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

**Rand Paul** (0:00)
We live on a house of cards because, and most people don't know this, and I don't want to scare your audience. I would scare your audience if I tell too much.

**David Friedberg** (0:07)
Go ahead.

**Rand Paul** (0:07)
I voted to raise the age of Social Security, but it's not going to be around unless you raise the age to 70 That's the only way it sticks around.

**David Friedberg** (0:13)
Do we really need American primacy?

**Rand Paul** (0:15)
He said, when you go back to Washington, make sure they know that wars with China is not inevitable. But I think it's overstated how great AI is going to be. The left has this modern monetary theory, and it sounds ridiculous, and it is, except that it kind of worked for 10 or 15 years.

**David Friedberg** (0:31)
If 40 to 50% of Americans are employed directly or indirectly by a federal, state, or local government, or government contractor, or earn their income from a government check, can we actually reduce spending?

**Rand Paul** (0:46)
Here's the bottom line. I voted against the big, beautiful bill because of the debt ceiling, but also here's the projections.

**David Friedberg** (0:52)
What was at the heart of the cover-up?

**Rand Paul** (0:54)
There's never been a more extraordinary cover-up in the sense that these people were saying in public the opposite of what they were saying in private.

**David Friedberg** (1:05)
All right, besties, I think that was another epic discussion. People loved the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours.

**Rand Paul** (1:11)
Absolutely. We crushed your questions in a minute.

**David Friedberg** (1:14)
We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What did you guys think? That was fun.
Senator, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me in your office. I'm really excited for this. You grew up in Texas with a well-known father, 12-term congressman, three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul. However, you became a doctor after residency at Duke Medical. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you chose that path instead of politics at the beginning of your career.

**Rand Paul** (1:44)
Well, that was following father also. My dad's a physician too, so I went to medical school. In fact, went to the same medical school as my dad.
My dad is in OB-GYN, he's retired now. We have a family of several doctors. My little sister's in OB-GYN, my brother's a family doctor. I got two nieces, three nieces that are doctors. So a lot of doctors. But as a kid, I have distinct memories of laying on the shag carpet, because we have had shag carpet in the 70s, and listening to him in, I don't know, Missoula, Montana on the radio. I'd hear the one end of him answering questions. I went to lots and lots of his speeches. I was interested in the books he recommended other people to read, and I read many of those. He gave me a full set of Ayn Rand's novels when I was 15, and said, there's a lot of good stuff in here, but there's some of the stuff we don't agree with either. But to be open-minded, to take the good with the bad, and to be able to filter through, but that there was something there about individualism. And I still believe that to this day, that there is something, all the critics hate Ayn Rand. It's, oh, she's so simplistic, this and that. But there is something that connected with the American spirit, the spirit of ingenuity, the spirit of being heroes. It's the idea that, I think why people were fascinated with Elon Musk and capturing those rockets from space, that it's like, wow, we can have somebody who really does cool things once again in our country.

**David Friedberg** (3:16)
Yeah. Ayn Rand's writings seem to be coming more prescient than I think we realized early on.

**Rand Paul** (3:22)
I think that's why the people thought it was simplistic, because the characters were character types. Nobody could believe they could ever exist at their BP. There would be middle management, there would be the Ellsworth Toohey, or the Peter Keating in the middle of these corporations, and nobody believed that their whole purpose would be mediocrity, and they purposely would try to choose people based on the color of their skin or their ethnicity over their merit. Nobody believed that could ever happen. That was such a dystopian sort of Harrison Bergeron. That was all farce, that was dystopian farce. Until now, you're right, it looks a lot like reality.

**David Friedberg** (3:55)
Here we are. Why did you make the career shift into politics after being a doctor for some time?