Joe Rogan Experience: #2437 with Rand Paul (Transcript)

It was back when we were testing every day. We would test all the guests, we would test all the staff before we did the show. And I came in and I had the sniffles. That’s it. And they said, you have COVID. And I was like, this is hilarious.

RAND PAUL: And I understand you did so well because your personal doctor was Sanjay Gupta. That clip of you and he on the program is my favorite clip of all time.

The CNN Campaign Against Joe Rogan

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know what he thought was going to happen. I think he just thought he was going to come in here and CNN was going to send their medical mercenary in with all his knowledge. But you can’t argue with someone when you can’t use facts. So he didn’t have any fact at his disposal and he was working for a network that was openly lying about me taking veterinary medicine.

Like, the whole thing was surreal. And for someone who is, you know, up until 2020, I mean, I was reasonably distrustful of mainstream news, but in a normal way, like, I’m sure they bend things a little bit or twist things a little bit. I would have never thought I would watch a campaign against me like that where every night it was “horse dewormer, horse dewormer, Joe Rogan, dangerous conspiracy theories, COVID Denier, vaccine Denier.” I was like, this is fascinating.

The Danger of Consensus Medicine

RAND PAUL: I think it brings up a broader question too, that when people tell you there’s a consensus and because the consensus exists, you cannot object. I think that’s a real danger to openness, to new ideas. But it’s also a danger in medicine and in medicine to say, “This is the consensus and we’re not going to do this.”

So in the first month of this, maybe first or second month, Fauci comes in and I said, you know, many people who die from the flesh eating bacteria, which is not the same, but it’s a serious illness, what they give them to try to treat them to prevent death and loss of limbs is high dose IV steroids. And I had a friend whose life was saved, he didn’t lose any of his limbs and he had this terrible illness.

And so I asked Anthony Fauci, I said, “Do you think there’s a chance as they’re getting very, very sick and their lungs are filling up with fluid, that we could try high dose IV steroids like we do in other infections?” He says, “Oh, no, no, we’ve tried that.”

Turns out, and we mention this in the book, the best treatment, when you were just about to go on the ventilator or on the ventilator when you have a 50% chance of dying at that point was IV steroids, an old generic medicine that big Pharma doesn’t make much money off of.

JOE ROGAN: Which steroids in particular were they using?

RAND PAUL: It’s called Solu-Medrol, but it’s just IV steroids. And it was a 36% reduction in death, which is pretty significant when you’re in the ICU. The people in the ICU were very, very sick. A third of them had a reduction in death by taking IV steroids. But he was dismissing it from the very beginning and already acting like, “Oh, I know it’s not going to work, and we’re going to try remdesivir,” which turned out not to work very well.

Fauci’s History with Dangerous Drugs

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, it gives people kidney failure. Well, I mean, he has a history of using medicine that has already been through the approval rating with, you know, what they did with AZT during the pandemic of AIDS. And that proved to be horrific, a terrible disaster. It’s just amazing that the same guy ran the same playbook, you know?

RAND PAUL: Yeah, no, and it was really sad. And the other thing about natural immunity that needed to be brought up is so all the people that were declared essential kept working. Like if you worked in a meat processing plant.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

Essential Workers and Natural Immunity

RAND PAUL: These are hardworking people. Many of them, you know, they’re busting their butt all day long. And there’d be like 296 people at a meat packing place in Missouri. All of them got COVID-19. Most of them survived. But what we should have been telling them is two weeks after you got it, come back to work, you don’t have to wear a mask now. You’ve had it, you have immunity. You won’t spread it to your family. And guess what? All the unknown about whether you’re going to die or not, you survived and you’re done.

But instead we tell people you might get it again and you still might die, and you got to wear a mask all day long, when in reality, we should have been celebrating the people who recovered and letting them have their freedom back.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there was also this kooky thing where after you got over the disease, they wanted you to get vaccinated, which was strange. It was almost like they wanted you to join the team. Like, take the blood oath.

Vaccinating People Who Already Had COVID

RAND PAUL: Yeah. I met a man in Orange County, and his mom was like 83, and she was very sick, and she ultimately died from COVID probably. But she went to the hospital with COVID. They wouldn’t admit her until she was vaccinated for COVID, while she had COVID, which is actually against all recommendations.

And this is the problem with the mass vaccination thing. If you’re going to Walgreens, do you think they ask you if you’ve had COVID recently before they gave you a shot? And so really, the best medical recommendation for a young person is one, you don’t need the COVID vaccine, but you certainly shouldn’t be taking it close to when you’ve had an infection because you’ve got an immune response that’s going against the disease, then you add in another stimulant to it that’s actually related to an increase in the rate of the heart inflammation that comes along with vaccinating some of the young people.

Vaccine Liability Protection

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s also the weirdness of what happened during the Reagan administration with vaccines, where they’re no longer liable for any vaccine injuries. And when you call this a vaccine, it’s very different than any vaccine that had ever been used before, but yet you have all of these injuries that people have no recourse.

RAND PAUL: My dad was in Congress at the time and voted against, you know, giving them the liability protection. And he also was there when they had the swine flu epidemic. And in that more people died from the swine flu vaccine. And I think there were no deaths from swine flu. I said, “Oh, it’s going to take over the world, and, you know, we’re going to lose, you know, 5% of our public.” Nobody died. The epidemic quickly stopped.

But then several people got Guillain-Barré and a few people died from the vaccine. And I’m not against vaccines. Look, there’s many miracles to vaccines, but they should be used judiciously, and the risks and benefit for each individual. And it turns out COVID had an age differential that was more significant, probably, than any disease we’ve ever seen. It really was an old person’s disease.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, an old person and people with comorbidities.

RAND PAUL: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: It was really bad for obese people.

The Religious Belief in Vaccines

But, you know, the disease aside, what was it like for you to watch this play being run? Because that’s essentially what it was. It was like there was a play being run and you had to follow whatever their narrative was to the T or you’d be attacked. I mean, and you would see these people that were acting like soldiers for the pharmaceutical drug complex. I mean, they would go out there and just brutally attack anybody who deviated from the narrative, say the most awful things, talk about how there was blood on your hands and like, it was very strange.

RAND PAUL: Well, the belief in the vaccines and the belief that you should do it was like a religious belief, and that’s the way they treated it. So if you didn’t believe in it, you were someone to be demonized as a non-believer, you were to be cast out, and you weren’t patriotic if you weren’t wearing a mask.

And even if I’ve already had it, I’m walking down the hallway between the office buildings and the Capitol and all those reporters, they’re 22 years old, most of them are journalist majors. They never had a science course in their life.

The Reality of Natural Immunity

RAND PAUL: And they’re lecturing me about why I should be wearing a mask. And it’s like I already had the disease. I’ve healed up. Three weeks. I don’t need to wear a mask. I’ve got immunity. Well, how do you know that? But even in the beginning, when they said they didn’t know, they did know.

We had an outbreak in 2003. It was a different coronavirus. It was the first SARS virus. But we knew that those people, 17 years later, still had T cells and still had immunity to it.

One of my favorite stories, and we include this in the book, was there was a woman, and she was 102. She goes to the hospital, and they bring her family in. They’re talking to her daughter, who’s 85, says, we don’t think your mom’s going to make it. And she said, have you met my mom? And she survived.

But while she was there, they decided to test her for antibodies to the Spanish flu, because when she was six months old, her mother was coming across the Atlantic. Her mom died from the Spanish Flu. She got it, survived. They tested her. 100 years later, she still had antibodies to the Spanish Flu. So immunity lasts a long damn time.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. But what was it like being in the government and seeing all this play out and that it was illogical. It didn’t make any sense. But yet everyone was following the playbook.

The Mask Theater in Congress

RAND PAUL: Well, people without any kind of scientific background were lecturing people. Sherrod Brown from Ohio was the senator. He was the worst. He would stop the proceedings and start pointing and yelling at me for not having a mask in the house. They made him wear the mask. And so you got everybody in there with a mask.

I got the infection, like in March of 2020. So I got it just as it came over. I’m all healed up. I volunteered in the hospital when I was done because I had immunity. And at that time, you’re right, we didn’t know everything. And there were some risks to the orderlies and nurses.

So when they had to rotate patients that were on the ventilator, I would go in and help them. So one less person had to go in the room because I had immunity. And everybody acknowledged that I did in my local hospital. They didn’t ask. There was no vaccine at the time anyway. And so, but they all acknowledged that, oh, this is great. He’s coming in. He has immunity, and he can help take the place of someone else who’s having to risk being in the room when we move patients around.

JOE ROGAN: One of my favorite scenes was there was a musical performance where there was a bunch of flutists and they had masks on with a whole cutout so they could play their flute through the mask. I was like, this is wild.

RAND PAUL: I mean, well, yeah. Explain to me the science of that. I can eat my peanuts for 20 minutes on the plane. And my favorite is some of the flight attendants were great. Some of them would actually come to me and pass messages. I would get little folded up message, thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you for challenging Fauci.

But then some of them were Karens. And it brings out the worst in you. A little bit of power can bring out the worst in people. And some of them were, you know, sir, you’re not eating your peanuts faster. Eat your peanuts faster. You need to put your mask on.

JOE ROGAN: In between eating peanuts on planes anymore. You’re dating yourself.

RAND PAUL: They still do have peanuts, but aren’t peanuts.

JOE ROGAN: They don’t. They keep them off planes because people have severe peanut allergies.

The Peanut Allergy Paradox

RAND PAUL: They do. And that’s a whole other story. And have you ever had Marty Makary on?

JOE ROGAN: I have not, but I’m trying to, yeah.

RAND PAUL: He wrote a book called “Blind Spots,” and in it he writes about the peanut allergy and, you know, how you prevent the peanut allergy.

JOE ROGAN: Give kids peanuts.

RAND PAUL: Give your kids peanuts when they’re very young. And now the recommendation even from the American Pediatric Association, who are terrible. They’re the worst people in the world on vaccine mythology and religiosity. But they finally came around. They said, don’t give peanut butter for like a decade. We got all these allergies. But now they finally, I think, changed their official position. And I think at three months you’re supposed to start introducing peanut butter to your kid.

JOE ROGAN: Why do you think they’re the worst when you said they’re the worst on that?

Vaccine Mythology and Risk-Benefit Analysis

RAND PAUL: It’s a blind notion. And it isn’t based on risk benefit analysis or anything. It’s this devotion that you are a good person, but you’re also a smart person if you believe. But it’s in all vaccines. And they’ve made the mistake because sometimes they had the first rotavirus vaccine 15 years ago. They gave it and they take it off the market because six months later they learned that something called intussusception, where the intestines go inside each other, which can be a real problem for a child was happening more often with a vaccine. They had to pull the vaccine.

But vaccines are like anything else. It’s like, you and I would sit down and we’d talk about your drugs, and I’d talk about the side effects of each one, what your disease is and what we can do. Like, I’m not completely, for example, with the COVID vaccine, I don’t think children should take it because I think the risk of the heart inflammation is greater than the chance of the disease.

Early on, they said for old people and overweight people, that reduced hospitalization and death. But I’ve been talking to the CDC because I want to know, is that still true? So let’s do a new study. The virus has progressively gotten less dangerous. The community’s progressively gotten more immunity. So what was true in 2020 may no longer be true.

I want to know if you’re over 65, and I give 1,000 people the vaccine, the brand new one, whatever it is, and I give a thousand people no vaccine, is there a reduction in hospitalization and death? Because this isn’t 2020 anymore.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only that. I mean, when was the last time you heard of someone dying or being hospitalized?

RAND PAUL: That’s what I mean. It’s not happening. It’s not happening.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s also because the strains, the variants.

RAND PAUL: The variants have become less. They become less dangerous. And we’ve also increased our amount of immunity. And so we should study this again. Why? Because Big Pharma is just making a gazillion dollars off of still scaring everybody over 65. And if it still works, I’ll come on your show and say, take it if you’re over 65. But I don’t know if it works, and I doubt that it works because I don’t hear of anybody dying from COVID anymore.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also this weird binary thing where it’s like there’s one thing that you could take and that’s it. There’s no talk about strengthening your immune system with vitamin supplementation. And what are the other options that you could have once you actually get sick? Like what can you do? IV vitamins are fantastic. There’s a lot of different things that people can do that are never recommended.

The Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine Controversy

RAND PAUL: And it’s changed. And really the two things that were controversial, at least among a lot of things, but ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. People will ask me about it and I’ll say, I don’t know. The government refused to study it. And so it’s very difficult because if you took in, let’s say 2020, the virus was dangerous.

And let’s say you took 5,000 people under the age of 50 and you gave them ivermectin and you did 5,000 people and you gave them nothing. Almost nobody died in either category. So it was hard to prove. But I don’t think ivermectin was harmful. I don’t think hydroxychloroquine was harmful either. But they wouldn’t study it. And you need a big study.

So to figure out, since the death rate was so low for healthy people, you might need 10,000 people in each arm of the study to figure out what works and what didn’t work. There were some international studies showing ivermectin worked and hydroxychloroquine. And there weren’t many here. But Fauci shut them all down. You know, they started to study and then he shut it down.

JOE ROGAN: How does one guy get that kind of power?

Fauci: The J. Edgar Hoover of Public Health

RAND PAUL: He was there forever. You know, he was there about as long as J. Edgar Hoover. I wrote an op-ed comparing him to J. Edgar Hoover. You know, Hoover was like there for 70 years, abused the civil liberties of people protesting for civil rights. He abused the liberty and the privacy of people protesting the Vietnam War.

And so Hoover was a terrible person with his longevity. I think Fauci ranks right up there with his disregard for people’s privacy. But even the stuff about the masks, you know, we studied pandemics for a decade. Bill Gates has been given gazillions of dollars. He’s gotten the government to spend money. And when we studied pandemics all the way up until 2020, there was never a recommendation for masks among the public for respiratory viruses.

JOE ROGAN: Fauci recommended against masks in a very public interview. That was a video where he was talking about, you know, it’s not going to help you. And worse, maybe you’ll mess with your face.

The Mask Science That Never Was

RAND PAUL: Yeah, well, the good one was that Birx woman. She was in the administration. She writes him a letter in January. She says, I have to go to a conference. Should I wear a mask? And he writes back to her, no, we’ve done all the studies, and there’s no evidence that for a respiratory virus it works.

And it turns out almost all the masks, the cloth masks, you know, you’ve heard all this. The pores were bigger than the virus. The virus goes through them. The surgical mask, a little better. But if you have these big gaps on either side, do you think the virus isn’t going around the mask? And it probably goes through that mask also.

The N95 mask, if you’re a doctor or nurse and you’re going in and out of a room and you wash your hands and throw away the mask, there probably is some value. So in the hospital, they recommended this. But one of the reasons Anthony Fauci was such a danger is what he recommended was actually dangerous.

So he’s wearing a Washington Nationals cloth mask to show people, or he’s wearing a Black Lives Matter mask to show people he cares. But if that’s the advice, and you’re 75 years old and your wife has COVID and you’re going in her room to take her food, and you wear a cloth mask, you are risking getting COVID and dying yourself. He didn’t tell, he gave us the wrong advice.

And then people thought they were safe with the cloth mask. So actually doing something they shouldn’t do, or they’re, you know, 85 years old and they’re going to church, but they’re wearing a cloth mask. Well, know that you probably shouldn’t go to church, frankly. You shouldn’t be told you can’t go to church. But actually the advice early on to avoid crowds and stay home if you were older or vulnerable.

But the kids should have just gone to school and tried to stay away from, you know, people. But eventually it happened anyway. It went everywhere. There was no stopping this virus.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s never been a respiratory virus stopped with a vaccine anyway, right?

The Flu Vaccine and Inflated Claims

RAND PAUL: No, the flu vaccine doesn’t really stop with it either. And I’m trying to get more statistics on the flu vaccine as well to see if it’s accurate, because I think they lied to us every year about it. You know, they say, oh, well, it wasn’t this, it wasn’t even the same category or type, but you’re getting some crossover effect.

I think most of the time that is being inflated. What they’re telling you is not actually true. And I’m trying to get them at the CDC to study all of this again because they have the power and the numbers to look at large numbers. And let’s be objective and tell people, you know, what is the odds next year the flu vaccine will work for you?

And we used to say, well, it may not work, but if you’re at risk, go ahead and take it. So it used to be over 50 or over 65. Now they want everybody to take the flu vaccine, and it probably is better, unless your child has an immunodeficiency disease, to go ahead and get these and develop immunity over time.

JOE ROGAN: And what do you think is going on? Like, why are they recommending this? Is this purely a profit thing?

Financial Conflicts and Big Pharma Royalties

RAND PAUL: I think if they were here, they would argue that it’s science and it isn’t for profit. But they argue vigorously against revealing if they’re receiving money from Big Pharma. So what I ask is if you’re on the vaccine committee and you’re going to recommend that every child get a COVID vaccine, shouldn’t you have to release whether you get royalties from Big Pharma?

And Anthony Fauci in committee said, “We don’t have to do it. The law,” and he quoted the law, “says we don’t have to do it.” So for two, three, four years now, I’m still trying to get this passed. I’ve gotten all the Republicans to agree to it, and I’ve gotten all the Democrats but two or three. And I’m still trying to get it passed unanimously.

But it would say if you’re a government scientist and you get royalties from Pfizer or from one of the big companies, you have to actually list it on a form. And really, you should be then recused from voting.

JOE ROGAN: Well, also, why are doctors allowed to be financially incentivized?

RAND PAUL: Yeah, that should be considered to be unethical or inappropriate. We did change some of the things with pharma and gifts to doctors about 10 years ago. It is better than it used to be as far as gifts to doctors, except they don’t call this a gift. I think this should be under the gift ban.

You should not be getting paid to choose certain things because I think it’s really, I think it’s actually malpractice to give children the COVID vaccine.

JOE ROGAN: Are you aware of Mary Talley Bowden?

RAND PAUL: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You know her story?

RAND PAUL: Not a lot. I’ve met her before.

JOE ROGAN: I think she told me that, you know, she has a small practice that’s in like a strip mall, I believe, outside of Houston. She said that in her small practice, if she had vaccinated everyone, she would have been compensated $1.5 million.

RAND PAUL: It’s a significant amount of money.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

RAND PAUL: And people have listed, yeah. No, it’s insane. And it’s the one sort of exception to, we have all these things preventing kickbacks to doctors except for vaccines, and that’s somehow exempt. So, yeah. No. We’ve looked at whether legislation could fix this, and I don’t think we’ve found a good answer. But I have definitely looked to see if there’s a way Congress could try to fix this.

Public Skepticism and Vaccine Debate

JOE ROGAN: What’s amazing to me is how many people in the general public are not skeptical. How many people in the general public will hear this kind of conversation and immediately their hackles get up and they want to argue against this. “Vaccines save more. Vaccines are so important.” And there’s, they have no information. They’ve done no research. They’ve never looked at it objectively. They don’t understand the whole history of compensation and what happened with the immunity.

RAND PAUL: So in the book, I tell the story of George Washington. One, to let people know I’m not against, and the smallpox vaccine was amazing. And in George Washington’s day, it was actually live. So what you did is if you’d had smallpox and you were doing pretty well and you survived and you didn’t have a bad case, you had a minor case, you had four or five pox, not a lot, as you were recovering, they’d open a scab, take pus from your arm, stab somebody else’s arm, and take the pus from your infection and stick it into someone else.

That’s a live vaccine. That’s crazy. But they did have some people die from it, but the death rate from smallpox is one out of three. And when it would show up in Boston, you’d have like 20,000 people die and the whole town would get it. It was terrible. And so people actually chose, but people weren’t being forced to do it.

But the George Washington case is very instructive. Martha wants to come visit him at the camps, at the war camps, and there were more deaths in the Revolutionary War from disease than there were from bullets. He says, “You can’t come until you’re vaccinated for smallpox.” It wasn’t vaccinated. It was called inoculated, because you’re getting stuck with a disease, not a vaccine.

And people say, “Well, I guess Washington took it, too, if he believed so much in this.” Well, it’s like, no, because he already had smallpox. He got smallpox when he was 15 in Barbados. They understood immunity. We have understood immunity for thousands of years, and yet it just went out the window with Anthony Fauci saying, “Well, we just don’t know. We just don’t know.”

We do know. We don’t always know how perfect it’s going to be, but we do know that nobody got COVID the second time around and had a worse case the second time around.

Fauci’s Controversial Pardon

JOE ROGAN: Well, one thing we do know is that when Biden left office, he was granted this very bizarre pardon, where he got a pardon that goes back to 2014 for crimes he was never accused of, never convicted. I mean, is that, it’s got to be one of the first times that anybody’s ever been pardoned.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. And I think it should be challenged. And so we have, under the Biden administration, I sent criminal referrals for Anthony Fauci to Merrick Garland twice, and I sent them evidence that he had lied to Congress, which was a felony. They just ignored me.

I’ve been working with Bobby Kennedy and he’s been very helpful on this. I have good relationship with him. He’s given us a lot of information. We’ve looked at the communications, and in Anthony Fauci’s communications, we now have evidence that he was telling people like Francis Collins, “Read this and destroy it.”

Well, you can’t do that. The executive branch, when they communicate, they’re required to keep their communications and they’re required to do it on government devices. So we have this evidence, and I’ve summarized it again in a criminal referral to Trump’s Attorney General. And I still haven’t gotten action.

But there’s a couple reasons we should do it. One, he shouldn’t get away with lying, he shouldn’t get away with destroying records. But two, we should check the pardon. Is an auto pen pardon valid? And is a pardon, a retrospective pardon back 10 years that doesn’t mention a crime, can you give people a pardon for everything they did in 10 year period?

I can’t imagine and I think the court might narrow that, but it doesn’t happen unless the Trump Justice Department will do something. And I’ve been sending them referrals and I can’t get them to do anything. I can’t guarantee they’ll win, they might lose, but they ought to go to court. Take this, take it to court.

The Gain-of-Function Debate

JOE ROGAN: When you were having that conversation with him about gain-of-function research, which clearly gain-of-function research was being done at the Wuhan lab and he was just standing in front saying that under the definition of gain-of-function research, that that does not qualify, what was that like?

RAND PAUL: We all knew he was lying and he was parsing words. He was trying to have a semantics type of argument. But one of the reasons we know he’s lying and one of the things that I presented as evidence is there was a group text chain on February 1st of 2020.

So you have all these virologists who are saying privately it came from the lab and publicly it didn’t. You have them all communicating. But one of the things Anthony Fauci says about the Wuhan lab is he says, “We know it’s dangerous and possible because we know they’re doing gain-of-function research, so we’re funding them.”

He would never admit we’re funding him because we were funding EcoHealth, this intermediary. So he said we’re not funding them. Well, we’re funding them through EcoHealth. It’s not going to function except for then he says the experiments they’re doing are gain-of-function.

And so I think everything about it was dishonest. He got away with it because people in the scientific community still to this day defend him. And people on the left made it a partisan. I don’t know why this is a Republican Democrat issue, but all of the main networks still defend him.

You know, he was given a million dollar prize. Some nonprofit gave him a million dollar prize. How’s a bureaucrat get to accept a million dollar prize while they’re working for the government?

JOE ROGAN: You tell me you work for the government.

Fauci’s Security Detail and Compensation

RAND PAUL: Then when he leaves the government, he gets 24/7 limo service and security. He’s got people in front of his home stopping traffic like you do for a president, getting in the car, which I’m okay for former presidents. That’s about it. You know, Anthony Fauci should have never got this.

I will say that Trump ended it. You know, everybody said, “Oh, he’ll be killed.” And it’s like, you know, I guarantee a lot of us have more threats than Anthony Fauci has, and none of us have a limo picking us up every day.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m sure he has threats. I’m sure Anthony Fauci has threats. And I think he probably, you know, should be concerned.

RAND PAUL: But…

JOE ROGAN: So, yeah, but based on what everybody knows.

RAND PAUL: Right, but the government doesn’t, you know, you’re a famous person. Government doesn’t pay for your limousine.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

RAND PAUL: He shouldn’t have a limousine paid for by the government with 24/7.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, I agree. It’s also, how much money did he make? Do we know?

RAND PAUL: We know he got the million dollar prize. We know he made more than the president. Towards the end, he was making $450,000 a year. But his wife, if he ever had an ethical problem, you know, he went to his wife. His wife was charge of bioethics for the NIH.

So if there was a question of whether or not his royalties were a conflict, he would ask his wife to find out if he was acting unethically. She made about $250,000. So they’re really making a combined $700,000, which I don’t, I’m not against money. You work hard, people pay you money. I’m all for it, but I am against the government paying bureaucrats that kind of money.

And so, and he really, there should be term limits for people in those positions. You shouldn’t be there for 40 years. So he appointed all the people beneath him and he stacked the deck. And, you know, I asked the question, and this was an email from Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci. He says, “Take them down.”

Talking about Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH, now talking about Martin Kulldorff and then an epidemiologist from Oxford. “Take them down.” And so when I have scientists come before my committee, I’ll ask them the first question. Have you ever or would you ever send another scientist a note saying to take down a fellow scientist you disagreed with?

My goodness, what kind of, that sounds like the mafia or something. Doesn’t sound like someone who’s supposed to be above the fray. Objective scientist.

JOE ROGAN: Were there any other avenues for revenue for him because of the creation of the vaccine or any other medications that…

The Financial Conflicts of Interest in Medical Research

RAND PAUL: I don’t think with the current one, we don’t know all of his royalties. He would say, oh, I got $25 or something. That’s not. It might have been true for a year, but there are years in the past that he was getting more. I think Open the Books or the Open Secrets, that group has gone through and through Freedom of Information has gotten information that like 1,500 doctors got $1.5 billion or 1,500 scientists got $1.5 billion in royalty.

So it’s not an insignificant amount of money. It’s a lot of scientists. And once again, I’m not even sure I’m for forbidding it. I just want to know if any of them are on a committee voting for the drug that they got money from that particular drug company.

The woman that was appointed for the NIH under Biden and never got approved, you know, she may well be an ethical person, but I think she done research grants of $231 million from Pfizer and it was listed and doesn’t mean she’s a dishonest person. But I wonder how she could be objective with Pfizer if through her career and all that money didn’t go to her. It was grants that she oversaw and some of the money went to her. And that doesn’t mean it’s illegal or unethical. But I think it’s hard for her to judge objectively a company that has been the main financer of her entire career.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it certainly incentivizes her to be more favorable towards them. Clearly, like you follow human nature. I mean, it just makes sense.

RAND PAUL: Now Bobby Kennedy has put, you know, and the left wing people hate all the people he’s put on there. I think he’s doing a good job of getting the people out who were so pro vaccine that it was a religion for them. And I think they have better people. And I’ve noticed as they go around the room, I don’t know if you’ve seen this. When they vote, they start by saying before they vote, “I have no conflicts of interest.” They are verbally announcing “I have no conflicts of interest,” which is a big improvement.

But I really want to see all the scientists who they get it from, how much and then let you know. Part of oversight is not just Congress, it’s the public. It’s people who analyze these issues, looking in and seeing how much they made and what do they oversee. Is there a conflict of interest?

The Shift in Government Tone Post-Pandemic

JOE ROGAN: What is the tone like in the government now in comparison to when the pandemic was going on?

RAND PAUL: I’d say it’s a calmer tone. There was hysteria that sort of ruled the day. And I think that, you know, and this was sort of the problem and how Anthony Fauci became so prominent. You know, the president was out speaking, and the president speaks off the cuff and doesn’t always say things that are always exactly accurate. Right.

And so as he was saying stuff, many of these sort of establishment senators were saying, we need somebody else. We need a scientist at those press conferences. So it was actually many of my colleagues who pushed Anthony Fauci, pushed them through Pence and pushed them through the president to accept him.

And one of the things that’s still inexplicable to this day is that as Anthony Fauci leaves government, President Trump gives him a gold medal, a Presidential Medal of Honor, you know, as he leaves, which, you know, knowing what we know, I think should have never happened.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The people that were so vehemently opposed to your position and the people that were so pro vaccine and pro mandate, a lot of them are still in the government.

The Truth About Masks and COVID Protocols

RAND PAUL: Yeah. And a lot of them are still in the news media, too. I was called all kinds of names by people, and it turns out that almost everything I was complaining about turns out in retrospect, I was right about most of them. The masks, really, most of them didn’t work. And even the ones that work, a lot of people don’t realize this. An N95 mask works to a certain degree, but once you’ve touched it, you’ve contaminated it.

And also after you’ve worn it for four hours, the moisture from your breath gets rid of the electrostatic charge, and it doesn’t really work very well. So the doctors don’t reuse them. They might use them a couple times.

JOE ROGAN: You’re putting in your own bacteria.

RAND PAUL: The doctors throw them away and wash their hands after every. If you can do that, there’s maybe some value or someone’s sick in your house. But for the general public, riding in a car, particularly when you ride by yourself in a car, an N95 mask does not help you. I hate to tell the Democrats.

JOE ROGAN: I like when they do it. Yeah, I think it’s important. And it’s important when people drive with a mask on, because it lets me know who’s out of their f*ing mind.

RAND PAUL: Also, you don’t have to ask them what party they’re in.

JOE ROGAN: It’s automatic. Yeah, I said it was a Democrats MAGA hat.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. If you’re hiking the Appalachian Trail and you see someone out by themselves and they have an N95 mask on, you can probably guess their party registration 100%.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it was a strange time to go through. It’s interesting, most of the people that were at CNN are gone now, except Brian Stelter. They got rid of them and then that’s how bad the talent is out there. They had to bring him back.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. One of them called me “obliviating ass.” And I haven’t been back on since about four years ago and said I was so awful to Anthony Fauci and that everything I said was dangerous and I was endangering lives. But I was right about the masks. I was right about natural immunity, but I was also right about this six feet of distance. It’s actually the opposite of what they told you.

So let’s say you were 80 years old and you and I were coming together in March of 2020. And, well, let’s say even worse, we’re going to go to a choir practice. We’re going to spread out six feet apart. Is that safe for an 85 year old to go? No, they should be staying at home. That’s the best advice for them. Stay at home in March of 2020. Because guess what? The virus goes 30 feet, 40 feet. You know, if you’re in this…

JOE ROGAN: It was just made up.

RAND PAUL: Yeah, it was made up, but it was made up in the wrong direction. So what he did is encourage people to stay six feet apart from people, go to a crowded room, go to choir practice and just stay away from people. But if you’re at risk, you shouldn’t be at choir practice. Not by law, but by advice. So he actually gave you unsafe advice on the masks. Cloth masks don’t work. So he’s giving you unsafe advice to go help and feed your wife or your husband with a cloth mask on.

Natural immunity does work and he told you it doesn’t work. It was the opposite of everything he told you. But he also never got, and I kept saying this in the hearings, he needed humility, humility to know that there’s a possibility he’s wrong in what he’s saying. And it should be advice. And this is what they don’t get about public.

If I were the public health doctor and a new pandemic came up, I should give advice, not mandates. Advice based on the best things we know. And other doctors should give advice because there might be other doctors that disagree with me on it. So you can choose. It’s sort of the idea of getting a second opinion. You go to your doctor and you think something’s not quite right and he or she wants to operate on my leg and maybe I want to wait another three weeks to see if my leg feels better. In three weeks you get another opinion. Or you go home and wait three weeks and see if you get better.

Medical Training Versus Government Illogic

JOE ROGAN: When you’re an ophthalmologist, right? When you’re one of the rare people that’s in the government that does have a background in medicine and at least in medical training, and you’re experiencing all this illogical s*, what is that like for you? Did you try to educate your…

RAND PAUL: You try, but most of them aren’t willing to listen. And you wonder now if they’ve even gotten it. But my favorite is sort of the response you get because the Internet is full of trolls. And so one of the favorite insults, if you’ll read insults of me, “oh, you know, he’s just a failed dental assistant.” Well, not quite. But why?

JOE ROGAN: How they come up with that one?

RAND PAUL: I don’t know. I don’t know. They somehow think I’m a dentist or an optometrist and I fit glasses or something. None of that’s really true. But the people. It takes a long time for people. I think slowly, some of them like. I think half the Democrats actually think it may have come from the lab. Now, they’re not real outspoken about it, but only half. Maybe what’s going on with the lab, the elected one. Yeah, this is maybe some other half.

JOE ROGAN: Still believe in natural spillover.

The Dangers of Multiple Vaccines for Young People

RAND PAUL: Three years into this, the doctor of the Senate was still recommending there are 16 year olds that are pages, they’re 15, 16 years old, that they get three vaccines. And I absolutely steadfastly think that that’s malpractice and a risk to them. So I fought it. And I would come to the floor and this is weird, no one’s ever done this. I would ask on the floor of the Senate for unanimous consent to pass a rule of the Senate that they don’t. They can opt out of this program. You know, they can listen, write, check something and opt out.

Because it turns out that the myocarditis increases in prevalence the more you take. So if you take one COVID vaccine, it’s less likely you get myocarditis. If you take a second one, it’s a little more likely a third one. So it’s the opposite of what you should be telling children. And the death rate for a healthy 16 year old really is essentially zero. I mean, it is so close to zero. Somebody might be able to find a healthy year old that died at 16.

Almost everybody that was on CNN, not to keep mentioning CNN, but they would put these people on there and they would hide the fact that they had terminal cancer. And it is sad that a child dies anytime, but they were dying from their cancer and they just happened to have COVID, you know, and it was dishonest because they were trying to scare regular people. Don’t send your kid to school. The teachers union is right. We should never go back to school. We need another year out. Which was just crazy. Well, it damaged our children.

Pharmaceutical Advertising and Media Influence

JOE ROGAN: It’s also there’s a giant incentive that in this country and in New Zealand, they’re the only two countries in the world where they allow pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise. And it’s a problem. I very rarely watch regular television, but every now and then I’ll just go, what are these f*ing crazy people up to? And I’ll watch MSNBC or CNN and…

RAND PAUL: See a million drug ads.

JOE ROGAN: The number of drug ads is staggering. And the weirdness in those ads, the calm tone of their voice as they list off these horrific side effects.

RAND PAUL: Well, and the thing that’s hard to imagine is there’s sometimes for a disease like 5,000 people in the country have a disease that, as a physician, even though I know the names of most of the diseases, I’ll be kind of uncertain now. I don’t remember seeing anybody ever with that disease. And yet it’s being advertised on MSNBC. And then the question is, do you think that affects what the newscasters are saying on the news? And it does. That’s why they’re so all in with this.

JOE ROGAN: They’re not trying to use those ads to sell those drugs. They’re using the money by putting those ads up to make sure that those pundits don’t talk badly about the pharmaceutical drug companies.

RAND PAUL: It’s probably more about shaping the news than it is getting sales.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the proof is in the pudding. There have absolutely been horrific side effects of a bunch of different pharmaceutical drugs. You don’t hear a peep about any of that stuff on CNN.

RAND PAUL: And you wonder who’s buying a drug when they say, well, you could die, you could become paralyzed, you could have a stroke, you could have a blood clot.

JOE ROGAN: Explosive bloody diarrhea, loss, all your memory, suicidal ideation. It’s just, they just list them off and they list them off like this, but consult your doctor.

The Hemp Ban Controversy

RAND PAUL: They’re protecting you. So you can take Ambien, but God forbid you take a hemp gummy. They will put your ass in jail if you take a hemp gummy. And they’ve just recently outlawed all the hemp stuff. And I’ve been fighting this for the last two months. But all the hemp products, I know Texas actually has a lot, they’re all going to be banned within one year now.

JOE ROGAN: Now how did that get passed Mitch McConnell? How is that guy still around when he just freezes up every now and again? He locks up like Windows 95.

The Hemp Industry Under Threat

RAND PAUL: He is very, very powerful and a lot of people owe him. You know, he raised money for decades, hundreds of millions of dollars, passed it out to the lesser known senators and helped them get elected when they would get challenges. And so then they all owe him. And I forced an amendment. And it’s funny, then the people in there go, “Why are you doing this? The government shut down. Why are you gumming up the works with a vote on hemp?”

Because they stuck it on the bill to reopen the government. It’s not my choice to talk about hemp at that time. That was my only choice. And so I brought forward an amendment. I got like 20 something votes and 70 of them voted. But they voted to set the limit and to change the amount of THC in the plant.

So all the plants are illegal now, all the seeds are illegal. There’s a real industry of farmers who grow this. And the thing is, who are we to tell somebody who can’t sleep at night that an Ambien is better for them than taking a hemp gummy to go sleep at night, or a veteran who could take Percocet or some kind of psychotropic drug or who has anxiety or post traumatic stress and we’re going to tell them they can’t take a hemp gummy. I think it’s insane and very much, you know, this presumption that we know what’s best for everyone.

JOE ROGAN: Is this the alcohol lobby? What is the motivation?

RAND PAUL: There was a little bit of the alcohol lobby and the cannabis lobby. The cannabis people hate the hemp people.

JOE ROGAN: The cannabis people hate the hemp people.

RAND PAUL: Well, it’s complicated. The cannabis industry develops state by state. And you really can’t make a marijuana product in Colorado and sell it in Kentucky. It can’t go across state lines. The hemp, because it was legalized nationally, they were selling it across state lines. So we have big companies now that sell the hemp gummies you can order them through the mail across state lines until this law came about.

And McConnell always felt it was an unintended consequence, and some of the growth might have been, but I don’t think it was. There were some bad products out there. And all of us, including the hemp industry, said, “All right, let’s regulate this. Let’s not have 100 milligram gummies.” The more traditional is sort of like 5 milligrams. That’s in a drink or in a gummy that people would take.

JOE ROGAN: Reasonable.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. And I think, I haven’t taken it. I’m for the freedom to take it, but I just, I sleep pretty good, but so it’s not really something I can attest to exactly how it works. But people who do take it tell me that have one of the drinks say it might be like drinking a beer or maybe not even drinking a beer when you drink one of these THC drinks.

JOE ROGAN: So the cannabis businesses in the states where it’s legal don’t want it legal nationally because then it would interfere with their business because you’d be able to order it through the mail.

RAND PAUL: Well, they’d probably accept it if we’d legalized cannabis nationally, and then they would compete with hemp. What was going on is we haven’t legalized cannabis nationally. We’ve legalized it state by state, but I don’t think even if your state has legal adult use and another one does, I don’t think you can transfer it across the state line.

JOE ROGAN: You’re saying hemp, but you really mean THC?

RAND PAUL: That’s for marijuana.

JOE ROGAN: CBD and THC, correct.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. CBD has a little bit of THC in it. And so do the hemp gummies have some THC in it, and then the drinks do. It’s about 5 milligrams in a lot of the different doses. There are different doses, but that’s…

JOE ROGAN: And so all of those are going to be illegal.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. The McConnell language says you can’t have more than 0.4 milligrams, which is such a low number that I don’t think it will have any effect. I mean, frankly, the THC is the effect. And so if you make the THC number so small, I don’t think people will take them. The CBD oil, people might still take some of that. But I assume the effect that people are getting from the CBD oil, if they rub it on, has to be the THC.

JOE ROGAN: No, no CBD itself, with no THC has a beneficial effect. There’s CBD Balm that you can use.

RAND PAUL: For, like, arthritis that may still be legal. The plant, though, they changed the definition of the plant that the CBD oil comes from. So they’re going to have to rehybridize all these plants.

JOE ROGAN: What I was going to say was, my mom, not my mom, rather, my wife’s mom uses CBD with THC, and she’s found that that’s more effective for arthritis and aches and pain than CBD without it. She’s done both, and she says the CBD with THC is more effective.

Medical Benefits and Personal Freedom

RAND PAUL: And there are some people, and once again, I’m not here to tell you to take it or not take it. I’m for the freedom for people to make their own decision. There’s some people with children who have seizures, who take medications, and the kid still has 100 seizures a day, which isn’t good for your brain and for the child. And some of them have added some CBD drops that give to the child of CBD oil with the THC and they think it slows the seizures down some.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I have a friend whose child has severe autism and sometimes has seizures. And the only thing that stops the seizures is CBD with THC.

RAND PAUL: And the best way to think about it is, I’ll never forget this. This was in, I think, 2007, when Romney was running for president. My dad was, in fact, I know somebody who is a supporter of my dad.

JOE ROGAN: I love your dad.

RAND PAUL: But anyway, they go up to Romney and it’s a person in a wheelchair with MS, and they said, “Are you in favor of making it illegal? I take marijuana at night to sleep. Are you in favor of making that illegal for me to take it? I have MS. Would you be for making it illegal?”

Romney looked right at him and said, “I sure would.” And I was like, what kind of person says that? What kind of person is so presumptuous of their moral position that they’re going to tell you it’s immoral to take that? But fine, to take some, you know, antipsychotic drug or some kind of narcotic that the pharmaceutical companies sell, but we’re not going to let you use marijuana.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s ignorance, you know, it’s people that have never consumed it and have these preconceived notions of what it actually does versus what it does. I mean, you’d be surprised at how many, you know, little old ladies are taking CBD with THC in it to help with their aches and pains.

RAND PAUL: And help them. My joke when I tell people who’s opposed to this, like McConnell, you know, who’s older than dirt, older than dirt, is that they all watch Reefer Madness in 1937 at the matinee and they’ll never forget what happens if you get that Reefer Madness. And some of them probably were alive in 1937, could have actually seen the movie.

But that’s it. It’s an irrational sort of fear. But on the other side of this, we’re on a program that a lot of people hear. I don’t want people at home thinking, I want everybody and every 15 year old out there smoking marijuana after school. I think there are some side effects to smoking marijuana all the time, particularly for the… I’m not here to encourage it. Drinking alcohol, same thing.

JOE ROGAN: I’m for personal choice for adults. And the problem with the whole Reefer Madness thing, I’m glad you brought that up. Do you know the whole story behind it?

RAND PAUL: No.

The Real Story Behind Reefer Madness

JOE ROGAN: William Randolph Hearst. William Randolph Hearst was responsible for this whole terrifying craze of people thinking that marijuana was driving people nuts and jumping out of buildings in 1930 something. I forget the year they came up with a new product called the Decorticator. And it was in Popular Science magazine, “Hemp, the new billion dollar crop.”

Because they had this new machine that allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber. William Randolph Hearst owned Hearst Publications, but he also owned paper mills. Hemp was a far more effective and far more durable form of paper. He was going to compete with hemp and he had forests that he was using for his paper where they were, you know, for paper mills. And hemp was going to replace all that. It was a competitor.

So they were arguing against it as a commodity. Marijuana was never a name for cannabis. Marijuana was a name for a wild Mexican tobacco. And so they started saying in his newspapers, they started printing these fake stories about how blacks and Mexicans were taking this new drug and raping white women. And that’s where Reefer Madness came from. And they call this new drug marijuana.

Government Regulations and Hidden Agendas

RAND PAUL: I know this is going to be shocking to you, but that’s the story of government. Yeah, most things that come out in government, if you look beneath the surface, they all have pretty names. They have acronyms say patriotism, the Patriot Act. You must be anti patriotic if you’re not for the Patriot Act. But most of the things they say, it’s the opposite.

Or someone has put something forward that really is about like, let’s say it’s a banking regulation. You say this is going to protect the poor people, but it turns out the banking regulation is easier paid for and absorbed by big banks. And so what happens to your small local bank? And you say, how come all the small banks get gobbled up by big banks? It’s because you put regulations on that.

Who favors the big banks? Favor the regulations because it puts the small bank out of business. They get absorbed by the big bank and then the new banks trying to come in can’t afford the compliance cost. Right now, one of the extraordinary things we’re doing with banks, and I don’t think many people know this, the Federal Reserve is now paying interest to big banks on keeping reserves.

At the Federal Reserve, there’s $3 trillion there. Last year, the big banks, primarily the big banks in New York, got $187 billion in interest. Previously, that interest would go back to the treasury to offset the debt. That’s about 10% of our debt. So our debt is 10% worse because we’re now paying, and we never did this before 2010, we never paid interest on reserves.

And what it means to pay interest on reserves is that it’s an incentive for the Fed just to leave it there. Why loan it to you if you’re expanding a business when I can just leave it here and get 4.4%? It also keeps interest rates from going down because if the Fed pays the big bank 4%, are they going to loan it to you for 3.5% when it can just sit at the Fed and gain four?

So it’s kind of, you know, President Trump always wants what he wants and sometimes he wants good things. But he, you know, may not go about it the best way. He wants interest rates to be lower. I think most people do. But one way to make interest lower is tell the Fed they can’t pay interest to these big banks.

JOE ROGAN: Have you ever had a conversation with him about this?

RAND PAUL: I’ve been trying for like three months to get a conversation with Bessent, and I held up one of their, with the Secretary of Treasury. I held up one of their appointees last week, which is one of the things you do to get the attention of the people you want to talk to. And they’ve agreed to meet with me, but we’re already, you know, halfway into January.

But I’m trying to get a meeting with Bessent to talk to him about this idea of paying interest, because they said, “Oh, it’ll only take $30 billion to set up the system.” Then it was a trillion, now it’s $3 trillion. And I think it just keeps growing and growing. But that money really isn’t being productive, and it’s a gift to these big banks.

JOE ROGAN: When it comes to this, this THC thing, what can be done?

Trump’s Marijuana Policy and Schedule Changes

RAND PAUL: Trump’s been good on some things. You know, the whole idea of changing it from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 is an improvement. It’s still illegal without a prescription. But a lot of the research with marijuana didn’t happen because Schedule 1 is just almost impossible. You’ve got to have, like, safes and guards and everything to deal with a Schedule 1 drug. And so very little research occurred on marijuana over time. And so lowering the schedule is a good idea.

State by state has kind of worked in the sense that it’s allowed people to see what it’s like and get used to it. But some of the states have backtracked and some are worried that they went too far. It’s harder to determine, I think, acute intoxication. If someone’s driving under the influence to do a test, I would guess the technology should be out there, but I don’t know that it’s widely available.

JOE ROGAN: I think it would have to be a blood test. Right? I don’t know if you’ve consumed an edible, you’re not going to be able to get something with a breathalyzer.

RAND PAUL: I don’t know that for certain. Your breath is amazing, what it actually has in it. So I don’t know the answer to that if they testing is not adequate. Which reminds me, there’s a guy in California I’ve met. You meet extraordinary people. He’s actually studying contents of what you exhale to look for cancer markers. So, I mean, they’re really minute. But he’s going to try to diagnose things.

Like, you know, you’ll hear of a friend, you know, like 45 years old, has pancreatic cancer. Or actually, we have a former senator right now, Ben Sass, who says he has stage four pancreatic cancer. And the reason it spreads before you know you have it. But he’s trying to get a test that measures markers just from what you exhale to try to pick up on cancers before they can be detected.

JOE ROGAN: So there’s a possibility that they can come up with some sort of a detection method to find out if you’re intoxicated.

RAND PAUL: I think probably, and I don’t know the technology that well, but either way, just for responsible use for adults, it just doesn’t make any sense that they would change it from what it is now and make it more restrictive.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

RAND PAUL: I don’t think any states have gone backwards. Most states have gone forward. In Kentucky, we don’t have adult use, but I think we’ve just legalized the medical. But the way medical works, it’s still strictly by state, so you have to have physicians who decide to prescribe it, farmers who decide to grow it. And it’s a little bit of a niche industry. And, you know, most industries in our country, one state gets really good and they export it to other states. And some climates are better for growing it. But that has been a hindrance to the marijuana industry.

The Cartel Problem and California’s Failed Legalization

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also you’re enabling the cartel to make money off of it. That’s the real problem. I had a gentleman on my podcast named John Norris. He was a game warden in California, and, you know, just checking fishing licenses and making sure that people are following the laws. And wound up chasing down a dry creek and trying to find out, like, had a farmer diverted the creek, like, what had happened here.

Well, it turned out there was an illegal grow operation by the cartel, because when California made marijuana legal in the state for adult use, what they did was make it a misdemeanor to grow it illegally. So it’s just a misdemeanor. So the cartel just started growing it in state parks, forests. And so they would find these heavily armed cartel operations in the middle of national parks, national forests.

And, you know, his group became—he’s got a great book called “Hidden War”—and his organization became essentially a tactical group. You know, they had Belgian Malinois and bulletproof vests, and they were having shootouts with the cartel in the forest because these guys were growing this stuff. And 90% of all the marijuana that’s sold in these states where it’s illegal was being grown in a state where it’s only a misdemeanor to grow it.

So they’re growing it in California, and they were using all sorts of horrific pesticides and herbicides that are illegal everywhere else, but they would use them. And so you’d get pesticide poisoning, herbicide poisoning. You know, it’s crazy. It’s like we’re curtailing responsible adult use. And the way we’re doing this is by propping up these illegal drug cartels the same way that during alcohol prohibition, they propped up the mob and the moonshiners.

RAND PAUL: Right? And this is what people don’t understand about prohibition. When you have prohibition, you get products that are more dangerous because they’re not openly regulated. You also have more young people using it because it’s already illegal. What do I care if I’m selling out of the back of my car? I’m not going to check your ID.

So to get adult use and to get rules on those things, it’s better to actually have it legal. So with the hemp thing, McConnell, I’m in the same state. So he goes home and he tells everybody, “Yeah, Rand Paul wants your kids to use hemp.” That’s not true because Kentucky passed a state law that says you have to be 21, regulates the amount. His law is going to overturn that, and there is no federal law on the age of hemp. So he’s actually the one who’s going to overturn the law by prohibiting it all.

But most of the states have reasonably looked at this. Now, Texas looked at it, and then Texas was going to ban it, and then Governor Abbott stepped up and vetoed it. But Texas, the legislature was terrible. They were going to pass a ban on hemp, and then Abbott vetoed it. It’s sort of in limbo now.

JOE ROGAN: So when does this national one go into effect?

RAND PAUL: It’s one year from when we passed it, and I think we passed it in probably November. So this coming November, the entire hemp industry—this is a $25 billion industry. This is not a small industry. There’s a lot of jobs. There’s a lot of people using it. Like you say, these aren’t reefer madness people out there committing crimes. It’s your grandmother, your mother. People have difficulty sleeping.

There’s still hope and I’m trying to reverse it. I have several bills that we’re working on going to introduce in the near future to either try to extend the deadline or change it. I’d like to change it where if your state has regulated it, the federal government would accede to your state regulation or allow your state to regulate it.

Working in Government as a Rational Person

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s got to be very bizarre being a rational person working for the government.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. And the people up there are of a different sort. Many of them have never worked really outside of government. So they really know nothing about writing checks. Yeah. Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: How to live your life.

RAND PAUL: And it’s kind of when people come up to me and they say, you know, they’re young, smart kids that have been interns in my office, “I want to run. I want to be part of government.” And I say go out and have a career first. Work some way. You know, I worked as a physician for about 20 years before I ended up running. And really you have to have a real career because politics, one, isn’t that great a career and two, there’s no guarantee. You can be the smartest person in the world, not win. It doesn’t always—you have to be the right person, right time, right place and a little bit of luck.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And you know, it’s hard. Like, how can someone effectively govern if you haven’t experienced life outside of the government? It just doesn’t seem even rational that you could be a person that would be a good representation of all these hard working people if you’ve never actually had a job.

RAND PAUL: It just seems weird. Yeah. That’s why people thought one of the Bushes was out of touch. I think it was the elder Bush when he went to the grocery store and he didn’t know what a scanner was. He’d never seen groceries scanned because he’d never been in a grocery store.

JOE ROGAN: That’s funny. But what is it like being—I mean, it’s got to be incredibly frustrating, but it’s also got to be bizarre.

Venezuela, Drug Interdiction, and Presumption of Innocence

RAND PAUL: Yeah. And I’ll give you an example of what I think is bizarre. So we’ve been blowing up these people in boats off the coast of Venezuela. They’re accused of running drugs, but nobody knows their names and nobody’s put up any evidence. When we had them September 2, two of them were still clinging to the wreckage. They’re shipwrecked. They blew them up.

And so what I think is bizarre is I hear mostly my Republican colleagues say, “Well, we shouldn’t have to—how do we know they’re not armed?” And it’s like, but there’s this thing called presumption of innocence. They say it doesn’t apply. Well, it actually always has applied on the oceans. We have always had drug interdictions, but we have always stopped boats and asked to search them. If they flee or shoot at the Coast Guard, they will get shot and blown up. But it’s usually an escalatory sort of steps.

We know that when the Coast Guard boards vessels off of Miami and off of California, one in four of the boats they board don’t have any drugs on them. So I look at my colleagues who say they’re pro-life and they value God’s inspiration in life, but they don’t give a shit about these people in the boats. And are they terrible people in the boats? I don’t know. They’re probably poor people in Venezuela and Colombia.

And really they say, “Well, we’re at war with them. They’re committing war by bringing drugs into America.” They’re not even coming here. They’re going to these islands in the south part of the Caribbean, the cocaine, and it’s not fentanyl at all. The cocaine’s going to Europe. Those little boats can’t get here. No one’s even asked this common question. Those boats have these four engines on them. They’re outboard boats. You can probably go about 100 miles before you have to refuel. 2,000 miles from us. They have to refuel 20 times to get here.

They really—it was all a pretense and a false argument. But I guess what I don’t feel connected to my Republican colleagues is that those lives don’t matter at all. And we just blow them up. And against all justice and against all laws of war, all laws of just war, we never have blown up people who were shipwrecked. It’s against the military code of justice to do that. And we’re doing it. And everybody just says, “Oh, well, they’re drug dealers.”

JOE ROGAN: Why do you think they were attacking those people? Because I’ve heard a bunch of different theories. And one of the big theories was they were trying to get the cartel upset at Maduro in order to get him out of office.

RAND PAUL: It’s all been a pretense for arresting Maduro. So we have to set up the predicate. We’ve got to show you we care about drugs. But the weird thing about it is they really care about drugs, except for the former president of Honduras, Hernandez, who was given a 40 year sentence, was tried, was found guilty, was given 40 years in a U.S. jail and he’s let go. At the same time we’re arresting Maduro because he’s attacking the United States with drugs.

And then I get this stuff. I had this on air from a respectable journalist the other day. She said, “Well, don’t you care about the kids in our country dying from fentanyl?” I said, of course I do. But you know, no fentanyl comes from Venezuela. Not a little bit. Zero.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. If we were really interested, we’d be attacking Mexico.

RAND PAUL: Well, they want to do that next. They want to bomb Mexico.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that this is like sort of a predicate, like we’re trying to set that up?

Regime Change and the Dangers of Intervention

RAND PAUL: I hope not. That’s why I’ve opposed it because look, I have no love lost for Maduro. I wrote another book called “The Case Against Socialism.” I think historically there’s been a link between socialism and state sponsored violence. And so in the book we talk about a 16 year old girl who has a gang and her gang’s turf or territory are the dumpsters outside of restaurants to scavenge for food. That’s what Maduro and Chavez did to Venezuela.

And so I’m glad he’s gone. I’m glad, you know, I hope they choose wiser. But at the same time, if the predicate is we’re going to snatch people, why don’t we snatch Da Silva from Brazil? Some people say Bolsonaro is unfairly in prison. May be true. And they say Da Silva cheated in the election. May also be true.

But should the President of the United States, no matter who he or she is, have the ability, without a vote of Congress, the people’s representatives, just go snatch people out of jails in Brazil and put a new government in? One, it doesn’t usually work. I’m hoping it’s successful here, but you know, we’ve tried it in other places. It’s one of the things I liked about Donald Trump. He was against regime change in Iraq, he was against regime change in Libya and it didn’t work real well in Iraq or Libya.

Venezuela’s Oil and the Regime Change Question

JOE ROGAN: So what do you think changed? Why do you think they’re so interested in Venezuela, do you think?

RAND PAUL: Just because of the oil influence, and I’ve jokingly said that there ought to be a reoccurring issue that we thought was resolved with the software. Be back. Okay? All right, we’re good.

Sorry folks, the program was interrupted by the NSA. You know, they are spying on the show to see.

JOE ROGAN: So here’s the question. The Biden administration had a $20 million. Was it 20 or $22 million bounty on Maduro. Like, they’ve wanted Maduro out forever. Why was that?

RAND PAUL: Because, you know, they don’t have free elections. It’s an authoritarian government. The people are suffering. So it’s this idea that that’s wrong and government should. And I think that’s a noble concept to want better government, more freedom for people.

But I could probably list for you a dozen different countries that have autocratic rulers right now. And we could go in and we could arrest them all and put people in place, but it sometimes backfires.

For example, I think one of the things. I think there’s a good feeling towards America from a lot of Venezuelans right now that are happy that Maduro is gone. But ask them again in six months if we’re still controlling their oil and we’re doling out a little bit of money. But the money’s not going to the people, it’s going to the socialist government. So you realize we’ve traded one socialist for another.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

RAND PAUL: Maduro’s gone, but his second in charge, who was elected with him and holds all of his beliefs, is there. And if she graciously or fearfully decides to accept what they’re telling her, that we’re going to confiscate all the oil and we’re going to sell it on the international market, we’re going to give her a little bit back if she behaves.

And let’s say that austerity doesn’t lead to a real vibrant economy. I think six months from now, the people will be just as upset as they were and they’ll still have the same government, essentially.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

RAND PAUL: So.

JOE ROGAN: One of the things that I’ve read was one of the primary reasons why we went in was because Russia and China were also interested in Venezuela’s oil. And China had met with Maduro literally the day that he was kidnapped by the United States.

China’s Influence and the Colombia Connection

RAND PAUL: Yeah, I think China gets about 4% of their oil. So it’s a small amount of their oil. The best way, I think, is not through war to keep China out of South America. It’s through trade cooperation. That’s why threatening to bomb Colombia was a bad idea, because we should continue to trade. We buy coffee from them, we buy bananas from down there. We should have trade.

So this Monday, I sent the president a text and he responded to him. I said, the ambassador called me and he said, their president’s been trying for several months to get a phone call through and he’d love to talk to President Trump. And the good thing about President Trump, and this is something I always really like about him, he’ll make decisions on spot. He didn’t ask a committee to vote on whether he can talk to the president. He said, of course I will.

And the president still has good instincts. I disagreed with the bombing of the boats and the bombing of Maduro. I’m not too unhappy with the result. But I don’t want the chaos to spread to Colombia. And I think Colombia does cooperate with us, particularly on the drug trade. It’s not perfect, but they do cooperate.

But he did end up making a phone call to the President of Colombia, and I think the setting is for less of a problem. And you say, well, why have things changed from where he was talking about regime change in the campaign? Some of it’s influenced the people around him.

JOE ROGAN: Him.

RAND PAUL: I’ve jokingly said we ought to pass a law saying Lindsey Graham shouldn’t be allowed in the White House because I think he is a bad influence. And Lindsey and I are friends. You know, we do okay. But he’s much more for a different type of philosophy.

For me, I say we fight when we have to, we fight when attacked. That’s about it. I’m not too interested in fixing every problem around the world. Look, we have a $2 trillion deficit. We can’t really go fix every problem in every country. And sometimes when we try to change the regime and put better people in, actually, we get the opposite right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is your dad’s philosophy as well.

RAND PAUL: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: It’s one of the things I really enjoyed about him. When you see these things at play, like the kidnapping of Venezuela and the bombing of the boats, how informed are you about why they’re making their decisions? Are you. Do you have conversations with the people that are making the decisions?

The Briefings on Bombing Drug Boats

RAND PAUL: We do, but the reasoning is mostly public. Like, we’ll get briefings. We’ve had briefings on the boats.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what do they say in those briefings?

RAND PAUL: They say that I’ll ask, are they carrying arms? Because it kind of makes a difference whether they kill unarmed people, to me. And they’ll say, yes, their arms are drugs and they’re invading us with drugs.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. But they’re not really. Right. Because if you look at it geographically, like you were just saying, they’re so far away from us, they’re in small boats, and they’re not bringing those drugs to the United States.

RAND PAUL: And the only way they can make war with the drugs is if they’re hitting you over the head with the drugs. And then making you take the drugs. All right, so I think that’s ridiculous. And I think that there is a difference between crime and war.

And the reason why they have to get it is it normally, like if. Let’s say the boat came all the way here, that speedboat got all the way to Miami, offloaded it into a U-Haul truck, and it’s going down the road. Do we stand on the side of the road and hit it with grenade launchers? Nobody would be for that. All of a sudden we’re going to believe that, well, gosh, there might be the wrong. We might blow up the wrong truck, or maybe we got the information wrong, we would stop and search them.

But why don’t we do the boats? The Coast Guard actually still does amidst all this. Coast Guard still stopping dozens of boats, but they tell us we’re only blowing up the ones that are related to the terrorists, the trend or whatever. I don’t know how they can know that with certainty. I don’t know how they can know with certainty that some of. I think most of these probably were blocking.

JOE ROGAN: Why do you think they’re doing it then?

RAND PAUL: They wanted regime change, and I think Rubio has wanted regime change. He’s been itching for it for 15 years. And I think he has a great deal of influence with the president. And they’ve convinced. And it’s a. Selling someone like the president that he can use his power for good is an argument that I think a lot of people would succumb to.

He believes that he’s doing good, and if it all works out and freedom rings true in Venezuela, people will say, well, gosh, yeah, I think. And that’s where now people think he did the right thing. I think people don’t know yet what’s going to happen. Whether or not people are going to be happy keeping the same socialist government, whether they’ll have a free election and somebody else will win isn’t known yet.

But I do think that while he’s done that and it seems to have worked, it’s my job and others to say that really invading Greenland is not a reasonable thing. Invading Cuba, invading Colombia, that there has to be pushback. But I get a lot of flack. I mean, there are. There are people that rally behind the president that are telling me I need to pipe down, that I need to be quiet. So the threats of that. Well, a lot of the mob. The Internet mob is. Internet is angry.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you can’t read that.

RAND PAUL: Yeah, you can’t. But you got to be a little bit wary also. But I mean, there is a thought and I don’t think it’s good for government, though. I also don’t even think it’s good for the president, who I largely like on a lot of issues. It’s not good for him to have no critics, for people would be afraid to criticize him.

JOE ROGAN: I agree. So is the argument that they want regime change, that these cartels are working with Maduro and that’s why we blow them up?

The Drug Predicate for War

RAND PAUL: That’s sort of the argument. But I don’t think the cartels and the drugs are really important. It’s about regime change because there’s.

JOE ROGAN: Well, okay, but if it’s about regime change, why blow up the drug post?

RAND PAUL: Because they need a drug predicate. They need. They want to say, this isn’t war, it is kind of war, and we’re going to take people as if it’s war, but it’s not really war. It was an arrest warrant. And they’ve actually persuaded some otherwise good people in my caucus to say, well, normally I would be against bombing another nation’s capital and removing the leader. Oh, but he was indicted for the indictment.

Most people don’t know this part of the indictment is for drugs, but that’s. He’s breaking a US law. How do we indict foreigners in their country? They haven’t broken law in our country for breaking law, but other than drugs. They’ve also indicted Maduro for possessing or conspiring to possess machine guns. And it’s like, what leader in the world doesn’t have security guards with machine guns? We have machine guns.

JOE ROGAN: Wait a minute. Did Maduro personally have illegal machine guns and illegal. How is it legal internationally? Like, what does that mean?

RAND PAUL: It means absolutely nothing.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. How many people in Texas have machine guns? You could legally have them here.

RAND PAUL: I used to go to the machine gun fest and it was a machine gun shootout. They’d have a line of 50 machine guns. You have to have a special permit to get them, but you can get them. But the thing is, is what’s ridiculous about it is our leaders, our soldiers have machine guns. Every country that has soldiers and security forces has machine guns.

But to indict him. But that’s. Then their argument is it’s okay to blow up Caracas. It’s okay to do something that looks like it looks like a war, but it’s not a war because it was just an arrest warrant. It’s a game. It’s gamesmanship for people who might succumb to, I think a silly argument.

JOE ROGAN: So what is the primary motivation for regime change? It can’t just be he’s a bad.

RAND PAUL: Guy, because there’s a lot of, you know, there’s. I think a country suffers and they want. People justifiably want better stuff for the people there. I think they also do worry, as you mentioned earlier, they said there’s too much influence of Russia and China there.

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s what I’ve been reading most that makes sense is that the concern was that China or Russia was going to ramp up oil production. Right. But I don’t know.

Why Socialism Fails: Venezuela’s Oil Industry

RAND PAUL: You know, the whole oil situation is an example of why socialism doesn’t work very well. I mean, it’s like 30 years old. Everything’s old. Everything’s rotting and rusting. They do a million barrels a day. They have more oil than Saudi Arabia, but they are just. It’s completely incompetent.

And mainly because the one thing that capitalism does is it gives you supply and demand and a price. And they’ve controlled the price, not the oil price, because that’s an international price, but they’ve controlled the price of all the things that go into the equipment and who owns it. So you have a bunch of people who studied in Marxism in Cuba running the companies. That’s not what we do here. You either make a profit here or you get fired.

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t the oil in a much more difficult form to extract than the oil in Saudi Arabia? So by saying they have more oil than Saudi Arabia. Maybe.

RAND PAUL: But that may be true. That may be true. There’s a difference.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s like almost a lot.

RAND PAUL: Of it’s heavy crude, I think. I don’t know the details of which kind of oil they have, but I think there probably are some technological problems. But I think there’s. I think it’s easy to make the argument that they’re not hitting their maximum efficiency with the current socialist government.

JOE ROGAN: Right. I think that’s a good argument. But what I’d read about the extraction was that the oil that is in Venezuela is almost like asphalt and that it requires all these. That could be chemicals, to break it down.

The Economics of Price Controls and Market Freedom

RAND PAUL: And so there may be more difficulty than Saudi Arabia, but I think also the system, you know, so when you look at Venezuela and you look at what happens, price controls, you need prices to go up and down based on demand, because if you don’t, you have shortages. If you set the price too low, and I’m a manufacturer, I’m not going to sell it for that. So you all of a sudden get shortage.

If you set the price too high, then it just sits on the shelf and a black market develops. There was a story behind the iron curtain. I think it was in Poland. I love this story. Guy goes in a store and he says, “Oh, are you the store that doesn’t have any eggs?” And the shop owner said, “No, no, no, we’re the store that doesn’t have any toilet paper. The store across the street doesn’t have any eggs.”

But it was so common that you always knew that the stores were always missing something. There were always shortages. And this is the main thing about prices that is so incredibly important. And people don’t think about it, but it’s incredibly important to let prices go up and down without the government getting involved.

That’s why, like it’s a mistake, it’ll sound right. But the president wants to ban interest rates above 10% for credit cards. Well, part of the interest rate being much higher if you’re going for a same day loan is one, you’re much higher risk, you’re more desperate. But also by you having to pay 30%, it’s going to teach you to be a better planner the next time. Because you can’t keep borrowing at 30%.

But the marketplace demands the 30% is what the market will bear. And if it was too much, then the interest rate will come down. And no one should borrow 30%. I mean they should teach in high school how to plan their budget.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t they sneak those in on college students? College students, people that are a little bit more…

RAND PAUL: We’re talking about ignorant people. College students, they’re high up on the list of ignorant people. People lacking common sense. Yeah, it’s that.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re also very young.

RAND PAUL: Yeah, yeah. People get into a gambling problem, they get into some problem where they don’t have money. But if you say it can be 10%, what does that tell me about my behavior? I just keep borrowing at 10%. I might have to stop someday at 30%, you know what I mean?

And so the marketplace develops these things. But that price is sending signals back to people. It’s the same way with interest rates on houses. The president’s always like, “We need lower interest rates. Houses are so expensive. Why don’t we just fix the price at 2% and tell the banks they can’t get more than 2%?”

The problem is this. If there’s a boom and everybody’s buying houses and the demand goes up for houses, prices will go up, the demand for the money goes up. And as the interest rates rise, then the economy will slow down.

So in 2000, from 2000 to about 2007, the Federal Reserve kept the interest rates low. It’s like 2%. You could get money. It was free. And there was this boom in houses, and there was some dishonesty, too, in the subprime market, but the boom kept going. If interest rates had risen to 4 or 5%, home sales would have gone down and people would have lamented that, but you wouldn’t have gotten such an enormous boom in the crash.

So the cycle of the economy going up and down is dictated by interest rates. And you want interest rates, you don’t want high interest rates. Nobody wants that. But if you don’t allow them to move, that sends a signal back that we’re buying too many houses and we’re building too many houses and we’ll slow down. If you just send the signal to keep interest rates at 2, you get the boom so high up here that the crash is devastating, like it was in 2010.

Corporate Home Ownership and Market Freedom

JOE ROGAN: What are your feelings about corporations buying up personal homes? Like, there’s Blackstone and there’s a bunch of different corporations that have bought. I don’t know if it’s Blackstone, but I heard that Blackstone, there was a drop in their stock price because of this thing that Trump is trying to do now to stop corporations from buying individual family homes and then leasing them out to people.

RAND PAUL: So in a free market, in a free world where you can choose a hemp product, you also make contracts with who you sell to. So for me to tell you, to me, it’s a freedom issue. If I tell you you can’t sell your house to Blackstone, that’s me limiting your choices. Maybe Blackstone’s going to give you 5% more. I’m stealing 5% from you.

And it’s not a given that it’s going to be bad. It might be bad, but I think if you look at this carefully, for example, one of the impediments or one of the costs of buying or selling a house is the real estate price. So the realtor takes, you know, they used to take, what, like 6%? But, you know, now sometimes you can get 3% and you go through a bigger company.

So corporatization, or making something bigger, where a bigger entity owns something, sometimes leads to lower cost because they can actually lower cost. So to me, it’s just a freedom issue. I don’t think, actually, probably, I think the price of homes has gone up because the value of the dollar’s gone down. We are destroying the dollar.

It’s like, is gold more precious? No. People are freaking out about how many dollars have been printed and how much debt we’re incurring. So the dollar loses its value and prices of homes, I don’t, I’m not making light of the problem. You know, I have kids of the age of trying to get a house. It’s difficult. Prices are extraordinarily high and interest rates are still high too.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I think the fear is like people are terrified that these enormous corporations are going to buy up all of the single family homes and you won’t be able to get one and you’ll be forced to lease a home and you’ll never be able to own a home. That’s the fear.

RAND PAUL: I know. I think I would probably want to study it more thoroughly to find out if that’s actually the result because some people talk about a fear of it happening. You know, if I’m Blackstone, I’m not doing stuff just to hold them around. I’m not like, you know, Mr. Potter, you know, “It’s a Wonderful Life” and wringing my hands together. I’m going to wait.

They won’t make any money holding onto a bunch of houses. They’re going to have to sell them. And it may be, what if Blackstone does have 10,000 homes? Maybe they’ll do it with a reduced, you go directly to them by website. Goldman Sachs owns homes. There’s entities like this. Buffett, you know, Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway owns homes as well.

So I don’t think it’s a brand new thing, but I would explore it. I think the, it’s a reaction to think big is bad and that these big players are going to rip us off. But if it’s a free contract, I think more of whether or not I should infringe on your liberty until you can’t sell your house to Blackstone. I think that’s, that’s me limiting your ability to contract with whoever you want.

JOE ROGAN: That makes sense. I think the fear is, well, the only reason why they would be doing it is they could make more money leasing the homes out then.

RAND PAUL: Yeah, I don’t know. The same way of buying apartments too. I’m guessing they bought apartments too because kids are staying in apartments longer and the apartment business has been a really good business for like the last 10 years, buying apartments. But corporations own apartments. I mean, the real disaster isn’t stuff like that, the marketplace, the disaster of like rent and homes and not having enough places like to live in Manhattan, which is very expensive or New York in general.

And I’m positive the socialist is going to make it worse. Rent control, what does that mean? So if you’re in the middle of Manhattan and you can get an apartment for $300, you’re like, “Oh, that’s great.” But if I’m the landlord and all the stuff’s broken in there and there’s holes in the walls, I’m not fixing it for $300 a month. I need $3,000 a month to keep the place up.

So what happens is the apartments go to, you know, into ruin. And also there’s a shortage. You need money, and you need big people with money to build apartment complexes, particularly in New York, where you got to tear something down and build something new. I’m not doing it if you’re going to tell me what my rent’s going to be.

The Miracle of Capitalism

So socialism doesn’t work. And the one thing people don’t understand about it because they fear somebody being ripped off. And how expensive something is, is, there was an economist, Joseph Schumpeter, and he put it this way. He said, “The miracle of capitalism is not that the queen can buy silk stockings, but the factory girl can.”

But in the beginning, the first person, the only person to buy them will be queens and kings and rich people. So the story of calculators. My dad had a calculator. He was a doctor. And we were, well to do. We were extraordinarily rich, but well to do. He had a calculator for 300 bucks in the 1970s. All it could do is add, subtract, and multiply, and it was about this thick and this big.

But you can go tour a condo and pretend to buy a condo, and the real estate agent will give you a calculator. Now, but in the beginning, only rich people got them. But if you forbid rich people from getting them at a high price, the only way it gets to a low price, like Tesla started with more expensive cars at a high price. They’re coming down, but they only come down because rich people bought them first.

So we can’t be, we can never be of the notion that we’re going to make things better by preventing prices from being too high in something. It’s how products get started. So the queen may have bought the first silk stockings, but eventually capitalism brings the price down enough that you have mass distribution and actually a factory girl can buy them.

JOE ROGAN: Cell phones are a good argument about that.

RAND PAUL: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: So when it comes to the economy, like, and when it comes to spending money, what do you think can be done differently? Like say if you had a magic wand and you could turn things around, what would you do differently?

The Penny Plan: A Bipartisan Solution to the Debt Crisis

RAND PAUL: I think the first thing to acknowledge is both parties are equally guilty. The debt is the problem of both parties and the spending against both parties. And there is a compromise. I tell people it’s a dirty little deal that’s going on right in front of your nose.

The right, Lindsey Graham and the war hawks want more military money. The left, Chris Murphy and Booker, they want more welfare. What’s the compromise? You scratch my back, I’ll scratch you. I’ll let you have your military money if you let me have the welfare money. So the compromise of the last 50 years is they’ve both grown enormously.

But the budget we vote on is only one third of the spending. Two thirds of the spending is mandatory spending. That’s just on autopilot. We never vote on it. The one third that we vote on is about $2 trillion. That’s what the deficit is. So when I vote for spending and I vote against most of it, almost all of that is borrowed.

What would be the compromise that would fix it? The reverse. I would go to the left, my buddy Ron Wyden, who I am good friends with, and I would say, look, we’re out of money. The interest is killing us. It’s crowding everything out. What if we spend 1% less next year on welfare and I’ll tell my party they have to spend 1% less on military.

If you do that across the board, you’d have to include the mandatory programs. You can balance your budget gradually over a five year period. And I’ve called this the Penny Plan. And I think it’s a compromise because instead of what conservatives have typically done is they’ve said, it’s Sesame Street, we can get rid of public TV and Sesame Street, we’ll show those liberals and we’ll balance the budget.

Well, it’s not enough money and I’m not against doing it. I voted to reduce the money. But there are some people on the left who live and die by public TV and they think it’s the greatest thing and it’s an offense to them. So rather than cut 100% of it, let’s cut it. And you can balance the budget right now if you cut 6% of the military, 6% of Sesame Street, 6% of everything everybody wants. And I think you could actually do it.

And I try this message out sometime. Everybody comes to Washington wants money, and there are usually things that you can have sympathy for. So one week they come and they wear the purple ribbons, and it’s for Alzheimer’s disease. I have family members who have Alzheimer’s. I have a great deal of sympathy, but we’re $2 trillion short.

So what I usually say to them is, we’re a rich country and we should be able to spend some of our money on Alzheimer’s research. But you got $100 million last year. I’m making up the number. But let’s say you got $100 million last year. And because we’re short of money, everybody has to get less this year. Would it be okay if I only vote for $94 million for you next year?

And when you put it that way, and they’re usually in there with tears running down their face talking about their mom and their grandmother and Alzheimer’s and they’re worried they’re going to get it to a person. You look around the table and they say, that sounds kind of fair. Everybody has to take a hit, right? 94%.

Almost everything that is like, for example, food stamps. People say, well, the people are going to starve without food stamps. Well, why don’t we just get rid of Coca Cola and Pepsi, no sugar drinks on food stamps. That’s 10% of food stamps. That’d be a 10% cut. We’ll do well. We’re going to spend 10% less. No one’s going to stop.

JOE ROGAN: Would you spend less or would you just limit the purchasing to non…

RAND PAUL: We’ll probably be lucky just to limit the purchase. But I would spend less.

JOE ROGAN: But how could you spend less? You would have to give them less. And you say, hey, not only can you not buy sugary drinks, but now you’ll have less money to buy healthy food, which is more expensive.

RAND PAUL: Well, what you would do is…

JOE ROGAN: But you know what I’m saying?

RAND PAUL: Well, maybe if you had a budget, let’s say it’s $100 million and next year the food stamp budget is going to be $94 million. And you say you can’t buy Coca Cola and Pepsi and sugar drinks, they would still have to make their decisions with a little bit less, but they on average are spending 6% or… Yeah, I think it’s about… No, I think it’s about 10% of the dollars are going towards these sugar drinks. They would have to make decisions to do it.

But I think even something like food stamps, that there’s a strong argument, oh, people will be hungry. Hunger is not a problem in our country. It really isn’t. Our problem is too much food. It frankly is there is no one starving in our country. There is food everywhere.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But it’s not too much food. It’s non nutritious food. I mean, it’s not even bad food. It’s not even food. It’s things you eat that have no nutrition in it at all.

RAND PAUL: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Like Coca Cola.

RAND PAUL: Yes, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Like candy and cookies and all this s* that you can…

RAND PAUL: And I’ve been talking, you can get candies, you know, you can get a bag of candy on your food stamps.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

Food Stamps and Nutritional Choices

RAND PAUL: There’s no… That should… And so I’ve been talking about this for years. And so I had a Democrat senator who I can talk to, we’re friends, we’re walking down the hall and I tell him about it. He says, that sounds reasonable, but I don’t want to reduce the dollar. So what you’re saying is the compromise is probably Democrats are never going to vote to reduce the dollars. We should, but we won’t get it.

But even when we got push came to shove, his staff piped up and they said, oh, I thought you were a libertarian. I thought you were for choice. And I say I am, with your money. I mean the taxpayer money. We don’t let you buy alcohol. I think it’s arguable that sugar drinks are as bad as buying alcohol.

JOE ROGAN: It’s close. I mean, certainly in terms of health consequences, diabetes and obesity and all the other comorbidities that come along with obesity. But the thing is, if you’re asking them to buy healthy food, healthy food is definitely more expensive sometimes.

RAND PAUL: If you want to go to Whole Foods, sometimes. Well, if you want to go to Whole Foods and buy things there, it is more expensive to buy all the fresh fruits and things. But there is a lot of things that you can buy that really frankly aren’t. You know, a head of lettuce is not that expensive. Right.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s not going to fill you up if you want calorie rich food.

RAND PAUL: Right.

JOE ROGAN: If you want to match calorie per calorie…

RAND PAUL: Beans aren’t that expensive and they’re healthier for you than most of the things we eat. But really the thing is you got to teach people how to cook now.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s the problem.

RAND PAUL: Actually, I would not me.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

Home Economics and Life Skills Education

RAND PAUL: I would have this in schools. So I would have the old concept of home economics in schools. And here’s what I would teach. Some of this comes from a book. There was a book written by Charles Murray years ago called “Coming Apart” and it compared people and said, these are the rich people in your society and these are the poor people, just divided into two groups. And the two main statistics that put you in either rich group or poor group, having kids before you were married, and education.

JOE ROGAN: Charles Murray, isn’t that the guy that had very controversial ideas about race and IQ?

RAND PAUL: Yep. Yeah, but this wasn’t racial. This was based on whether or not you were in one of those two categories. But I would teach this in home economics. I wouldn’t teach morality. I wouldn’t teach people that it’s evil to have sex. I would say that the odds are, the statistics are if you have not had your children, you have a choice.

The statistics are overwhelming, that if you have your kids before you’re married, you’ll be poor. And the thing is, it is true. Why not teach that? But in that same class, I would teach how to go to the grocery store, what to buy, and also how to prepare it. I’d go to the grocery store. I would do this for obese people in our country.

So Medicaid pays just gazillions of dollars for diabetes and all that stuff. I would pay for dietary training, but I actually think you need to go to the grocery store with people and show them all the crap they’re putting in their cart that they shouldn’t be putting in.

JOE ROGAN: That sounds like you’re for another government program.

RAND PAUL: Damn, you got me.

JOE ROGAN: It sounds great on paper, but the reality is, in order to change people’s behavior, it takes a radical shift of your perceptions, and that’s very difficult to do. You can’t just teach people like, this is how you make spaghetti and meatballs, and then now they’re going to eat healthy. It’s not that.

RAND PAUL: Spaghetti, meatballs. You don’t really have to teach people. People aren’t as dumb as you think they are.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not that they’re dumb. It’s just they’re set in their ways. To change people’s behavior…

RAND PAUL: That’s why you have to give up. Extraordinarily difficult, but that’s why they have to be… I have to make choices. They become smart very quickly. If you give somebody 96% or 94% of what they were getting for food stamps, they will be smart within a week. They will make these decisions.

JOE ROGAN: I would argue against that. I think that there’s a problem in that people are very set in their ways and they’ve developed a pattern of behavior over the course of decades that you’re not just going to shift with a change in policy and a reduction in their food stamps.

Financial Incentives and Behavioral Change

RAND PAUL: What about this? Do you think anybody has changed their lifestyle in America since two people at McDonald’s cost 20 bucks to eat? Now a burger, a drink and fries is 20 bucks for two people. You think anybody in America has shifted their buying patterns for food and are eating at home more? I guarantee you thousands and thousands of people are eating less out probably. I’ve seen Wendy’s go to business.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it’s a bad example because McDonald’s is terrible for you too. Like that doesn’t make any sense.

RAND PAUL: The president eats it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, I do too, but it’s not good for it.

RAND PAUL: Filet o fish is…

JOE ROGAN: No, but I think people will not. You can’t teach. I agree with you to a certain extent. I don’t think you can teach people to make wiser decisions. You can sort of encourage it as part of the educational model. And I wouldn’t spend more money on this. We spend a lot of money on education. I would make this part of the curriculum.

But I do think that if you aren’t given a financial incentive to make these decisions, you won’t do it. You could ban the foods and actually am for taking them off the formulary. We have something called WIC, which is women and children. It’s for food during pregnancy. It only has healthy food on it. You can’t get Coca Cola with your WIC dollars, but you can go through the line with your SNAP plus your WIC and all that stuff.

But I’d get rid of the sugar drinks. I’d get rid of chips. I get rid of candy Ding Dongs.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think that’s a no brainer. That’s a no brainer because that stuff’s not…

RAND PAUL: But I don’t have one Democrat sign on. I have yet to get a Democrat. No reduction in money. So my bill doesn’t reduce money. I think we should.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think we have the voters.

RAND PAUL: The Democrats won’t vote.

JOE ROGAN: They’re held prisoner. But their voters want that. They don’t want you to tell them what to do with that money. And a lot of people feel entitled to that money, which is also very odd.

RAND PAUL: But I don’t do it because I dislike people on food stamps. I do it because I want them to be healthier.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

The Future of Work and Social Safety Nets

RAND PAUL: And I actually don’t want to. You know, the goal is, see, people think the goal is we need more Medicaid. Know what we need is less people on Medicaid. The goal should be an economy where 5% of the economy really, in a good functioning world, 5, 6, not much more than that, shouldn’t be able to take care of themselves.

There really should be health care that almost everybody can afford, except for a small percentage of people. You know, once you have kidney disease, you’re on dialysis, so almost everybody’s on Medicaid. It’s a little more understandable. Diabetes, if we fed people right, 80% of adult onset diabetes is curable by loss of weight.

JOE ROGAN: Right. I see, and I see where they’re going to argue against what you’re saying about food stamps and you know, from this libertarian perspective. But I think you’re absolutely right in that you should be allowed to do whatever you want with your own money. But if you’re going to get government assistance, there should be some sort of a limitation to you getting food that’s only healthy.

We shouldn’t be paying for you to kill yourself. Just like you can’t buy cigarettes, right? You can’t buy alcohol.

RAND PAUL: And this is something Bobby Kennedy is changing and they hate him. Just hate him.

JOE ROGAN: Because they’re voters. They’re voters.

RAND PAUL: No, not the voters. The establishment hates him more. His own family hates him more. But you know what? If he only does one thing, and one thing he’s remembered for is treating sugar as a, not a sin, as a bad food. Sugar added to convince us that adding sugar to cereals and all these things that we add sugar to, that it’s bad for your health. That will transform the people who accept.

JOE ROGAN: It certainly will. And the education, the understanding of that. When I was a kid and I talked about this the other day with my friend Whitney, we were doing a podcast. We didn’t think sugar was bad for you, we just thought it gave you cavities. We would throw sugar on our cereal and we would put sugar in their coffee and sugar and this and sugar. Nobody thought anything of it.

Sugar and Public Health

RAND PAUL: But since the government is responsible for so much food anyway, think about how healthy. I don’t think we should have sugar drinks in high schools. They have machines in all the high schools and they say, oh, we get extra money for our football field. Let them put non-sugar drinks in if you really want their advertising dollars.

JOE ROGAN: I agree. You know, I agree. I mean, look, but again, you know, if you’re a kid and you work and you’ve got a job, you know, you’re working at a corner store and you’re making, you know, whatever, you make 15 bucks an hour, whatever, not even what’s minimum wage.

RAND PAUL: Well, the state, federal is different. State, some states have $15 an hour. Federal is still like $7. It’s inconsequential.

JOE ROGAN: So if you’re a kid and you make $7 an hour, let’s say working at a store, and you want to use that $7 to buy a Coca Cola and a pack of Ring Dings, who cares?

RAND PAUL: $7 is probably gone now.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s it. That’s your whole paycheck for the hour. But the point is giving you money, I think it’s very reasonable to say this money cannot. Like we’re supposed to be helping you get back on your feet.

This is the problem with social safety nets, where I’m a big believer in it. When I was a child, my family was poor and we were on welfare and we were on food stamps, but they worked their way out of it. And then when I was in high school, they were doing really well.

So it’s like, it’s a very valuable thing for families that are down on their luck and things aren’t going well. And I’m a big believer, and I think we should treat this country like a community. And when you have the downtrodden and the people that aren’t doing so well, I think it’s really important to help them.

I think to let abject poverty and starvation exist in a country that has such extreme wealth is abhorrent. It doesn’t make any sense to me. But I also think people get very dependent on social safety systems and social safety nets. And when you have people that have generation after generation have existed on welfare, then it becomes a problem.

And it becomes a problem where we have to figure out how to motivate people or educate people as to choices that they can make that will be more beneficial to their lives to provide for themselves and be outside of it.

Another thing that’s going to mess with that motivation is unhealthy food. Because one of the surest ways to keep people unmotivated and have no energy is to keep them unhealthy. Healthier people have more vibrancy. You have more energy to go pursue your dreams and do the things you want to do in life.

If you’re constantly dealing with type 2 diabetes because you’ve been eating sugar all day and garbage all day and you’re morbidly obese, you’re not going to have the same energy as a person who’s eating healthy food and getting up early and drinking water. And it’s just, it’s going to affect the choices that you make because it’s more burdensome to carry around that body.

Welfare Reform and Tough Love

RAND PAUL: Yeah, I think that, and I don’t disagree with what you’re saying on having a safety net, but we have to have tough love involved with it and we have to have the idea that it’s temporary and we’re trying to get you to another place so we can enable.

JOE ROGAN: People to continue bad choices over and over and over again and say, well, we just have to take care of them.

RAND PAUL: Right. So food stamps when they started were really primarily for mothers, single mothers with many kids who can’t work. So mom can’t work. We didn’t want them all to starve. She has four kids. And once you’ve had the kids, I’m not against that, they’re there and you got to do something with the kids.

But we didn’t give it to able bodied, you know, 21 year old men who were in college didn’t get it. Or able bodied men who were out of high school didn’t get it. You didn’t do that because they need to work and they still can work. There are jobs everywhere for able bodied people.

So we have to look carefully at all these programs and this is what some people on the left complain about. Able bodied people, if they get something, should be very, very temporary, if at all.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

RAND PAUL: So then all the programs have to be reevaluated. Like when I first moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky in 19, one of my patients was head of the local welfare and there was a local welfare department and there was some real degree of the people had to come in on certain deadlines, they had to prove that they were looking for work or why they couldn’t look for work.

And there’d be some people that still have four kids at home will come back and won’t be able to work again. But the able bodied people come back in six weeks and she would show them, here’s the newspaper, here’s a job. I want you to go here tomorrow. And she’d make them do that. And not because she hated them. She worked with welfare because of the beneficial part of it. But we’ve gotten away from that.

And so if I propose something like that, it’s like, oh, you don’t like the poor? No, I want them to become rich. But we also do have, and this is a fallacy, people are moving up and down from rich to poor all the time in our country.

20% of the people born in the bottom 20% make the top 20%. 60% of people who make a million bucks this year will not make a million bucks next year. People are going up and down. We have great income mobility.

And the reason you have to express that is otherwise you lose hope. If you live in a poor area of town and you know, you’re single mom and everybody tells you, you’re never going anywhere, that’s when your reaction is, I might as well steal or sell drugs or something.

Instead, the message to our young people is it should be there’s never been a better time to be alive. I believe that so strongly and that we’re doing a disservice to our young people by saying, you’re a victim. Oh, your color skin is dark. Nobody’s going to want to hire you. It’s the opposite.

We live in a time where people are less likely to judge you based on your color of skin than ever in the history of mankind. Doesn’t mean there’s no bigots out there. People are less likely to judge you on your sexuality than they ever have on the color of your skin, on your religion. We are an incredible country. Are we perfect?

JOE ROGAN: No.

Economic Opportunity and Trade Schools

RAND PAUL: But there’s never historically been a better time to be alive. And you can do it. I mean, you literally can do a manual job, earn enough money to start your own small business. You know, if you wanted. If you’re in high school and you’re a decent student, but you’re not a rocket scientist. You don’t love reading books and you don’t love math, but you’re pretty good and you’re intelligent enough, if you do HVAC, you’ll have one hell of a career.

You go to a technical school in Louisville. All of the people in the class, I went to one recently. There’s 100 people in the class for HVAC fixing air conditioners. Every one of their tuition was paid for and they had a job if they completed the course.

And HVAC, if you’re an HVAC worker, I’m guessing, I’ll bet you could make $80 to $100,000 a year fixing air conditioners. But if you start your own HVAC company, you’ll be the richest man or woman in town. In my town, the people in the HVAC companies are some of the richest people in our town.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s a good argument also with automation and AI because automation and AI is going to do a lot of jobs that people are going to school for. Unfortunately, a lot of people are getting degrees that are going to be irrelevant when automation and AI takes whatever percentage of jobs it’s inevitably going to take. But trades, being a carpenter, being a plumber, those are always going to be valuable.

RAND PAUL: I think things like that you may have technical assistance when you get there, that a computer helps diagnose the problem and helps fix the air conditioner. But I don’t think the jobs, I talk to people every day and many of them are, well, you’re going.

JOE ROGAN: To have to carry things and install things. You have to get in, open up walls.

RAND PAUL: I think it’s still going to exist. But I talk to everybody every day and they’re scaring the world saying there’ll be no more jobs and everybody will just sit around looking at each other. And I really, I don’t, I hope that’s not true. And I, you know, they’re richer and smarter than I am maybe, but they all say it’s going to happen.

But I say if it happens, what will also develop is secret societies. And they’ll be like speakeasies. And you’ll go down the stairs, you’ll knock on the door and someone will decide. You’ll do the password. You’ll go inside and you’ll be able to build s* in there. You’ll be able to like grout bricks and put them together. You’ll be able to nail wood together. Secret work. Because people will still want to work even though there are no jobs. They will secretly want to work.

The Dystopian Future of Work

JOE ROGAN: Why would it be secret?

RAND PAUL: Because the government will make it illegal. The government, stupid.

JOE ROGAN: The government will make work illegal? Is that what you’re asking? Yeah.

RAND PAUL: I think this is a dystopian society here. Bear me out.

JOE ROGAN: What novels are you reading?

RAND PAUL: I taught a course in this. So when we have AI people saying the jobs disappear, work will become so foreign, but there’ll be a small remnant that searches for work, but they’ll do it secretly. And after you build stuff in the little speakeasy down under with a secret password, you’ll have to destroy it before the government comes. That’s just my theory of what’s going to happen. I might be wrong. I could be wrong.

JOE ROGAN: Have you ever had a conversation with Elon?

RAND PAUL: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: He thinks that we’re going to need universal basic income. And he thinks it won’t actually be universal basic income. His rose colored glasses version of it is universal high income. Because he believes that AI is going to create so much wealth, that there’ll be so much money that people won’t have to work anymore.

So hear me out here. So the question is, is it essential that the only way you take care of yourself and feed yourself and house yourself is through work. And can people find meaning outside of work? Can they find things to do or will they just be sitting around playing video games all day?

The Future of Work and AI

RAND PAUL: So the first thing that I’ll probably just acknowledge is he may be smarter than me and he’s probably a little bit richer than me. So I don’t discount his opinion, Elon Musk. But I hope he’s wrong.

And with regard to work, I think work is something so necessary that the problems we have in our society are with the people who aren’t getting the benefit of working. And so I see work and I would mandate work for welfare programs. If you’re able bodied, you would have to work. I wouldn’t give you a penny. Everybody would have to work.

But I tell people I’m not in favor of that as punishment. That is reward. Work is a reward. I can tell you that I’ve never been unhappy. Maybe I’m lucky in the work I’ve had, but I’ve always wanted to go to work and I’ve done hard jobs. I’ve roofed houses, I’ve worked on lawns. I’ve done every job that a kid growing up in the 70s. But I was never unhappy to do it and always felt better. If I sweat off 5 pounds, 10 pounds in the hot sun, I felt great.

JOE ROGAN: You and I are very different because my bad jobs that I had motivated me to never want to do it.

RAND PAUL: Well, yeah, I didn’t want to do them forever. You’re right about that.

JOE ROGAN: Well, yeah, a thing in life that I didn’t have to just work as a laborer.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. And I noticed you don’t really sweat too much in this current gig you’ve got.

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s a pretty easy gig, but I mean, I did a lot of those kind of jobs when I was younger. What they did was teach me that I didn’t want to do that forever.

RAND PAUL: There has to be work. And I hope people won’t preach too much that AI is going to be no work because that to me is a despairing future. It’s a dystopian future when there is no work most of the time.

And this is, while I do respect Elon Musk and think he may know more than I know about this, the reason I would say is that from a historical perspective, every bit of automation has led to more jobs. This would be the first time in the entire history where automation took jobs. They feared that when the automated loom came that all the weavers would go out of business.

What they found instead is people had to make the sewing machines. People had to fix the sewing machines. And then clothing prices went down and people used to have one wardrobe, maybe two shirts. People have dozens. Even regular people can have dozens of shirts. You can get a shirt for five bucks at Target or eight bucks at Walmart. So it changed things.

When electricity came around, the candlestick makers rioted. The Luddites in the 19th century broke the wounds with hammers and protested against. But we always got more jobs. Progress went on. So I guess from a historical point of perspective, I don’t know, there’s a good example of automation. It could lower employment in a certain industry, but overall employment. Look, we have 7 billion people on the planet and we have less poverty on the planet than we’ve ever had right now.

JOE ROGAN: Right, but it’s not Luddites that are concerned, it’s people that are aware that this is an unprecedented technology. Artificial intelligence is unprecedented.

RAND PAUL: And that’s the question they’re positing that this is different than it’s ever been. And I guess my argument, and I am willing to acknowledge these people may know more about this, but my argument is from a historical perspective. We’ve never had any kind of invention or automation that ultimately led to less jobs. It always led to more and led to more prosperity.

Now they’re arguing AI is going to get more prosperity. And that’s why then they’ll say artificial high income. There’ll be plenty of money, but there has to be work for the mental well being of people. They cannot sit around and it’ll be a terrible world.

JOE ROGAN: No, I agree, but I mean can you find meaning in life without it just being for money? Can you find tasks and things and goals?

RAND PAUL: Which gets back to my speakeasy. And it may or may not have to be secret, but people are going to go work, even just to work.

JOE ROGAN: But well, why does it have to be work? I mean, why can’t it be art? Why can’t it be learning how to play music? Something interesting.

Historical Progress and Prosperity

RAND PAUL: But I also think that the more leisure time you have, AI is going to give, I grant them that AI is going to give us more leisure time. And we also are progressing and progress is exponential.

At this point in 1820, before the Industrial Revolution, at the beginning of it, 98% of people lived on less than $2 a day. And the World Bank does these statistics. Everybody, the only people didn’t were royalty. The only obesity was among royalty, regular people. Even in 1920, there were no fat people.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they didn’t have processed food back then.

RAND PAUL: They didn’t have abundance of time and abundance. They didn’t have overabundance of food. The reason we’re taller, everybody but me got more calories and got taller protein. Yeah. And so it’s a food thing.

But in 1820, 98% of people live in abject poverty less than $2 a day. Today, not just the United States, the entire world is less than 10% live on $2 a day. Constant dollars. Controlling for inflation, we went from 98% to less than 10%.

AI is going to continue that and maybe it’s exponential, but when you have more leisure time, you have time to think of other stuff to do. We have time for our idle brains, which are pretty big, to come up with new ideas. So I think it’s not yet known what we will think of what may pass as work. Maybe art is work at some point and everybody’s an artist.

But maybe there also are people who, even now there’s automation and we can grow with pesticides and fertilizers and stuff, just enormous amount of food. And actually that’s been good for the most part in supplying more food for people. But there’s still, people have organic farms who don’t use pesticides or any of this. There are people who have cattle with no antibiotics and no vaccines, chickens. And that’s sort of labor intensive and not as cost effective.

But the only way that can exist is you kind of let them charge more, you know, so that niche market can still exist. So it’s the same with AI. There probably will be some things that maybe AI could do it, but maybe you’d rather a human do it.

Even now with art, my wife Kelly has written a children’s book and she’s looking at art. She looked at the AI and it was pretty darn good. But she really wanted an artist because she wanted something to be, to have real meaning, you know, and to be something that people connect with. For children’s books, a lot of it is connecting with the pictures.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I certainly think there’s going to be a lot of value in art that’s made by humans, just like there’s value in music and even films. You know, that’s the argument that I had Bradley Cooper in here the other day and we were talking about the concern that a lot of these artists that create films, they’re really worried that they’re going to start using digital actors and doing everything through computer generated AI prompts and films even being written by AI prompts.

RAND PAUL: My favorite Dilbert cartoon is this woman comes up to Dilbert and she says, “I’m really worried about the robots, I’m worried about automation and I’m worried my son won’t get work because of the robots.” And Dilbert looks at her and he says, “Well, you know, I’ve met your son and he could be replaced by a hammer.”

Always has been this fear, but we have to have innovation and get around it. There will be technical jobs or other jobs. I don’t know, I guess I’m an optimist just by nature and technology historically has not destroyed jobs, it’s created jobs. And we’re way better off. You know, absent the industrial revolution, all those inventions, we’d still be living, 98% of us on $2 a day.

Minnesota Fraud Investigation

JOE ROGAN: One of the things I want to talk to you about is what’s going on in this country right now. Well, one of the big ones, one of the big things that’s in the news is this whole Minnesota thing, particularly a lot of things to cover, but particularly fraud and that they’re uncovering a lot of fraud that it seems like not only was there a lot of fraud, but a lot of these people that were getting a lot of money from this fraud were donating to politicians.

There’s, I believe $35 million by daycares was donated to Democrats in Minnesota last year. Is that an accurate number? Let’s find out.

RAND PAUL: It’s extraordinary.

JOE ROGAN: That’s one of the best things for AI. AI will get you extraordinary.

RAND PAUL: I saw a good cartoon yesterday. It was an iceberg, and the top of the iceberg was Minnesota fraud. But the iceberg beneath the surface was California.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

RAND PAUL: And can you imagine?

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re looking into California fraud now because of Minnesota fraud. And it’s, look, just the homeless thing alone, just the fact that California spent $24 billion on the homeless, can’t account for where the money went. And the problem just got worse.

RAND PAUL: Well, there’s a couple things about the refugee thing. I don’t think refugees should get welfare and I have a bill to say they shouldn’t get it. If you come to this country and your church sponsors somebody to come to it, you support them, you sign up, you sponsor them, you support them, the taxpayers shouldn’t support them.

The other thing is we did a lot of, a lot of these people came on special visas. They weren’t part of the normal as part of this refugee program, but they got special visas. The Somalis came because there’s perpetual war in their country and famine.

JOE ROGAN: No evidence Minnesota daycares gave millions to political campaigns. What is this? Yahoo News? I don’t believe that. So I don’t believe they haven’t given any money. This is where I got it from.

The figure appears to come from a viral social media post, widely shared video alleging that the daycares. Here’s the problem with this. If this fraud is as widespread as it is, you’re going to get a lot of people that are covering their tracks right now. And so one of the ways to cover the tracks is to debunk things and to post stories. And I don’t think we really know how much money is missing.

RAND PAUL: I think part of the reform is we just shouldn’t give out welfare. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help people. But if you’re coming to this country and you want to experience the greatness of this country and someone sponsors you, they should take care of you. But what happens is most of these charities that work on bringing refugees in, they have a big heart. They’re bringing them in, but the first paperwork they fill out is signing up for welfare.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so according to our AI search, it says fact checking organizations review campaign finance data and public records report no evidence that Minnesota daycare or childcare operators donated anything close to $35 billion to political campaigns.

One fact check notes that supposed charge circulating online misrepresents or fabricates contribution totals and far exceeds what small child care businesses would realistically give. But it depends on how much money they’re making. When you say small, just I don’t like the way they phrase that “small child care businesses” because you’re talking about a large number of these businesses.

And so the total, the all told, what is the number? Especially compared to large corporate donors? That’s fat, right? Also, they’re listing Snopes as a source, which I don’t like. It’s a very biased source.

Refugee Policy and Afghanistan

RAND PAUL: So I had this debate for years with McCain. McCain said we should admit all these people who were interpreters in Afghanistan, all these people that are interpreters in Iraq. And my response to him was this. If they can speak English and they’re pro western, they need to stay in their country and be the founding fathers of their country.

If the people who speak English and are pro western, all leave, then all the crazy jihadists are the ones going to run the government. So part of the reason the Taliban runs Afghanistan again is 80,000 of the best people probably came over here that speak English and have some kind of knowledge. They should have stayed in their country.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, but isn’t that kind of a simplistic perspective? Because a lot of those people would be dead.

RAND PAUL: You know, we won the war.

JOE ROGAN: What war? We won what war?

RAND PAUL: Well, the war went on forever and ever.

JOE ROGAN: We didn’t win anything in Afghanistan. I don’t think saying we won the war in Afghanistan as you.

The Minnesota Fraud Investigation

RAND PAUL: They won it and immediately reverted to the stone age when we left. But for many, many years when they were coming over here.

JOE ROGAN: But you can’t say we won it.

RAND PAUL: What I’m saying is, from the perspective of the people, the government that was in place for the 20 years that we were there was a moderate government that was friendly to these people. I think them leaving was them. They should have been the founding fathers of their country. So for example.

JOE ROGAN: But wait a minute. Once we left, they had no protection and they were in grave danger. A lot of them became also a lot of them were working with the American. We left them there to die.

RAND PAUL: In 1812, the British came back and attacked us. If we would have all left and said, oh well, damn, they’re attacking us again and we’re under attack. No, they should have fought for their country. And the thing is, is everybody sure you can. It sounds like a good thing, bring them over here. But we really didn’t need another 80,000 people from Afghanistan. We didn’t need another 80,000 people from Iraq, and we certainly didn’t need another 80,000 people from Somalia.

And if they’re coming, they should be ineligible for welfare. If you come as a legal immigrant, you’re not supposed to get welfare for five years. And yet we know it’s happening. The refugees can get it immediately. And that just they’re on.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the problem is refugee status.

RAND PAUL: And then they figured out, gosh, they are smart at one thing. That’s those learning centers, those learning centers. Are they smart at those?

JOE ROGAN: Well, I mean, once you realize that you can get a lot of money doing that. There was also autism diagnoses and then they’d open up an autism center and.

RAND PAUL: You know, all the money going overseas.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t fault people for taking advantage of a system that has giant loopholes in it. Especially when you come over here from a war torn country and there’s a bunch of people that are already doing it, like, how do you make money? Everybody’s doing it. Yeah, but somebody had to have helped them.

The $9 Billion Daycare Fraud Scandal

RAND PAUL: But there are people saying, and the whole thing needs to be audited. And I’m also presenting a bill that will audit all this stuff everywhere. But there are people saying that there are either Chinese hackers as well as Russian hackers that are also stealing millions of dollars. The Somalis were so good at it, they were sending hundreds of millions of dollars back overseas. So I think that we’re at the 10 proven. I don’t know. We need to ask Snopes.

JOE ROGAN: No, don’t ask Snopes. Put it in a perplexity. Snopes gives it as an example. Ignore it.

RAND PAUL: Well, they said it was $700 million the other day. The reports were $700 million. I think you have to check off a box when it goes through the airport. And they weren’t even hiding that they were sending it back. So the poor Somalis sent like, $700 million over the last couple years.

JOE ROGAN: So if they had $700 million to send back to Somalia, if that’s true, where’s that coming from?

RAND PAUL: Well, they stole $9 billion. And they.

JOE ROGAN: Is that real?

RAND PAUL: Well, that’s the number they’re saying. That’s why it all. It’s been in the press reports. I can’t tell you exactly who, but we need. The whole thing needs to be audited. California and New York are going to be enormous problems with the same kind of fraud. Yeah. And I think it’s virtually a guarantee that we will find more. But why in the world would we run a government where we don’t audit this stuff every year?

JOE ROGAN: Right. How did it get to this point?

RAND PAUL: We don’t audit the Pentagon. The Pentagon can’t match their records either.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, but this is the TSA stuff. This is.

RAND PAUL: This is a no, but this is. You check it off in a box. So this is for a total of nearly $700 million over two years.

TSA Cash Flagging Data

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so this. We actually ran this through perplexity. So which is our sponsor? It’s a AI program. It’s always pretty accurate. Federal officials say that TSA flagged nearly $700 million in cash and luggage leaving Minneapolis, St. Paul area.

RAND PAUL: So if you have more than $10,000, the law says you have to check a box. And I think these people voluntarily checked a box. So they’re looking through data, TSA forms, they just added them all up. So I think it’s real.

JOE ROGAN: But this is the same thing. This is this one weird website that we found the other day, Just the News. So this website, Just the News published a report saying, a report recently that revealed Transportation Security Administration has flagged approximately $700 million in declared U.S. cash. But the question is like, where is Just the News getting this information from?

RAND PAUL: I think from TSA.

JOE ROGAN: Why is it one weird right wing website that is reporting this that everybody refers to when they’re talking about this?

RAND PAUL: Because nobody’s been looking. John Solomon is a good researcher and he does come up with stuff. So have him on. Ask him where he came up with it. I’m pretty sure it comes from TSA forms. I don’t think he’s making the number up. I think this is an.

JOE ROGAN: Insane amount of money to send back to Somalia.

RAND PAUL: But this is also the gall. You’re stealing welfare money and you’re taking it out of the country. And you are so in the belief that you won’t get caught, you’re not smuggling it out, you’re putting on the form, I’m taking $20 million out of the country.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’ve been doing it. If it’s true, and it seems to be true, they’ve been doing it for decades. And this is, I mean, when did we start mass immigrating people from Somalia into this country?

RAND PAUL: You know what I think we should do? The next step would be, okay, we know how much is going on in Somalia. Let’s look at every airport around the country and see who else is shipping money out.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we tried to find that the other day too, but we couldn’t find any. We tried looking at different money that was like, how much has the TSA flagged over the entire course of the year, all over the country. We couldn’t find that data. But that might just be because nobody’s published it.

RAND PAUL: Well, I’ll ask. I can ask and I’ll have my staff. We’ll look into it and see if we can find that answer for you.

Comparing Immigrant Communities: Hmong vs. Somali

JOE ROGAN: That would be great. One of the things I was reading recently is interesting because Minnesota has this one group of immigrants in the Somalis, but they also have another group in the Hmongs, and they have a completely different result in terms of the amount of people that are on welfare, the amount of people that graduate from college or high school, the amount of people that are on Medicaid. All of them are like radically different. It’s much lower in the Hmong community, which is interesting.

It’s like, well, what is that? Is it education in their community? Is it they don’t from. They don’t come from a culture that enables fraud. I mean, you have to realize Somalia is obviously where you get an enormous amount of piracy. That’s the movie with Tom Hanks. “Look at me. I’m the captain now,” right? That’s Somalia.

RAND PAUL: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And by the way, they were kind of forced into that behavior. Their original name, they didn’t call themselves Somali pirates. They called themselves the People’s Coast Guard of Somalia because the Europeans were dumping toxic waste off the coast and killing all their fish. And they were fishermen. So they started kidnapping the people that were in these boats and then to try to get a ransom because they destroyed our fishing ground. And then they went, oh, well, you know what? It’s probably easier to just kidnap people than it is to be a fisherman.

The Swedish Work Ethic and Immigration Success

RAND PAUL: The discussion reminds me of a story. So the Hmongs versus Somalis. Why are 86% of the Somalis still on Medicaid? And why are the Hmongs doing better? So they used to always make this argument that Sweden is so great because it’s socialists and that Swedes are all just doing fine. They’re all so happy. Everybody’s happy in Sweden.

And so they were talking to Milton Friedman about that, and he was over there, and they were bragging about the country, about how great Sweden was and everything. And they were attributing it to socialism. And he looked at them and he says, you know, the Swedes are very happy. They’re also very happy in Minnesota. If you look at the statistics of people from Sweden who immigrated to Minnesota, they’re kicking butt. They’re in the top 1%. And it gets back to, what is the argument? Why do Swedes do so well? Many people say it’s this northern Scandinavian work ethic. They brought it with them and kept it in their families, and it’s transmitted down.

JOE ROGAN: They’re also not fleeing a war, right?

RAND PAUL: Oh, yeah. I’m not saying it’s more difficult. It’s more difficult for refugees.

JOE ROGAN: But they’re not coming over here as a refugee from a war. They’re coming over here as an immigrant who wants a better life. Right?

RAND PAUL: But I will tell you that. So, for example, there are people who come and in one generation, just kick. I’ll tell you, the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese came. I know a guy, he came over here, he was on an island for a year, and he got one cup of rice. He lost like 60 pounds. And he wasn’t fat to begin with. He was just nothing.

He finally got here because he had fought with us where his brother had fought with us. He gets here, opens a transmission business. Three of his kids are doctors, one’s a vet, one’s a pharmacist. They just kick butt. In one generation, there are Nigerians that have come here. They have dark skin. Everybody says, oh, America’s racist. They kick ass. They have. The average Nigerian income is higher than the average white income.

JOE ROGAN: So they’re also famously scammers overseas in Nigeria.

RAND PAUL: Yeah, but what I’m saying, they do.

JOE ROGAN: A great job in tricking people, but.

RAND PAUL: I think it is. I think it is. It’s not so simple as to say racism keeps people down. It’s ingenuity. It’s your family.

JOE ROGAN: And Nigerians are particularly ingenious when they come into this country.

Immigration Reform and Sponsorship

RAND PAUL: They’re hard workers. But it’s also what we should, in an immigration system, select for. Instead of saying, we’re going to bring in 50,000 Somalis, why don’t we look one at a time? And if you want to sponsor a family or another Somali family wants to them, let’s do it one at a time. And then let’s not offer them any kind of welfare. And if they struggle, you take care of them when they come over, whoever.

JOE ROGAN: Sponsors them, what do you think they’re going to uncover when they do a full audit of the. Just, let’s just talk about Minnesota. What do you think is going to. I mean, what do you envision the real scope of this is?

RAND PAUL: Well, I think it’s going to be out and out fraud. It’s not going to be like just some mistakes on forms or something. It’s going to be these learning centers that have nobody coming to them. They just don’t even exist.

JOE ROGAN: Food kitchens that aren’t feeding anyone.

RAND PAUL: But I do believe the $700 million leaving is real. They say it’s only a few people, but I believe it’s real because I think it’s marked on the forms voluntarily by the people doing it.

JOE ROGAN: So this isn’t $700 million leaving Israel.

RAND PAUL: What do you mean $700 million leaving Minnesota? Somali Israel? I didn’t mean to say.

JOE ROGAN: I was like, that’s the new thing.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. The $700 million leaving, I think, is voluntarily checked off on those forms by Somalis.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that has to be fraud, right?

Immigration Reform and Welfare Fraud

RAND PAUL: Yeah. So I think that’s part of the fraud as well. But I think that if we audit the system, we’re going to find organized gangs of Russians and Chinese doing the same thing. We know that during COVID there were gangs of Russian hackers and Chinese hackers stealing stuff. There were Americans stealing stuff. But we have to have a tighter system.

Our problem is everybody’s so generous, everybody wants to help people. And you’re a grumpy old terrible Scrooge if you don’t want to give refugees more money, but ultimately you have to give them less money or you won’t get to this. So let’s say we gave them $5 billion last year, you give them $6 billion. Do you think we’re going to do a better job at rooting out the fraud or a worse job?

If you give them more money, they’ll steal more money. You have to give them less. So everybody’s looking harder at the money and you do it. It’s the same with the Pentagon. If you give the Pentagon, you know, $500 billion more, do you think they’re going to be better with our money or more? So we got to give less money.

So you got to give less money to the refugees, and then you have to have more scrutiny of it. But the interesting question is, if I put forward a bill that says we’re going to audit all the welfare, not just the refugee program. We’re going to audit all the cash transfer programs for every state, do you think any Democrats will vote for that? Zero.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think one Democrat will vote for that. I doubt it. Well, also, it would be terrible for their base, you know, if they found out that these are the people that are voting to audit.

RAND PAUL: But you could argue you’re actually making it better for poor people, because I’m trying to get rid of the Somalis stealing it. So more of the dollars actually go to people who are poor.

JOE ROGAN: That’s great to say, but most people think you’re trying to reduce the amount of money that a hungry family gets. That’s how they would frame it. And then people would frame it as you being cruel. Unfortunately, like this is just.

RAND PAUL: And that’s the problem with having the debate, is the debate is demagogued.

The Border Crisis and Immigration Policy

JOE ROGAN: Right. So, speaking of which, what was your take on the border being wide open for the last four years? And not just wide open, but they were encouraging people to come to America, telling them how to do it, and even helping them get across, giving them EBT cards, giving them cell phones. What was your take on all that?

RAND PAUL: I do believe that they understand that most of the people coming across will ultimately be voters and that two out of three will vote Democrat. So it’s all power politics. They say it’s about, you know, humanity and being humane and all that. It isn’t that. It’s all about voting demographics.

And they want these people to come in because many of them are suffering, you know, through sex trafficking, all the other crap that went along with this mass migration. So I don’t think it’s necessarily the best place to be, but I’d say it’s one of the most extraordinary accomplishments. You know, I occasionally, on the other side with Donald Trump, we don’t always agree on everything.

But on the border, I think he did a fabulous job. By sheer force of personality, he fixed it before any money was allotted. He fixed it in the first three months, and it went from whatever the number was down. He reduced it by 98%. He relocated some people there. But by sheer force of personality, before any money was even spent, he fixed the problem on the border.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it seemed like the Democrats wanted the problem to exist.

RAND PAUL: I think because they want more voters.

JOE ROGAN: They don’t vote. And they were moving people to swing states. And the idea being that the census only counts human beings, doesn’t count citizens.

RAND PAUL: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And so you get more congressional seats.

RAND PAUL: So California probably has a couple of congressional seats that are based on illegal aliens. You know, so there’s such a large population that I think you have about what is about 750,000 people per congressional district. There’s got to be one or two congressional districts that they have that they probably don’t, they shouldn’t be allotted.

JOE ROGAN: So then the problem becomes the people are here, and a lot of the people that came across the border are here illegally. Even though they were encouraged to be here, they are here illegally. What do you do?

A Moderate Approach to Immigration

RAND PAUL: Well, this is going to shock you. I’m a moderate on this. I actually think that most of the people that are here and working lawfully and can pass a background check, I would give them no welfare and I would give them no citizenship, no voting privileges, but you can work and we won’t arrest you.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, no citizenship, but a potential path to citizenship.

RAND PAUL: I think it’s better just to say the trade off is this, that you came illegally. Right now, the law says you got to go back and you’ll never get in. Basically. So the compromise is you came in illegally, you just don’t get to be a citizen. Your kids will be.

Now the new ones, the 8 million that might have come in last year, some of them need to go back, and particularly any of them committing crimes. And I think people are very open. And I think the Trump administration has sent a lot of criminals back. I think that’s good.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no question they’ve sent a lot of criminals back. There’s also no question they’ve arrested citizens that they thought were illegal aliens. They’ve sent people back that were in this country most of their lives. They came over here as infants and they don’t have birth certificates and they don’t have ID. They don’t have citizenship.

RAND PAUL: See, the compromise I’m offering is different than anybody’s ever talked about. Everybody thinks the compromise has to include voting and citizenship. If in Texas we gave amnesty and let, I don’t know, a couple million people vote immediately, Texas becomes Democrat for the next 20 years. So that’s what it’s all about. It’s about voting.

JOE ROGAN: Is the problem the census? Because why are they counting people and giving congressional seats based on people that aren’t citizens? If they change that alone and made it so you’re counting people, but you’re only giving congressional seats based on the amount of citizens?

RAND PAUL: We could change the law, but changing the law is difficult, you know, I mean, you have to end up getting 60 votes, which means we need seven Democrats.

JOE ROGAN: Right, but isn’t that a crazy law to begin with, where you can get congressional seats based on the amount of illegal aliens you have in your area, which is crazy because then encourages you to bring in illegals so that you get more congressional seats?

RAND PAUL: Yep. Kind of nice.

JOE ROGAN: And then what do you do? You give those people Medicaid, you give those people food stamps, and then they’re on your side.

RAND PAUL: And it’s part of the answer to immigration that makes it less of a burden on us, is if we base our society on work, we put a wall around our welfare system and we don’t give it to people, refugees or immigrants, legal or illegal. Nobody gets any. And you have to come for work.

And what that does is you’re going to select out for people who work. And that’s why I try to say, and not many people on my side will see this, say this. I think some of the best Americans just got here, frankly. They have good work ethic, they’re hard working people, they work in our fields, they pick our tomatoes, they clean fish, they work in chicken houses. A lot of the dirty jobs in our country are done by immigrants.

JOE ROGAN: So they also came here with ambition because they want a better life at great peril, at great risk.

RAND PAUL: And some of them here are here illegally. I would have a work program. I let them sign up for work, pass a background check.

JOE ROGAN: But do you think that they should have to go back home in order to become a citizen? If you could show like if some guy came over here 20 years ago, started off as a laborer, now he’s a carpenter. He’s working for some construction company, but he’s an illegal.

RAND PAUL: The trade is you don’t get citizenship at all. Your kids will. I would just say you don’t get citizenship. That’s your trade off. You know what? Here’s an interesting survey. Let’s find 1,000 people who are in Texas illegally and do a poll and say, would you accept this? Would you accept that you don’t get to vote during your lifetime, but your kids will get to vote if they were born here in exchange for not having to worry about being in a car accident or being sent back to Mexico?

I’ll bet you 80% of the people here illegally would take work without citizenship. But you know who wants the citizenship and doesn’t care about work? Democrats. All they care about is the voting part. See, what I’m trying to propose is something humane on the work part. Plus, I think we need some workers and I think the people would actually accept it.

But they give up, they don’t have to give up the country and leave and come back, which may never happen. They just give up the voting. They’re not supposed to vote now anyway. They broke the law to come here.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s a really concerning thing that some of them are voting.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. And that shouldn’t happen.

Voter ID and Election Integrity

JOE ROGAN: And that’s one of the craziest things that California’s passed where you’re not allowed to show ID when you vote, which is just, you’re essentially saying you’re encouraging fraud.

RAND PAUL: That’s insane.

JOE ROGAN: It’s insane. It’s insane that it passed. It’s insane that it’s legal. It’s insane that they could say that with a straight face and have any sort of a weird gaslighty answer as to why that would be a good thing.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. But it sort of shines a light on the gulf in our country between, you know, one party and the other. That the gulf is so huge that they really don’t want to verify who the voters are. They come up with, they come up with arguments that just, frankly aren’t true. Oh, there’s racism in the ID and stuff. Almost all the voter ID bills have said you can get an ID for free, you know, to make sure there isn’t some sort of inherent racism.

JOE ROGAN: You needed an ID to prove that you had a COVID vaccine just a few years ago.

RAND PAUL: Not me, I didn’t get a vaccine.

JOE ROGAN: Right, but you needed one if you wanted to fly just a few years ago, and now it’s fine with them.

RAND PAUL: Go to New York.

JOE ROGAN: The hypocrisy is astounding. You want to go to a restaurant, you had to have a COVID vaccine, you had to have your ID. It was astounding. But the weirdest one was the open shipping people to swing states. Just the fact that that’s okay and that they spent tax dollars just flying people to these states.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. You start to think it’s not a humanitarian project, it’s a voting project.

ICE Enforcement and Recent Controversies

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean, it does make sense, but how do you feel about the way the government currently is going about trying to round up illegals? Like obviously we have this terrible tragedy in Minnesota where that woman was shot, which was horrible. I mean, I don’t know why I feel way worse when a woman gets shot, but I always do, especially in that situation. I understand that the officer that shot her, apparently he had been dragged by a car like really recently.

RAND PAUL: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Which I would imagine, and also tensions very high. But it just seemed all kinds of wrong to me.

The Challenge of Immigration Enforcement

RAND PAUL: Yeah. I think there is general consensus about getting rid of gang members, people committing crimes, rapists, murderers, even among Democrats. I think when you go to Boston, you round up some of these really bad people in Boston that are committing crimes. I think some of the Democrats are quietly okay with it.

I think when you get beyond the criminals to the next set of people who some of them are just working in our country, I think it’s harder. I also think that the ICE agents have a tough job. So do the police. Police are trained in this and there’s a lot of training on how you deal with protesters, how you do things. It would be better if it were local police than ICE.

But what do you do if it’s Minnesota and the local mayor says, “We’re a sanctuary city, we’re not asking anybody whether they’re here legally or not. Someone robs you, someone rapes somebody, somebody steals a car, we are a sanctuary city, we’re not going to tell you.” The only way you can have police is you have to bring in the federal police.

So one thing I would tell these left wing cities is if you want less ICE in your city, why don’t you police your city?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but they’re not willing to want to police their city.

RAND PAUL: That’s what I mean.

JOE ROGAN: And if you can’t force them to do it, if they don’t agree with it, and if the people and the state largely, if they vote against it, and if you have a large percentage of population of illegals, like say California, not just a large percentage of populations that are illegal, but a large percentage of people that think that those illegals are a part of the community.

RAND PAUL: Right.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, LA without Mexicans would be crazy. I mean, it wouldn’t be LA. I mean, they are an integral part of Los Angeles, both illegal and legal, but illegal as well. I mean, how many restaurants employ, great restaurants in Los Angeles employ illegal people from Mexico?

RAND PAUL: Right. I think that local police is better than national police. But the only way you can have local police is the local police have to enforce the law. And so they are breaking the law and having an obscure, a bizarre way of interpreting the law to say we are going to defy the national immigration laws.

So I think it would be better done by the local cities. But if the local cities aren’t going to do it, then you have to have national agents going in. And it is a tragedy. But like I say, I also have sympathy for the people that are in law enforcement trying to do a very difficult job.

JOE ROGAN: I do as well. But what was your take on the actual shooting itself?

RAND PAUL: You know, I don’t know that I want to go too much into the specifics of it because I don’t want to pass judgment like a jury would because really someone will have to go into and look specifically at every fact and every angle and every angle of camera. So I don’t like to judge criminal things that happen in our country and say, “Well, that person needs to go to jail, that person’s innocent.”

I don’t know that I can make that judgment. And then am I coloring the situation for anybody who will have to make that judgment someday on some kind of jury?

Deportation Numbers and Statistics

JOE ROGAN: Let’s see if we can find this out. How many people have been sent back during the time of this administration? So in the year now that this administration has been operational, how many illegals have been rounded up and sent back? I know a lot of people self deported when Trump got into office because I think they were probably worried about being sent somewhere that they didn’t want to be, which was a thing.

RAND PAUL: I’ve seen somewhere that it doesn’t greatly exceed some of the deportations under Obama, that the numbers aren’t as big as you think they are.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But I think the deportations under Obama, what they’re counting is people that snuck across the border and were turned back, not people who were snatched up at Home Depot and then, you know, brought to some country that they didn’t even come from.

RAND PAUL: I don’t know what the numbers are. The answer is horrible.

JOE ROGAN: Prison. So we’ll pull this up here. Public estimates. Estimates indicate the Trump administration has removed on the order of a few hundred thousand people since returning to office January of 2025, not millions.

So here’s the problem with that. What was the numbers of people that were sneaking in every year? It was kind of crazy, right? Was because it was 20 million over four years, right?

RAND PAUL: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t that what the number is on the other side?

RAND PAUL: Yeah. I don’t know what the number is. The numbers are in the millions, but I think it’s hard to estimate because some of them didn’t get, you know, if you’re not getting caught, how do we estimate how many.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

RAND PAUL: But I think millions of people came in, and I think it was a tragedy. And like I say, you know, it’s one of the things Donald Trump has been an absolute success on is controlling the southern border.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. And it should have been done a long time ago. But the question is, like, how effective is the removal process? And is it, do they have, do they have a quota that they have to meet? Is this why they’re being so aggressive about it?

So it says here, October 2025, Homeland Security update referenced in one overview stated more than 2 million people removed from the country in 2025. But that total combined formal deportations, which were 527,000, with roughly 1.6 million people who voluntarily left or lost status rather than being physically deported.

Separate NPR report described about 600,000 deportations in 2025, along with about 1.6 million immigrants. So similar off by, you know. Okay, let’s see here. Reflecting broader crackdown. Okay, here’s a question. What is the estimate of the amount of people who came in illegally between 2020 and 2024?

RAND PAUL: I think I’ve seen some guesses at 8 million. I think 20 is going to be high.

JOE ROGAN: But then 20 million is the exaggeration?

RAND PAUL: Oh, I don’t know. But there’s also been reports through the years of how many are here illegally. They used to say 11. Now some people say 20. Some people like that.

JOE ROGAN: In the whole country.

RAND PAUL: Yeah, I don’t know what the number is.

JOE ROGAN: But I mean, we don’t know.

RAND PAUL: The estimates vary widely.

JOE ROGAN: If 20 million people got in a year, that’s crazy.

RAND PAUL: Well, that would be insane.

JOE ROGAN: That would be crazy. That means we doubled what was the year and then made it even 8 million.

RAND PAUL: In a year would be a lot. I would guess that at least millions came in under the Biden administration.

JOE ROGAN: Certainly millions, but how many? Okay, it says from 2020 to 2024, government data shows roughly 11 to 12 million encounters in italics, with people crossing the US border illegal, and mainly at the southwest border, because many people try to cross multiple times. The number of individuals is slightly lower than the number of encounters.

But then you have to factor in the people that they didn’t encounter, which were numerous. Right. So by saying the number of encounters is the accurate representation of the amount of people that got in illegally is kind of crazy. That doesn’t make any sense.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection counts encounters, which includes apprehensions between ports of entry and people deemed inadmissible at ports of entry. Okay, so we don’t know. So, but that number was 10.8 million encounters nationwide between 2021 and 2024 alone. That’s just encounters.

I think it’d be safe to say that whatever the encounters are, the actual number is probably higher. Even if you have, you know, people getting caught multiple times. It’s a lot of people, whatever it is. Let’s say it’s 5 million. Let’s say it’s 8 million. That’s way bigger than the city of Austin. Snuck in illegally in four years because they wanted them to be here and they didn’t want to enforce it.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. So they say Austin is kind of a liberal city.

JOE ROGAN: It is very liberal.

RAND PAUL: Do you have any of the sanctuary city kind of policies here or not?

The Masked ICE Agent Controversy

JOE ROGAN: I don’t believe so. I don’t think they do. I mean, there’s certainly a lot of ICE protests. You know, there’s a lot of people that protest ICE. I mean, there was some arrests here, I guess, yesterday or the day before. I mean, after that woman was shot, I think, unfortunately, well, everything is unfortunate about it. Right.

But one of the real problems is now ICE are villains, and now people are looking at them like murderous military people that are on the streets of our city, and they’re masked up, which is also a problem. Right. Because if you get arrested by a cop, you’re allowed to ask the cop what is your name and badge number, and you could film that cop.

If you get arrested by an ICE agent, you have no such right. They’re wearing a mask. They don’t have to tell you anything. That’s a problem. That’s a problem on our city streets. Right. Because you could also pretend to be an ICE agent.

So I saw this terrible story about this family that was killed where these guys pretended to be a UPS driver and they showed up and they made their way into the house and killed people because they were dressed up as a UPS driver. If you could pretend to be a UPS driver, for sure you could pretend to be an ICE agent, especially since they’re completely anonymous.

So think about how many people can get arrested or robbed by criminals. Right. Because you could just have people pretending they’re like, it’s not like it’s impossible to fake their logo. Right. It’s pretty easy. Just as ICE. You know, how hard is that? You could easily imagine armed gangs pretending to be ICE agents robbing people.

RAND PAUL: Yeah. I think you could make an argument when you’re working right along the border or at night with large groups that there’s a lawlessness to the cartels that hiding the identities of ICE along the border, it’s a little harder to make the argument.

And I saw this image in a courthouse in Chicago where it’s a big elevator and the ICE agents all have masks on and they’re arresting people and it’s all women and children in a big elevator in a courthouse. It’s like, really, I don’t think you really need to be wearing a mask.

JOE ROGAN: They’re worried about being doxxed.

RAND PAUL: But our local police have to do that. And they don’t wear masks. You see what I mean? Local police go to the courthouse to arrest somebody or the bright lights of the city or during the day.

JOE ROGAN: But again, the local police have to state their name and badge number. The local police have always been here. The ICE element is completely new.

RAND PAUL: Right. I’m saying.

JOE ROGAN: Or at least at this scale.

RAND PAUL: I’m saying that for most of the regular arrests, you probably don’t need to have them wearing masks. That’s what I’m saying.

JOE ROGAN: The problem is once they don’t wear a mask, then they’re going to get doxxed. And people have actively doxxed them and threatened their families.

RAND PAUL: Local police too, though. I mean, that’s what I’m saying. Local police don’t.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But the police have always been there and police are there for a reason. If you call the police, if someone’s breaking into your house, you’re assuming the police are going to come. You don’t call ICE, you don’t self report, you don’t say, “Oh, I’m having an issue with some immigrants, we call ICE.”

No, they’re a new factor in the community. And they’re wearing masks. That’s a big difference. It’s not the same comparison like most people, except the kooky people that went nutty during 2020 after the George Floyd riots that were like, “Defund the police.” And boy, did they change their tune as soon as they started getting riots and their buildings burned down.

RAND PAUL: Where’s the police?

The ICE Debate and Sanctuary Cities

JOE ROGAN: Well, you f*ing defunded them. Stupid. Like people, most people believe the police are necessary. Most people believe that crime is awful and you can’t have murderers and armed robbers roaming the street and you should arrest them. And you’re going to need police officers to do that.

But those same people that believe that might also believe that once someone is here, they should be able to stay in this country. And ICE is operating illegally and we shouldn’t have militarized border groups of people roaming the streets, just showing up with masks on, snatching people up, some of them U.S. citizens, and shipping them to countries they didn’t even come from.

So that’s why they have to wear a mask. If you want them to do that job, if you want them to be able to deport 500,000 people over a year, which is a lot of people, if that’s the real number, you know they’re going to be. Their life’s going to be at stake. You’re not going to be able to get people to do the job unless you allow them to be anonymous.

And then again, allowing them to be anonymous creates a whole host of other problems where you could have people pretend to be them. And how would you know who’s who and who’s not?

RAND PAUL: Some people have offered sort of an in between where they wear badges that have a number or a first name on them such that when you’re arrested, if I think you’ve abused my rights in arresting me, Steve, you know, and a number three, two, four.

JOE ROGAN: People are going to dox them instantaneously. Their face will be on the Internet instantaneously. They’ll make lists, they’ll put it on social media sites. It’s complicated, obviously, but it’s also very ugly to watch someone shoot a U.S. citizen, especially a woman, in the face, where it’s like, I’m not that guy. I don’t know what he thought.

And again, this is a guy who had almost been run over, but it just looked horrific to me. When people say it’s justifiable because the car hit him. It seemed like she was kind of turning the car away. It seemed like she was out of her f*ing mind to begin with. That lady seemed crazy. Right? And she, didn’t she move there specifically to get involved in all this?

RAND PAUL: Yeah, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: She didn’t seem mentally healthy. But does that mean she should be shot in the head? Is there no other way to handle it? And then you got these people that are showing up at these ICE people and they’re blocking traffic, and she was one of them that was doing those kind of things where they think they’re an activist and they’re an agitator.

RAND PAUL: Right. But I get back to my initial sort of argument about having local police do it. They’re not doing it. But in an ideal world, the way we fix this and have less ICE agents in cities where they’re having a very difficult job is the local people do their job, and they’re not sanctuary cities.

JOE ROGAN: Well, how could you stop sanctuary cities?

RAND PAUL: Well, I’m not sure I can. I’m saying, but what I’m saying is that some of the blame for ICE being there is the left and their policies of sanctuary cities.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

RAND PAUL: So when they want to just say, oh, we hate ICE and we don’t want ICE in our city, maybe they should be reflecting that ICE is in your city because you’re disobeying the law. And when someone is arrested and they’re clearly not a citizen, you’re not reporting them to ICE.

See, it’s defiance. It’s nullification. They have been nullifying our laws on deportation for years and years. And so now they have something they really dislike. But who brought it upon? My point is the left brought this. It’s not an answer, but it’s an explanation that the left is bringing this to their cities because they’re refusing to enforce the laws.

JOE ROGAN: Right? And they don’t want those laws. They don’t like those laws. They think that once people are here, they should be able to stay. And, you know, this is what my friend Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy.” And I think there’s a balance to be achieved. I just don’t know how it gets done, because I see both perspectives.

I see the perspective of the people that say, hey, there was an illegal program moving people in here to get votes, moving people in here to get congressional seats, and we’ve got to change that. We’ve got to take those people that got in and send them back to where they came from or do something, because if we don’t, they’re going to keep doing it.

If they get in office again in 2028 and it’s going to accelerate and you’re going to have to take away some of the damage that’s been done to a true democratic system because you’ve kind of hijacked it and they kind of have.

And then I can also see the point of view of the people that say, yeah, but you don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens. They just don’t have their papers on them. Are we really going to be the Gestapo? “Where’s your papers?” Is that what we’ve come to?

So it’s more complicated than I think people want to admit. People want to look at this as a black and white issue. If you’re a compassionate person or if you’re a pragmatic person. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s both.

RAND PAUL: But I think the argument needs to be made again and again. And the left needs to hear that they have created this situation by disobeying the immigration laws, by ignoring the deportation orders, by not reporting people who are committing crimes.

Now, we’re not talking about some guy mowing lawns. We’re talking about somebody who stole a car, somebody who raped somebody. They are in jail. So this isn’t the ordinary working person who’s here illegally. We’re talking about the criminal illegals in our country.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think most people, the people were in favor of getting rid of gang members, criminals, murderers, rapists. Most people are in favor of those people.

RAND PAUL: But the thing is, is that the left wing cities that are sanctuary cities are not reporting that. That’s part of the reason why ICE is in Minnesota.

JOE ROGAN: And a good example, right. Aurora, Colorado, where Tren de Aragua was taking over apartment buildings and they were a sanctuary city, so the police literally could do nothing about it, which is just pure insanity. A lot of problems, but we solved.

RAND PAUL: At least half of them. I think we did.

Closing Thoughts and Fauci’s Accountability

JOE ROGAN: Rand, thank you so much. I’ve been a big fan of yours for a long time. And thank you again for being a voice of reason and for holding him to the fire during the whole COVID thing. Because you were really one of the only people that was asking informed, tough questions of him and I really, really appreciate that you did that.

RAND PAUL: We think he needs to come in one more time and I have asked him to come in voluntarily for testimony. We’re negotiating with his attorneys. If he comes in voluntarily, we came to testify. Resist. I have subpoena power, but it would probably require a court case to get him to come in. But I think he needs to fully explain why this wasn’t gain of function and why he was destroying federal records.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, what was the destroying of federal records?

RAND PAUL: Emails back and forth saying, “destroy this after you’ve read it.” That’s illegal. And we have evidence that.

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure all that’s in the book “Deception.” Now, did you do the audio version of it?

RAND PAUL: No. Somebody else did, and I wanted my wife to do it because she’s a great reader and she helped me write the book. But no. But my wife and I wrote it together. This is our second book together. We wrote “The Case Against Socialism” a few years ago, and then she and I collaborated. And I jokingly say the boring, dry, scientific part is mine. If there’s anything really interesting to, that’s my wife.

JOE ROGAN: All right, well, it’s a pleasure meeting you. Thank you very much.

RAND PAUL: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Thanks for being here. All right, bye, everybody.

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