#1454 - Dan Crenshaw

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Congressman, Congressman, how are you, sir?

Dan Crenshaw (0:01)

Hey, I'm doing well, Joe. Good to see you again.

Joe Rogan (0:04)

You look official. Bro, you look very official. You have an American flag in the background. You got books. Have you read those books? Be honest with me.

Dan Crenshaw (0:11)

Yeah, that's a good question. Some of them. I mean, this one's like a congressional cookbook. Like, I'm not going to read that, so obviously.

Some of these I have, or at least I dabble in books. Like, I'll look over a book mostly. I've definitely read my book. That one's out there.

I've read that way too many times. I hate reading it now.

Joe Rogan (0:29)

And that's the one you read? I've read that way too many times. I hate reading it now.

Dan Crenshaw (0:32)

And that's the one that's out right now? I don't know when we're posting this, but Tuesday, April 7th.

Joe Rogan (0:37)

That's tomorrow. Yeah, that's exactly when this will come out. So perfect.

Fortitude, we need that right now.

Dan Crenshaw (0:45)

And we do. We do. Now, the rest of this, I just kind of set up for this.

I found that weird-ass painting right there at some flea market in San Diego back when I was stationed there. It's like a bunch of ships.

Joe Rogan (0:59)

It looks like a horrible idea for a tattoo. Sometimes people have those really bad old ship tattoos. Yeah.

Dan Crenshaw (1:08)

I feel like there's worse tattoos you could get.

Joe Rogan (1:10)

Oh yeah, I've got them.

What about the typewriter? Do you use the typewriter? Is that legit?

Dan Crenshaw (1:16)

No, that is a legit typewriter. That was my granddad's old typewriter. So I saved that. They kept it in pretty good.

Shape. I didn't really have to do much restoring, but you can still buy the ink for that.

Joe Rogan (1:38)

What's your take on what we're going through right now, Dan? For everybody in the future, this is a day, it's basically a month into like extreme coronavirus lockdown for the country. It all started sort of in the beginning of March. Now, here we are in the first week of April, and everybody's stir crazy and weirded out by this, including me, and I'm sure you as well. What is your take on this?

Dan Crenshaw (2:04)

Wow. Generally speaking, I remember the weekend where everything all of a sudden shifted. It was the March 14th weekend. I remember that weekend because it was my birthday.

And I remember how everybody was basically still going out to bars and restaurants and then all of a sudden, everything changed. Like the entire paradigm changed.

And I could go through a long timeline of how we got there. There's a lot of finger pointing right now, a lot of opportunism. The reality is a lot of us didn't, pretty much everybody didn't know a whole lot. And then we ended up in this situation where and now my general take on it, we are in a, what I would call a tactical retreat. So I'm going to use a military term there to describe what we are doing. We all of a sudden ran into a hail of gunfire. Okay, like, and I think about this in military terms, we're on a patrol, we run into a hail of gunfire. We're not really sure what hit us. We have a basic idea. We know who they are. We know generally what the enemy is, but we weren't quite sure how to combat it. So we took a retreat, tactically speaking. That retreat looks a lot like a lockdown, okay? Don't talk to anybody, don't touch anybody, maintain that social distancing, lock things down. We have to slow the spread and allow our backup, our public health system to catch up.

At a certain point, we have to come out of that tactical pause. We have to come out of that retreat and start engaging in the enemy a little bit.

Now we do that slowly and we do it carefully. And so I think that's the, I like to look at it that way as the conversation about how to reopen society. At a certain point, we have to move away from risk containment and move into a risk mitigation strategy, and we're ramping up our production of things like ventilators, of PPE, of testing capability in order to do that.

Joe Rogan (3:47)

Now there's some talk of when this is going to end. And I don't know how you even make that distinction. How does one make a decision? And it seems like one of those things where once it starts, once you lock a country down and tell people stay away, stay home, don't go to work, don't do anything unless it's very essential like grocery stores, hospitals, media, there's certain things that are allowed to be done right now.