 DeSantis seemingly calling for military intervention in Mexico. Let's roll that and talk about it. As commander-in-chief, I'm going to use the US military to go after the Mexican drug cartels. They are killing our people. And the stories that I've seen in Florida, we had an infant, 18 months, parents rented an Airbnb. And apparently the people hadn't rented it before we're using drugs. The infant was crawling. The toddler was crawling on the carpet and ingested a fentanyl residue and died. Are we just going to sit here and let this happen, this carnage happen in our country? I am not going to do that. So I guarantee you on day one, this border is going to be a day one issue for me as president. We're going to declare it a national march. Yes, we'll build the wall. We'll do remain in Mexico. But those Mexican drug cartels are going to be treated like the foreign terrorism organizations that they are. So is that a threat to invade Mexico? Yeah, like, is it a declaration of war on day one? Like, what's the legal mechanism here? Yeah, I mean, I think you can imagine a situation and Mike Pence has had sort of more reality-based things to say about this. You could imagine a situation where you have some sort of cooperation with the Mexican government that involves deploying US military assets in Mexico with their permission. And maybe you could even pressure them in certain ways into doing that. But I don't think it's at all clear that you necessarily would succeed at that. Amlo is very much a nationalist and I think is unlikely to be keen on the idea of the US military attacking cartels inside Mexico. And if you do that without the Mexican government's permission, you have invaded Mexico. It's like, it's this really hawkish, bizarre idea that could have all sorts of negative unintended effects. And it's just sort of being thrown out there. Like it's a thing like, oh, just like send the military. And also like you can't, you'd have to send troops if you wanted to do this sort of thing. I mean, part of the problem with the fentanyl trade is because fentanyl is physically so small, the quantity of it that you need. And because it's synthesized artificially, you can't just like identify sites from the sky and drop chemicals on them or bomb them or that sort of thing. If you were truly to have an effective operation like this, you would have to have a US military presence in Mexico, which would be a huge policy change. And if they're really threatening to do that without Mexico's permission, that's literally a threat to invade, which just seems crazy. Yeah, and the more moderate Nikki Haley position is just send special operations there. So it would be a sort of, I guess like off the books, CIA operation or something like that. I mean, the underlying issues here are that we've got our immigration problems and then the drug war. And from my perspective, the inflow of fentanyl into the country has been a direct result of drug prohibition. Fentanyl has existed as a medication and anesthetic in hospitals, but the reason that it spilled onto the streets is because we went from an opioid epidemic to a heroin problem to now a fentanyl problem. And I think that the approach that that discussion around decriminalization harm reduction is of course completely off the table for the GOP, but there's also the question of immigration, which is brought up over and over again on that stage. And for the amount of times that Ronald Reagan was invoked, there was not a discussion of the fact that the Reagan Republicans were a much more welcoming party. I mean, Reagan at the time offered an amnesty and also basically was talking about a highway connecting Canada, Mexico and the US. Like we're all, we're gonna have a new North American alliance. So that is obviously far in the rear view now, but it's gotta be part of the solution, any serious solution to any of these problems is actually figuring out a way to meet the demand of the people who want to come and live and work here peacefully. Liz, what was your think? I think there's also an interesting component of this, which is very difficult to argue against because I think it effectively tugs at people's heartstrings, but like the anecdote that Dosantis cites about the 18-month-old baby who was crawling on the floor of an Airbnb and touched fentanyl and ingested fentanyl in some way and died as a result of this. I mean, I don't know if you guys saw the daycare, the Bronx daycare, which was, this was a story, I think basically last week where a two-year-old in New York City died of, I guess, ingesting fentanyl in the daycare, despite having passed all of its city inspections, was actually being used as a drug front. And so now the city is going after the people who were running the daycare and running the drug front as well. But it's interesting, right? Because these stories capture people's imaginations. It's kind of a little bit of a throwback to milk cartons kids. And we see this moral panic surrounding kids, kids in razor blades, kids in fentanyl, kids in, whatever they might be able to access. And A, I need to like sort of independently do my own research and actually verify that this anecdote exists because just because somebody said it on a debate stage does not mean it is actually grounded in fact. And two, like, I think it's actually probably better to bring the discussion closer to reality where like, yes, maybe every once in a while there's an anomalous absurdly terrifying story like the Bronx daycare one or like this 18 month old in this Airbnb. But fundamentally, we don't really have a country where like millions of children are ingesting fentanyl and dying each year. Like let's be very clear about what the problem is. There is an opioid crisis, but I think it would actually be better to focus the conversation on the median opioid user and addict and how to get them the treatment that they need, not these outlier cases. Well, but I mean, the problem, I mean, these cases are not the typical fentanyl problem that we're having on the order of 100,000 drug overdose deaths a year in the country and it's massively higher than it used to be. And it's a legitimately extremely hard policy problem. I think a much harder policy problem than the immigration issue, which I think we know what the trade-offs are and what the solutions would be. I mean, the reason we ended up with this fentanyl problem as you described, Zach, is we went through this period where the prescribing guidelines for opioids were much too lax and this seems to have been largely an honest mistake. There was a sense in medicine that basically, lots of people have chronic pain and this was a safe way to treat chronic pain. And it was a huge mistake and it created this large number of people with opioid addictions and then you had that progression in the market through heroin and then fentanyl. But I think one lesson to take from that is if you had an even more permissive legal opioid policy, where it was not just that we were gonna go back to writing a lot more prescriptions, but that we were going to get rid of prohibition and allow people to just go out and buy Percocet if they wanted, you would still have a tremendous number of addicts and overdose deaths and you wouldn't have two-year-olds stumbling upon a block of fentanyl in the back of a daycare because it would be a legal market. But the legal market would be a source of enormous problems in the country. And so it's not like marijuana where you can just look at the costs and the benefits and say, prohibition was ridiculous and we're better off with permitting this. You end up with enormous social costs regardless of which policy you choose. And I think that's part of why you end up getting this fantastical like let's invade Mexico because if there was a simpler, clearer thing to do about it, that's what they'd be proposing to do. Which is not to say that I think the Mexico thing is gonna work. It's just people get into these realms when they lack a good answer. Yeah, I agree that there's no perfect solution and that opioids are certainly a much more damaging drug when abused than something like cannabis. The problem is that shift it, cracking down on the opioids after that the offer of prescription happened then made basically what it led to is a lot of people turning to heroin and then once that demand for heroin went up then, oh, look, it's even more efficient to just make this in a lab in China or wherever and then sneak it over the border. And so I think that there could be a more sophisticated conversation about trade-offs and accepting that there are going to be social ills but perhaps there are less damaging interventions than kind of the simplistic let's just crack down on it and see what pops up next. Liz, I interrupted you. Regardless, the type of conversation that you guys are modeling, which acknowledges some externalities and unintended consequences that arise from different policies and trace the evolution of how we got into this mess, to me that's a much more interesting way to do debate. And so I really, really wish, and I know this will never really happen in US politics but I wish we could move away from like 18-month-old babies stumbled across a little bit of fentanyl and died and it's like the super outlier moral panicky type case and toward the types of things that you guys are talking about which I think are both extremely valid ways of approaching this. I'm sorry, but like if we actually want serious policy-making and serious people in the White House we should have the expectation that that's where the conversation happens as opposed to whatever bullshit we saw on the stage last night. Hey, thanks for watching that conversation with Josh Barrow about the recent GOP debate. You can watch the full conversation right here or another clip over here.