Vivek Kar has been a media personality for a long time. He s been in the media, he s run for office, and he s running for president. We sat down with him to talk about all of that and much more.
00:01:36.000I can't believe that you pronounce, like, oh my gosh, I'm just kidding.
00:01:40.000Which actually, you know what, Way to Break the Ice, you may not be familiar with this, we've been following you for a while, and we actually have a segment called The Flying V, and we have a stinger, which this is the very first time that Flying V is going to see it.
00:02:47.000And so I was on the book tour for Nation of Victims.
00:02:49.000And it is kind of a, you know, first you take it as a compliment, but then you take it seriously, where you're giving speeches to audiences about your book.
00:02:56.000I'm running a new business that I had launched and gotten off the ground called Strive.
00:03:01.000And yet people are coming up to you afterwards and saying, hey, you should really run for president next year.
00:03:06.000Okay, the first time that happens, you know, whatever.
00:03:20.000They're still going through psychological therapy for the fact that the one son that didn't go to med school, that's me, is doing this craziness, and the other son who did go to med school didn't end up practicing.
00:03:40.000I think it's very clear they would, certainly they made it clear at the very beginning that if they had a veto on it they would exercise the veto.
00:03:47.000Well I don't blame them just in the sense of like no one wants to... I'm not trying to want my kids to go through it either, but you look at it differently for your kids versus for yourself.
00:03:57.000So the idea is playing in my head, but I think I saw the red wave that never came.
00:04:01.000That was probably the catalyst, asking myself, what's the gap in the Republican Party?
00:04:04.000There's a bunch of people who have become practiced at criticizing the radical Biden agenda, and I've done my fair share of that.
00:04:10.000But I think that's That's the main reason why the Republican Party didn't do so well last time around is that they didn't have an agenda of their own.
00:04:17.000They didn't have an actual affirmative vision, but could critique from a binder all of the things that the radical Biden left had done, which frankly became boring and unuseful.
00:04:28.000And so my wife and I, we had brought our second son into the world last year.
00:04:58.000Can't ask for more from this country than the country's already given us.
00:05:02.000How am I going to make the maximal impact?
00:05:04.000And as ridiculous as that might ordinarily sound, oh, I'm going to have my impact by running for president.
00:05:09.000That's actually the conclusion that I came to because I do think it's going to take somebody coming from a different generation to lead the next generation and revive a national identity that I think young people, but frankly, all people in this country are badly missing.
00:05:28.000And my wife asked me, she being the same person in a relationship, asked me a reasonable question, which is, okay, even if you want to do this, if we want to do this, Are you sure you don't want to wait 20 years from now when our kids are out of the house when you have some more experience?
00:05:45.000And so that had me pause pretty seriously, you know, in the early part of the year.
00:06:27.000It may be on life support, that might be closer to where it is.
00:06:30.000It's not morning in America, but it can be.
00:06:33.000But I think it takes somebody who was both motivated by something other than just pummeling
00:06:40.000the other side into the ground versus actually asking what are we running to, but not doing
00:06:46.000it in this fake optimistic Pollyanna way that pretends like we're not in the middle of this
00:06:50.000war that we're actually in as a country.
00:06:52.000Well, and it also requires someone with some skin in the game, something to lose, you know,
00:06:55.000politicians, let's be honest, these people, they never want to leave office.
00:06:57.000I mean, of course, last time Joe Biden saw private office, I think like five, I think.
00:07:03.000I don't even know if we were on the new... I don't even know if we were AD at that point.
00:07:06.000The only time they want to leave office is if they can exploit their government connections to actually make more money than they otherwise would have made.
00:07:38.000I think sometimes people get it wrong when they say the American dream is dead and they'll talk about like that, you know, price of a house or something like that.
00:07:43.000They'll talk about, you know, a pension that their parents had, the boomer generation.
00:07:48.000I go, well, when was the last time you worked in a foundry?
00:07:50.000There are still trades that are available.
00:07:51.000You have more options to live in houses further out of the city.
00:07:55.000But as far as the idea that the world is your oyster and that you can go out and you can do better for yourself, I do see that generationally.
00:08:05.000Well, perception is reality for a lot of young people.
00:08:28.000They were built on a national set of ideals.
00:08:31.000And so if you have a group of people that decide those ideals no longer exist, that has an underlying effect on the way the country actually works.
00:08:39.000And so I do think it's going to take somebody who's able to reach the next generation of young Americans to revive that conviction in our purpose.
00:08:47.000And I don't think the American Dream is just about green pieces of paper.
00:08:50.000I mean, you know, you've achieved that perhaps through your company business here.
00:08:54.000I've achieved, you know, I've achieved my version of the American Dream.
00:09:45.000When each of those things, and they have, have disappeared in their importance in our American life, that leaves this deep vacuum of purpose and meaning in the heart of a generation, and that's where we are right now.
00:10:00.000And you can't fill a vacuum with a void.
00:10:02.000You know, that's what we see, for example, a lot of the Middle East, where it's like, well, hold on a second, even if these people, even if we try and stabilize it, right, and this is something that's never really worked.
00:10:41.000And I think the trap that we have often fallen into, myself included in this, if you read some of the books I've written at times, I've been doing this, is criticize all that's wrong and hypocritical with that vision without talking about an alternative vision, say, grounded in the individual, family, nation, God.
00:11:02.000I personally think that beats race, gender, sexuality, and climate, if we have the courage to actually stand for it.
00:11:08.000But I think that that was the muscle memory of the modern conservative movement, was to define ourselves in opposition to their vision, without offering an actual substantive vision of our own, where we dilute their poison to irrelevance, rather than just hammering it out of existence.
00:11:23.000Well, I want to get to some specifics, like, on the three-letter agencies and Section 230, but it's interesting that you bring that up, because on a personal level, you know, I've talked about this, is the only way you develop self-esteem is by getting really, really good at something.
00:11:41.000It's just a certain amount of doing it, and it goes back to, okay, What is America great at doing right now?
00:11:48.000You know, other generations kind of had that, whether it was World War II, they had an incredible sense of purpose, you know, whether it was manufacturing, spewing technology.
00:12:04.000Which I think is why it probably draws people like you, who are trying to look for that intellectual consistency.
00:12:08.000Like, no, no, no, hold on a second, the emperor has no clothes, But you can't also fix that self-esteem issue that has now been replaced with identity without letting people know how you actually gain self-respect and purpose.
00:12:21.000On an optimistic day, what I will say is the loss of self-esteem is right over the target in terms of what's going on in our country right now.
00:12:30.000The analogy I would love to draw, and I think it's true, I hope this is true, is that maybe as a nation we're not actually in decline.
00:12:41.000Maybe we're just going through our version of adolescence.
00:12:47.000And when you go through your adolescence, you lose your self-confidence.
00:12:51.000You do some things you regret out of that self-confidence loss.
00:12:54.000Well, maybe our nation is going through our version of adolescence, but like all of us do, hopefully, or many of us do, we get to our adulthood on the other side.
00:13:04.000And then for me, I think the current picture of what I see in the country, this would be my version of the optimistic lens that I bring to the table, not just some sort of slogan written, recite Reaganism and say it's morning in America.
00:13:15.000But maybe it's possible that we're just in the thick of that adolescence.
00:13:20.000But we will get to our adulthood on the other side, and we don't have to be that nation in decline.
00:13:53.000The real thing I have a problem with is Republican or Democrat people who make money off their public service and will further advance policies to line their own pockets.
00:14:05.000And, you know, we have so many more important things to discuss than to assail individuals on that stage.
00:14:10.000That exists in the Republican Party, including in this race.
00:14:13.000But I think most of them are good people tainted by a broken system.
00:14:19.000OK, so I'm not running against any of those individuals.
00:14:24.000And I have come to this conclusion with firm conviction in a way that if you asked me a few years ago, I wouldn't have said it was a problem in the same way.
00:14:33.000The super PACs are a cancer on politics, on American politics and the Republican Party and Democrat Party alike.
00:14:39.000And I should have come to this conclusion earlier because my crusade against... Do you guys talk about the ESG movement?
00:14:48.000I mean, one of my so my last business before I ran for president was this company called Strive, which offers index funds, basic low fee ways to invest in the stock market or index funds, index funds that are similar to those offered by BlackRock and StateStream and Vanguard, but without pushing these environmental and social agendas onto the underlying companies when they vote their shares.
00:15:11.000One of the reasons I care about this is, I think that the way things work in the United States of America, they're supposed to work, is that we the people Settle our differences on questions from climate change, to racial injustice, to whatever, through a constitutional republic where every citizen's voice and vote counts equally.
00:15:30.000And the ESG movement rejects that because it says that Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, gets to decide that from the Park Avenue corner office in Manhattan.
00:16:01.000And my response at the time was, at the time, and I've evolved a little bit on this, from having seen this.
00:16:07.000Can I really quickly jump in here, because a lot of people don't realize, this was the left, and I used to combat them, where they'd say, Citizens United, businesses are not people.
00:16:12.000I was going, well, hold on a second, though.
00:16:13.000The ruling of Citizens United was basically the Hillary Clinton That's right.
00:16:17.000The Clinton machine wanted to stop a negative documentary against Hillary Clinton.
00:16:27.000And that's probably where you started off with the defense point and then saw it metastasize.
00:16:31.000And I'm a free speech advocate, and so we can put the legal holding in the First Amendment holding of
00:16:36.000Citizens United and just respect that we have a First Amendment in this country,
00:16:39.000and we have to have a world in which people can criticize politicians or those who rise to power.
00:16:45.000But my response to the left, they would say that you're inconsistent because you're not calling out the actual influence of super PACs on electoral politics where everybody's citizens' voice and vote doesn't count equally, but you're only focusing on this ESG thing because it's politically popular for you because you're on the right.
00:17:03.000I don't think of myself as a traditional partisan anyway.
00:17:06.000But I said, you know, that felt to me like the bigger problem was the use of capital, retirement funds, trillions, tens of trillions of dollars of our own money, probably the money of people watching this program that don't know it, that are being used to vote for toxic left-wing policies in corporate America's boardrooms.
00:17:23.000That's the real cancer, and it is a cancer.
00:17:25.000However, I think that now that I have a close proximity to politics, which I didn't have then, I came from the business world where I realized what a big problem that was there.
00:17:36.000I have moved a little bit to now believe that, you know what, the super PAC influence on our electoral politics absolutely is a big problem, and if that was a left-wing concern, Thirteen years ago, so be it.
00:17:48.000It ought to be an America First conservative concern today.
00:17:51.000And so my view is that it's going to take somebody who's independent of that to break that system.
00:17:58.000One of the things I've learned is every politician, and I've met a lot of politicians, not just presidential candidates at every level, every politician is gross and dances to the tune of their biggest donor.
00:18:21.000And so that brings with it a special sense of responsibility.
00:18:25.000And so I'm thinking about, as this race evolves, part of me has a deep-seated irritation with respect to the other professional politicians in this Republican primary, in the Democrat race as well, and Joe Biden and everything else.
00:18:39.000But the part of me now that realizes these people are just vessels, right?
00:18:44.000They're really just vehicles for advancing the interests of what the guy or gal who wrote their biggest check wanted them to say.
00:19:52.000So I think that the truth is, I'm finding clarity in terms of what I'm actually running against.
00:20:00.000I'm running against the puppet masters who are putting up these puppets on that stage.
00:20:03.000At the same time, There's no point in trying to meld over some sort of, you know, we don't really disagree on that much policy.
00:20:13.000We disagree on a few policies, but these are people who are effectively being wielded and manipulated by a super-packed puppetry system that I think I need to more or less take my gloves off and go after directly because the idea of trying to play nice or play mean doesn't make any sense.
00:20:27.000Yeah, so one of the ways to fix it is, I mean, you could just do it in the context of this race.
00:20:32.000I said, look, I'm in this to win this, but I would give up and publicly call on, technically, you know, these are a separate parallel system, but I would publicly call on any super PAC supporting me and say, give that money back to those mega donors, and I won't show up at your events or anything else, as long as every other Republican candidate in the race pledges to do the same thing, or at least the ones who matter.
00:20:54.000You know, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, at least.
00:21:29.000But if it's to promote a particular candidate, to effectively either run campaign operations, door-knocking operations to hand out signs for Ron DeSantis or whatever, just everybody's subject to the same rules.
00:21:40.000What are most viewers of this program?
00:21:41.000Are they told $3,300 is the maximum you can give to an individual candidate?
00:21:46.000Well, then why should somebody else be able to give $30 million but get special political favors out of it?
00:21:56.000We already have a regime that limits the amount you can give to a candidate, so we've already accepted that's not a constraint on free speech.
00:22:01.000The only one arrested for it was Dinesh D'Souza, who gave it to a friend running for a Senate race that they lost.
00:22:06.000I don't know the specifics of that case, but I'm sure it was the law.
00:22:09.000Of course, the law was applied even-handedly to people regardless of their political beliefs under President Obama.
00:22:13.000I'm sure he was politically suffering at the cost of his views, but that's the way I think the system should work.
00:22:36.000Should somebody be able to create a film that offers a criticism of Hillary Clinton's policies or somebody else's policies or stands for a particular agenda, whether or not I agree with it?
00:22:49.000But if they're going to use it as a campaign contribution or a constructive campaign contribution in propping up a specific candidate by name in the exact same format as a political ad, specifically advocating for an individual candidate, apply the same rules Well, you just brought up a very interesting problem to when you're talking about the Hillary Clinton documentary.
00:23:07.000Well, no one's saying that Michael Moore can't raise as much money as he wants, right?
00:23:09.000We're talking about private investment.
00:23:10.000This is a problem that also happens in conservative media.
00:23:13.000Every major conservative media outlet, and this is why we started Mug Club in our network, they all have a 501c3 and they all have a 501c4.
00:23:20.000And ironically, the left Yeah, it's interesting.
00:23:40.000And there's a big reason that this is a big thing that we've had a lot of conflict with.
00:23:43.000But there are a lot of, unfortunately, conservatives out there who have to play ball by YouTube's guidelines and by Facebook's guidelines, because donors want to make sure they're still... Yeah, exactly.
00:23:52.000It's, you know, hopefully you'll kill me last, and they never do.
00:23:55.000And that's why we're entirely funded by Mug Club, by independent viewers.
00:24:00.000It's not PBS where we say that and then take money from the federal government.
00:24:03.000But that is one thing that you will be up against, just so you know, because these same people who give to the giant PACs also give to the 501c4s of these giant media entities.
00:24:14.000And so part of the reason I'm able to say some of the things that I'm able to say Pardon peaceful Jansic protesters, that I'm against the war in Ukraine continuing and against further US funding.
00:24:25.000I mean, go down my views on the climate agenda.
00:24:27.000A lot of people on the conservative side of the aisle making good money off of those subsidies coming from on high from the Biden administration.
00:24:34.000The reason I'm able to take these views is precisely because it doesn't align with the donor establishment, but still, I'm able to be independent of that.
00:24:43.000For those people who can't tell, Joe Louis, if he's distracted, Joe Louis, which is incredibly rare.
00:24:46.000He never barks at anything, so someone's probably being murdered out there.
00:25:23.000Now, unfortunately, it involves government intervention, but not to the same degree.
00:25:27.000Elizabeth Warren just wants to say, too big to fail, so that they have control.
00:25:30.000Well, the way I look at it is, let's actually roll back the government intervention that created a lot of those behemoths in the first place.
00:25:38.000So you want to go big tech direction or BlackRock?
00:25:57.000Take the three largest financial institutions, BlackRock, StateStreet, Vanguard, or you want to take Facebook, Google, or MetaGoogle, whatever.
00:26:05.000These are the most powerful companies in human history, more than the Dutch East India Company back in the day, which couldn't decide what you do or don't say to express yourself.
00:26:17.000Part of the reason why, in both cases, we'll get to the BlackRock case too, Is government intervention to create special privileges that these companies effectively enjoy?
00:26:31.000I know that you all have paid attention to the Section 230 debate.
00:26:34.000That's one example of a crony capitalist privilege conferred on a special class of companies that the rest of The country or the rest of the industries don't enjoy, right?
00:26:45.000So my view is you can't have it both ways.
00:26:49.000Either you get special governmental protections, in which case you are bound by the same constraints applied to the government, namely the US Constitution.
00:27:00.000Or you don't get those constraints and you're free to decide whatever it is you want to do.
00:27:05.000And so what happens today is these tech companies are effectively making political decisions—I mean, you all experience this—about what kind of content can and cannot appear on the Internet that violate the First Amendment.
00:27:19.000But the thing that people used to say four years ago is, oh, you know, if you said that, oh, you're a rube.
00:27:24.000The First Amendment only applies to— Right.
00:27:26.000The government doesn't apply to state actors, doesn't apply to private companies.
00:27:33.000If it is state action in disguise, right?
00:27:36.000If the government is giving a special blanket of protection to a class of companies to do exactly what they're doing, then if it's state action in disguise, the Constitution still applies.
00:27:48.000And so one easy example, sometimes you get out of the present and you go to the past a little bit, go to history, you can come back to the present and see it more clearly.
00:27:55.000There was this heavy debate about the railroad companies during the War on Drugs, version 1.0 of it at least, where they wanted to search and seize individual passengers for whether or not they had drugs on them.
00:28:07.000The inconvenient part of this for the government is that there's this pesky thing called the Fourth Amendment that says you can't quite do that.
00:28:13.000So what the government did is they got clever.
00:28:15.000They said, OK, we're going to pass a statute that says that We're not gonna search and seize anything.
00:28:21.000The government, police, forget about it.
00:28:23.000We're just gonna say the railroad can't be sued if they do that for one of their employees or passengers.
00:29:01.000So now in the tech case, not only do you have Section 230, which does the same thing, which says that if you take down Section 230, C2 in particular, people pay attention to C1, C2 is the part that says if you take down content that is otherwise constitutionally permissible, That you can do that with impunity, even though there are some laws at the states that say you can't engage in political discrimination.
00:29:36.000But with the tech companies, it's one step worse.
00:29:38.000Not only do they do that, they're also holding a gun to your head and saying that if you don't take down that speech, We're going to break you up, we're going to penalize you,
00:29:45.000we're going to regulate you, and so on.
00:31:32.000But if we're just relying on government where you don't have People with actual capabilities to compete, well that doesn't really solve the market choice problem.
00:31:41.000On the other hand, the market choice problem alone, against the backdrop of government-created protections that these companies enjoy, that's also not going to, on its own, solve the problem until you actually overcome the scale advantage that the existing incumbents have.
00:31:56.000The reason BlackRock, StateStreet, and Vanguard manage 20 trillion plus amongst the three firms alone, that's about as much worth as the US GDP in the hands of three firms, is that pension funds, particularly blue state pension funds in New York and California, those are arms of the government.
00:32:15.000Invest trillions of dollars with these asset managers, and they further tell them that we won't invest that money with you unless you embrace the goals of the Paris Climate Accords, unless you adopt diversity, equity, inclusion standards, not just at your firm, but vote your shares accordingly in any of the underlying firms that you're investing in.
00:32:35.000So that's directly using government-controlled money of the taxpayer or the pensioner to do through the back door what government couldn't get done through the front door.
00:32:44.000So it's the same movie as we're seeing with censoring speech as we now see with the weaponization of capital through capital markets.
00:32:54.000to liberty that we face today. It's not just big government, right? It's not Reagan 1980 anymore.
00:32:59.000It's this hybrid of big government and big business that together are able to do
00:33:03.000what neither one could alone, and we require leaders who recognize that new threat rather
00:33:11.000than just reciting slogans that we memorized back in 1980.
00:33:15.000That's the death, where I would say, of the quote-unquote American dream.
00:33:18.000I still think there are a lot of possibilities, and I do think that a lot of people are entitled generationally, but this leviathan that is both big government and these big businesses, who by the way could not have scaled to that degree without the assistance of government, they actually are beholden to acting outside of the best interests of the American people.
00:33:37.000You cannot be both I think that lays out the answer to a question that a lot of people, I think, are probably, when I travel this country, certainly wonder about.
00:33:45.000by the way, which by the way, the US pulled out of right.
00:33:48.000So it was when Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord that
00:33:50.000these people then said, Okay, we're gonna get it done through the
00:33:52.000backdoor using your capital without you knowing it as a vehicle to actually do it. So I think that lays out the
00:33:59.000answer to a question that a lot of people I think are probably
00:34:02.000when I travel this country certainly wonder about. I do think we're
00:34:06.000in the middle of a kind of war in this country. It is a war between the majority of us who love this country and what
00:34:13.000we're founded on, and love the founding ideals of this country
00:34:17.000and believe that all men are created equal, and that you get
00:34:20.000ahead not in the color of your skin, but in the content of your
00:34:22.000The basic American creeds we know to be true.
00:34:24.000Most of us who share those values in common And then this fringe minority, and I do think it's a fringe minority in the country, that believe that your identity is based on your race, your gender, your sexuality, that you have to abandon carbon emissions here in the United States, even if you shift into places like China.
00:34:41.000But the mystery is, why is this other side Winning that war when it's a fringe minority that don't represent most Americans in this country.
00:34:48.000Well, because we say fringe minority, but you can't name one member of the national platform, of the DNC, that doesn't actively support it.
00:34:55.000They have the Democratic Party in a chokehold, but they have every major institution in a chokehold, right?
00:34:59.000Every technology company, every asset management firm, every educational institution, K-12, or universities.
00:35:27.000The original version of Breakup Big Tech back in the early 2000s and even to the early 2010s came from the left.
00:35:34.000The criticism of the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War came from the left.
00:35:39.000So you go through institution one by one.
00:35:41.000These used to be institutions that took their main criticism from the old left.
00:35:48.000And so what ended up happening, one institution after another, all the way up to and including our own military, let alone Wall Street to Silicon Valley, which we were talking about before, is they realized that they could defang the old left if they adopted and used their own corporate power or used their own managerial power, in the case of the military or otherwise, To foist the new left's chosen ideology onto everybody.
00:36:13.000So that's what BlackRock is doing, because the old version, they said, Occupy Wall Street.
00:36:18.000My only criticism there would be that the Tea Party came well before Occupy Wall Street, after the Santelli rant, where he was the one who said, this is what you get.
00:36:25.000Too big to fail with that famous 2008 crash.
00:36:39.000This is the original sin of the bailouts, right?
00:36:42.000And so the original version of what became Occupy Wall Street later, the left-wing reaction, the left-wing position, right, even in that election, in the 2008 election, John McCain, I think he would have won that election if he had criticized the bailouts, but he came out like a stooge.
00:36:57.000But the Tea Party was the right populist movement that did criticize it, and there was a big schism there between the Bushes and the McCains.
00:37:07.000The 2008 election was lost across the board.
00:37:09.000Right, but I'm saying that the Tea Party came out in protest of the idea of the big banks and too big to fail before.
00:37:13.000And I say that because I was there and I thought, man, if there could be common ground, you would think the initial Tea Party and Occupy Wall It actually was in New York, I went to some of those Tea Party meetings back then too, so I know what you're referring to, but I would say broadly speaking, what you saw was, forget left or right even, if you're BlackRock, or if you're Facebook, or if you're Google, or if you're the U.S.
00:37:34.000military, who are the people criticizing me for the war in Iraq, or for the bailouts, or for the Agglomeration of monopoly power in big tech.
00:38:00.000And that was the trade that effectively allowed this fringe minority, by numbers in the United States, you know, as most people in this country, they don't share these views.
00:38:11.000But to be able to capture the managerial class that still wields power over every major institution in American life, that is how the other side is winning this war.
00:38:19.000And so if we're to recapture control of this country and institutions in and outside of government, we have to understand that arranged marriage, that mutual prostitution of these two strange bedfellows that, one, agreed to advance the ideology as a sort of vessel, as long as they got what they needed to out of that trade.
00:38:41.000And I think that's a big part of what happened roughly. I mean, there's a different version of
00:39:23.000I mean, even on the Super PAC question, right?
00:39:24.000Now, the old left, it's interesting, now that I've taken up this message, I'm not hearing many on the left rise up and join me, because Biden's reelection campaign is absolutely going to be run by the same apparatus that's running most of the other Republicans, which is the Super PAC apparatus.
00:39:39.000But it should, in principle, be an issue that transcends traditional partisan policies.
00:39:43.000Well, there was a lot of overlap between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
00:39:46.000I say this as someone who, I mean, mercilessly mocked Bernie Sanders, but we had a lot of people, once Bernie dropped out, once he was screwed, let's say, out of the primaries, a lot of them came over and they became Trump supporters.
00:39:56.000I was, back then, we have a large sample size, right?
00:39:58.000Because we have so much, as far as what comes in through back then Google and my own website, we're going, oh wow, a lot of these people were really mad at me for criticizing Bernie and his praising of Karl Marx and socialist policies, but now they've come back because they see a rebel, an outsider in Donald Trump.
00:40:15.000I mean, we're here, we're, you know, we consider ourselves on the right, but it's interesting to observe even a fissure there on the left.
00:40:22.000So you bring up the Occupy Wall Street in the 2012 version of this.
00:40:26.000There was this video, I talked about this in my first book, Woking, I can't remember where it was.
00:40:30.000I want to say it was in one of the Occupy Wall Street movements in Philadelphia, because it's spread out in New York.
00:40:36.000Where there was this event, everybody's showing up, pissed off at the system, against the big banks that are taking our money, redistribution from rich to poor, that's what we're standing for.
00:40:45.000And so this guy takes the microphone, but he's a white man, and they say, hey, you have to step up and stand back.
00:40:55.000Well, there's an intersectional hierarchy where they decided that actually, if you were black and a woman, you got to the front of the line in terms of when you got called on.
00:41:02.000And this guy was coming ready to rail against the system, because he was the one oppressed against it.
00:41:07.000And you could just see it in his face.
00:41:08.000But wait a minute, I was going to be the one who was going to be the one who's complaining about the big banks screwing us out of all of our money.
00:41:14.000But now she gets to be the one who complains about... And she didn't even know she was supposed to complain.
00:41:18.000She's like, I guess I'm a microphone now.
00:41:20.000So that was kind of a fissure between You know, Bernie has kind of moved and kind of bent the knee a little bit to the woke mob, too.
00:41:28.000But the version of just the economic redistributionist left that gave way to this new intersectional hierarchy, the woke oppression, identity, identitarian version of it, that was sort of a weird fissure even on the left, that, you know, the Wall Streets of the world, they don't want the economic redistributionists to necessarily be the ones they were debating.
00:41:47.000But the identitarians that want to talk about climate change, we'll do that all day because we can just check a box and it's easy for us to do.
00:41:53.000And so that was sort of the way that played out.
00:41:55.000And that also brings us to kind of the enforcement of this.
00:41:57.000You talk about sort of these strange bedfellows.
00:41:59.000I mean, they're so strange at that point, it'd be like, you know, the Hellraiser boudoir at that point.
00:42:11.000And so when I'm thinking about what do I want to do as US president?
00:42:15.000Shut down that administrative state and its entire apparatus.
00:42:18.000Now, this has been talked about for a long time by Trump and otherwise and people all the way back to Reagan.
00:42:24.000I think it's going to take a unique combination of traits to do it.
00:42:28.000It's going to take a CEO, an outsider coming in saying that, you know, if somebody works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't work for you.
00:42:44.000But on the other hand, it's going to take an outsider who also understands the law and the Constitution in a deep way.
00:42:51.000And let's just make a basic observation here.
00:42:54.000Those two characteristics don't go well together, right?
00:42:59.000Because on one hand, you have an academic that might be pontificating about the law and the Constitution, but doesn't have the sharp elbows to get something done.
00:43:05.000On the other hand, you might have a sharp-elbowed guy who's going to say, I'm going to break the system, but doesn't understand why he's going through the motions he does.
00:43:12.000And this is how they duped Trump in many ways.
00:43:14.000They told him that you can't fire those people because there are civil service protections.
00:43:25.000The logic is if you work at the, I don't know, FTC and I disagree with you on abortion, I shouldn't be able to fire you if I'm the president.
00:43:30.000Agree or not, that's what the rules are made to do.
00:45:00.000You know, I think the dumbest idea I've ever heard is when they found how many terabytes of pedophile pornography on CIA computers that there were no mass layoffs.
00:45:15.000Like, how about, at what point do you say, oh, okay, you cease to exist because you're committing the grossest evil.
00:45:20.000This is where other people, and it annoys the heck out of me when I see other Republicans, we're going to, I mean, We're going to get in there and fire Christopher Wray and, like, try to act like a tough guy.
00:46:44.000People at the FBI have no clue what they're doing because the guy who was doing child trafficking today is doing counterterrorism the next day and is doing financial crimes the day after that.
00:46:57.000So move people to the exact places where they can precisely do their jobs And it's not a coincidence that when you have the loss of that specialization and the over-bureaucratization, that's when you see the corruption.
00:47:08.000So it's not like we're happening to get lucky solving two problems at once.
00:47:12.000The two problems go hand-in-glove together.
00:47:15.000The ineffectiveness and the bureaucratic bloat is itself a formula for the corruption, because you have a bunch of people showing up to work that shouldn't have been at work.
00:47:24.000They find things to do that they shouldn't have been doing.
00:47:27.000And so, yes, it's going to take somebody who is willing to get in there and gut it.
00:48:14.000I've had my experiences with those guys.
00:48:15.000Well, that was one of the first places that I saw you when you were talking to CNN, and I think it was about, there was some ethnic conversation that you were having with somebody who... Oh, was it Don Lemon?
00:48:28.000But it was one of those moments where, like, all right, somebody's taking on the earpiece.
00:48:31.000Well, and that's one of the things that resonated with the American people about Donald Trump is that he was ready to say things that a lot of people thought, and he just didn't care about the niceties of politics.
00:48:41.000He didn't care about saying something that sounded good.
00:48:43.000Now, you can have your problems with President Trump.
00:48:46.000But that's the thing that I think a lot of people saw in you as well and said, Okay, somebody's coming in from the outside that might be able to get something done.
00:49:38.000I'm not a plan B or a plan after kind of guy.
00:49:40.000We've got the next mission lined up and we'll figure out what comes after after.
00:49:45.000But I do think it will take somebody from the next generation to reach that next generation.
00:49:50.000And I think we can do that in a way that Trump, you know, is of a different generation.
00:49:54.000It's going to be a lot harder for him to do that job.
00:49:56.000I also think we can pick up where he left off.
00:49:58.000I mean, I'm not saying that I would have been Able to do everything I'm telling you we're going to do if Trump hadn't laid the groundwork.
00:50:04.000Part of the reason that we, I can confidently tell you, we will be able to, without asking Congress for permission or for forgiveness, lay off 75% of those federal employees, shut down these government agencies, is the legal basis for doing it.
00:50:17.000It's contested, but six to three, the current Supreme Court agrees with me.
00:50:25.000If you believe in the holding of West Virginia versus EPA, which said that there are certain regulations on coal miners coming from the EPA that Congress never gave them the power to pass, and so they're unconstitutional.
00:50:37.000If you believe that, that means literally the overwhelming majority of federal regulations are also unconstitutional. So this
00:50:47.000is how you drive change on the timescales of history. Trump gave us a great Supreme Court. He did
00:50:53.000pretty much all a reasonable person could do, could reasonably have done in those four years. Great. I
00:50:58.000want to build on that and move this forward. But I've got fresh legs this time around. And I
00:51:02.000won't be the same person eight years from now that I am today after going through it.
00:51:08.000You drain the swamp, the swamp tries to drain you back.
00:51:10.000He's not the same person today that he was eight years ago, because we're all human beings.
00:51:15.000But I do think it will take thinking about our movement in terms of the content of what we want to achieve, rather than just which person is it going to be.
00:51:28.000It belongs to the people of this country.
00:51:30.000And so the question is, who's best positioned to take that agenda forward?
00:51:33.000I think it's going to take somebody from a different generation, coming in from the outside, with fresh legs, to be able to see this through.
00:51:40.000And I think I'm going to be best positioned to do it.
00:51:43.000So you've got a lot of these agencies, right?
00:52:22.000BlackRock just doubled their size of ownership in there.
00:52:25.000I think they went from 6 million shares to 12 million shares as of August.
00:52:28.000Are you worried these companies, these big investment firms out there, are going to try to get their hooks in financially and try to put pressure on you that way?
00:52:39.000Well, so here's the way the game works, and so my most recent book, it's probably the most technical of the books, is Capitalist Punishment.
00:52:47.000It lays out exactly how this game is played.
00:52:50.000If you're a public company, like let's say you take your company here public, which I would advise you not to do.
00:52:56.000But many, many firms do need to go public for a wide range of reasons.
00:53:00.000You don't have a choice in terms of who owns your shares, and so it's automatic, it's programmatic that BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and similar firms, through their index funds, because they're not even making investment decisions, it's just that they have to have broad exposure to the market, they will end up owning 5, 6, 7% each, 25%, 30% collectively, and they're voting their shares in your boardrooms.
00:53:24.000So even many of these CEOs who don't want to be adopting DEI policies, or carbon emission policies, or the goals of the Paris Climate Accords, or condemnations of, you know, George Floyd's death, or whatever, that shouldn't be the business of companies.
00:55:01.000But then BlackRock and State Street come in and say, we're going to vote and support that proposal anyway.
00:55:07.000It gets majority shareholder support at Apple's shareholder meeting, such that Apple's management team and board then go back and adopt the racial equity audit.
00:55:34.000The reason is Apple, or BlackRock, can't do business in China If they dare criticize the practices of the CCP, but if you're also criticizing the United States or adopting a racial equity audit or a carbon emissions cap, then the CCP rolls out the red carpet.
00:55:51.000So that's how this game is played, and it is an ugly game.
00:55:55.000So the answer to your question is, how does BlackRock have all this money?
00:55:59.000It's because If you have a pension fund, or a retirement fund, or a 401k account, they're the ones managing your money that are investing it across the board.
00:56:06.000So absolutely, I'm deeply concerned about this.
00:56:08.000And it's going to take a president, it's going to take leadership in this country that undoes a lot of the rules in the administrative state.
00:56:15.000There used to be a rule that said you have to invest exclusively for profit if you're managing retirement fund money.
00:56:21.000That has changed under the Biden administration.
00:56:23.000They rescinded what was known as the sole interest rule at the federal level under ERISA, to now say that you can invest according to other standards that take into account factors like climate change and racial injustice.
00:56:35.000The government needs to change a lot of that.
00:56:36.000The pension funds need to stop using political strings attached when they invest their money.
00:56:41.000But it also takes market alternatives to deliver those solutions, which is why I started Strive, the most recent business that I did.
00:56:55.000Don't get mad at me here, but this is one thing that is, you mentioned another criticism, because we have to give you the ability to answer these.
00:57:00.000You mentioned Strive like eight times.
00:57:03.000Some people would say you're running for president to promote a company.
00:57:05.000They'll say the right things because, and by the way, if that were the case, I'm not saying this, that is not dissimilar from a lot of people who are in the swamp who run for president to sell more books.
00:57:14.000But there are people who are going to pick that up and say, are you just promoting strife?
00:57:19.000No, actually, I mean, if you look at the, probably, we came up in this conversation because we're talking about BlackRock, and we're talking about big tech.
00:57:26.000If you look at probably the hundreds of hours of my discussion in the run for the presidential campaign, my talking about this issue is less than 1% of the total.
00:57:35.000Right, and I actually think it's a strong suit of yours, so it'd be good to talk about it more.
00:57:40.000Actually, that's one of the things that I've picked up is people know a lot about my policies, but people ask me, oh, well, you've come from nowhere.
00:58:21.000If you're running for President of the United States, every question is fair game.
00:58:25.000But I think it's important to have somebody who has actually understood the challenges as they pop up in the outside world and in the private sector.
00:58:34.000versus somebody who has only ever lived within the insular four corners of an existing political
00:58:40.000apparatus, which is what most people are running on.
00:59:36.000Interesting how a politician leaves government in debt and goes to being worth $8 million by starting a military contracting firm with your family and joining the board of Boeing and all kinds of other things.
01:00:15.000So here's what I would say is, if you want the same thing as the last 25 years of foreign policy, $3 trillion spent in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, tens of thousands of American lives lost that need not have been lost.
01:00:30.000Wars in the Middle East that have no point, no end, now seeing the same thing likely happen again in places like Ukraine and otherwise.
01:00:37.000Fine, go with one of the people that have foreign policy experience.
01:00:40.000But if you want somebody who understood and grew up in an era as a young person, right?
01:01:01.000That's the same wheels that are now turning again in new conflicts on the other side of the world.
01:01:07.000Most notably in Ukraine heading into major conflict with Russia that doesn't advance American interests, but we're going to see that proliferate in other places too.
01:01:15.000If you want an existing foreign policy establishment that favors war for the sake of war, and a lot of bad actors in there who even make money off of advocating for it, fine, go with one of those people with foreign policy experience.
01:01:26.000But what I do have is a deep understanding coming in from the outside to say that I've made a career making successful deals for myself.
01:01:37.000I've offered the clearest plan of anybody in this race of exactly how we will end that Ukraine war and deliver peace.
01:01:44.000Make a hard commitment that NATO won't admit Ukraine to NATO.
01:01:47.000Yes, freeze the current lines of control.
01:01:49.000I know that drives a lot of people nuts, but these are Russian-speaking regions that have not been represented in Ukraine's parliament for a long time in Luhansk and Donetsk.
01:02:09.000As a matter of fact, I think... And I think it takes an outsider with clear understanding, but without the baggage of historical experience capture.
01:03:49.000This is a very clear case where these are bad actors against bad actors, and I'm not saying that... Yeah, I think the MAGA movement has actually been far more effective in securing peace than any other left-wing peace, pro-peace movement in American history.
01:03:59.000Is there any question at this point, like, everyone acknowledges the economy, right?
01:04:02.000As far as Donald Trump, okay, you have, because you have eight years of Obama, He kept us out of war and he grew the economy.
01:04:08.000That's why he was an excellent president.
01:04:10.000He didn't have any foreign policy experience as well.
01:04:12.000The funniest part, man, for that first debate is Mike Pence saying that we don't need a rookie on the job.
01:04:19.000The only reason that guy ever got anywhere near the vice presidency was because some guy who didn't have any political experience was a rookie.
01:04:43.000You talk about talking points on that stage.
01:04:45.000Every single line is rehearsed and then you can see sometimes where he looks out like a kid who just told a joke but it's inappropriate because he's in front of adults.
01:05:07.000In that Hamas is a terrorist organization where the extermination of all Jews is in their charter, and I don't necessarily think... And Israel matters to our national interest more than Ukraine does.
01:05:16.000As a matter of fact, they certainly do matter to our national interest.
01:05:18.000Now that doesn't mean that there isn't an argument to be made, and we ran the numbers.
01:05:22.000If we cut the funding to all of the nations with, you know, who we provide foreign aid to, And by the way, those numbers are always a very low estimate when you actually understand also the incentives, and Israel as well, that they would come out ahead, because we fund a bunch of people who want to wipe them off the face of the map.
01:05:36.000Or, help Israel a little bit, and cut money anyways to places like Iran.
01:05:40.000The analogy you're drawing is interesting.
01:05:41.000Elon has drawn this analogy with respect to electric vehicle subsidies, where if you got rid of all electric vehicle subsidies, Tesla comes out ahead, because the unit economics actually work.
01:05:49.000Well, that's because they've sold too many Teslas.
01:05:50.000That's why they don't get the subsidy anymore.
01:05:52.000I think it's after 250,000 sold, the subsidy goes away.
01:05:54.000So it's like, oh, so I sold good cars.
01:05:56.000And the unit economics are just more solid in terms of how they're running the operation.
01:07:33.000But we have to be very careful not to sleepwalk or emotionally outburst ourself into another broad regional conflict in the Middle East that the U.S.
01:07:46.000isn't meshed in with ground troops or otherwise.
01:07:49.000This is when we've made our worst foreign policy disastrous mistakes in the past.
01:07:53.000If I'm talking to Bibi, I would say, listen up, we got your back.
01:08:10.000And we entered disastrous multi-decade commitments in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and 20 years later, it did not do us an iota of good.
01:08:21.000There's a little bit of a difference, though, I will say.
01:08:47.000So I'm just making the point that we've made some of our worst decisions in response to emotional reactions to really, truly disastrous things that needed to be dealt with.
01:09:00.000Targeted response, get rid of Bin Laden, get rid of the Taliban, absolutely.
01:09:04.000Get rid of Al-Qaeda, hiding in the caves, the people who are responsible for this, which by the way, Was a far more complicated story than the U.S.
01:09:13.000government let out until the declassified files came out 20 years later.
01:09:16.000Go actually get the real job done, rather than using an emotional response to do something that literally might be an orthogonal objective, but in the mental haze and in the mental fog of war.
01:09:30.000We've made some of our worst decisions, so have other countries in their history.
01:09:33.000That's Israel's decision to make, but my job as the next U.S.
01:09:35.000president is to look after American interests, and I do not think we want to be Entrenched in another long, drawn-out, US-involved, regional, broad conflict in the Middle East that would not advance American interests, but there are easy ways we ought to support Israel diplomatically with intelligence sharing.
01:09:53.000I mean, heck, we don't even have an ambassador to Israel right now.
01:09:55.000Confirm an ambassador to Israel and Egypt and other countries where we don't have confirmed ambassadors right now.
01:09:59.000Can we start with like, no money to Iran at all?
01:10:06.000But even indirect aid to Hamas that's actually been going through in the name of humanitarian aid or otherwise.
01:10:10.000Deport anybody in this country who has had any ties to Hamas or otherwise, extradite them to Israel.
01:10:16.000So there are things we ought to absolutely be doing.
01:10:19.000But there's also things that nobody else is talking about that we ought to be talking about.
01:10:23.000We have to make sure that we oversee full phase-out through the monitoring and agreements of Iran's nuclear program.
01:10:29.000But what the heck are we thinking with the Biden administration, with some Republicans cheering it along, talking about nuclear technology transfer to Saudi Arabia?
01:10:38.000We should not want nuclear proliferation of any kind in the Middle East, and definitely not in Iran, but not in Saudi Arabia either.
01:10:44.000And yet nobody's talking about that right now.
01:10:46.000So I think this is a moment for level-headed rationality, rather than emotional knee-jerk responses.
01:11:04.000I was in college at the time, but I was against the Iraq War then.
01:11:07.000I had a bunch of other harebrained ideas that I was dead wrong on, but that wasn't one of them.
01:11:11.000And that was a left-wing position then, even though I wasn't on the left.
01:11:14.000I considered myself a libertarian back then.
01:11:17.000But now, it's easy to do that now, but the hard part is in the thick and the heat of the moment to make sure you don't make that same mistake, but it's not going to relate to Iraq.
01:11:25.000It might relate to Iran or a broader regional conflict in the Middle East, and that's the moment to think rationally.
01:11:31.000How do you do the right thing in supporting Israel to do what it needs to do to defend its national self-existence, but at the same time as the U.S.
01:11:37.000look after our interests to make sure that we don't accidentally tripwire ourselves into some large protracted conflict in the Middle East.
01:11:44.000Now is the moment To think with that level of clarity and reason rather than what I see as really lazy responses from all over the political spectrum.
01:11:55.000The far left trying to create this false moral equivalence between Israel and their enemies, that's wrong.
01:11:58.000But you've got people in the old neocon right that have no muscle memory other than just effectively pounding the drums for war without asking the question of the why we're doing exactly what we're doing.
01:12:08.000And so back to the question of foreign policy experience.
01:12:10.000I don't think somebody with the foreign policy experience record of the last 25 years should be in charge of making those decisions.
01:12:16.000I think it should be somebody of my generation coming from the outside, and in this race, that's me.
01:12:21.000When the track record is bad, it's not much of a track record.
01:12:23.000I still do believe kill every single last one of them as far as it relates to Hamas.
01:12:28.000By the way, they don't need our money to do it, but they certainly need our moral support.
01:12:54.000And if you look into the history of what's happened... But the Hamas 2.0 or whatever, you know, you get rid of... It could be worse, but they don't seem... You get al-Qaeda, you get ISIS.
01:13:02.000And tell ourselves these false illusions because it made us puff our chest and feel good about ourselves to actually ask the question of what job are we getting done?
01:13:08.000What is the mission we're getting done?
01:13:10.000And then go and have confidence about what we're actually doing and understand what we're not doing or else you're gonna tell yourself false myths as we have for the last 25 years that have led us astray.
01:13:20.000So that's just I think we have to be really clear about this.
01:13:22.000I think in the Hamas case it's a little bit different.
01:13:24.000Just a little bit, because it can't really get much worse unless you're talking about more money, as far as the ideology, as far as what they have done to the Jews, or as far as what they've said they will continue to do.
01:13:33.000This is like an ISIS-like organization.
01:13:35.000It's as bad as it gets, and there is no end.
01:14:18.000And you said by the end of your first term, that was, that was a lot of people may not have understood how lofty that was, but that is an incredibly lofty goal that a lot of people would say is not even practical.
01:14:28.000Is what, what made you think of that and why was that something that you thought could get done?
01:14:32.000I guess, would it be about five years roughly at the end of your first term?
01:14:36.000So I think it's achievable if you look at just the trajectory of what you're looking at in terms of the TSMC plant in Arizona, the Intel plant in central Ohio, where I'm from today.
01:14:45.000But that's been a disaster in Arizona, though, the TSMC.
01:14:48.000But part of the reason, part of the disaster nature of this is it's not money, which is what we pretend the problem is, and then we shower a bunch of crony money in the name of a CHIPS Act that's really just a Green New Deal and CHIPS clothing.
01:14:59.000Which works well with American cars, but yes.
01:15:00.000Yeah, I mean, it's funny how this pattern repeats itself.
01:15:06.000So I think one of the things we should focus on is bringing some of those skilled workers from Taiwan over here, but then also training more Americans for the know-how of how you create sub-10 nanometer semiconductor chips, right?
01:15:17.000Those are the leading edge ones at really the front lines of this.
01:15:22.000But it can't just be an on-shoring strategy.
01:15:24.000I love on-shoring, and I would love for that to be the long-run steady state.
01:15:52.000But ally shoring has to be something that we complement that with.
01:15:56.000And so if you look at the totality of what's possible there, right, and you provide market access to the, you know, Samsung's, etc, of the world here, to build here, etc, Japanese companies as well, that I think is a reasonable, achievable path to five years from now, having basically achieved near total, leading edge advanced semiconductor independence, which means that China's not going to have an economic gun to our head if they choose to annex Taiwan. Doesn't that gun just go
01:16:22.000straight to Taiwan's head? Do we worry that they go like, oh wow, we're kind of up shit creek here.
01:16:28.000Well, Taiwan should be focusing on defending itself right now. And I would say in the meantime,
01:16:32.000the US should run one destroyer through the Taiwan Strait every week. We should absolutely
01:16:37.000work with India to have an ability to block the Andaman Sea and the Malacca Strait.
01:16:43.000That's where China actually gets 60% of its Middle Eastern oil supplies.
01:16:47.000Or 60% of all of its oil supplies, which come from the Middle East, come through that strait.
01:16:51.000So there's a range of things we need to be doing.
01:17:04.000So there are elements of what we call a porcupine- I mean, absolutely.
01:17:08.000That's another thing that we talked about last week.
01:17:11.000They at least have a civilian-trained military, and so it's not the whole solution, but it's at least a step better than Taiwan is right now.
01:17:18.000Well, imagine if those people were carrying, like, a lot of people here in Texas at that music festival.
01:17:44.000That's not, you know, and then I say something like this, and then CNN will try to press me a million times, isn't, isn't, didn't you claim your Taiwan deterrence strategy was just putting the Second Amendment in Taiwan?
01:18:15.000is clear about what our objectives are, then Absolutely.
01:18:18.000Right now, and people forget this, the Republican Party, these people are such jokers, the current U.S.
01:18:23.000posture towards Taiwan is strategic ambiguity.
01:18:29.000The one China policy is the policy of both parties right now as we speak.
01:18:33.000I don't know if you guys remember this, when Donald Trump won the election, he picked up the phone when his phone rang from the Taiwanese president.
01:18:39.000He was laughed at by both parties, violating diplomatic protocol.
01:18:42.000Yeah, that's the same GOP that somehow says that we somehow stand with Taiwan.
01:18:47.000We don't recognize its existence as a nation.
01:18:53.000We will defend Taiwan, at least until we get semiconductor independence, at which point we can then return to the status quo, like exactly what it is right now.
01:19:01.000Return to that five years from now after we're semiconductor independent, we're strictly better off.
01:19:05.000So let me clarify, because I think a lot of people miss this.
01:19:06.000You are saying that you would switch a stance to, we are officially defending Taiwan, as opposed to this moral ambiguity.
01:19:11.000And then, when we achieve semiconductor independence, we'll go back to what Biden did.
01:19:22.000And by the way, in the meantime, we should fortify our homeland defenses, cyber defenses, super EMP defenses, border defenses, nuclear missile defenses.
01:19:29.000Taiwan can spend more of its own military spending on GDP.
01:19:32.000We've been running destroyers through the Taiwan Strait.
01:19:34.000Xi Jinping would have to be an idiot to invade Taiwan.
01:19:37.000In the meantime, have that economic gun to our head, forget about it, we're independent.
01:19:40.000And afterwards, We're in a better position, and Taiwan's in a better position than they've ever been.
01:19:49.000They made it sound like you were going, all right, see you Taiwan.
01:19:51.000No, that's, I mean, if you look into what somebody else's super PAC is saying in a mail flyer about me, and that's what this whole process of politics is so badly broken.
01:19:59.000But this is what I've said at every step of the way.
01:20:02.000Upgrade from the status quo, and then return to the status quo, but upgrade during the window.
01:20:07.000Which gives Taiwan some lead time to start getting their act together.
01:20:09.000And allows us to get our act together.
01:20:11.000And we can pull in Afghanistan, and maybe leave one of those destroyers in the strait.
01:20:15.000We just forget, has a few pallets of cash, and Uncle Sam's not the wiser.
01:20:19.000What do you say to somebody's critique, though?
01:20:29.000But somebody would say, like, look, China right now, they can save face because the United States isn't necessarily kind of bowing up and saying, we'll defend Taiwan.
01:20:36.000Strategic ambiguity is just a term for all of us.
01:20:39.000We all know that if China invades Taiwan, we're coming to the aid, and so is South Korea and Japan, right?
01:20:44.000I think we all kind of understand that's likely.
01:20:47.000I mean, at a time where we're running low on munitions.
01:21:40.000Especially because the situation changed.
01:21:41.000No, that's a good answer for it, because I've heard critique, and I wanted to kind of understand your position.
01:21:45.000I actually, yeah, and I actually really like that answer.
01:21:47.000And by the way, Navy was fantastic, till the village people screwed it up for the rest.
01:21:50.000I'm convinced that regardless of partisanship, I think most people in this country will agree, definitely most Republicans and a lot of independents and some Democrats too, will agree with the position that I just laid out to you.
01:22:02.000What I don't know is are they going to be able to hear it.
01:22:07.000A lot of people understand it's just a hop and a skip away.
01:22:11.000So a lot of those economic drivers, right, where they would say, oh, okay, this makes sense.
01:22:15.000So now we have some lead time, because look, it would be completely unrealistic to think that the United States never has an interest, especially after COVID, to achieve some type of semiconductor independence, or at least capabilities, right, as far as scale.
01:22:27.000They know that, and they're saying, okay, this gives us some lead time where we're not just worried About being wiped off the face of the map.
01:22:32.000Okay, we can now understand what our agreement is.
01:22:40.000And yeah, that's very, very different from the way it's been portrayed, which is, hey, Taiwan, we're going to stay ambiguous until we have our semiconductors and then buy.
01:23:32.000They're going to come in, and I don't know what it's going to be in this conversation, but they're going to come in, pick something we've said here, completely take it out of context.
01:23:39.000But that's the projection that still much of the generally older Republican primary base still gets served to them.
01:23:45.000So we're in this intermediate transition phase, where 10 years from now, that legacy media is going to be far less relevant, if not gone.
01:23:51.000But this is going to be the way of the future.
01:23:53.000But now we have this intermediate version of this where we're having a long what hour, hour plus hour and a half discussion now, that Needs to be in the listener who's gone through this is going to be listening to the whole thing in full, but the average person sitting in Iowa that's only getting their news from cable news and the newspaper they read is getting some purposefully distorted clip because some guy in the opposition research camp of Nikki Haley's campaign and Ron DeSantis' campaign, actually it's not gonna be their campaign, it's gonna be their super PAC,
01:24:21.000That the Super PAC is watching this, and is watching what they're going to distort from what came out of this conversation.
01:24:26.000And they have some paid historical repeat player relationship with some third-rate publication that calls itself a newspaper, and that's exactly the way this game is going.
01:24:35.000On CNN or Fox News, there'll be a clip of you saying, I, Vivek, Jews, hate, kill Taiwan!
01:24:50.000Alright, well I think, and I know that we've gone over time, it's vivek2024.com and people can follow you on X. Can you, okay, tell people how to, we have it in the lower third, Vivek, but what, G Ramaswamy.