Arnold Schwarzenegger on the Pandemic Response

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Hi, I'm Isaac Havert, and this is a bonus episode of The Ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

I'm at home in Washington.

I've been at home for about two weeks now.

All of us have been encouraged to stay home if we can, by government officials, by friends and family, by co-workers.

But there's one person out there who's taken his own spin on the message.

See, the important thing is that you stay at home because there's a curfew now.

So yeah, that's Arnold Schwarzenegger, who a few days ago posted a video of himself at his kitchen table feeding carrots to his mini horse whiskey and his mini donkey Lulu.

Lulu loves carrots.

Whiskey loves carrots.

I just had my little bit of vegan food.

Oh, that was yummy, huh?

And though it was very jokey and silly in the way that it went, he is encouraging everyone to take this seriously.

See, that's what we do.

We don't go out, we don't go to restaurants, we don't do anything like that anymore here.

Millions of people have watched this video, and it's certainly weird to have Arnold Schwarzenegger with a mini donkey and a mini horse giving public health advice.

But it struck a chord, so he's kept at it.

Here I am at home, taking a jacuzzi, smoking a little stogi.

A lot of folks were still out and about, including all these videos that we've seen of kids out on spring break or out in Disney World.

That made Schwarzenegger give another warning here.

I still see photographs and videos of people sitting in outside cafes all over the world and having a good time and hanging out in crowds.

That is not wise because that's how you can get the virus.

I've gotten to know Schwarzenegger from covering him.

It was only a few months ago that I sat down with him at his office in Santa Monica for a previous episode of this podcast, which we ran in January.

Those were really different circumstances.

But after seeing that first video, I reached out to see if he wanted to talk.

He's going through the same stuff we all are, albeit in a nicer house with a mini horse and a mini donkey and a hot tub.

Of course, he was also governor of California, so he spent a lot of time thinking about disaster preparedness.

He comes at it with a very different perspective and in a distinctively Arnold Schwarzenegger way.

And besides, these are surreal times, and what's more surreal than FaceTiming with Arnold Schwarzenegger during a pandemic?

So here's our call.

There we go.

Hi.

But the question now is, where's Isaac?

Can you not see me?

Oh, now I can see you.

Yeah, it's when I talk that it'll go, you'll see my face.

So

that's the first time I've done that because I'm not the technical genius.

So anyway, so you wanted to talk to me about the virus?

Yeah, I want to talk to you about all sorts of things.

So why don't we start with,

I want to get into the policy stuff in a moment, but can we just talk about Lulu and Whiskey?

How are they doing?

They're doing great.

Noodle, my dog is lying right next to me over here.

She's doing well.

And whiskey and

the Lulu is roaming around out there in the yard somewhere, eating grass.

and kicking each other and running around.

Can you just explain to people why you have a donkey and and a small horse?

All of those things are accidental.

You know, this is not something that I planned.

But it didn't, the donkey didn't just show up at your house one day.

Well, the miniature donkey my daughter had for many years.

And then when I saw her getting busier and busier, she didn't have the time to spend as much time with the miniature donkey as she used to.

I built a stall here so I can spend some time with her that she's not always by herself.

Yeah.

Get into the house and make her feel like she's like one of the dogs or something like that.

And so, that's what I was successful in doing.

That she started coming around for dinner, and I started feeding her carrots and food from my plate.

And so, she got used to kind of eating with us and hanging out.

And then, on December 14th, my dog Gustav passed away, right?

And so,

at that time, Heather has ordered

donkey, exactly, ordered the miniature donkey, and it just happened to be that the next day

i'm no actually the the day uh of the the the dog passed away in the morning and that very same day accidentally when i came home from my motorcycle ride uh

there was someone driving in front of me really slowly and they said who is this person with that little trailer behind it and it was actually the delivery of the donkey.

Just the normal day in your life, you go out for a motorcycle ride and come back to a miniature donkey being delivered.

Well, it was very interesting because I delivered with the motorcycle.

We took the dog in where we cremated

up in Mauribu at some place.

And so I was kind of really upset about it.

The loss of this dog was 13 years old.

He was with us every day.

And

my daughter and I picked him.

And so it just happens to be that very...

literally a few hours he passed away at six in the morning and then at 10 in the morning when I came back from my motorcycle ride the donkey was unloaded from this little trailer that this woman had behind her so now she met whiskey that's my first scene when I drove up the driveway was you know those two meeting and getting along really well and I was like shocked and then Heather said you know happy Merry Christmas

And so it was one of those coincidences.

So that's how I ended up with those two.

But they, interestingly enough, provide so much entertainment.

I mean, it's really fun to play with them throughout the day and to have them around and all that stuff.

So they've really been a great joy.

I mean, this all sounds very nice that you've got your house to hang out in.

You've got the dog and the donkey and the horse.

But it strikes me

that you probably would like to be in the action a little bit in the response to this.

Well,

people ask me a lot of times: do I miss being governor?

And I always tell them, you know, not really, because, you know, I have such a wonderful life.

After that, I always saw it as just a seven-year thing that I would do, put time

out for my entertainment and all the other stuff that I do, and just dedicate myself for seven years to the state of California and to the governorship.

But there are moments, and especially moments like this,

where I feel like, oh, oh that would be really great to be there now and to be part of the decision making and to be the ultimate decision maker right along with your team that you always have around it of experts because you never know the details as much as the experts

and so

so I felt that you know when there was you know a fire crisis or if there was a financial crisis or whatever it is i felt like oh it would be great to be there now and to make those decisions And the same was now with the coronavirus.

And I started following it very closely.

And this is what I would do now.

I would get the whole team together.

We would have had discussions and all this.

But I think when end of January we saw the first case in America and simultaneously the same case in South Korea, I think that at that point I would have started you know, kicking into gear and start saying, I think now we have to act.

Yeah.

And what does that look like?

Is that stockpiling resources at that point?

Well,

I would have done the research, you know, from the experts, and that's when we would have found out,

you know, of the scientific community, as you know, regardless of what the politics is in any country or who the leader is, they communicate very well.

Most of the stuff that is happening, they knew will happen.

The writing was on the wall, so to speak.

And so I would have then kicked in there and just then would have gotten that information that we are really short.

Uh, just like there's no difference than the information I got when I got in there as governor and we had the first fire.

When I was still in a transition period and I visited the different fire locations with Grey Davis, it was clear that we were short of resources, yeah, and we were short, and our infrastructure was not meant to uh, you know, for the amount of fires that are coming now to California and that happen here.

And so I established right then and there a Blue Ribbon Commission to kind of study this very quickly because again, I was not expert in fires and I just started this job.

I mean, transition.

And so after I became governor, I think it was the end of 2003, where I said, guys, I've just now visited several of the big fires.

It seems to me they're bigger than ever.

We don't have the resources.

Let's go and create a Blue Ribbon Commission and study what we need.

So, you know, and let's not make it a political issue.

And so that's what we did.

So it's kind of like being ahead of

the problem rather than always behind it.

And so I just happen to be a big believer in that.

Not everyone is,

because a lot of times you get attacked that you're an alarmist and that there is some other motivation behind it or something like that.

But I feel always that it is better to be accused of being an alarmist rather than being accused of not being well prepared or not good enough.

Also, for instance, with the levees.

No one in California talked about levees and it was kind of brushed aside.

Even though we had accidents with levees, I knew that we have vulnerable levees.

And I said, I said, okay, so what do we need to do?

And the expert said,

what we need to do, there are 100-year-old levees.

These are levees that were built out of dirt way back by farmers 100 years ago, and they're not really up to date, and they're very vulnerable, and we have earthquakes here.

And if there's an earthquake, a lot of these levees will break, and it will create an enormous flooding, and it will wipe out everyone's homes, and blah, blah, blah, and the capital will be underwater and all this kind of things.

So I said, okay, we got to go and put a package together.

And I started talking to the legislative leaders.

Of course, they laughed about it and they brushed it off.

until of course Katrina happened.

After Katrina happened, they came to me back and they said, what was that again that you talked about?

So again, they called me alarmists then.

I mean, we are just recovering from a recession.

Why would we spend $6.4 billion on levies when we need the money for other things?

And blah, blah, blah.

So they were all discussed.

But then they came after Katrina and said,

you're right.

There is a danger.

Let's go and look at your idea.

And so the same would have been the case with this one.

Don't ever assume that we are ready for any of this.

This particular situation is such that you have to really think it through kind of from the beginning to the end.

And you have to say, okay, if we have this increase, we are talking about the vandalators.

We don't have enough vandalators.

Okay, so how do we go and create those vandalators?

Do we have enough gear, protective gear, for the nurses and for the doctors?

Do we have enough masks?

for the nurses and for the doctors and for the people that work in the hospital.

So you have to go through all of this stuff.

I think that there's a lot of things that if you start early on, the earlier the better.

Right.

It's just that simple, like I said, there's things that you can do early on, and there's things, and this is not to criticize anybody today, because I don't believe in that.

I think it's the time now to work together.

And to do all these things, I'm just telling you what I would have done because I'm rather called the alarmist rather than being called like I'm not prepared.

You are someone who believes generally in smaller government and in being conservative when it comes to fiscal issues.

And we have massive government spending that's going to happen here and massive government action that's going to need takeovers and a certain way of factories and other things.

What is the case to conservatives at this point?

Is it just like this is an emergency and we've got to deal with it?

How do you make the fiscally conservative case for what we're dealing with here?

Well, I have to say

I have to kind of quote, you know, the Austrian Chancellor Kurtz.

As one does.

No, because

he has gone through that and he just went to the people and he said, look, this is going to cost us a lot of money.

This will create a huge deficit.

But, you know, if I have the choice between the safety of the people and the health of the people versus money, I will go with the safety of the people.

And so therefore, I'm going to go and do X, Y, and C.

And I don't know the details of things that he's spending the money on, but he has, and this is exactly what I feel like would have, would be the case in America.

You know, the sad story is only that we have run a deficit as it was with the most healthy economy, a trillion dollars this year without the coronavirus.

And now that will go.

to two trillion dollars, although maybe the three, who knows?

But the bottom line is we have to go now and do everything that we can.

And it's not just a financial thing.

It's more like having the guts to go out and just order things to be done right now, rather than waiting for another press conference and another press conference and then making it in incremental steps as you go along.

There's no more waiting.

And we have seen it's increasing now.

We have seen this is like a copy of South Korea and other countries.

And so now is the time to really go and kick ass.

And I also have to say there's opportunities there because let's not forget that we can put a lot of people to work in those kinds of facilities where they can build more ventilators, where they can build more masks.

Right, it's like World War II got us out of the Great Depression, right?

And because exactly, so in World War II, we put the extra 17 million people to work.

I'm not saying that the virus is the same exact thing as a Second World War, but I mean, there are opportunities there.

And I think if we put everyone to work now to build those masks, ventilators, and to do all the things that we need to do to get up to speed and to do it 24 hours a day.

That's what we need to do.

We got to kick in kind of like 24 hours, like they built hotels in Vegas, where it's 24 hours a day, where there are three shifts, and you go around the clock and you just build, build, build, and build, because they are opening, they erect the hotel in a year and a half, two years, which normally would take, you know, five years.

So that's what we could do right now.

Do you think that people have wrapped their heads around how much the world has changed already and is going to change?

No, I think there's people still living in denial.

And I think that there's also some people that, you know,

they

even see a crisis like that is through a political lens.

And so I think that's what holds us back.

I mean, for anyone to say this is not dangerous, it's just another virus and other viruses kill much more people than this virus does and all this stuff, this is nonsense dialogue.

It doesn't help anybody.

But I think it seems seems like it's maybe more than that, that we're dealing with the first couple of weeks of the response here, but really thinking forward to, hey, in six months, in a year, we could still be dealing with this.

And one way or the other, it feels very much like, at least for the next, I don't know, decade or more, we're going to be thinking of the kind of pre-Corona world, the post-Corona world, right?

Oh, believe me, I think this is one of those things that 50 years from now, people will still talk about about this period, just like we do now about the Great Depression and we talk about the economic comeback during the war and all this kind of stuff we're talking about today and using as an example.

That's what they will use as an example then.

If it turns out well, they will use it as an example.

If it turns out bad, they will use it as an example because it's also a good example of how to be ready.

in case of emergency because it's a it's a wake-up call.

I try to tell people like they're talking about the curve is absolutely correct,

to re-emphasize that, that to have people stay home and to be isolated and to not have any contact.

And I just did another video where I sit in the jacuzzi and I smoke my stogi.

And I tell the people that I just I'm taking a jicuzzi now.

I just finished my bike ride and my workout and I'm sitting here by myself.

And I said, the reason why I'm mentioning that is because I still see pictures of people sitting in outdoor cafes in Switzerland and all over in other places in the world.

There's the spring break coming up and the inclination is that thousands of kids get together on the beach.

I said, don't do it.

I said, because the virus is only successful when you get together.

That's the only way you can catch the virus is when you get together.

When you're separated, you're alone at home, no one can infect you, and you cannot infect anyone else.

So I said, don't do it.

That is the key key thing here.

And so I think that we want to keep that curve down because then the outcome is going to be different and then the amount of beds we need is going to be different.

But that's why I think that message is the most important message right now, besides what the government can do, and that is to be ready and to build and to work and to not wait anymore.

There is no more time of waiting.

We know the writing on the wall.

We have seen this scenario in China.

We have seen this scenario in South Korea.

We have seen it in Italy.

we've seen it how it cripples and how many people die because we don't have enough beds, we don't have enough emergency facilities and ventilators and all this kind of and protective gear and on and on and on.

Yeah,

the first video that you put out about with Lulu and Whiskey in it was such a sensation on the internet.

All I'm caring about is that what can I do to help people and at the same time put the anordism in there in the message so that there's entertainment at the same time.

So the reason why

I was eating, this was not a staged dinner at all.

It was like I was literally eating and I just

said to somebody, I said, can you go and just quickly read it?

I have an idea of a message that I want to put out there about staying at home.

And so that's what I did.

So there was a real scene.

or a real kind of a reality thing.

And I think that people enjoy that, you know, that it's unscripted when I do those messages.

It's not reading off a teleprompter or anything.

I don't do the political kind of stuff.

I just say what my concerns are.

And my concern really is that everyone stays away from crowded places and from having any contact with other people.

I think that

we can overcome this with

a five rather than a ten.

And so I think the key thing is that now everyone buttons down and just not goes crazy and it just follows the rules that are being recommended and deal with reality.

The more honest you can come forward with the problem,

and the more honest you can come forward with a plan that people really feel like, oh, this guy really has a plan, our governor has a plan, our president has a plan, our vice president has a plan.

There are plans there, I think, the better they will be.

All right, thank you, sir.

Absolutely.

Anytime.

This has been a bonus episode of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Thanks for listening.

Stay safe out there.

Catch you next week.