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

23:52So you've read a lot of history, a lot of philosophy. I've interviewed Ray Dahlio twice. I'm mad at me, he's a fascinating guy. Talking about his cycle of empires and where his kind of thesis is, we're one of six cycles. over the last 500 years and we're kind of at the tipping point here and there's a set of trends that are very common. He says, you know, different characters same act, you know, like it happens over and over again. And we take on too much debt when the country gets wealthy at growth and the economy expands. We start to get offered free money, we take it, we spend it, all of a sudden.

24:26One of the things we had a dinner, a bipartisan dinner with him recently, and one of the things he's saying is the way to get out of this, is what we have to do is we have to get, and this isn't even drag, I think, draconian, we have to get three percent or debt or annual deficit needs to be three percent of GDP. Well, it's six percent now, so we'd have to be cutting out. And I think it's very reasonable, and a lot of people nod in their heads, but it takes a tough vote. Like I voted to raise the age of Social Security, and people said, God, you hate old people. I say, no, I aspire to be an old person.

24:55I want my Social Security, and I want the system to be around for ordinary people, but it's not going to be around unless you raise the age to 70. But it's on way sticks around. It is that in order to get reelected, you have to offer your voter something that they don't have today. And therefore, every election cycle, you have to show up with something else. No one ever gets elected by saying, I'm gonna cut back half or cut back a quarter or 10 % of what you're getting today. You might. But is that the dynamic world? Or is this... I'm positive that you don't have to say, I'm gonna bring them to the back and I'm gonna bring you your freedom.

25:25I'm gonna keep the government out of your lives. And I'm gonna allow you to become richer because freedom and capitalism makes us all richer, and I'm gonna allow you, and it's gonna be mostly unmarried, which is better than the government deciding that. So I think you can say that, and I've said it explicitly, I will never go home with a check saying, we brought you this to your community, because we don't have it, and it has to be borrowed, and that makes us all poor through inflation. It is that fear, though, and the president has bought into this. The president says, so the security we can't talk about, Medicare we can't talk about, and really on Medicaid, 80 severely limited what could be talked about food stamps they they nibbled at it they talked about some good things But most of it's in the distant future and and here's the bottom line I voted against the big beautiful bill because of the debt ceiling But also here's the projections The CBO had a projection that was gonna add three trillion all the Republicans said oh CBO has too low a great road We can't we can't believe the CBO Well, the authors of the bill did something I agreed with.

26:27They said, we're doing it based on policy, and this is what we project, that the taxes will go on, and that they aren't really, we're not giving a tax cut. Most of that is just keeping the same policy. That's not except that. So what are your numbers? The authors of the bill, the Republican supporters of it, said, well, the first 10 years, now the first five years, it's gonna lose 500 billion. So it'll be more 500 billion more in the whole. The second five years, we'll make that up, and we'll go trillion positives, so we'll be plus 500. I believe the first five years, I don't believe the second five years.

26:56And this is from the authors admitting. And the reason you know it's going to lose 500 billion is this. Many tax cuts will pay for themselves over time, but almost all of them have a little bit of dip in revenue in the beginning. It's not a reason to be opposed to tax cuts. It's amazing to at least be wary. Even if you don't count the tax cuts that we already had that we continue, and you count the new ones, there's going to be a little dip in revenue. And maybe some of these weren't that growth -related tips and things like that may not be that growth -led to reduce tax on tips. So that's going to be a dip down.

27:25For the other reason why you know the deficits came better, they put $500 billion of new spending. So from the very beginning, this was Lindsey Graham in the military industrial complex. They wanted more money for the military. They already got an increase in the military last time. This is $150 billion for the military and $150 billion for the border, which I'm for controlling the border. I applaud the president for controlling the border. He didn't need the $150 billion. You may, you know, $20 billion would have probably been enough to secure the border, but nobody's when it comes to that. I saw your hearing where I think you challenged the bill, the amount, the day of the wall, because you kind of went through the numbers and it was pretty striking that.

28:01It was on their website. The next week they changed their website because they didn't like me reciting their website back to them. Right. So where we had it, 37 trillion of debt. If the debt gets financed at five, six percent, which is kind of where interest rates are trending, we're talking about an incremental trillion dollars a year of interest expense. interest expense will probably become too trillion a year. We don't seem to be cutting the budget much. Everyone wants more, everyone wants more budget for their particular interests and their states and whatnot. What's your view on where we're headed over the next 10 years for borrowing a lot of Rand Paul's getting elected to?

28:35Yeah. The government... The government... The left, you know, has this modern monetary theory. And it sounds ridiculous and it is, except that it kind of worked for 10 or 15 years. So, Bush doubled the debt from 5 trillion to 10 trillion, but the interest rates went in half, so those interest payments the same. You know, we went from 5 to 10 trillion with the same interest rate. We played a lot of games to do something similar. So, for the last 10 years or so, or maybe 8 years, we averaged our payment was like 1 .5 percent for the debt. That's what we were paying. Now, it's 3 .5. That's a pretty significant jump.

29:10But I think if they stay where they are, it's going to be even more. where I had a trillion in interest now, could we go to two and what happens? All of these things are fixable. America is a great place because of capitalists. We just need to start fixing them. And it's not even Dracconi, just a little bit at a time. For 12 years, I've been saying, just raise the age three months a year for the next 20 years. And you'll be at 70, you may eventually have to go higher depending on longevity. The other thing you have to do is the age doesn't fix so security anymore. You got to mean -stest it. And the only difference we have with the Democrats on the means testing, well on all of it, if they would agree to any reform, they just want to tax rich people in the beginning.

29:49So there's a limit. Your Social Security tax is going up to about 160 ,000 in their index to kind of keep creeping up a little bit, which I can live with that. But if there's a choice, whether rich people will get less Social Security in the end or we tax them up to $10 million, I'd rather do it in the end because something making $10 million is investing in creating a lot of jobs and I'd rather not stop that. But I don't care for which people have, including me, and I'm not that rich, but I'm an upper middle class, and I would get less so security also. You can fix the system that way. And I think we are so dependent on it that it's hard to go back to a pure system where we develop, it would be worked on charity and private mentions.

30:27But we've got to get started on it. The longer you wait, the more difficult it is to fix. Is there a point of no return that you view as a debt amount to GDP, a debt ratio that I mean, there is a point of return of no return for a catastrophe and I don't know that. If I would, I'd be predicting the day and then I'd be fine and everybody else would get, killed by the calamity. I don't know, you gotta be really smart or lucky to predict those calamities. Like the people who saw the housing crisis were really smart and they figured that happening. So I don't know that. It is going to happen, but I think what's important and I tell people this all the time, you always get your social security check.

31:08you always get your Medicare, it will never end, but it just may not be worth anything. So there will be a point in time when we cut you your check, and there are colas, but what happens when if you're in 1923 and Germany, and you get annual colas, it didn't work so well, because the money was losing 30 % an hour. You know, there were times when the German workers, and it was in 22 or 23, they wanted to be paid at noon, because they didn't wait to the end of the day, because it was depreciating so fast. Colas work for a while, but the cost of living increases. But they are somewhat of a game. You have a problem.

31:43You're creating this inflation. You hate to punish people so you give them a cola. But the cola comes once a year. Part of the breaking point for all this stuff that has cola's on is when you need to do it every month. So that's much higher inflation. And we've been extraordinarily lucky. And I've never really seen anybody write this as I think detailed as that could be. I think we've exported our inflation. I think we've created so much more inflation than we have, but because we import more than we export, we pay them in the dollars. Some of them find their way back into our stock market, and they're our stock market up, but you can go to two dozen countries around the world and they're trading in your dollars.

32:21So the actual physical dollar never comes back on some of these trades. And so I think if you took what the M1's going up, what the money's going up, and I think you looked at it, some of it disappeared. Then they play the games with paying interest to keep it in the fed, which I've got to build to eliminate that right now. And that bills cost -bonsored by Bernie Sanders. We paid $188 billion the Fed did in interest to banks not to loan money. Most of them went to five banks in New York, the big five, but 40 % of them went to foreign banks. So the Fed's buying our interest with fake money. The taxpayer still has to pay the interest back to the Fed.

32:57The Fed used to use it as profit and give it back to the Treasury. It's a weird game. But now instead of at least playing the weird game, they're giving it to rich people. So this is something reminiscent of the Occupy Wall Street movement where you got right and left coming together. The free market is not dumb to this, it seems, right? So the global free market, dollar reserves according to the IMF report on central bank holdings have declined in the last decade. So it's been shown the dollar reserves have declined from 60 % to 40 % in last 10 years. Meanwhile, gold has doubled from 10 to 20 % of central bank holdings.

33:34And as a result, we're seeing gold prices, I think $3 ,600 an ounce as of yesterday. What do you think is the path here for the dollar? Like maybe we can just kind of talk to the average person listening. Where's this taking us? Because the market wakes up to this and they're saying these dollars aren't really what they used to be. I think there are two scenarios. One is the one we're used to and that's the gradual scenario. then the Fed tries to intervene to try to control inflation. I think they can, but I've always asked this question to very smart bankers and things. Is there a point in time at which the Fed doesn't control its restraints?

34:10Many times they'll say, well, the Fed doesn't really control the long -term interest rates after the daily stuff that it's really controlled by the marketplace. But when is there a time in which it just becomes out of control? So you have the government shows up and says they want to sell 20 billion dollars with the debt and nobody shows up and the Fed has to buy all of it. I think right now of our 36 trillion dollar debt, the Fed has about a third of it. What foreign governments have about a third and then the marketplace has about a third. What happens when the private marketplace doesn't show up?

34:44Is there a time in which you have a Friday, they do it on Fridays, I think you do a Friday sale and nobody shows up and fed by the whole thing. What do you think happens to that Monday? Do you think you'd be trying to prepare to sell some stock, you know, overnight before Monday opens? And then I think you could have a calamity. And some of it can be fixed. And some of it we live on a house of cards because most people don't know this and I don't want to scare your audience with a scary audience if I tell too much. It's great. It's going to get clicks and views. Yeah, okay, this is very scary.

35:19So you have a thousand dollars in your checking account, and you go to the bank and you want all of it. That only works if a few of you go, because the bank I think only holds 10 % of your checking account. Now, I want the bank to loan money, so I give them a thousand dollars in a CD. They pay me two percent, and they loan it out for three percent, and that's how banks traditionally make it money. But they have a game, I have a racket. It's called fractional reserves system, and it works until it doesn't work. And once a bunch of people go crazy at bank run and we've had bank runs even back the 19th century We nearly had one with Silicon Valley bank two years ago exactly exactly But it's really based on that and I haven't been as involved exactly with what the rate should be But I I think I'm loading out 90 % of your checking account is a recipe for a bank run And we don't have it because we just print more and we flood the system with liquidity when when people get get skittish But there's a time at which they can't control that and it's coming, but I try to get back to simple things because I don't know when that's gonna happen Maybe it's not gonna happen.

36:18The simple thing is you spend what comes in most people do you borrow if you have an asset that the bank can hold like your house or something This is what normal people do and they spend what comes in your government should behave that way and the same way There are ramifications to you personally if you overspend you'll ultimately be punished It's going to happen to us and so the first thing we do We don't even need to think about the 36 trillion. We need to think about the 2 trillion we're borrowing next. And that number needs to be smaller. But I can tell you people aren't getting it. I asked the Secretary of Treasury Secretary Bissent about this.

36:51I said, you guys are spouting all these numbers. The big, beautiful bill. And it's going to be great. And there's going to be no more debt. And all the Saudis are going to invest $20 trillion in our country. And we're all be rich. And it said, but the number I'm concerned about is, will the deficit be bigger or smaller next year? And he said, well, in terms of the GDP it will. But even that's not going to be true. The deficit next year, this year, the one we're in, it's gonna end in about three weeks. It's gonna be about 1 .9 something trillion. And that's gonna be about 150, 160 billion worse than last year.

37:25And as a percentage of GDP, I think it's going from six to about 6 .2. So we are getting worse. And it isn't, I don't say this because I wanna be mean and get the wrath of Donald Trump. I say this because as Republicans we need to be for balanced budgets, less spending, no matter who's in the White House, and it's going to take some back and forth with the President to get there. Well, I want to introduce another kind of frightening metric and statistics. So, by my estimate, and this is not reported by anyone, this is just me doing some addition in an Excel spreadsheet, somewhere around 40 to 50 % of the American workforce age population earn their income from directly from a government or a government contractor.

38:08If 40 to 50 % of Americans are employed directly or indirectly by a federal, state or local government or government contractor or earn their income from a government check, can we actually reduce spending. And this is a real problem when you look at our spending as a percentage of GDP, spending part, the 7 trillion, the average of the last five years is about 26%. Right now we're at 23 or 24 % of GDP. And I love it because the people say, well, we'll just have tariffs and we'll run the government off tariffs. And I said, well, when they did that the 19th century government was 3 % of GDP. I'm for that.

38:46You bring me spending bills and I'll vote for all of them to make us a 19th century government of 3 % of GDP and I'll vote for all your tariffs. But that's a big change and it is a problem and it's sort of a two -fold problem. The people are actually working for government. You got to make government smaller so we don't have as many government jobs. But the other segment is worrisome if not more and that is the people not participating in the workforce. They're getting money but they're not participating. It's like 38, 40%, 42%, depending on the state. So 40 % of the people eligible to work, able to work, and not working.

39:20And this is, you know, libertarians had this debate like what do you do? Some of them don't want any border controls. And they say, and my dad used to say, this is not kind of agree with this part, you need to build a wall around the welfare state and don't give any people coming into the country, a legal any access to your welfare state. And I still agree with that part. I think you still have to have border security too. And you have to push back on millions of people coming all at once. But there is a problem. If you had, like for example, and people will tell you this in that have tomatoes or anything else, the things that require hand -picking, you won't have enough people.

39:56But you would have enough people for Americans work, but a whole chunk, 40 % of them aren't working you should. But if you want to expel 20 million people from the country and do that, you have to simultaneously quickly, quit paying the people not to work or you won't have enough workers. There is also this argument, there was an economist by the name of Julian Simon, and it was a big promoter of this. Populations actually proportional to wealth. So it's trade. You look at big large charts over decades and decades. The more trade you have, the wealthier you have. The more people you have, the wealthier you have.

40:30And there was a famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon about five different commodities. and whether it be more rare after like a 10 -year period. Julian Simon, the Libertarian economist, wins this bet because basically, he said the real resource, the real ultimate resource is the mind, it's the ingenuity. Nobody would have imagined, even in my lifetime, they'll concept of AI. We didn't even imagine smartphones or cell phones. We didn't imagine all of these things. And we're gonna have these big debates, maybe bigger than everything we've discussed whether or not we're going to succumb to the Luddite philosophy or whether we're going to believe that we will overcome, not only overcome, but technology, we will succeed in technology.

41:15It doesn't mean you can just sit there and do nothing. You have to adapt with the times and move forward, but the people breaking the looms were wrong. You think this transition with AI in our economy and our society will actually create such significant productivity gains that jobs will proliferate, that we can get people off of the welfare, where off of government jobs and into the private workforce, because they're... I don't know if it fixes that problem, but I am of the opinion that I don't fear technology in general. And I was having this conversation really with one of the world's richest men, and he told me, yeah, that's fine.

41:48And I've been with you, and I'm not for the Luddites except for, and I said, well, the human's away. You got to have humans to make robots. He says the first generation. The second generation of robots will be made by the robots. And I guess it doesn't resonate with me because I have such a profound belief in the ingenuity of mankind that I think it is limitless. And I don't think that we need to smash the computers. I don't think we have to break, you know, somehow shut down the chip companies and say we're all going to be able to work. I do think, though, there'll be a time that we will have such great leisure that we will actually choose to work.

42:27can always tell people this anyway. I want everybody in America to work, not as punishment, but as reward. There is a reward to working. And I think even if all jobs were eliminated, you'd have sort of like secret societies where you can go someplace and it'll be underground, and you have to do it under threat of death, but you can go and work. You know, even if we have no work. There will be people who want to have work. We did need to have yoga classes and pilates classes and massage therapists and many of the luxuries that we take for granted today that simply didn't exist 100 years ago when the Industrial Revolution, the Second Industrial Revolution was underway.

43:00And as we fast forward the next few decades, I think our life, and this is one of Pinkner's points is just labor per capita, like labor hours has gone down. Steadily, we've given ourselves more free time with the leverage we've created on human time. He does this and so does Marion Tupi at human progress. They talk about time hours. And so did the William Northhouse. It was the famous example, maybe when the first from Yale, who was the economist who wrote about how many hours of work it takes to get light for a year to read by. And it was like in the 19th century, because you had to have candles and it was like 10 ,000 hours of work or maybe it was the thousand hours of work to have nighttime light to read by.

43:41It's 10 seconds of work, gives you an entire year with a light. That productivity increased, nobody could fathom. And all the loadites, you know, hate that kind of stuff. and it's like, it's not gonna happen, and we need to take the pitch fork and the ax to the computers. Now, we'll figure it out. I do think though that the AI people, and once again, I'm not a genius on AI, I don't write code, I don't know any of that. But I think it's overstated that how great AI is gonna be. I think it's gonna be a lot of cool things. And I think some people are gonna get caught. We're gonna have too many data centers at one point, and I don't care how much electricity they're sucking, but at the same time, I think we're gonna have too many of them because people will say, the one thing I see they do really well now is they are great adjacent to things.

44:28I've looked up political questions even today on what happens if we end the reverse repos at the Federal Reserve and it gives a pretty good explanation. It's a faster, it isn't smarter than humans. It's much faster at doing the search that I could have done manually by using the Google search engine, but these things just kill. And I wonder whether that's, you know, everybody, oh, we got to break up Google because I have them not been in search engines. I wonder how long it will take until and maybe it's already happening that AI will make Google less of a dominant search engine. This was actually in the court ruling yesterday, the judge that decided to not break up Google.

45:05There was a write up on the rise of AI showing a point of view. And that I'm in favor of on multiple levels, but I think it's also cool. Nobody would have predicted, oh, Google's going to have everything in the whole world. Let markets work. I'll send something, comes in new. AI like any other technology prior provides leverage on human time and therefore leverage on human capital. And when you get a higher ROI on capital, you generally have more capital flow in, not less. So people will invest more in people. They will pay more to people. They will hire more people as AI tools are utilized. They're just going to increase productivity for every person.

45:39That's a great way of putting it. And I hadn't thought of that because that fits with my sort of Adam Smith model that the extent of our prosperity is the extent of the division of labor. And so if AI gives me for more free time, you know, then I'm going to be smarter and I'm going to think up other ideas and maybe we will get to Mars, you know. I just want to ask your point on Doge. There was a lot of proclamations at the start of this administration about the importance of Doge, Elon Musk's role in the administration. The president and others in the administration declared Doge such an important part of the efforts and all the cabinet members were incorporating Doge team members into their work.

46:14today is Doge dead. No, I still meet with people in government who I think are part of Doge, where probably colleagues and friends of Elon Musk and brought into the situation. I think they've been a great addition because one, there are people who know about profit and loss and there are people who have been successful in business. And the fact that they've been selected by the marketplace is being successful. People mean so good people to have in government. Is it everything I'd wished? No, but that's not the Doge people fall. All that's people resisting those and resisting the cuts. I like the fact that the president pushed on with another round of the foreign aid cuts and he's doing this pocket resision.

46:52And I am a stickler for the rules and for the Constitution. The Constitution is very explicit on how you spend it, but it's pretty silent on not spending up. I think the best way for people to have their doubts about whether they should do it is, imagine we need an aircraft carrier and we hire somebody who looks at every nut and bolt like Elon Musk and his rockets. We hire Elon Musk and we give him a billion dollars and he says, This is crazy. I can do this for 800 million like this. And he probably can. And that's probably two of every aircraft carrier we have. So he does it for 800 million. Should we be forced to spend the 200 million that this person found in savings?

47:25Should we go to Las Vegas and have a big convention for all the GSA people with champagne and everything? No, it's ridiculous. The money should go back to the Treasury. Now the appropriators on both sides, they'll say no, it's been appropriated, should be spent. But sort of ignores the fact that we're $2 trillion over a budget. If you had a balanced budget, you could argue, well, we wanted to be spent. If you have two trillion dollars in the hole, if you don't spend it, we should be applauding the savings and the money should go back to the treasury. So I'm with them on the resision stuff. I want more of the doge cuts.

47:55I'm all for it, but the pushback, and it's bipartisan, the pushback, it's the spenders. It's the big spenders in both parties that have pushed back on doge, but I still wish from success and still and for them. I was struck by how many Senate confirmation hearings I watched were senators blatantly spoke on camera about the need to keep dollars flowing to their state. And that was the motivation. It just drove me nuts. Anyway, we'll move on. I want to talk about your new book, Deception, the Great COVID cover -up. What was it the heart of the cover -up from your point of view? Some people get nervous when you talk about cover -up or conspiracy.

48:30They're like, oh, you're one of those crazy people. And I think the best way to think of a conspiracy is the way George Carlin put it. George Carlin said that it's not necessary to have a cabal of people that are all evil, that get together in a room to have a conspiracy. All that's necessary is to have a convergence of interest. The convergence of interest in COVID was holy crap. We funded this. And so if you are Anthony Fauci and you know that you've made a deal to do very dangerous research in China, one, because there's less oversight in China and there's complaints beginning to circulate in America.

49:05let's outsource us to China. What's your first thought? We gotta cover this up. And that's exactly what he was doing. The phone calls went on in my book. My wife helped me write it. We go on and vivid detail of the minute by minute of him going to three in the morning that first night. Email is going back and forth and back and forth. Jeremy Ferrar is his counterpart at Welcome Trust in England. He is saying, I didn't know what a burner phone was. I had to buy a burner phone. My wife said I should talk to my brother, bring him in, and case something happens to me. And then he goes on to say, it was no big deal.

49:43It turns out it just came from animals. It's like, well, you think the animals are gonna kill you? Why are you getting a burner phone? Why are you giving your last rights to your brother? These people were very concerned, maybe not that they were gonna be killed by foreign agents, but that the public was gonna find out that they had been funding this very dangerous research and that millions of people die because of lack of oversight. But I go through the emails. There's never been a more extraordinary cover -up in the sense that these people were saying in public the opposite of what they were saying in private.

50:16So freedom of information became the tool that uncovered a lot of this. And thousands of people helped to get this done. But in private Anthony Fauci is saying, I'm 50 -50, whether this came from the lab or animals. In publicly saying, you're a conspiracy theorist and you should be treated as crazy and that we should Expunge you or we should expose you we should Bring you down him and Francis Collins are talking back and forth about bringing down Jay Batacharya and All of the others that were exposing this stuff This is it's extraordinary. We have the with the proof you're saying they knew That their funded research which was done in China because there was less oversight is what ultimately led to the development of SARS -CoV -2 and it escaped from the lab.

51:02They knew there was a high, everything's a proportion, everything is a percentage. They knew there was a high chance it was and they chose to cover it up because in the book I say, this is about the business of science. This isn't about science, it's about the business of science and people have to realize there are some good people in this world, there are good scientists who want to cure cancer, but there are many people getting millions of dollars. There's nothing against money, I'm all for money and good people should be paid for important discoveries, but they shouldn't be paid not to tell us the truth and it should be exposed.

51:32I think all the scientists should have to reveal their royalties, not one scientist in government reveals their royalties. Some of them are now getting millions of dollars in this stuff. Pfizer paid 800 million and Moderna paid 400 million and they've taken that money and now they put it in a foundation that I have no oversight in government. A government has no oversight of, there's an NIH foundation that has $1 .2 trillion in it given from Big Pharma for their share of the COVID vaccine. So, no, it's an extraordinary thing where in private they were very open to the fact, leaning towards and in favor of the fact that the virus came from a lab.

52:09In public, they were disdainful. They got Facebook to take all our crap down. They got Facebook to take down the discussion of it as a conspiracy. That's an evil thing to do and it's dishonest. It's not just you're a bad person. If you were in the government and you were leading people astray as to the cause of something, is you find it, you deserve to be punished really in a criminal way. I saw your heated exchange with Fauci. There was a video, it's about nine minutes long, when viral, you're questioning Fauci about gain of function research. And I just wanna talk about the origin of gain of function research, because it's a term of art that's got different definitions, right, depending on who you ask, Fauci obviously disagreed with the definition.

52:51What's your view as a doctor, as someone who's worked in science, and as a political leader about the role that government should play in researching ahead of the curve so that understanding what may come next, which I think is part of the argument for some of this research that we need to understand how viruses can evolve so that we can prepare for the next pandemic because if we don't there will be a congressional hearing saying why didn't you prepare enough? So there's different aspects to this. Should we know how viruses of all of absolutely? Should we test viruses and infections from different natural sources?

53:27Yes. Gain of function is different than that. Gain of function is forcing evolution in a direction. So gain of function is I take a rat and I put human lungs in it, not little human lungs, but I have a, they will express receptors that make cells think that they're invading a human. So I give it a virus and I run it through and nine rats survive and one sick of shit. What I do is I take the really sick one, I culture the virus out and I do it again. And every time I just keep cultureing it until I get a virus that really attaches to human cells. We believe COVID is that because most animal viruses, the avian flu right now, if the avian flu is not manipulating a lab, it can infect a human but doesn't go human to human.

54:08It has trouble. That's why animal viruses are. When COVID started, it hit humans and went everywhere. It just, there was nothing stopping it, which made us think it was pre -adapted. There are many other reasons why we think this happens. But as far as gain of function, and what should be regulating, what shouldn't. One, it's very dangerous. Viruses are more dangerous than bacteria if they're aerosolized. Something can spread through the air can be incredibly dangerous. Lethality. Should you increase the lethality of it? Some of these viruses start with 50 % lethality. And if you want to know what that's like, Reed Barber took men's about the 14th century calamity and the Black bag.

54:42When a third of Europe died, I mean, we're talking about setting back civilization, hundreds of years. We're talking about entering the stone age. We, some people think we could lose 10 % of our population and we wouldn't get chlorine in the water. We'd no longer have potable water and we would have riots like you've never seen in just a disaster. So, aerosolization, increasing the lethality, increasing the transmissibility are all dangerous things. They did all of that and yet he argued, oh, you can't have gain of function unless it was intentional. And it's like, well, if you're running it through humanized mice or rats, you're pushing it, you're pushing its evolution to be infectious in humans.

55:21And, you know, he basically lied. One day he came and they had actually changed the definition on his website the day before. So they knew I'd been arguing that it was going to function. They actually literally changed the definition on the website to say, oh, it matched the definition. You would still support research into where viruses are headed and protecting the population and doing this research, but not in this directed engineered way. Right. So there's a big difference. And even many, some of the people support Fauci actually support me on this. Identifying viruses, mostly a good idea, but still you have to think about it.

55:54Well, all these viruses are 300 feet underground in these enormous bat caves in South China. So should you go down 300 feet underground and just randomly get as many as you can and take them back to a lab and woo on? Well, there's the danger that one you got is the one that's going to kill all of mankind, but maybe it was never getting up and other viruses would dominate it and never was getting up to service. You should check the humans who live around the cave. You should check viruses that get up into our world. I'm not sure you should bring viruses from very remote areas to big cities. But then it's worse than that.

56:24The big virus identification, which sounds benign, they were taking the coronaviruses, they were taking a backbone of it, and they have a new one they found in a cave. They were taking the S protein off a new one and sticking it on a backbone. The backbone is infectious, and the warning note does it make it more or less infectious. Well, that's really a recipe for discovering something that maybe as a disaster, it isn't helping. And most of the people who follow this that oppose gain of function say no gain of function research has developed any vaccines. But here's further, I think I'll compromise in a moderation of this.

56:57I don't want to ban it. I want to set up a presidential commission of scientists who are not currently employed by NIH don't have grants that I can and give them bigger grants if they agree with me. And I want them to evaluate this. But not only do they need to evaluate the civilian side of this, they need to evaluate the classified side. Because here's what happens in our government. I don't only know this much, because they won't tell me either. They say, well, the Chinese are doing this. Well, then we need to do it. You have to, oh, the Chinese are doing this. They're working with Norbert virus.

57:27I'm just making this part up of which virus. They're dealing with this very dangerous virus. Well, we should too. That is basically the logic and what it takes to get a research grant in the classified area that the Chinese are doing it. Well, you know, we might have an accident doing something that Chinese are doing that the Chinese shouldn't be doing and we should be trying to stop them from doing, but we could kill the world also through an accident. Even the safest labs in our country have dozens of accidents every year. Fair enough. Do you feel like there's been an erosion of public trust in science and scientific institutions in this country?

58:01And importantly, When people lose faith in science, which is meant to be the source for objective truth, a process by which we discover the truth through testing and experimentation, hypothesizing testing and experimentation, and looking at the results objectively, does it not create space for people to come in with untruths and convince the public of untruths being true? Right, absolutely. And so the biggest one they're talking about now is vaccine hesitancy. So, and people say, oh, it's all the right wing. It's people crazy on the right wing that are creating this vaccine hesitancy. And I say, well, if you tell people things that aren't true, they become distrustful of all science.

58:40So I'll tell you one right now, I've had this back and forth with Bill Cassidy, the center from Louisiana, and with other members of the establishment medical community. Does your two -day -old need a hepatitis B vaccine? I just went through this personally. And we opted not to, and we have to deal with it in the school, and we've been having this debate about how we did the same thing. We did it later on in school. But here's the thing, does your two -day -old name, there's one indication for your two -day -old get it. Mom has hepatitis B, and you have to within 12 hours give them the vaccine, and you have to give them immunoglobulin, which is like a monoclonal antibody against hepatitis.

59:16But they test it already. So if the mom does not have hepatitis B, is there any indication that hepatitis B, no? In fact, you know what the honest people will tell you? They'll say, oh no, but we have you there, and we can get much better compliance by forcing it and pushing it in the hospital. The other problem is this. There's so many problems on so many levels. The hepatitis B vaccine wears off. When does it wear off about 10 to 12 years? When might you want to knock your kid for hepatitis B? If you are worried about your teenager getting involved in sex, drugs, and rock and roll and IV drugs?

59:45That's when it's going to happen. You might consider the hepatitis B vaccine plus he's 12 years old at that point and much much bigger, stronger, and able to take whatever you give them. But they are creating vaccine hesitancy on this because they're lying to us. They're absolutely lying to us. COVID vaccine the same. People think I'm anti -vaccine. My age, I'm 62, I probably would have taken it. I'm still a little livid on some of the details, but the reason I didn't take is I got infected in March of 2020. I had it and I didn't take the vaccine. But would I give it to my five year old right now?

1:00:15Hell no, wouldn't have. Would I have given it to him in March of 2020? I don't want to know because all of the initial evidence out of China was children, they weren't even sure if they were getting sick. When they started doing the testing, they found out they were all getting it, and they weren't getting sick. It's like a lot of social discourse and politics. It's become so binary. There's no nuance and there's no gray area for a conversation about some of these makes sense. Some of them do not. Why can't we agree that we can each have a different point of view on that? And most of Europe doesn't do the COVID vaccine or push it on goods.

1:00:41So I think I blame them and actually do want people to believe in science. I come from a scientific background. I've had papers published in scientific journals. You know, I come for that background, but you have to be honest with people. And I also believe people are smarter. You don't have to have a PhD to know people who are lying to you about the epivaxing. Just today, Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un stood together in Beijing very dramatic show of strength and unity as a group. What does it mean for America to be in competition with China? Is this going to evolve into a conflict from your point of view?

1:01:16or is there a way to carry the world forward where we all have prosperity, where we all progress, where all society succeed, where they cooperate, and we have a multipolar world that doesn't dictate a winner and a loser. Do we really need American primacy? The shorter answer is yes. The longer answer is more complicated. Graham Allison wrote a book, the Thucydides Trap. We interviewed him at our show last night. He's amazing. Really bright cry. And a guy in fond of, he talks about up and coming powers and is war inevitable. And interesting, and I don't know if this commander, but I met with one of the Pacific Fleet Manders.

1:01:49I don't want to name him because I don't want to, his conversation, but he said, when you go back to Washington, make sure they know that war with China is not inevitable. And I think it's a profound statement from a guy who's gonna be in charge of the war out there fighting on the front lines. And I think it is very possible. And I think it gets back to fallacies. Can you trade with China where you both get rich and it's not there ripping us off? I think yes. And I think that is the truth of the matter since 1975 on, we've had a trade deficit every year and we got rich and so did they, are there problems in dislocations in industry?

1:02:20Yeah, but I would actually argue what killed the steel industry or hurt the steel industry the most in this, in this country was actually protectionism. They've been protected for a lot, well, one, antitrust killed them first when they broke up US steel and that became less competitive with foreigners because they were smaller. But then the second thing that went after them is we did try to protect them. This is in the first time we tried to protect steel. We've been trying to protect steel as we protected steel, what did it do? Did it breed better and more profound market decisions or worse decisions?

1:02:50So if you're selling me chairs and I tell you, you sell them for $50, I can say, well, we'll put a tariff on you, sell them for $100. You're gonna be more efficient or less. You won't make us wise a decision because you're being protected from the competition. And so all of that happened with steel industry, but I think we can, we have to get through the fallacy part, but we also have to understand that I think we're pushing in the wrong direction. There's a possibility. People think we're going to defeat them and we're going to come out on top because we're so great and protectionism is going to show how great we are.

1:03:19But them all meeting together to me shows one other possibility and I don't know what will happen, nobody does. But there's one possibility that it finally unites them enough that they do everything in their power not to use the dollar and maybe they can displace the dollar. They already try in their transactions. And so I think we use the stick in foreign policy and you have to have it but we should have a carrot offered as well. I just met with some Syrian Americans today, physicians mostly in intellectuals and engineers and things, and they want to get rid of the sanctions on Syria. And I say, finally, now they did like that.

1:03:55I think this group liked the sanctions before, but they want to get rid of them. Finally, somebody wants to get rid of the sanctions because there has to be a reward. And so even with countries we find distasteful and often are distasteful, Iran, there has to be an offer somehow to get rid of the sanctions. I would send my diplomats to China. I'll give you a great example. Blinken and Yellen went to China and they were screaming, pitching a fit and telling the Chinese how bad they were. One that's not very good diplomacy, but they wanted them to stop selling dual use parts to Ukraine. I mean to Russia and the Ukraine war.

1:04:28And so I say, well, it's a reasonable goal. But had I been in charge, I would send my diplomats to China and I would say, look, the Chinese don't like to lose face. They don't like you insulting them in their own country. Quietly say, you know, this sanction, I think, is costing you about $50 billion worth of wealth. We'll remove it, but you've got to quit selling them the dual use. They would never admit that we pushed them into doing it. It's a trade and it's transactional. And diplomacy sometimes needs to be that. We have a lot of people, both in Congress and in involved administrations, who are much more black and white, that there are good and bad people in the world, and the bad people need to die, and we need to defeat them utterly.

1:05:07And I wish they would die and go away, but you know, I can't, that kind of attitude. We're gonna be waiting a long time if we think sanctions is gonna get rid of the Communist Party in China. Capitalism might someday, and everybody complain, well, dank shouting, open it up, and they still have repression and capitalism. It's true, but I think you might argue, and this isn't a great argument for what current China, but the China may be a better place than it was under Mao. I mean, people have been there tell me that it definitely is. 10X Improvement in GDP per capita. Visit a modern Chinese city.

1:05:36It's like living in the future. People are very happy, it seems, despite the... But not an argument for socialism, but an argument that most of that's actually due to the amount of capitalism they've allowed to come in. There's an interview with the guys from the... I think it was the Hoover Institution, and it was actually the entrepreneurism in the country. Political future for you, Senator, are you thinking maybe you could run for president again in the future? You know, I think it depends on what happens in the next year or two. I think there needs to be a voice within our party that is more libertarian free market.

1:06:07I think we have populism and protectionism covered, and I think there will be many errors and many people competing to be errors of Donald Trump in the protectionist front. I don't think it's good for our country, and I think it will make us less wealthy, and ultimately could really lead to a calamity. If things are rosy in three or four years, and the economy's percolating long, and it is a possibility. It is a possibility that the tariffs, as bad as I think they are, are not a big enough percentage of the overall GDP to slow things down that capitalism is still vibrant enough to overcome the tariffs.

1:06:37There's a distinct possibility. If that's true, we'll get more tariffs and we'll get another protectionist populist president. I wanna be that voice, whether it's in the Senate or running for the presidency, I don't know. I think right now, all things given, free markets and free trade isn't very popular right now. People are all making excuses for why we should own Intel, howard, Latinx thinks that's part of that capitalism and you know that tariffs are lowering taxes and all the gobbledygook that makes no sense. If that if the economy is still percolated and all people may still accept that nonsense that's truth.

1:07:12I've been to DC a number of times in the last year to I always tell people I'm disappointed when I meet with members of Congress when I come back from DC because I hear the same thing over and over I don't see a progressive voice that actually speaks to where this nation needs to go. I often consider myself a libertarian. So I want to thank you for your service, for your leadership, for your voice. Thank you for being here today. Thank you. I'm doing all you.

1:07:48I'm doing all of you!