Sevan Matossian (00:01):
Good morning.
David Pan (00:02):
Morning. How are you doing?
Sevan Matossian (00:04):
Oh, I love it. Good audio. Good video. Sweet.
David Pan (00:10):
All right. Yeah, I think I got it figured out.
Sevan Matossian (00:13):
That was a good spot though, before. I like it. I like the family home basement look, and I do like the fact that you had a bunch of family over for the holidays. It’s always a good sign when someone’s got the family together and they’re bringing people home for the holidays.
David Pan (00:30):
It’s really nice. It’s a really nice time for us. I mean, we’re kind of spread out, so it’s nice to be able to get together.
Sevan Matossian (00:38):
David, a nutshell, I was raised in Berkeley, California. I was raised a very political family, all Democrats, Republicans were bad people. And I started working in 2006 for a company called CrossFit, and the owner was a libertarian. And the process of CrossFit is to take absolute responsibility and accountability for your health through diet and movement, and to let the body express itself in the way it’s supposed to be expressed, and to take really, really good care of yourself and not to put that out on other people so you can live a strong, fulfilled life. And the owner is, his dad was the former chief scientist of Hughes Aircraft, and he’s a big brain guy, and he trusts his discernment over outsourcing discernment because of his consciousness and his capacity to see things. And he’s a big advocate of freedom. So slowly over the years as I worked for him, I would hear his perspective and I was always hearing it.
(01:46):
And of course, I would have these emotional pushes against it because of kind of my loyalty to my upbringing and my family. And then I had kids at 49, I started having kids, and now I’m 51, sorry. At 43, I started having kids. And now at 51, I have three kids. I have two 7-year-old boys and a nine-year-old boy that I’m raising myself with my wife. We raised them out of the system. And so I’ve gone through this dramatic shift of understanding, being more logical in my choices. And when I went to college, I went to uc, Santa Barbara, and it was called affirmative Action, but I never asked what affirmative action was. I never thought, oh, when these kids get in, these kids don’t get in. These kids are given something because of the biology of their makeup, their melanated skin, and then these people don’t get the spot because of theirs. I just thought affirmative action. And as a Democrat, I’m a do-gooder, right? And I’m to let the people, I’m to help people. And I was tricked by definitions of words and not asking what things meant and not actually looking at things.
(02:57):
So I’ve had this awakening, and now I have this platform through this podcast, and it’s a fun process to share. And when I saw you stand up, I think it was at a regents meeting, and you were defining actual implications of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I was so excited that someone like you was running for office who could speak in this calm tone and who could express it, that actually through this forcing people to believe this thought we’re actually doing the antithesis of diversity. And it’s been okay for years, for an example, for people not to like Christianity, but now all of a sudden if you’re not a fan of Islam, you’re Islamophobic. And so we have this lack of balance and what you’re allowed to think and say. And I appreciate your stance on it. So I wanted to have you on and talk with you, and I have a broad range of questions for you in regards to that.
David Pan (04:04):
Great. Yeah, I really appreciate this.
Sevan Matossian (04:07):
So you were a German professor at the University of Riverside?
David Pan (04:12):
University of California. Irvine.
Sevan Matossian (04:14):
Irvine. Okay. I always get those two confused. And how did you become a German professor? You do not look like a German professor.
David Pan (04:23):
So I started out in college and I did, one of, it was at Stanford. They had this Western culture program. It was called, well, it was a special program called Structured Liberal Education. And they did the classics of Western civilization, and a lot of them were Germans. We studied Hagel and Marx and Nietzche and Freud and Kafka, and a lot of classic Western writers, but include a lot of Germans. And so I got really interested in that. And so I started to learn German, and then I just kept doing that.
Sevan Matossian (05:02):
When you went to Stanford, what did you go for? What was your intent?
David Pan (05:07):
My intent was to study physics, actually. But then I really just enjoyed doing humanity stuff. I think a lot of it from this course that I took in the beginning was a freshman kind of comprehensive western culture course, a kind of course that they don’t really do so much today anymore. But my department still does that kind of work. I mean, it’s a Department of European language and studies, so we obviously do western culture.
Sevan Matossian (05:39):
When I search the internet for videos about you, and I want to learn about you, I see you speaking about, I dunno how to categorize it. I want to say you have a focus on maybe the constitution or on liberty or on liberal values. Can you explain that to me?
David Pan (06:05):
Well, let’s see. I guess there’s a lot of different things that I’ve done, but yeah, I do have a focus on, I dunno what you’d call it, I suppose.
Sevan Matossian (06:16):
Oh, good. That makes me feel good that you don’t know what to call it either, but clearly you’re interested in the truth and the operational mechanisms that allow society to function through law.
David Pan (06:30):
Yes, but also I think a lot of what I’ve been trying to promote is something that actually comes from one of my mentors, Paul Ney, who’s passed away. He was the editor of this journal Telos, and he developed this idea that he called federal populism, which is a real strong focus on our constitution and the way it’s structured, particularly the Federalist aspect, which is to say federalism for him meant putting as much responsibility down toward local communities and away from the central government. But he also, he promoted an idea of populism, which was combined with that, which really meant we’re not going to try and micromanage people. We’re going to give them freedom. We’re going to give ’em responsibility. And I think those are the two things that really guide a lot of what I’ve been thinking through, which is to say we have to rethink the way we relate to our government right now. We’ve got this legacy of welfare programs dating from the New Deal, where the idea really is to kind of micromanage people in the way they live.
(07:51):
It takes away freedom, it takes away responsibility. And we really have to rethink, I think the way in which the government relates to us. I mean, I feel like the government relates to us as if we were some kind of machines like clocks or something like that. Some machine needs oil, you give it oil, you think people are needing food, you give them food stamps, but people are not like machines. They’re more like, at the very least, they’re like animals like a dog. You treat a dog a certain way, you give him table scraps every day. He’s going to be always begging. I mean, you affect people’s behavior by the types of decisions you make about how to provide for them. And I think the government, I’m not against government. What I’m against is the government trying to micromanage. So the way in which you want to promote certain kinds of behaviors, which is something like promoting responsibility, promoting freedom is not to somehow we’ve got benefit systems in which we only give people the food stamps if their income is below a certain level, if they don’t collect up any assets.
(09:03):
Well, you’re kind of promoting that behavior. You’re promoting this behavior of not producing income, of not collecting up assets, and it’s totally anti antithetical to what you really want to be promoting people to do. You want people to have meaningful lives. You want people to be productive. People want that. People want to have meaning in their lives, and you’re taking away one of the key ways that people are able to develop that meaning in their lives, which is to say, taking responsibility for themselves, thinking through the future, thinking through how they’re going to earn money. That’s a key aspect of what gives you a sense of self, self-respect and responsibility for yourself, obviously. And so you take that away from people and you’re undermining their relationship to themselves and their meaning for themselves. So anyway, so that’s kind of a fundamental aspect of what I’m thinking through, or the way I think, through the way we should relate to our government. So I don’t know. There’s a long answer, but I
Sevan Matossian (10:07):
Hopefully No, no,
David Pan (10:09):
That’s an idea of my perspective.
Sevan Matossian (10:11):
I’m here for it. The three platforms or the three topics that you’re driving home on your website and that I’ve heard you talk about is a school choice for parents reducing inflation and return to law and order. I want to dig in on those briefly. When you say return to law and order, what do you mean?
David Pan (10:34):
Well, so one thing that I really think that we’ve gotten into a problem with, and this has been, frankly, it’s been a problem with our courts to a certain extent. So a lot of people in my district are concerned about homelessness. So this is not Los Angeles, this is like Santa Ana, which is its Orange County, but some of the problems from Los Angeles are kind of leaking over here, and people are worried about the homelessness. And there was this recent court case here in California, grants Pass, California, where the court had made this judgment that the city of Grants Pass was not able to enforce an ordinance against vagrancy.
Sevan Matossian (11:26):
Vagrancy means sleeping if someone sets up a sleeping bag in front of the door of my small business, right?
David Pan (11:31):
Exactly. Right.
Sevan Matossian (11:32):
Okay.
David Pan (11:34):
And so the determination of the court was this was cruel and unusual punishment. And in fact, they set a really high standard. They said that if there are not enough shelter beds for everybody, for all the homeless people in the city, then you make it illegal for any single homeless person to be in violation of the law. And so it was just announced it was going to the Supreme Court because this is such a big deal about taking away the ability of cities to make it a violation, to be, like you said, sleeping in somebody’s business or setting up a tent on a public sidewalk. I mean, this is a basic right of a community to be able to enforce certain laws that maintain public order. And we’ve lost that to a certain extent, partly because of our court system. It’s a shame because the court system is supposed to be upholding the law. This was actually, I mean, if we want to go back to Affirm action, the whole Affirm redaction thing, and it really started with the Supreme Court in the backing decision about setting up or allowing this whole system of preferences, even though they tried to restrict it, it really had this kind of perverse effect.
Sevan Matossian (13:07):
So this is one of the spots going back to how we use words, affirmative action, abortion, and now the word homelessness. So I spent many years homeless by choice, and the thousand homeless people I met, there was one other guy besides me who was not a drug addict. Of the 1000 homeless people I met, anecdotally, two of us were not drug addicts. And I think it’s just a crazy mischaracterization to call them homeless because me and you, David, we sort of have these, and I’ll project this onto you. We have these priorities. We want to get oxygen, and then we want some food, and then we want shelter. And then we would like some intimacy with a family, a woman, and create a family and start building. And so there’s this natural order that I would say that we’re in. And when you are a drug addict, what happens is, is you’re willing to forego. You’re not concerned about shelter and food. You do want air, but also your occupation is stealing because there’s by any means necessary component when you’re a drug addict. And that’s another thing that frustrates me because it’s similar to what happened with Covid. We are trying to cure the symptom instead of the cause,
(14:30):
And we will never build enough. And it goes back to what you were saying. If we just keep building homes for homeless people, the non-homeless people who are on the fringe, instead of fighting to get better, they’ll be like, well, I can get shelter. I’ll just fall off this way. Because for them, they’re like a rat trying to get through the maze. They just want to be covered by the rain or covered from the rain.
David Pan (14:53):
I think a huge part of our welfare system really functions that way. It really just incentivizes people to do these things that from their perspective is really rational. If by earning money and having making a decent living, I’m going to lose all sorts of benefits. Oh, then why should I be doing that? And then you’ve got people next door who are working really hard and they’re just basically barely getting by and they’re watching somebody else that’s really not doing anything. It is getting kind of the same benefits. It’s demoralizing for people,
Sevan Matossian (15:30):
And by mischaracterizing the problem, they’re exacerbating it. So if we know the problem from a covid infection is overweight for or more comorbidities, we conflate the issue as covid opposed to nutrition and movement, not a single maybe of the 4 million people who do CrossFit on all the continents in the world, maybe two died from Covid. Because at our baseline in our cult, we have a food pyramid, we have nutrition as our number one, and then movement. And one of our things is don’t eat sugar. And so I just get concerned when I hear it called homelessness because to address homelessness will exacerbate the problem of homelessness.
David Pan (16:16):
Right. Yeah, no, that’s a great
Sevan Matossian (16:17):
Point. As opposed to address them as what they really are, they are. And then here’s another thing. Imagine if you or had a daughter who was addicted to heroin or I had a son who was addicted to heroin. I’m not opposed, I don’t want free needles given to them, and I don’t want them allowed to be on the street. I would like them to be arrested and get reprieve in a jail for two weeks or a month.
David Pan (16:42):
And I think to force them into rehabilitation, I think that’s a necessary thing. It’s a good thing for them. If they’re not able to choose to get into rehab, then yes, I think it would be a much better thing to force them into some kind of rehab program.
Sevan Matossian (16:59):
There’s this demarcation line, David, where we have to, like you said, you’re not against government. We need the government to tell us red means stop and green means go, because if we don’t agree to that, we’re going to get in car accidents. But somewhere, there’s a line where if they tell us too much, it’s like, Hey, you can’t fix everything. You will exacerbate the problem.
David Pan (17:20):
Right. Well, it’s also, I mean, it’s not just about the quantity. It’s really the quality of the type of interventions you want. So one thing that the government does, you need government in order to have a free market because the government guarantees the market, the government sets up the conditions for a free market by the types of laws that it establishes. Obviously, a communist government is not allowing a free market. And so our government has certain policies that promote that free market in a lot of places, not in all places, not in enough places, I think. Right? And so it’s about thinking through the way the government is going to really relate to people, and it really is more like, I guess one metaphor you can use is maybe a garden. I mean, I talked about how you would deal with your dog or something like that, but it’s something where you have to be smart. You’ve got to set up the conditions for flourishing. That’s what you need to set up. You can’t be directly intervening, but you want to set up the right conditions and the right structures.
Sevan Matossian (18:32):
David, you’re running for Congress in the state of California and your area is Orange County, the Orange County area?
David Pan (18:39):
Yeah. Well, part of Orange County, so sort of the Northwestern edge of Orange County. So it’s Santa Ana and Anaheim basically part of Fullerton, part of Orange and Stanton. So it’s like, yeah, orange County includes about five congressional districts, and this is one of ’em.
Sevan Matossian (19:02):
Do they have a Democrat or a Republican representing the region now?
David Pan (19:08):
Right now, that district has a Democrat representing it. His name is Lou Cara. He’s been in there for, this is his fourth term,
Sevan Matossian (19:17):
And their four year terms, or six
David Pan (19:19):
Year, oh, two year terms for conference council representatives.
Sevan Matossian (19:22):
Oh, okay. So
David Pan (19:23):
It’s like seven years or so? Yeah.
Sevan Matossian (19:25):
Okay. I had no idea. Hey, does the root of, I have some strong beliefs of what happened with the safety issue where we crested a point, and I think it was the George Floyd incident and the lockdowns, so it was a double fear. It was the mischaracterization of what I call the suicide or death of George Floyd with the lockdowns that sort of sent this our civilization to break its informal partnership with law and order, and basically cause police to be afraid to interact with people with darker skin. And there’s tons of anecdotal information out there if you talk to cops. Does that interest you at all at the root of where we tipped, because we weren’t seeing all of these things of roaming groups of kids going into Nordstrom’s and cleaning the place out until this happened, and there became these laws in Santa Cruz where it’s basically not a crime to steal stuff, or it’s a really small crime under $950 and things like that. Right.
David Pan (20:45):
No, that’s a huge problem here. I mean, this is not the court. This is our legislators who have created this law that basically legalizes petty theft, and it’s undermining the mean. It’s undermining law and order, and just created this sort of culture of petty theft. It’s really a shame. And so this is obviously something that I’m really concerned about too.
Sevan Matossian (21:16):
Disproportionately hurting small businesses. I mean, if I have a small business, I can’t lose $500 worth of product in a day.
David Pan (21:26):
But even large businesses, I mean, target has been closing down stores in some of these inner city areas. I mean, it doesn’t matter what kind of business mean, especially small businesses. But yeah, we can deal with this.
Sevan Matossian (21:39):
There is some crazy number, David, where it’s in the twenties, CVSs or Walgreens closed in the Bay Area because of the thievery, and then in the Northwest it’s disputed why, but four Walmarts closed in a region up in the northwest in Washington, but I think it’s safe to say that it was because of the stealing.
David Pan (22:04):
Yeah, right. No, no. They public announced some of these decisions and said, yes, we can’t deal with all of this theft. I mean, business can’t run that way, and there’s no way to do anything about them. You’re just supposed to let them run in and run out. I mean, no.
Sevan Matossian (22:23):
So that is part of the public safety, right? I mean, because we’re working, we’re making money, and that money represents our human energy. They’re basically stealing time from us.
David Pan (22:33):
Yeah, right. Yeah, no, that’s absolutely a huge problem here in California, and it’ll take some time before we can turn that around. There’s so many, I mean, there’s a super majority of Democrats in the state legislature here, and it’ll take, take some time effort to turn that around to be able to change those laws. The homelessness thing, I think something can be done more quickly just if the Supreme Court can make a new decision on this issue of how cities deal with things like vagrancy, but these laws that are in place in California, that’ll be more difficult to change.
Sevan Matossian (23:19):
Were you always a Republican?
David Pan (23:22):
No. In fact, I was like, I’m Democrat all my life. I switched to Republican last year, though I guess my views had been changing for a long time. I mean, I wrote on affirmative action 20, 25 years ago against affirmative action, but I guess I started as a Democrat mainly. I thought Democrats were kind of the party of rights for minorities, really. I think the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that’s something like the Democrats really pushed, but
Sevan Matossian (24:02):
Although a ton of Democrats voted against it, including Al Gore’s debt.
David Pan (24:07):
Okay, yeah, right. But it was bipartisan. I mean, it was Republicans and Democrats, but it was something where you could think that Democrats were, I mean, we’ve always, I think, thought that Democrats were more the party of minorities and supporting things like equal opportunity, but they’ve subverted that where they’re against equal opportunity now and in favor of this idea of equity. I think that’s the key shift that they’ve made where they say, no, we don’t want equal opportunity. We want equity. And that’s this whole concept that, I mean, yeah, it’s this idea actually. I mean, I think of it as a form of socialism really, because it’s saying that we want an equal outcomes, equal results. We’re not looking for equal opportunities. So then we have to engineer these results, admit more minorities, but specific minorities, the ones that are deemed to be underrepresented, and I hate that term too, that’s the term they use underrepresented minorities, but they’re talking about blacks and Hispanics, but they’re not actually underrepresented in the sense that the qualified applicants, there’s a certain number of qualified applicants amongst from blacks and Hispanics, and those are the ones that should be admitted.
(25:39):
But if we’re admitting more blacks and Hispanics, because we’re letting in those who are less qualified than people from other races, and so that’s not underrepresentation, they’re actually overrepresented from my point of view in the sense that you should be admitting you should be using the same standard as everybody else. Now, if they’re underrepresented as a portion of the population, then the issue is not so much on the level of college admissions. The issue is in primarily, I think in schooling on the more basic elementary level, primary schools, high schools, and affirmative action is not solving that at all. It’s actually diverting attention from that problem where we really need to be focusing there, and we can get into school vouchers, but that’s really one of the things that I think that we’d need in order to improve the schools. But there’s this whole teacher union lobby that opposes that.
Sevan Matossian (26:40):
I want to go back to switching to become a Democrat. Was that difficult for you, and what were the implications of switching and running for Congress as a Republican, while you’re in a system which is the uc system, and I don’t know how involved you are in the Chinese community, but in a system or in an area where 80, 90% of the people are Democrats?
David Pan (27:07):
Yeah. Well, I guess I’ve been developing a kind of reputation as a conservative anyway, just because of the stuff I’ve been writing. I had just not, I guess, officially announced that I was Republican. And I guess that’s been difficult to a certain extent. Academia itself, all of academia is really heavily skewed toward the Democrats. In fact, the ratio on our campus in this area around uc, Irvine, is something like, it’s like 25 to one where Democrats are Republicans. So I can think of, I can’t think of a single Republican actually in my whole school of humanities really. I don’t think There’s one guy who’s retired a little while ago, but that’s the only one. So yeah, I think the difficult thing that I had was really that I wasn’t really making much headway in academia and publishing my stuff and getting a hearing for things that I was writing. And that’s what was so frustrating, and that’s why I’ve said, okay, look, I need to get out of this system and work outside university in some kind of political capacity. I mean, the type of work that I was doing was a lot of political theory, a lot of stuff related to politics, but not activist stuff on more of a theoretical level. And that was where a lot of the frustration was, where I just was not getting a hearing from anybody.
Sevan Matossian (28:53):
Was the shift scary? Were you scared?
David Pan (28:56):
I was scared about going into politics. It was such a new thing for me. Right. Yeah.
Sevan Matossian (29:00):
How about losing your job, though? I mean, here you are very successful, respected. How long have you been at the university?
David Pan (29:10):
I’ve been here since 2006, so I guess 17, almost 18 years.
Sevan Matossian (29:17):
And so many people would be afraid to express logical views in their workplace or anywhere for fear of retaliation. I mean, it’s real in California.
David Pan (29:32):
Yeah, I guess so. I guess I wasn’t so worried about that. I mean, theoretically, I guess what happens, I think there have been other tenured professors who have somehow lost their jobs due to positions they’ve taken, right? And so it’s not like there’s no danger of that.
The above transcript is generated using AI technology and therefore may contain errors.
Check out our other posts.
