been exposed to Western literature and had your mind polluted by free people. But I got 20 million, I got 20, I got 20 million victims, and I can't show your faces. I can't show them to you. You have to imagine them. But no one's denying the numbers. And of all the things that makes communism miserable, the most miserable thing about it is, they will talk to you and say, "It wasn't 20 million, it was only 6 million. It was only 6 million people that we killed."

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  Okay, all right. So that's what happens when you value the power of the state over the power of the individual. Make your choice, choose wisely. This country's not going to go to these people. The vast majority of the American people are not going to put up for this. And if it turns out that they do, they're going to find out what we're finding out here in California. We're just going to go someplace else. We're going to go someplace else, and if there finally is no place else to go, that's when we'll finally, what we'll use our Second Amendment for.

• 1:28:35Mike Rowe?

  Last question. Do you think the choice in November will be as simple as, here's a party that has disavowed communism and socialism, and here's a party who is not?

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  Well, it could come down to that. The problem with the Republicans is, we've been so, conservatives and Republicans suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. We've been demonized by so many different voices for so long that we're starting to almost agree with them. When Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama in 2012, I said Mitt Romney didn't even believe his own story. They said, "Mitt Romney, you know, you're worth $200 million." And I said, "If I was Mitt Romney," I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not worth $200 million. I'm worth $250 million. I worked really hard for that money. People gave me that money freely in exchange. I don't live 250 million times better than everybody else. I've paid millions and millions and millions of dollars in taxes that have gone to the poor. What have you paid, Mr. Community Organizer?

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  How much money have you actually paid into the system that actually provides meals for poor people? I've put tens of millions of dollars of my own income into that. On top of that, I have hundreds of thousands of employees. I've paid all of their bills, all of their meals, all of their taxes, all of that stuff's gone into the pot. What have you done?" So the problem isn't so much that we're going to be facing that choice. The problem is finding Republicans who are clear-minded enough to be able to go against this social pressure of, "You're a Nazi, you're a this, you're that," and stand up for it. And I'll tell you who does it and who I think is terrific at it and who would be my choice, and that's Marco Rubio. And Marco Rubio, if it turns out in 2028, this does come down to this fight, Marco Rubio will be able to tell you personal stories about communism.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  So here's your last lesson for the day here, folks who are still on the fence about this. There have been hundreds of thousands of people that have had a choice between communism and capitalism, free market economy, a free country.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  No one, no one has ever gotten to a beach in Fort Lauderdale. No dentist ever loaded up his family into the minivan, drove to the beach in Fort Lauderdale, strapped a couple of inner tubes onto a chase lounge, and then set out 60, 90 miles south through shark-infected waters to get to the free healthcare down in Cuba. That's never happened once. The direction of the rafts between Cuba and the United States, if it was 60/40, that would be a pretty strong argument for America, but it's not 60/40, and it's not 75/25, and it's not 90/10, and it's not 95/5, and it's not 99 to 1. It's 100% of the people who move and risk their lives and watch their families drown in the Gulf of Mexico before their eyes, did it to get away from socialism and communism

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  to come to free, to free countries. No one ever got shot at the Berlin Wall trying to get into East Germany. Those are people who paid with their lives. This isn't academic for them. It's not an academic argument. It's not a copy shop argument. It's not a teacher's lounge argument. These are people who've talked about risking their own lives and their families' lives, and not one of them, not one ever in history, ever, was killed, gave their life trying to go from a capitalist society to a communist one. Never. It's never happened.

• 1:31:41Mike Rowe?

  I don't want to get the quote wrong, Chuck, but I believe she said, "Elect more communists."

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes, she did.

• 1:31:48Mike Rowe?

  Okay. Bill, I appreciate it a lot. If I can get you out of your shell next time, I think you're... No, look, it's important, and again, is it persuasive? We'll see.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  I try to be, I try to be fair.

• 1:32:01Mike Rowe?

  Look, you have a platform, and you have a resume, and for what it's worth, I do too, and I don't want to sit this one out. I just don't. I don't want to look back and feel like, oh, well, you know what, you had your foundation, you had this and that, but you kind of, you kind of kept your mouth shut on this one.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  Most people that buy the socialism argument today are good-hearted people.

• 1:32:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  Most of them are good-hearted people. They have purposely, not only been not educated, they have been diseducated about this subject. And they've been diseducated by the kind of people that want to end up with $800 million in their bank account, but they don't want to work for it.

• 1:32:36Mike Rowe?

  To be continued?

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  To be continued. Anytime.

• 1:32:40Mike Rowe?

  Bill Whittle, I'd be remiss to, where should people go? To learn more.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  BillWhittle.com?

• 1:32:45Mike Rowe?

  Clever.

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:32:47Mike Rowe?

  That's with an H.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't forget that H.

• 1:32:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Thanks, Bill.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

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