Louder with Crowder - How Vivek Plans to Save the World - Ukraine, Israel, Deep State & Donald Trump

00:00:00.000 🎵 🎵You're a strange animal🎵 0.68

00:00:16.000 🎵That's what I know🎵 🎵I know🎵 0.95

00:00:20.000 🎵I know🎵 🎵You're a strange animal🎵

00:00:24.000 🎵I've got to follow🎵 🎵I'm in the speed🎵

00:00:28.000 🎵Speed🎵 🎵Speed🎵

00:00:32.000 🎵Speed🎵 🎵

00:00:39.000 Alright, welcome to Ash Wednesday, but there are no ashes today.

00:00:41.000 ashes today.

00:00:42.000 No one is smoking cigars because we have a guest here who's not a big cigar guy.

00:00:46.000 We won't fault him for it.

00:00:48.000 You can support him, follow him.

00:00:49.000 You've seen us cover him on these debates, of course, and his, I guess, dunks, as people call it, with the media.

00:00:55.000 Vivek2024.com.

00:00:57.000 You can follow him, not on Twitter, but on X. We have the link up there below.

00:01:02.000 Mr. Vivek, thank you for being here, sir.

00:01:03.000 It's good to be here, man.

00:01:05.000 I'm not saying your last name because I feel like I'll screw it up.

00:01:05.000 I'm glad to have you.

00:01:08.000 It's alright.

00:01:08.000 Yeah, you can say it.

00:01:09.000 Ramaswami.

00:01:09.000 I don't want to.

00:01:13.000 I trust you.

00:01:13.000 I think you can do it.

00:01:15.000 Yeah, I believe in you.

00:01:15.000 Ramaswami.

00:01:16.000 Was that right?

00:01:17.000 That's dead on.

00:01:18.000 But it's Vivek.

00:01:20.000 That's the thing.

00:01:21.000 It's like Vivek-like cake.

00:01:23.000 But I've lived this for my whole life.

00:01:25.000 Best efforts.

00:01:26.000 I'm good with best efforts.

00:01:27.000 Right, yeah.

00:01:28.000 Do you ever use it to screw with people to act like you're offended if they get it wrong?

00:01:30.000 You know, that's a good one I'll add to my arsenal.

00:01:32.000 Oh, you absolutely should.

00:01:33.000 It would be very disarming to the left.

00:01:35.000 Yeah, I think actually.

00:01:36.000 I can't believe that you pronounce, like, oh my gosh, I'm just kidding.

00:01:40.000 Which 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.

00:01:53.000 I'm pumped to see it.

00:01:54.000 Let's let him see it. It's good.

00:01:56.000 We spread not we spread. 0.53

00:02:05.000 No expense at all.

00:02:05.000 That's amazing, yeah.

00:02:07.000 But it's good because every time you would do something great in media, we loved it, we'd play it with that.

00:02:11.000 Fake thing, I like that.

00:02:13.000 And then everyone just went off and it became a knuckle puck time.

00:02:16.000 I'm sure that people will send in the memes, we can take your chats, but alright.

00:02:18.000 I'm pretty pumped.

00:02:19.000 Let me ask you first, because there's, I think now it's, is it 1,800 people running for the Republican primary?

00:02:25.000 Yeah, and growing.

00:02:26.000 Yes.

00:02:27.000 Why do you want, and everyone else asked this and we'll get specific.

00:02:31.000 You had a moment, when was that moment you said, I need to run for president?

00:02:35.000 Last December.

00:02:36.000 Really?

00:02:36.000 Yeah.

00:02:37.000 Okay.

00:02:37.000 So I had come off of my second book that I had written.

00:02:40.000 I go through these phases.

00:02:42.000 So I had started a series of businesses.

00:02:43.000 Okay.

00:02:44.000 Was that Nation of Victims?

00:02:45.000 Nation of Victims was my second book.

00:02:46.000 Yeah.

00:02:47.000 And so I was on the book tour for Nation of Victims.

00:02:49.000 And 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.

00:02:56.000 I'm running a new business that I had launched and gotten off the ground called Strive.

00:03:01.000 And yet people are coming up to you afterwards and saying, hey, you should really run for president next year.

00:03:06.000 Okay, the first time that happens, you know, whatever.

00:03:08.000 Yeah, you're like, thanks, mom.

00:03:09.000 Exactly.

00:03:11.000 And then on from there, actually, the funny thing is my parents are the biggest opponents of my doing this.

00:03:17.000 They're probably just still disappointed that you're not a doctor.

00:03:19.000 They still are.

00:03:20.000 They'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.

00:03:30.000 Vivek, it's never too late!

00:03:32.000 It is.

00:03:33.000 Well, you know, they can hold out hope, but there's always the grandkids now.

00:03:36.000 They've turned to the grandkids.

00:03:37.000 I'm running for president.

00:03:38.000 No.

00:03:39.000 It's a big deal.

00:03:40.000 I 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.

00:03:47.000 Well 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.

00:03:56.000 Right.

00:03:57.000 So the idea is playing in my head, but I think I saw the red wave that never came.

00:04:01.000 That was probably the catalyst, asking myself, what's the gap in the Republican Party?

00:04:04.000 There's a bunch of people who have become practiced at criticizing the radical Biden agenda, and I've done my fair share of that.

00:04:10.000 But 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.

00:04:17.000 They 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.

00:04:28.000 And so my wife and I, we had brought our second son into the world last year.

00:04:31.000 I had just launched a new business.

00:04:33.000 It was a whirlwind of a year, but we took a big step back and just sometimes you ask yourself the question of, Why?

00:04:38.000 Right.

00:04:39.000 I mean, why even bother doing the things we're doing right now?

00:04:41.000 Yeah.

00:04:42.000 Writing these books.

00:04:43.000 Starting Strive to compete against BlackRock.

00:04:45.000 All this stuff.

00:04:45.000 Why?

00:04:46.000 Yeah.

00:04:48.000 And to tell you the truth, if you take a step back, we're only going to be here for a short time.

00:04:50.000 I felt compelled.

00:04:52.000 I saw a gap in the Republican Party.

00:04:54.000 There's an absence of national identity in this country.

00:04:57.000 We've lived the American dream.

00:04:58.000 Can't ask for more from this country than the country's already given us.

00:05:02.000 How am I going to make the maximal impact?

00:05:04.000 And as ridiculous as that might ordinarily sound, oh, I'm going to have my impact by running for president.

00:05:09.000 That'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.

00:05:28.000 And 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?

00:05:45.000 And so that had me pause pretty seriously, you know, in the early part of the year.

00:05:45.000 And that was fair, too.

00:05:50.000 But I think the conclusion we came to is that I think we have 20 years left as a country.

00:05:56.000 Really?

00:05:57.000 Yeah, not the same country that you and I grew up in.

00:05:57.000 I really don't.

00:06:00.000 Now, careful, people will say that's pessimistic.

00:06:01.000 They'll say, oh, you have no chance unless you do the Reagan Shining City on a hill.

00:06:04.000 Well, it's not morning in America.

00:06:06.000 That's the point.

00:06:07.000 It can be morning in America again.

00:06:09.000 I do believe that.

00:06:10.000 I'm inherently an optimist, actually.

00:06:11.000 I'm natively an optimist to a fault, but I also believe in not filtering your optimism through a fake prism.

00:06:20.000 Yeah.

00:06:21.000 And so yeah, some people will on the Republican debate stage, the American dream is alive and well.

00:06:25.000 No, it's it's actually not right now.

00:06:27.000 It may be on life support, that might be closer to where it is.

00:06:30.000 It's not morning in America, but it can be.

00:06:33.000 But I think it takes somebody who was both motivated by something other than just pummeling

00:06:40.000 the other side into the ground versus actually asking what are we running to, but not doing

00:06:46.000 it in this fake optimistic Pollyanna way that pretends like we're not in the middle of this

00:06:50.000 war that we're actually in as a country.

00:06:52.000 Well, and it also requires someone with some skin in the game, something to lose, you know,

00:06:55.000 politicians, let's be honest, these people, they never want to leave office.

00:06:57.000 I mean, of course, last time Joe Biden saw private office, I think like five, I think.

00:07:03.000 I don't even know if we were on the new... I don't even know if we were AD at that point.

00:07:06.000 The 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.

00:07:10.000 Exactly.

00:07:11.000 Which happens in both parties, by the way.

00:07:12.000 Which goes back to, like you said, we're not here for a very long time.

00:07:14.000 He's certainly not here for a very long time.

00:07:15.000 He's six foot five.

00:07:16.000 They don't live very long.

00:07:17.000 It doesn't matter what you do.

00:07:18.000 My wife's a nurse and she texted me during the show.

00:07:19.000 How tall are you, man?

00:07:20.000 I'd say 6'2".

00:07:21.000 This guy's big.

00:07:22.000 Yeah, he's 6'4", 6'5".

00:07:24.000 E65.

00:07:24.000 He had a while to go.

00:07:26.000 They don't live very healthy.

00:07:27.000 I don't care how much cycling you do with your Lycra pants.

00:07:30.000 So I think that's important because you do have to identify a problem in order to actually have genuine optimism.

00:07:37.000 Yeah.

00:07:38.000 I 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.

00:07:43.000 They'll talk about, you know, a pension that their parents had, the boomer generation.

00:07:48.000 I go, well, when was the last time you worked in a foundry?

00:07:50.000 There are still trades that are available.

00:07:51.000 You have more options to live in houses further out of the city.

00:07:54.000 We have different priorities.

00:07:55.000 But 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.

00:08:05.000 Well, perception is reality for a lot of young people.

00:08:07.000 It is.

00:08:08.000 And we call it the American dream.

00:08:10.000 It means something.

00:08:12.000 The way you describe America Affects the way America actually works.

00:08:17.000 That's the unique fact of a country built on ideals.

00:08:21.000 You know, other countries are built on, let's just say, a religion or a monarch.

00:08:27.000 America is not built on these things.

00:08:28.000 They were built on a national set of ideals.

00:08:31.000 And 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.

00:08:39.000 And 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.

00:08:47.000 And I don't think the American Dream is just about green pieces of paper.

00:08:50.000 I mean, you know, you've achieved that perhaps through your company business here.

00:08:54.000 I've achieved, you know, I've achieved my version of the American Dream.

00:08:56.000 I don't know, I'm living the dream.

00:08:57.000 People look at us like, yeah, you know, he's surviving.

00:08:59.000 You're doing pretty well, man.

00:09:00.000 I got a tour of the place.

00:09:01.000 You're surviving and thriving.

00:09:04.000 But I don't think that that's the whole story.

00:09:06.000 I don't think it's about accumulating green pieces of paper.

00:09:09.000 I think it is about reviving conviction in our purpose.

00:09:15.000 As citizens of this nation.

00:09:17.000 Yeah.

00:09:18.000 Right now, it just feels like we're going through this aimless passage of time.

00:09:23.000 And there's more to life than the aimless passage of time.

00:09:25.000 But what happened, I think, somewhere along the way, is the things that used to fill our sense of purpose... Yeah.

00:09:31.000 You can fill in the blank.

00:09:32.000 For different people, it's different.

00:09:33.000 Faith, for many people.

00:09:34.000 Patriotism, belief in country, for many people.

00:09:37.000 Hard work, the idea that I work hard and create something in the world and I'm proud of that, I derive my meaning from that.

00:09:43.000 Maybe it's my family.

00:09:45.000 When 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.

00:10:00.000 And you can't fill a vacuum with a void.

00:10:02.000 You 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.

00:10:09.000 Exactly.

00:10:09.000 people who are under what would be considered radical regimes, but at least

00:10:12.000 there was an ingrained ideology. These were fascists, they were anti-freedom, but you

00:10:16.000 can't fill that void with nothing. And that's what the challenge came into.

00:10:20.000 And so the left is good at this. They have their understanding of this is far

00:10:25.000 deeper than actually many conservatives.

00:10:27.000 They will say we'll fill that void with something.

00:10:29.000 Yeah.

00:10:30.000 Not jihadism somewhere else.

00:10:32.000 Race, gender, sexuality, climate, which is sort of ideological jihadism and intellectual jihadism in this country.

00:10:39.000 But at least they're doing that.

00:10:40.000 Yeah.

00:10:41.000 And 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.

00:11:02.000 I personally think that beats race, gender, sexuality, and climate, if we have the courage to actually stand for it.

00:11:08.000 But 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.

00:11:23.000 Well, 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.

00:11:32.000 Getting excellent at something.

00:11:33.000 I think that's correct.

00:11:34.000 At something.

00:11:35.000 It doesn't matter what it is, you just have to get really good at something.

00:11:35.000 It starts with passion.

00:11:37.000 That's the only way that you see, oh, wow, reps work.

00:11:40.000 Oh, wow, time works.

00:11:41.000 It's just a certain amount of doing it, and it goes back to, okay, What is America great at doing right now?

00:11:48.000 You 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.

00:11:55.000 Winning that war, whatever it was.

00:11:56.000 Right, whatever it was.

00:11:58.000 And that void has been filled with, your self-esteem is found, actually, in your identity, because it's criticism-proof.

00:12:03.000 Yes.

00:12:04.000 Which I think is why it probably draws people like you, who are trying to look for that intellectual consistency.

00:12:08.000 Like, 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.

00:12:20.000 I totally agree with you.

00:12:21.000 On 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.

00:12:30.000 The 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.

00:12:41.000 Maybe we're just going through our version of adolescence.

00:12:47.000 And when you go through your adolescence, you lose your self-confidence.

00:12:50.000 You lose your way a little bit.

00:12:51.000 You do some things you regret out of that self-confidence loss.

00:12:54.000 Well, 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.

00:13:04.000 And 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.

00:13:15.000 But maybe it's possible that we're just in the thick of that adolescence.

00:13:20.000 But we will get to our adulthood on the other side, and we don't have to be that nation in decline.

00:13:25.000 Maybe we're still early.

00:13:28.000 in our ascent. So let me ask you before we get because we covered these debates right we did the

00:13:32.000 the two debates with these live streams um and you know it seemed like there was a stark contrast

00:13:37.000 between the first one where you did come out aggressive yeah afterward you said hey everyone

00:13:40.000 on the stage you know they're good people it seemed much more amicable. I would say that for

00:13:43.000 most people on the stage yeah. Even Chris Christie? Well uh you know he's he's got his he's got his

00:13:48.000 thing he's got his got his shtick.

00:13:50.000 His thing is not being one of the good people.

00:13:52.000 For me, it might be.

00:13:53.000 The 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.

00:14:05.000 And, you know, we have so many more important things to discuss than to assail individuals on that stage.

00:14:10.000 That exists in the Republican Party, including in this race.

00:14:13.000 But I think most of them are good people tainted by a broken system.

00:14:19.000 OK, so I'm not running against any of those individuals.

00:14:19.000 Right.

00:14:23.000 I'm running against a broken system.

00:14:24.000 And 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.

00:14:33.000 The super PACs are a cancer on politics, on American politics and the Republican Party and Democrat Party alike.

00:14:39.000 And I should have come to this conclusion earlier because my crusade against... Do you guys talk about the ESG movement?

00:14:48.000 I 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.

00:15:09.000 Now, why do I care about this?

00:15:11.000 One 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.

00:15:30.000 And 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.

00:15:38.000 Right.

00:15:39.000 And then Elizabeth Warren, socialist-in-chief, gets to say, oh, they're too big to fail.

00:15:42.000 I'm the socialist, but when was the last time I got a check from these companies?

00:15:46.000 Right, and it's a merger of state and corporate power and that whole game. 0.99

00:15:49.000 And so the left, when I wrote Woke Inc., which was my first book, and even when I started

00:15:53.000 Strive, some thoughtful critics on the left would come up to me and say, okay, well, where

00:15:59.000 are you on Citizens United?

00:16:01.000 And my response at the time was, at the time, and I've evolved a little bit on this, from having seen this.

00:16:07.000 Can 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.

00:16:12.000 I was going, well, hold on a second, though.

00:16:13.000 The ruling of Citizens United was basically the Hillary Clinton That's right.

00:16:17.000 The Clinton machine wanted to stop a negative documentary against Hillary Clinton. 0.94

00:16:21.000 That's right.

00:16:21.000 So initially, I'm going, well, hold on a second.

00:16:23.000 These filmmakers, even though they're a business, have the right to free speech.

00:16:26.000 That's right.

00:16:27.000 And that's probably where you started off with the defense point and then saw it metastasize.

00:16:31.000 And I'm a free speech advocate, and so we can put the legal holding in the First Amendment holding of

00:16:36.000 Citizens United and just respect that we have a First Amendment in this country,

00:16:39.000 and we have to have a world in which people can criticize politicians or those who rise to power.

00:16:45.000 But 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.

00:17:03.000 I don't think of myself as a traditional partisan anyway.

00:17:06.000 But 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.

00:17:23.000 That's the real cancer, and it is a cancer.

00:17:25.000 However, 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.

00:17:36.000 I 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.

00:17:48.000 It ought to be an America First conservative concern today.

00:17:51.000 And so my view is that it's going to take somebody who's independent of that to break that system.

00:17:58.000 One 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.

00:18:10.000 It's like a circus monkey.

00:18:12.000 So that's just like as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west kind of thing.

00:18:14.000 It's like a law of physics.

00:18:16.000 In my case, and in a rare few other cases, that biggest donor is me.

00:18:20.000 Right.

00:18:21.000 And so that brings with it a special sense of responsibility.

00:18:25.000 And 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.

00:18:39.000 But the part of me now that realizes these people are just vessels, right?

00:18:44.000 They're really just vehicles for advancing the interests of what the guy or gal who wrote their biggest check wanted them to say.

00:18:50.000 I can't even hold it against them.

00:18:52.000 They don't have, in many cases, independent thoughts.

00:18:54.000 Oh, I can.

00:18:55.000 But they're not even... I mean, I think of them as...

00:18:59.000 Literally, it's just vessels, vehicles.

00:19:02.000 It's the system that I'm running against.

00:19:03.000 At the same time, sometimes it's a two-way relationship.

00:19:05.000 Some of them will also make personal money off of it, and it becomes a two-way incestuous relationship.

00:19:10.000 That's what I'm up against.

00:19:11.000 I think it's a fair point to say that they're vessels, and I have to be very honest.

00:19:14.000 During the first debate, I was cheering you on because I was like, you're making great points.

00:19:17.000 These guys are trying to talk over you.

00:19:19.000 You're doing a great job.

00:19:20.000 In the second debate, I was yelling at the camera.

00:19:22.000 Because I'm like, you're trying to make friends with these people, is what it seemed like.

00:19:25.000 It did feel like that a little bit.

00:19:27.000 I appreciate that you're trying to pull out the partisans.

00:19:30.000 You've just got to be yourself, Yvette.

00:19:32.000 You're a Republican, so I get it.

00:19:35.000 There was a sense of being in the Reagan Library.

00:19:37.000 It was framed as we're going to have a policy debate.

00:19:40.000 There's six people talking at the same time in what was effectively an unmoderated debate.

00:19:44.000 And the knives were out, though.

00:19:46.000 And the bad jokes.

00:19:47.000 Donald Duck.

00:19:48.000 Yeah, it wasn't great.

00:19:49.000 It was a terrible joke.

00:19:52.000 So I think that the truth is, I'm finding clarity in terms of what I'm actually running against.

00:20:00.000 I'm running against the puppet masters who are putting up these puppets on that stage.

00:20:03.000 At 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.

00:20:13.000 We 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.

00:20:26.000 So how do you fix that?

00:20:27.000 Yeah, so one of the ways to fix it is, I mean, you could just do it in the context of this race. 0.63

00:20:32.000 I 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.

00:20:54.000 You know, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, at least.

00:20:56.000 Maybe Tim Scott.

00:20:58.000 Who is, all of whom, are basically funded by super PACs.

00:21:01.000 It's a joke that your campaign is actually being run by your campaign.

00:21:05.000 It's not.

00:21:06.000 This is the super PAC primary where the people who can write unlimited checks are wielding these people as pawns.

00:21:10.000 Okay, well that won't happen though.

00:21:11.000 So do you have a plan B?

00:21:12.000 Yeah, look, so I think from a policy perspective, now I've got to win to be able to do this.

00:21:17.000 My view is, there is already a regime that says there are limits on how much you can directly contribute to a campaign.

00:21:25.000 So my view is, do you have free speech rights?

00:21:28.000 Absolutely you do.

00:21:29.000 But 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.

00:21:40.000 What are most viewers of this program?

00:21:41.000 Are they told $3,300 is the maximum you can give to an individual candidate?

00:21:46.000 Well, then why should somebody else be able to give $30 million but get special political favors out of it?

00:21:50.000 Now, we have a free speech issue.

00:21:50.000 Right.

00:21:51.000 Fine.

00:21:52.000 Policy?

00:21:53.000 Whatever policy or cultural view you want to address?

00:21:55.000 Great.

00:21:56.000 We 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.

00:22:01.000 The only one arrested for it was Dinesh D'Souza, who gave it to a friend running for a Senate race that they lost.

00:22:06.000 I don't know the specifics of that case, but I'm sure it was the law.

00:22:09.000 Of course, the law was applied even-handedly to people regardless of their political beliefs under President Obama.

00:22:13.000 I'm sure he was politically suffering at the cost of his views, but that's the way I think the system should work.

00:22:20.000 $3,300 max per primary, per general.

00:22:23.000 So $6,600, that's the current regime.

00:22:26.000 That's a lot of money for a lot of people, for sure, but it's not going to be enough to buy off a politician at the federal level.

00:22:33.000 That's why we have that regime.

00:22:35.000 So you have the separate regime.

00:22:36.000 Should 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?

00:22:44.000 Absolutely.

00:22:45.000 Should there be limits on how much money they can invest in that?

00:22:47.000 Absolutely not.

00:22:48.000 Right.

00:22:49.000 But 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.

00:23:07.000 Well, no one's saying that Michael Moore can't raise as much money as he wants, right?

00:23:09.000 We're talking about private investment.

00:23:10.000 This is a problem that also happens in conservative media.

00:23:13.000 Every 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.

00:23:20.000 And ironically, the left Yeah, it's interesting.

00:23:23.000 I was aware of that.

00:23:24.000 enterprise, right?

00:23:25.000 Totally.

00:23:26.000 As far left as it, but Hollywood, right, at the end of the day, dollars make sense.

00:23:29.000 And the right is far more reliant on non-profit donors for even media content.

00:23:34.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:23:35.000 I was aware of that.

00:23:36.000 So you guys have a C3 arm as well?

00:23:37.000 No, we do not.

00:23:39.000 No, we do not.

00:23:39.000 We do not.

00:23:40.000 And there's a big reason that this is a big thing that we've had a lot of conflict with.

00:23:43.000 But 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.

00:23:52.000 It's, you know, hopefully you'll kill me last, and they never do.

00:23:55.000 And that's why we're entirely funded by Mug Club, by independent viewers.

00:23:58.000 You guys know where to sign up.

00:23:59.000 It's capitalism, man.

00:24:00.000 It's not PBS where we say that and then take money from the federal government.

00:24:03.000 But 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.

00:24:11.000 Totally.

00:24:12.000 It's a choked system.

00:24:14.000 And 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. 0.68

00:24:25.000 I mean, go down my views on the climate agenda.

00:24:27.000 A 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.

00:24:34.000 The 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.

00:24:43.000 For those people who can't tell, Joe Louis, if he's distracted, Joe Louis, which is incredibly rare.

00:24:46.000 He never barks at anything, so someone's probably being murdered out there.

00:24:49.000 No, that's not true.

00:24:51.000 He's the most mellow.

00:24:52.000 No, no, I'm saying he never barks.

00:24:53.000 When was the last time you heard him bark?

00:24:55.000 So let's go back to BlackRock.

00:24:56.000 You're kind of talking about this.

00:24:58.000 This does seem to be this sort of amalgamate, right?

00:24:59.000 You have these giant companies that are, quote-unquote, sort of taking away the American dream.

00:25:04.000 Even if you look into housing, you look into wanting to create an entire generation of renters, right?

00:25:09.000 Own nothing and like it.

00:25:10.000 And then, of course, big tech, which determines what you can and can't say, and also determines what people can and cannot learn.

00:25:15.000 And the government determining the winners and losers in those spaces. 0.82

00:25:21.000 Do you take that on?

00:25:22.000 How do you do it?

00:25:23.000 Now, unfortunately, it involves government intervention, but not to the same degree.

00:25:27.000 Elizabeth Warren just wants to say, too big to fail, so that they have control. 0.95

00:25:30.000 Well, 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.

00:25:38.000 So you want to go big tech direction or BlackRock?

00:25:40.000 Let's go big tech first.

00:25:41.000 Big tech first, okay.

00:25:42.000 Because BlackRock is kind of easy.

00:25:43.000 Everyone can say BlackRock, opioid epidemic, you know what I mean?

00:25:45.000 Everyone goes, yeah, we don't like that.

00:25:46.000 But let's talk about Big Tech.

00:25:47.000 Well, I think there's a lot to say there, too.

00:25:50.000 And Vanguard, and McKinsey & Company, right?

00:25:51.000 Absolutely.

00:25:52.000 But that's been the last several years of my life, so we can go there.

00:25:54.000 We'll go Big Tech first.

00:25:57.000 Take the three largest financial institutions, BlackRock, StateStreet, Vanguard, or you want to take Facebook, Google, or MetaGoogle, whatever.

00:26:05.000 These 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.

00:26:16.000 Now, why are they so powerful?

00:26:17.000 Part 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?

00:26:29.000 Now, this dates back a long time.

00:26:31.000 I know that you all have paid attention to the Section 230 debate.

00:26:34.000 That'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?

00:26:45.000 So my view is you can't have it both ways.

00:26:49.000 Either you get special governmental protections, in which case you are bound by the same constraints applied to the government, namely the US Constitution.

00:27:00.000 Or you don't get those constraints and you're free to decide whatever it is you want to do.

00:27:03.000 Exactly.

00:27:04.000 But you can't have both.

00:27:05.000 And 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.

00:27:19.000 But the thing that people used to say four years ago is, oh, you know, if you said that, oh, you're a rube.

00:27:24.000 The First Amendment only applies to— Right. 0.87

00:27:26.000 The government doesn't apply to state actors, doesn't apply to private companies.

00:27:30.000 Well, not so fast there.

00:27:33.000 If it is state action in disguise, right?

00:27:36.000 If 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.

00:27:48.000 And 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.

00:27:55.000 There 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.

00:28:07.000 The 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.

00:28:13.000 So what the government did is they got clever.

00:28:15.000 They said, OK, we're going to pass a statute that says that We're not gonna search and seize anything.

00:28:21.000 The government, police, forget about it.

00:28:23.000 We're just gonna say the railroad can't be sued if they do that for one of their employees or passengers.

00:28:29.000 So what do the railroads do?

00:28:30.000 They start searching and seizing, and they can do that with impunity.

00:28:32.000 At the behest of the government, though.

00:28:33.000 At the behest of the government.

00:28:34.000 Not with just the incentive.

00:28:35.000 You're saying they went behind the scenes, probably, and said, hey, guys, it'd be really nice if you did this.

00:28:39.000 Well, the funny thing is, in this particular case, in the Big Tech case, you get the incentive, too.

00:28:44.000 But in this, you get the backdoor goading, too.

00:28:47.000 In this case, it literally was just the incentive.

00:28:49.000 And so this went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the incentive alone Right?

00:28:54.000 The loss of immunity alone was enough to say that the railroad companies couldn't do that.

00:28:58.000 That was state action in disguise.

00:29:00.000 Right.

00:29:01.000 So 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.

00:29:22.000 Right.

00:29:23.000 About half the states in this country have such a law.

00:29:25.000 This says no, no, no.

00:29:26.000 For a tech company that operates an internet website, you don't have that same liability.

00:29:31.000 It overrides any liability you might have under that state law.

00:29:34.000 So it's the same thing as with the railroads.

00:29:34.000 Right.

00:29:36.000 But with the tech companies, it's one step worse.

00:29:38.000 Not 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,

00:29:45.000 we're going to regulate you, and so on.

00:29:47.000 It's even more corrosive because...

00:29:49.000 Both in this case. It's even a stronger case than it was against the railroads.

00:29:52.000 Well, and there were only a handful of railroad companies back in the day because it was very expensive.

00:29:56.000 Right.

00:29:56.000 The issue with big tech, right? A lot of people, having been there since 2006, for example, on YouTube,

00:30:00.000 my brother was one of the first original partners, it was, hey, this is going to break apart the stranglehold

00:30:05.000 that really only five companies on earth as far as media hold, ABC, CBC, CBS, Viacom, Turner.

00:30:11.000 And so independent creators flocked to these platforms because they could make a living.

00:30:15.000 And now those same people are saying, hey, great, we brought in all the independents,

00:30:18.000 only now we've eliminated competition, we can tell you what you can and can't say.

00:30:22.000 And then even further down the line, you have a company like Rumble who is being banned by foreign governments.

00:30:28.000 Being banned for simply allowing speech on the platform.

00:30:28.000 Yeah.

00:30:31.000 And they're the only company that's really had the balls to say, okay, they flipped the bird to all of France. 0.95

00:30:35.000 Yep. And the UK recently. 0.97

00:30:36.000 And the UK. And you have a lot of conservatives who are afraid to touch it.

00:30:39.000 So I do, by the way, little known, you know, the railroad.

00:30:41.000 Who are afraid to touch it, meaning?

00:30:42.000 They're afraid, they're still afraid to touch it and really go after big tech and YouTube and Facebook.

00:30:46.000 There's a lot of talk, and there's been nothing done since I've been around.

00:30:49.000 I think this goes back to the other effect of lobbying through capture, right?

00:30:53.000 It's the oldest trick in the book.

00:30:54.000 Use government as a tool, as a moat.

00:30:57.000 To stop somebody from being able to compete against you.

00:31:00.000 And so my view is one of the solutions to all of this doesn't come from government at all.

00:31:04.000 It comes through competition in the market.

00:31:07.000 I actually, you guys may not know this, I invested in Rumble back when it was a private company.

00:31:11.000 Precisely because I believed in competition to Google and YouTube.

00:31:14.000 That's also why I started Strive, to compete against BlackRock.

00:31:17.000 Look, we can complain about the powers that be, but let's create market alternatives that people are actually able to avail themselves of.

00:31:23.000 The challenge there, though, is they have such an advantage and such a leg up at this point.

00:31:26.000 Scale.

00:31:26.000 That's right.

00:31:28.000 So there's no panacea.

00:31:30.000 There's no silver bullets.

00:31:31.000 It's an all-of-the-above approach.

00:31:32.000 But 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.

00:31:41.000 On 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.

00:31:54.000 You know, take the BlackRock example.

00:31:56.000 The 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.

00:32:15.000 Invest 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.

00:32:35.000 So 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.

00:32:44.000 So it's the same movie as we're seeing with censoring speech as we now see with the weaponization of capital through capital markets.

00:32:52.000 And so that's the real threat.

00:32:54.000 to liberty that we face today. It's not just big government, right? It's not Reagan 1980 anymore.

00:32:59.000 It's this hybrid of big government and big business that together are able to do

00:33:03.000 what neither one could alone, and we require leaders who recognize that new threat rather

00:33:11.000 than just reciting slogans that we memorized back in 1980.

00:33:15.000 That's the death, where I would say, of the quote-unquote American dream.

00:33:18.000 I 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.

00:33:36.000 Of course they are.

00:33:36.000 Blackrock and Vanguard.

00:33:37.000 You 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.

00:33:45.000 by the way, which by the way, the US pulled out of right.

00:33:48.000 So it was when Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord that

00:33:50.000 these people then said, Okay, we're gonna get it done through the

00:33:52.000 backdoor using your capital without you knowing it as a vehicle to actually do it. So I think that lays out the

00:33:59.000 answer to a question that a lot of people I think are probably

00:34:02.000 when I travel this country certainly wonder about. I do think we're

00:34:06.000 in 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

00:34:13.000 we're founded on, and love the founding ideals of this country

00:34:17.000 and believe that all men are created equal, and that you get

00:34:20.000 ahead not in the color of your skin, but in the content of your

00:34:22.000 The basic American creeds we know to be true.

00:34:24.000 Most 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.

00:34:41.000 But 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.

00:34:48.000 Well, 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.

00:34:55.000 They have the Democratic Party in a chokehold, but they have every major institution in a chokehold, right?

00:34:59.000 Every technology company, every asset management firm, every educational institution, K-12, or universities.

00:35:06.000 I mean, even our own military.

00:35:08.000 And part of what's going on here is That take each of these institutions, what do they have in common?

00:35:14.000 It's something that you got to go beneath the surface to see it.

00:35:19.000 Wall Street.

00:35:20.000 Okay.

00:35:21.000 Occupy Wall Street occupied Wall Street after the 08 crisis.

00:35:25.000 The criticism came from the left.

00:35:27.000 The original version of Breakup Big Tech back in the early 2000s and even to the early 2010s came from the left.

00:35:34.000 The criticism of the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War came from the left.

00:35:39.000 So you go through institution one by one.

00:35:41.000 These used to be institutions that took their main criticism from the old left.

00:35:48.000 And 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.

00:36:13.000 So that's what BlackRock is doing, because the old version, they said, Occupy Wall Street.

00:36:17.000 Well, I don't want to do that.

00:36:18.000 My 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.

00:36:25.000 Too big to fail with that famous 2008 crash.

00:36:27.000 Now it's Pre-Occupy Wall Street.

00:36:29.000 I will say that the Tea Party, this, well, let's go through the actual timing of this.

00:36:33.000 So the bailouts were made under the Bush administration.

00:36:37.000 Yeah, for talking about the initial TARP.

00:36:39.000 Absolutely.

00:36:39.000 This is the original sin of the bailouts, right?

00:36:42.000 And 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.

00:36:42.000 Yeah.

00:36:57.000 But 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.

00:37:02.000 For the 2010 run.

00:37:03.000 No, no, no.

00:37:04.000 This was pre-Occupy Wall Street.

00:37:05.000 It didn't have any impact.

00:37:07.000 The 2008 election was lost across the board.

00:37:09.000 Right, 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.

00:37:13.000 And 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.

00:37:34.000 military, 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.

00:37:43.000 Yeah.

00:37:44.000 What do I say to appease most of them?

00:37:46.000 You know, the Tea Party?

00:37:47.000 Okay, we're not gonna get them, but mostly the rest of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

00:37:50.000 What are we gonna say?

00:37:51.000 We'll put token minorities on your boards. 1.00

00:37:53.000 We'll muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change, as long as we still get to fly in a private jet to Davos to say it.

00:37:59.000 Yes.

00:38:00.000 And 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.

00:38:11.000 But 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.

00:38:19.000 And 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.

00:38:41.000 And I think that's a big part of what happened roughly. I mean, there's a different version of

00:38:44.000 the story in different domains.

00:38:45.000 No, I think you're right. I think that it happened in every sphere of American life.

00:38:47.000 The Tea Party had that midterm sort of red wave politically, and Occupy Wall Street had the

00:38:51.000 cultural and economic impact, like you're talking about with ESG and DEI, right? These are sort of

00:38:55.000 these, I guess you would say, cancerous growths that come from the...

00:38:58.000 Because I was down there too.

00:38:59.000 It was the dowry.

00:39:00.000 Yeah, I was down there at the Zanotti Park.

00:39:02.000 Yes, I was sitting there.

00:39:03.000 And I'm going, okay, Occupy Wall Street.

00:39:04.000 And then I see Hammers and Sickles.

00:39:06.000 And Che Guevara and Karl Marx.

00:39:09.000 I'm going, oh, okay.

00:39:10.000 So I guess you're saying that too big to fail is a problem.

00:39:12.000 You want to nationalize everything.

00:39:14.000 Okay, this is where I get off on this stop.

00:39:16.000 The logic train isn't stopping here.

00:39:17.000 But we should have been able to find some common ground.

00:39:20.000 Also, quick note, there was a great book on the railroad.

00:39:21.000 And maybe we can now.

00:39:23.000 I mean, even on the Super PAC question, right?

00:39:24.000 Now, 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.

00:39:39.000 But it should, in principle, be an issue that transcends traditional partisan policies.

00:39:43.000 Well, there was a lot of overlap between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

00:39:46.000 I 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.

00:39:55.000 And that surprised me.

00:39:56.000 I was, back then, we have a large sample size, right?

00:39:58.000 Because 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.

00:40:13.000 You want to know something funny?

00:40:14.000 This is even just a rift on the left.

00:40:15.000 I 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.

00:40:22.000 So you bring up the Occupy Wall Street in the 2012 version of this.

00:40:26.000 There was this video, I talked about this in my first book, Woking, I can't remember where it was.

00:40:30.000 I want to say it was in one of the Occupy Wall Street movements in Philadelphia, because it's spread out in New York.

00:40:36.000 Where 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.

00:40:45.000 And so this guy takes the microphone, but he's a white man, and they say, hey, you have to step up and stand back.

00:40:54.000 What does that mean?

00:40:55.000 Well, 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.

00:41:02.000 And this guy was coming ready to rail against the system, because he was the one oppressed against it.

00:41:07.000 And you could just see it in his face.

00:41:08.000 But 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.

00:41:14.000 But now she gets to be the one who complains about... And she didn't even know she was supposed to complain. 0.99

00:41:18.000 She's like, I guess I'm a microphone now.

00:41:20.000 Right?

00:41:20.000 So 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.

00:41:28.000 But 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.

00:41:47.000 But 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.

00:41:53.000 And so that was sort of the way that played out.

00:41:55.000 And that also brings us to kind of the enforcement of this.

00:41:57.000 You talk about sort of these strange bedfellows.

00:41:59.000 I mean, they're so strange at that point, it'd be like, you know, the Hellraiser boudoir at that point.

00:42:03.000 It is awful.

00:42:05.000 But the enforcement, of course, doesn't take place without the three-letter agencies.

00:42:08.000 This is the ultimate version of the managerial class in the swamp.

00:42:08.000 That's right.

00:42:11.000 And so when I'm thinking about what do I want to do as US president?

00:42:15.000 Shut down that administrative state and its entire apparatus.

00:42:18.000 Now, this has been talked about for a long time by Trump and otherwise and people all the way back to Reagan.

00:42:24.000 I think it's going to take a unique combination of traits to do it.

00:42:28.000 It'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.

00:42:36.000 Right.

00:42:37.000 It means you work for them because you're responsible for what they do without any authority to change it.

00:42:41.000 So that's on the one hand.

00:42:44.000 But on the other hand, it's going to take an outsider who also understands the law and the Constitution in a deep way.

00:42:51.000 And let's just make a basic observation here.

00:42:54.000 Those two characteristics don't go well together, right?

00:42:59.000 Because 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.

00:43:05.000 On 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.

00:43:12.000 And this is how they duped Trump in many ways.

00:43:14.000 They told him that you can't fire those people because there are civil service protections.

00:43:18.000 Right.

00:43:18.000 Well, if you read the law, you realize those civil service protections only apply to individual firings.

00:43:24.000 Right.

00:43:25.000 The 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.

00:43:30.000 Agree or not, that's what the rules are made to do.

00:43:32.000 Right.

00:43:33.000 But they do not apply to mass layoffs.

00:43:36.000 Mass layoffs are absolutely what I am bringing to the DC bureaucracy.

00:43:36.000 So that's the key.

00:43:40.000 75% headcount reduction by the end of the first term.

00:43:44.000 Over a million in the first year.

00:43:46.000 50% of that taking place in year one.

00:43:49.000 People can find honest work in the private sector.

00:43:51.000 I'm told that there's more open jobs and there are people looking for work.

00:43:53.000 This is a two-for-one if we want it.

00:43:54.000 Right.

00:43:55.000 Let's test that theory.

00:43:56.000 Absolutely.

00:43:57.000 Let's put some people to some actual honest work and grow the economy.

00:44:00.000 Agencies that should not exist.

00:44:02.000 Department of Education, FBI, IRS, ATF, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, CDC.

00:44:08.000 which I know you like to quote. I quoted it and got us banned. Yeah, got us banned. Well,

00:44:11.000 well, uh, even though I know you, you may like to quote it, we're still going to shut it down.

00:44:15.000 Okay. I'm actually okay with that. You're okay with that. I'm not from CDC. So that's another.

00:44:19.000 So you're sharp elbow enough to do it. Yeah, absolutely. I think you need to have somebody

00:44:24.000 who has a complete and total disregard for Washington, DC and its norms. Yes. Well,

00:44:27.000 but it's also for your own popularity because look, we're talking about the most popular agencies,

00:44:31.000 not popular, I guess powerful is the right term, in the United States and maybe in the world.

00:44:35.000 Not popular, yeah.

00:44:36.000 Sorry, wrong P word.

00:44:38.000 Powerful agencies.

00:44:40.000 That's risky, right?

00:44:42.000 I mean, obviously you've had to have these kind of, okay, I'm doing some pretty big things.

00:44:46.000 There are going to be some people that don't want me to succeed at doing this, and nobody's been able to successfully do this.

00:44:51.000 Maybe it's because they haven't tried, but there's somebody in the Republican Party.

00:44:54.000 Chris Christie has called this the dumbest idea that he's ever heard was to shut down the FBI.

00:44:58.000 I disagree. 0.88

00:44:59.000 I respectfully disagree with that. 0.82

00:45:00.000 You 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. 0.98

00:45:09.000 Unbelievable! 0.98

00:45:10.000 And yet these are the same apparatus that's supposed to be going after it.

00:45:12.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:13.000 On the other side.

00:45:14.000 It's so disturbing.

00:45:15.000 Like, how about, at what point do you say, oh, okay, you cease to exist because you're committing the grossest evil.

00:45:20.000 This 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.

00:45:30.000 What is that going to do?

00:45:31.000 I mean, come on, you're checking a box.

00:45:33.000 That's all.

00:45:33.000 That's what it is.

00:45:34.000 And you're trying to use some emotional... and I see these people behind the backstage before the debates, man.

00:45:39.000 I mean, it's really sad.

00:45:40.000 But then it comes on, there's, I will fire Christopher Wray and...

00:45:44.000 To what end?

00:45:45.000 Because you're gonna get James Comey 2.0?

00:45:47.000 The machine is what the rot is all about.

00:45:50.000 That is the Leviathan.

00:45:52.000 Now, this is also very practical for me.

00:45:54.000 You can't just offer slogans, say, shut down the FBI.

00:45:57.000 I'm serious about this.

00:45:59.000 35,000 employees work at the FBI, the failed Bureau of Investigation.

00:46:02.000 It is still, by the way, the J. Edgar Hoover building that people walk into in Washington, D.C.

00:46:06.000 Can you believe this?

00:46:07.000 It is still honoring his legacy.

00:46:09.000 The same guy who collected tapes and threatened Martin Luther King with suicide.

00:46:12.000 The same guy that's now going after concerned parents, calling them domestic terrorists.

00:46:16.000 That's still the same legacy they're celebrating.

00:46:18.000 35,000 employees.

00:46:20.000 20,000 of them are bureaucrats in back office functions, which is where the rot and the corruption comes from.

00:46:26.000 15,000 of them are agents on the front lines.

00:46:28.000 I say put those agents where they will be more effective.

00:46:32.000 The U.S.

00:46:32.000 Marshals have actually been far more effective in going after child trafficking in related cases than the FBI has.

00:46:38.000 Fine, move some of the 15,000 there.

00:46:40.000 We've laid out a clear plan to do this.

00:46:42.000 You know, financial crimes, complex white-collar crimes.

00:46:44.000 People 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.

00:46:51.000 There's no specialization anyway.

00:46:53.000 There's a separate part of the Treasury called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

00:46:53.000 Move them.

00:46:57.000 So 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.

00:47:08.000 So it's not like we're happening to get lucky solving two problems at once.

00:47:12.000 The two problems go hand-in-glove together.

00:47:15.000 The 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.

00:47:24.000 They find things to do that they shouldn't have been doing.

00:47:27.000 And so, yes, it's going to take somebody who is willing to get in there and gut it.

00:47:31.000 Incremental reform Will not work.

00:47:33.000 No, it won't work.

00:47:34.000 Fire Christopher Wray is a false premise.

00:47:36.000 It is a false lie.

00:47:37.000 You're being lied to, and their job is to dupe you.

00:47:40.000 They're trying to distract you to make you feel like they did something, and they didn't.

00:47:43.000 He's a symptom, just as I would even say that bureaucratic bloat.

00:47:47.000 All those things are symptoms of one thing, a complete lack of accountability.

00:47:50.000 In other words, you only get that bloat with a complete lack of accountability.

00:47:53.000 We have 87,000, and we want to be sure that we're not fact-checked on YouTube.

00:47:56.000 87,000 new employees to the IRS.

00:47:58.000 Not all our agents, right?

00:47:59.000 That's the wordplay.

00:48:00.000 Then what do they do?

00:48:02.000 You guys are very good.

00:48:04.000 Well, they'll catch you.

00:48:05.000 They'll suspend us for that.

00:48:07.000 If you say agents and not 87,000 employees.

00:48:09.000 It'd be interesting if they applied that same standard to the CNN clips that end up online.

00:48:13.000 Oh, they don't.

00:48:13.000 It's really funny.

00:48:14.000 I've had my experiences with those guys.

00:48:15.000 Well, 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?

00:48:24.000 Yeah.

00:48:25.000 Not now, guys!

00:48:26.000 Get out of my ear! 1.00

00:48:27.000 I can't think straight!

00:48:28.000 But it was one of those moments where, like, all right, somebody's taking on the earpiece.

00:48:31.000 Well, 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.

00:48:41.000 He didn't care about saying something that sounded good.

00:48:43.000 Now, you can have your problems with President Trump.

00:48:45.000 That's fine.

00:48:45.000 I understand that.

00:48:46.000 But 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.

00:48:52.000 That's what it's gonna take.

00:48:53.000 The biggest question, though, is, okay, people have tried it before.

00:48:57.000 Why are you different than a President Trump was?

00:49:00.000 Because he even had some problems getting everything.

00:49:02.000 He did a lot of great things.

00:49:03.000 I think he did a lot of great things.

00:49:04.000 And you've said that, so I appreciate that.

00:49:05.000 I think he's an excellent president.

00:49:06.000 I mean, everybody else is trying to Monday morning quarterback some small thing that he did.

00:49:09.000 They feel like they have to.

00:49:10.000 Which is senseless.

00:49:12.000 When, in fact, he was a great president, now how do we move this agenda forward?

00:49:14.000 That's my question.

00:49:15.000 So, a few things.

00:49:17.000 I think it will take, I said we're in a war.

00:49:20.000 All else equal, who's going to be the general that moves us forward in that war?

00:49:23.000 All else equal, it's better to have a general who hasn't yet been wounded in that war.

00:49:28.000 I have fresh legs.

00:49:29.000 I'm 38.

00:49:30.000 I think it's less than half of Trump's age.

00:49:32.000 Now my question is, what are you going to do with the last half of your 40s?

00:49:34.000 Goodness, what's next after that?

00:49:38.000 I'm not a plan B or a plan after kind of guy.

00:49:40.000 We've got the next mission lined up and we'll figure out what comes after after.

00:49:45.000 But I do think it will take somebody from the next generation to reach that next generation.

00:49:50.000 And I think we can do that in a way that Trump, you know, is of a different generation.

00:49:54.000 It's going to be a lot harder for him to do that job.

00:49:56.000 I also think we can pick up where he left off.

00:49:58.000 I 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.

00:50:04.000 Part 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.

00:50:17.000 It's contested, but six to three, the current Supreme Court agrees with me.

00:50:20.000 Look at West Virginia versus EPA.

00:50:22.000 I don't know if you paid attention to this case.

00:50:23.000 Very important case.

00:50:25.000 If 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.

00:50:37.000 If you believe that, that means literally the overwhelming majority of federal regulations are also unconstitutional. So this

00:50:47.000 is how you drive change on the timescales of history. Trump gave us a great Supreme Court. He did

00:50:53.000 pretty much all a reasonable person could do, could reasonably have done in those four years. Great. I

00:50:58.000 want to build on that and move this forward. But I've got fresh legs this time around. And I

00:51:02.000 won't be the same person eight years from now that I am today after going through it.

00:51:07.000 I just won't.

00:51:08.000 You drain the swamp, the swamp tries to drain you back.

00:51:10.000 He's not the same person today that he was eight years ago, because we're all human beings.

00:51:15.000 But 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.

00:51:24.000 America first.

00:51:25.000 It does not belong to Donald Trump.

00:51:26.000 It doesn't belong to me.

00:51:28.000 It belongs to the people of this country.

00:51:30.000 And so the question is, who's best positioned to take that agenda forward?

00:51:33.000 I 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.

00:51:40.000 And I think I'm going to be best positioned to do it.

00:51:43.000 So you've got a lot of these agencies, right?

00:51:43.000 Yeah.

00:51:45.000 You're targeting these guys.

00:51:47.000 And look, I think it resonates a lot with what we talk about on the show.

00:51:50.000 These are the same kinds of things that we talk about.

00:51:51.000 You talked about BlackRock as well.

00:51:53.000 So one of the companies, I don't know your exact connection to it, but Rovient.

00:51:58.000 Right.

00:51:58.000 I founded it.

00:51:59.000 So you founded that company.

00:52:00.000 Is that something that you're still currently involved with heavily?

00:52:02.000 I stepped off all my boards.

00:52:04.000 I have other candidates in this race.

00:52:06.000 It's remarkable.

00:52:07.000 I think Nikki Haley, while running for president, is collecting stock options off some corporate board. 0.78

00:52:11.000 That seems unconscionable to me.

00:52:13.000 It seems a little bit weird.

00:52:15.000 So you mentioned BlackRock.

00:52:16.000 So as far as my concern, you go after these agencies, they come after you.

00:52:20.000 You go after Google, they come after you.

00:52:21.000 You go after BlackRock.

00:52:22.000 BlackRock just doubled their size of ownership in there.

00:52:25.000 I think they went from 6 million shares to 12 million shares as of August.

00:52:28.000 Are 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?

00:52:35.000 Of course.

00:52:36.000 That's the whole ballgame.

00:52:38.000 But how do you plan for that?

00:52:39.000 Well, 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.

00:52:47.000 It lays out exactly how this game is played.

00:52:50.000 If you're a public company, like let's say you take your company here public, which I would advise you not to do.

00:52:54.000 No, absolutely not.

00:52:56.000 But many, many firms do need to go public for a wide range of reasons.

00:53:00.000 You 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.

00:53:24.000 So 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.

00:53:40.000 They're forced to do it.

00:53:41.000 LGBTQIA+, hashtag, dollar sign, dollar sign, whatever it is.

00:53:45.000 Yeah, well, the last dollar sign is silent.

00:53:47.000 Silent, yeah.

00:53:48.000 I see, I see, I see.

00:53:49.000 So that's, but pretty soon that may, BlackRock may decide that that's not silent anymore, in which case they don't know.

00:53:55.000 Well, what they decide goes, yeah.

00:53:56.000 So, and I actually could give you some specific details on this.

00:54:00.000 When you said that, you're saying it as a funny aside, it's actually true.

00:54:06.000 If you want to take Apple, The world's largest company by market capitalization, right?

00:54:09.000 We all know Apple.

00:54:11.000 They were demanded by a fringe left-wing group that held a few shares to adopt what they called the racial equity audit at Apple.

00:54:20.000 And Apple says, no, we don't want to do that.

00:54:22.000 Now, I mean, this is not some sort of conservative company, okay?

00:54:25.000 Apple has- Right, no.

00:54:26.000 That accusation was never leveled against them.

00:54:29.000 But the one thing, if you're Apple, you don't want to mess with is the talent in your engineering ranks, right?

00:54:34.000 You want the best and brightest, because that's how you're competing against the equivalents in other parts of the world.

00:54:38.000 So they said, no, thank you very much.

00:54:40.000 Nonetheless, that fringe group puts up this, I think it was called Color Us United, was one of the non-profits that support it.

00:54:47.000 No, not Color Us United.

00:54:49.000 Color Us United is a good one.

00:54:52.000 I'm trying to remember who it was.

00:54:53.000 I know that we covered it on the show.

00:54:54.000 It's, it's, it's some, some, Colors United is a good one, yeah.

00:54:56.000 It could be like Colors Are Us, whatever it is.

00:54:58.000 Yeah, something like that, something like that. 1.00

00:54:59.000 It was stupid. 1.00

00:55:00.000 It was stupid. 1.00

00:55:01.000 But then BlackRock and State Street come in and say, we're going to vote and support that proposal anyway. 0.99

00:55:07.000 It 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.

00:55:15.000 Right.

00:55:17.000 This is nuts, actually.

00:55:18.000 How about the equity for the kids in factories building those phones?

00:55:26.000 We used to have sweatshops, now we have tech shops.

00:55:30.000 But here's the other side of this.

00:55:32.000 It's not just passive hypocrisy.

00:55:34.000 The 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.

00:55:51.000 So that's how this game is played, and it is an ugly game.

00:55:55.000 So the answer to your question is, how does BlackRock have all this money?

00:55:59.000 It'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.

00:56:06.000 So absolutely, I'm deeply concerned about this.

00:56:08.000 And 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.

00:56:15.000 There used to be a rule that said you have to invest exclusively for profit if you're managing retirement fund money.

00:56:21.000 That has changed under the Biden administration.

00:56:23.000 They 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.

00:56:35.000 The government needs to change a lot of that.

00:56:36.000 The pension funds need to stop using political strings attached when they invest their money.

00:56:41.000 But it also takes market alternatives to deliver those solutions, which is why I started Strive, the most recent business that I did.

00:56:49.000 Yeah.

00:56:49.000 And so am I worried?

00:56:50.000 Absolutely I am.

00:56:50.000 But am I sitting around about it and whining?

00:56:54.000 No.

00:56:55.000 Don'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.

00:57:00.000 You mentioned Strive like eight times.

00:57:03.000 Some people would say you're running for president to promote a company.

00:57:03.000 Yeah.

00:57:05.000 They'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.

00:57:14.000 But there are people who are going to pick that up and say, are you just promoting strife?

00:57:14.000 Totally.

00:57:18.000 I have to ask you that.

00:57:19.000 No, 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.

00:57:26.000 If 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.

00:57:35.000 Right, and I actually think it's a strong suit of yours, so it'd be good to talk about it more.

00:57:39.000 No, absolutely!

00:57:40.000 Actually, 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.

00:57:48.000 You know, are you just offering that?

00:57:51.000 India?

00:57:52.000 We would never say that.

00:57:55.000 Ohio's not nowhere.

00:57:56.000 Parts of it are.

00:57:58.000 I lived there for a little while, so I can say that.

00:58:00.000 So I think it's important that people understand that I have a track record of taking on bureaucracies and succeeding and winning.

00:58:08.000 But there's a lot better ways to Promote your businesses?

00:58:12.000 Maybe be part of your businesses?

00:58:13.000 Than to spend 15, 16 million dollars of your hard-earned money.

00:58:13.000 Yeah.

00:58:18.000 Right.

00:58:19.000 And people should ask every question.

00:58:21.000 If you're running for President of the United States, every question is fair game.

00:58:25.000 But 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.

00:58:34.000 versus somebody who has only ever lived within the insular four corners of an existing political

00:58:40.000 apparatus, which is what most people are running on.

00:58:42.000 Well, let's flip it.

00:58:43.000 And you know what?

00:58:44.000 Just, hey, Mug Club, I hope you guys – I think this is – sorry, I was looking at

00:58:45.000 the wrong camera because that's usually my camera.

00:58:47.000 Mug Club, today I think we're going to put all of this out there for the public because

00:58:51.000 it's too important of an interview.

00:58:52.000 I'm going to put it out there for the public.

00:58:53.000 I hope you understand you can hit the like button and share it and we'll do some extra content this week.

00:58:57.000 We'll flip that from where you do have experience that all of these people at BC don't, right, in the private sector. 0.68

00:59:01.000 They suckle at the government teat.

00:59:03.000 But they would say, and I don't think that this is actually as virtuous as they believe it is, okay, no foreign policy experience, right? 0.72

00:59:09.000 That's sort of the flip side of the coin.

00:59:11.000 I think it's fair.

00:59:12.000 And it's a question for people of what they want.

00:59:15.000 I don't have foreign policy experience.

00:59:18.000 I think Nikki Haley in the first debate, she said, you have no foreign policy experience and it shows.

00:59:22.000 My view for most of the other people on the stage is you do have foreign policy experience and it shows.

00:59:25.000 Yeah.

00:59:26.000 What if your experience is bad?

00:59:26.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:59:27.000 Well, first of all, it shows in your bank account.

00:59:29.000 Yes.

00:59:29.000 I mean, some of these people have, I mean, just in her case, made 8 million bucks.

00:59:33.000 In the period after she left the UN.

00:59:36.000 Interesting 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.

00:59:46.000 So this is the rot at its worst.

00:59:49.000 People who... Well, she's an aerospace engineer. 0.63

00:59:51.000 That's why she's on the board.

00:59:53.000 She was a Pratt & Whitney before.

00:59:54.000 It's a whole thing.

00:59:55.000 But she's a symptom of a deeper cancer of corruption that causes people to adopt policies, including pro-war policies.

01:00:03.000 That have made a lot of people rich in this country.

01:00:05.000 We said boring.

01:00:06.000 I was thinking Boeing.

01:00:07.000 I'm sorry, continue.

01:00:10.000 But Boeing can be a boring, you know, boring.

01:00:12.000 That's the Elon Musk drilling.

01:00:13.000 Yeah.

01:00:15.000 So 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.

01:00:30.000 Wars in the Middle East that have no point, no end, now seeing the same thing likely happen again in places like Ukraine and otherwise.

01:00:37.000 Fine, go with one of the people that have foreign policy experience.

01:00:40.000 But if you want somebody who understood and grew up in an era as a young person, right?

01:00:46.000 My peers.

01:00:47.000 I wasn't one of them.

01:00:48.000 I'm grateful to my peers who did go serve in those places.

01:00:50.000 But 20 years later, now rightly ask the question of the Taliban still in charge in Afghanistan. 0.69

01:00:55.000 We have a hostile anti-American regime still in charge in Iraq.

01:00:58.000 To what end?

01:00:59.000 It was to literally no end.

01:01:01.000 That's the same wheels that are now turning again in new conflicts on the other side of the world.

01:01:07.000 Most 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.

01:01:15.000 If 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.

01:01:26.000 But 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.

01:01:34.000 What do you know about a deal?

01:01:36.000 Everybody has to win in that deal.

01:01:37.000 I've offered the clearest plan of anybody in this race of exactly how we will end that Ukraine war and deliver peace.

01:01:44.000 Make a hard commitment that NATO won't admit Ukraine to NATO.

01:01:47.000 Yes, freeze the current lines of control.

01:01:49.000 I 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.

01:01:57.000 Fine, we can do that deal.

01:01:58.000 Does Putin get something out of that deal?

01:02:00.000 Yes, he does, but we get more.

01:02:02.000 We require him to pull out of the alliance with China. 0.72

01:02:06.000 That's something you haven't heard from anybody in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.

01:02:08.000 No, I think it's very important.

01:02:09.000 As a matter of fact, I think... And I think it takes an outsider with clear understanding, but without the baggage of historical experience capture.

01:02:16.000 Yeah.

01:02:17.000 That's what it's going to take to, I think, keep us out of World War III. 0.74

01:02:19.000 I mean, I think there will be some learning on the job.

01:02:20.000 Of course.

01:02:21.000 But I think that what you just said is important.

01:02:22.000 You know, we've talked about this where people will get furious.

01:02:25.000 We'll answer, people say.

01:02:26.000 And by the way, not a fan of Russia, Putin at all, an oligarch.

01:02:30.000 Russia bad. 0.94

01:02:30.000 Also not a fan of Ukraine. 0.94

01:02:32.000 Also, by the way, Hitler bad, just to be clear. 0.74

01:02:33.000 Hitler bad, Mussolini bad, Pol Pot bad. 0.63

01:02:35.000 Okay, let's go through all of it.

01:02:36.000 Just to make sure, covered.

01:02:37.000 But when people say, like, and there is no part of Ukraine that identifies as Russian or has ever been Russian, you're like...

01:02:42.000 It's not true.

01:02:43.000 It's just not true.

01:02:46.000 So you can't just ignore those people.

01:02:47.000 Why is there no cattle insurgency?

01:02:49.000 Everybody ask that question?

01:02:50.000 Yeah.

01:02:50.000 In the eastern parts where they actually have captured land?

01:02:53.000 Right.

01:02:54.000 Part of the reason why is that those are Russian-speaking regions.

01:02:57.000 That have not been represented in Ukraine's own parliament.

01:03:01.000 It doesn't justify, obviously, the military action.

01:03:03.000 Of course it doesn't!

01:03:04.000 We've got to see facts.

01:03:05.000 Exactly.

01:03:05.000 If we're not looking at it for what it really is.

01:03:07.000 We have to take that into account.

01:03:09.000 As we have to take into account the fact that Ukraine is not some paragon democracy.

01:03:13.000 I mean, this is a country that's banned 11 opposition parties.

01:03:15.000 That's consolidated all TV media into one state media arm. 0.90

01:03:19.000 Does that mean Putin is anything other than a craven dictator? 0.99

01:03:21.000 No, Putin is a craven dictator. 0.97

01:03:23.000 But just because Russia's bad does not mean Ukraine is good. 0.98

01:03:26.000 And we have this false narrative that we've built up.

01:03:30.000 That's what the existing foreign policy establishment is good at doing.

01:03:32.000 I mean, you get to George Bush, good and evil in Iraq.

01:03:35.000 How much better off are we for seeing that?

01:03:36.000 But the media hated him, and the left hated him, and when Obama became president, Barack Obama, I'm going, where's Code Pink?

01:03:41.000 Same thing now with Biden.

01:03:42.000 Remember they used to protest outside of the White House?

01:03:42.000 I'm like, where are they?

01:03:45.000 Where's Michael Moore, right?

01:03:46.000 He's out there waving a Ukrainian flag.

01:03:47.000 I'm going, oh, hold on a second.

01:03:49.000 This 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.

01:03:59.000 Is there any question at this point, like, everyone acknowledges the economy, right?

01:04:02.000 As 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.

01:04:08.000 That's why he was an excellent president.

01:04:10.000 He didn't have any foreign policy experience as well.

01:04:12.000 The funniest part, man, for that first debate is Mike Pence saying that we don't need a rookie on the job.

01:04:19.000 The 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.

01:04:28.000 That's not the real reason.

01:04:29.000 He was put there because Donald Trump wanted someone who made him look even taller.

01:04:38.000 That was his greatest call.

01:04:40.000 Like Mike Pence.

01:04:40.000 We're not big fans of Mike Pence.

01:04:43.000 You talk about talking points on that stage.

01:04:45.000 Every 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.

01:04:52.000 Like, this joke didn't land, man.

01:04:54.000 I just wish that people would be more authentic.

01:04:56.000 Now, can we delineate, though, and we've talked about this obviously in the last couple of weeks, the last week or so, with Israel Hamas.

01:05:03.000 Yeah.

01:05:04.000 There's a big difference between Ukraine and Russia.

01:05:06.000 Big difference.

01:05:07.000 In 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. 0.90

01:05:15.000 Yeah, sure, they do.

01:05:16.000 As a matter of fact, they certainly do matter to our national interest.

01:05:18.000 Now that doesn't mean that there isn't an argument to be made, and we ran the numbers.

01:05:22.000 If 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.

01:05:36.000 Or, help Israel a little bit, and cut money anyways to places like Iran.

01:05:40.000 The analogy you're drawing is interesting.

01:05:41.000 Elon 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.

01:05:49.000 Well, that's because they've sold too many Teslas.

01:05:50.000 That's why they don't get the subsidy anymore.

01:05:52.000 I think it's after 250,000 sold, the subsidy goes away.

01:05:54.000 So it's like, oh, so I sold good cars.

01:05:56.000 And the unit economics are just more solid in terms of how they're running the operation.

01:06:00.000 So here's what I would say.

01:06:02.000 I think that this is a moment right now, when we're having this conversation now, where

01:06:08.000 we need rational, cool-headed responses to ask, yes, how do we support Israel's own right

01:06:15.000 to its own national self-defense as Israel is fully entitled to?

01:06:19.000 What happened, what Hamas did was barbaric, it was wrong, it was inhumane, it was medieval 0.99

01:06:24.000 in its nature.

01:06:25.000 Israel absolutely has the right to national self-existence and to fully defend itself.

01:06:29.000 That's a decision for Israel as to how they go about doing it, and our job is diplomatically,

01:06:33.000 in terms of intelligence sharing, in terms of limited circumstances of munitions support,

01:06:38.000 that is our job as a partner and ally at the UN.

01:06:41.000 Tell the UN you're not going to draw some false equivalence between Israel's defense.

01:06:44.000 Ceasefire?

01:06:45.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:06:46.000 All that nonsense. 0.99

01:06:47.000 Oh, it's the most ridiculous thing. 1.00

01:06:48.000 It's the most ridiculous thing. 0.99

01:06:49.000 Hey, ceasefire. 0.99

01:06:50.000 But I was just raped, though. 0.97

01:06:51.000 Yeah, but now it's a ceasefire. 0.95

01:06:52.000 Ceasefire, exactly.

01:06:52.000 Selective timing of this.

01:06:54.000 I'm still sore.

01:06:55.000 Our job is diplomatically to stand against all that nonsense.

01:06:58.000 But I don't want to be one of these people shrieking, I mean Nikki Haley was screeching on air, finish them! 1.00

01:07:04.000 You know, with a vague reference to, almost Iran was what she invoked right before she said that.

01:07:09.000 And then you talk about Mike Pence, just do it!

01:07:11.000 It's like, it's like a Nike, finish them is from like Mortal Kombat.

01:07:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:07:14.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:07:15.000 Just do it is like a Nike slogan.

01:07:17.000 So they're like misappropriating corporate slogans as though that's our form.

01:07:20.000 But Lindsey Graham, he said something equivalent to this. 0.99

01:07:23.000 No, I'd say kill every last one of Hamas. 1.00

01:07:26.000 Absolutely. 1.00

01:07:27.000 Every last member of Hamas. 0.81

01:07:28.000 And that's Israel's decision to make. 0.82

01:07:30.000 And so Israel's making those decisions. 0.60

01:07:31.000 I trust them to do the right thing.

01:07:33.000 But 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.

01:07:46.000 isn't meshed in with ground troops or otherwise.

01:07:49.000 This is when we've made our worst foreign policy disastrous mistakes in the past.

01:07:53.000 If I'm talking to Bibi, I would say, listen up, we got your back. 0.73

01:07:56.000 You're on the right side of this.

01:07:57.000 Don't let anybody stand in your way from defending yourself.

01:07:59.000 And we've got your back on that.

01:08:01.000 But my advice to you would be that we've made some of our poorest decisions in the wake of real disaster.

01:08:07.000 That was your 9-11.

01:08:08.000 We had our 9-11 here.

01:08:10.000 And 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.

01:08:21.000 There's a little bit of a difference, though, I will say.

01:08:22.000 And so just be careful.

01:08:23.000 Yeah, be careful.

01:08:24.000 But if you're comparing it as a percentage of the population, I think it would roughly work out.

01:08:28.000 36 times, you know, what it was.

01:08:30.000 Yeah, 20 to 30,000 Americans, and they live right there.

01:08:33.000 And it's never, you know, they... But here's all I would say is, though, let's say, you know, As awful as this would have been.

01:08:39.000 As 30 times as many people died on 9-11 as they did.

01:08:41.000 And Canada did it.

01:08:44.000 But going to Iraq still has nothing to do with that, right?

01:08:47.000 Right.

01:08:47.000 So 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.

01:09:00.000 Targeted response, get rid of Bin Laden, get rid of the Taliban, absolutely.

01:09:04.000 Get 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.

01:09:13.000 government let out until the declassified files came out 20 years later.

01:09:16.000 Go 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.

01:09:30.000 We've made some of our worst decisions, so have other countries in their history.

01:09:33.000 That's Israel's decision to make, but my job as the next U.S.

01:09:35.000 president 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.

01:09:53.000 I mean, heck, we don't even have an ambassador to Israel right now.

01:09:55.000 Confirm an ambassador to Israel and Egypt and other countries where we don't have confirmed ambassadors right now.

01:09:59.000 Can we start with like, no money to Iran at all?

01:10:02.000 And no money to Hamas!

01:10:02.000 Absolutely!

01:10:06.000 But even indirect aid to Hamas that's actually been going through in the name of humanitarian aid or otherwise.

01:10:10.000 Deport anybody in this country who has had any ties to Hamas or otherwise, extradite them to Israel.

01:10:16.000 So there are things we ought to absolutely be doing.

01:10:19.000 But there's also things that nobody else is talking about that we ought to be talking about.

01:10:23.000 We have to make sure that we oversee full phase-out through the monitoring and agreements of Iran's nuclear program. 0.58

01:10:29.000 But what the heck are we thinking with the Biden administration, with some Republicans cheering it along, talking about nuclear technology transfer to Saudi Arabia?

01:10:38.000 We should not want nuclear proliferation of any kind in the Middle East, and definitely not in Iran, but not in Saudi Arabia either.

01:10:44.000 And yet nobody's talking about that right now.

01:10:46.000 So I think this is a moment for level-headed rationality, rather than emotional knee-jerk responses.

01:10:54.000 And now it's a cool thing, right?

01:10:55.000 It's what the cool kids do, criticize the Iraq War 20 years ago.

01:10:58.000 In either party, it's the cool, easy thing to do, because it's long past, and there's no consequence to you to do it.

01:11:03.000 I'm not patting myself on the back.

01:11:04.000 I was in college at the time, but I was against the Iraq War then.

01:11:07.000 I had a bunch of other harebrained ideas that I was dead wrong on, but that wasn't one of them.

01:11:11.000 And that was a left-wing position then, even though I wasn't on the left.

01:11:14.000 I considered myself a libertarian back then.

01:11:17.000 But 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.

01:11:25.000 It might relate to Iran or a broader regional conflict in the Middle East, and that's the moment to think rationally.

01:11:31.000 How 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. 0.51

01:11:37.000 look after our interests to make sure that we don't accidentally tripwire ourselves into some large protracted conflict in the Middle East.

01:11:44.000 Now 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.

01:11:55.000 The far left trying to create this false moral equivalence between Israel and their enemies, that's wrong.

01:11:58.000 But 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.

01:12:08.000 And so back to the question of foreign policy experience.

01:12:10.000 I don't think somebody with the foreign policy experience record of the last 25 years should be in charge of making those decisions.

01:12:16.000 I think it should be somebody of my generation coming from the outside, and in this race, that's me.

01:12:21.000 When the track record is bad, it's not much of a track record. 0.97

01:12:23.000 I still do believe kill every single last one of them as far as it relates to Hamas. 0.60

01:12:28.000 By the way, they don't need our money to do it, but they certainly need our moral support. 0.74

01:12:31.000 I think you had a follow-up.

01:12:32.000 The only thing I would say there is just be careful to think that's not the end of the road there.

01:12:36.000 Because, you know, Hamas is just a client of broader forces that are wielding them, like Hezbollah.

01:12:40.000 So, it's the Taliban story. 0.79

01:12:43.000 The Taliban, 20 years later, is still now in charge. 0.91

01:12:44.000 Yeah, but you know what? 0.98

01:12:46.000 When they kidnap your women and children and cut off their heads, it's a good start. 1.00

01:12:49.000 And I don't mean that irrationally. 0.98

01:12:50.000 I mean, Hamas, look, this is in their... It's different.

01:12:52.000 It's in their charter, right?

01:12:54.000 And they're right there.

01:12:54.000 And 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.

01:13:00.000 We just have to be careful.

01:13:02.000 And 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?

01:13:08.000 What is the mission we're getting done?

01:13:09.000 What matters?

01:13:10.000 And 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.

01:13:20.000 So that's just I think we have to be really clear about this.

01:13:22.000 I think in the Hamas case it's a little bit different.

01:13:24.000 Just 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.

01:13:33.000 This is like an ISIS-like organization. 0.65

01:13:35.000 It's as bad as it gets, and there is no end.

01:13:37.000 There is no possible end.

01:13:37.000 If it was someone who you thought could sit at the table, they could be reasoned with.

01:13:40.000 It's no. 1.00

01:13:41.000 Exterminate all Jews. 1.00

01:13:41.000 That includes women and children. 1.00

01:13:43.000 We're going to put our weapons caches in our schools so that we can actually have our own.

01:13:46.000 They're committing war crimes on both sides.

01:13:47.000 It's dead wrong.

01:13:48.000 It's dead wrong.

01:13:49.000 And I agree with you on Ukraine, Russia, same even looking back.

01:13:52.000 And Israel's a very different situation.

01:13:54.000 Very different situation.

01:13:55.000 We're correct to stand with Israel in terms of our funding of their national self-defense.

01:13:58.000 But be aware if there's a vacuum for sure.

01:13:59.000 In a way that we shouldn't for Ukraine.

01:14:01.000 So this is related to foreign policy, but you, I said you had kind of like your moonshot

01:14:05.000 moment.

01:14:06.000 You made a claim on China and Taiwan that I wanted to dive into where you kind of laid 0.99

01:14:11.000 out your solution for the problem.

01:14:12.000 And part of that was to kind of reduce our dependence on Taiwan for chip manufacturing.

01:14:17.000 Yes.

01:14:17.000 Right.

01:14:18.000 And 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.

01:14:28.000 Is what, what made you think of that and why was that something that you thought could get done?

01:14:32.000 I guess, would it be about five years roughly at the end of your first term?

01:14:36.000 So 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.

01:14:45.000 But that's been a disaster in Arizona, though, the TSMC.

01:14:48.000 Oh, so far.

01:14:48.000 But 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.

01:14:59.000 Which works well with American cars, but yes.

01:15:00.000 Yeah, I mean, it's funny how this pattern repeats itself.

01:15:03.000 But it's actually a skills shortage.

01:15:06.000 Right.

01:15:06.000 So 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?

01:15:17.000 Those are the leading edge ones at really the front lines of this.

01:15:22.000 But it can't just be an on-shoring strategy.

01:15:24.000 I love on-shoring, and I would love for that to be the long-run steady state.

01:15:27.000 Quicker ways to do this as well.

01:15:29.000 Broader agreements with South Korea and Japan.

01:15:32.000 I mean, Samsung is still further along than any company is in the US, even though TSMC is still further along than Samsung.

01:15:39.000 So if we're serious about decoupling our dependence on China or Taiwan, we have to take an all-of-the-above approach. 0.96

01:15:46.000 And I think that's what's different than a lot of people who might share my views but just stick to onshoring alone.

01:15:51.000 Yeah, I love onshoring.

01:15:52.000 But ally shoring has to be something that we complement that with. 0.99

01:15:56.000 And 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

01:16:22.000 straight to Taiwan's head? Do we worry that they go like, oh wow, we're kind of up shit creek here. 1.00

01:16:28.000 Well, Taiwan should be focusing on defending itself right now. And I would say in the meantime, 0.92

01:16:32.000 the US should run one destroyer through the Taiwan Strait every week. We should absolutely 0.82

01:16:37.000 work with India to have an ability to block the Andaman Sea and the Malacca Strait. 0.80

01:16:43.000 That's where China actually gets 60% of its Middle Eastern oil supplies.

01:16:47.000 Or 60% of all of its oil supplies, which come from the Middle East, come through that strait.

01:16:51.000 So there's a range of things we need to be doing.

01:16:54.000 I love the Second Amendment here.

01:16:55.000 How about the Second Amendment in Taiwan?

01:16:57.000 China's deathly afraid of anything that resembles the Second Amendment. 0.65

01:17:00.000 Put a gun in every Taiwanese household. 1.00

01:17:02.000 Taiwan's government could.

01:17:03.000 Train them how to use it.

01:17:04.000 So there are elements of what we call a porcupine- I mean, absolutely.

01:17:08.000 That's another thing that we talked about last week.

01:17:11.000 They 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. 0.53

01:17:18.000 Well, imagine if those people were carrying, like, a lot of people here in Texas at that music festival.

01:17:21.000 When people say, what a good gun!

01:17:23.000 Hey, yeah, it absolutely will.

01:17:25.000 It'll certainly even the odds when they're Fortnite hang-gliding in, knowing that these people are defendants. 0.59

01:17:30.000 Keep in mind, I was raised in Canada, which is a very silly place, I'm ashamed, and no one there owns or carries guns.

01:17:35.000 So the Second Amendment was created for a very specific purpose and it works. 0.55

01:17:38.000 Right.

01:17:38.000 Okay, when you're talking about foreign invasion, autocrats invading, even your own government invading.

01:17:43.000 That's what it was designed to do.

01:17:44.000 That'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?

01:17:53.000 No, I didn't say that.

01:17:54.000 But it's part of a broader view of taking what you think of a porcupine strategy to keep Taiwan on its own feet.

01:18:00.000 Taiwan's spending less than 2% of its GDP on military right now.

01:18:04.000 I mean, that's less than the NATO commitment.

01:18:05.000 Taiwan should be spending 5 plus percent of GDP on military, which is why I love Israel as a partner. 0.96

01:18:09.000 They actually spend for their own national defense.

01:18:11.000 That's a good friend and a good ally.

01:18:13.000 So when the U.S.

01:18:15.000 is clear about what our objectives are, then Absolutely.

01:18:18.000 Right now, and people forget this, the Republican Party, these people are such jokers, the current U.S.

01:18:23.000 posture towards Taiwan is strategic ambiguity.

01:18:29.000 The one China policy is the policy of both parties right now as we speak.

01:18:33.000 I 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.

01:18:39.000 He was laughed at by both parties, violating diplomatic protocol.

01:18:42.000 Yeah, that's the same GOP that somehow says that we somehow stand with Taiwan.

01:18:47.000 We don't recognize its existence as a nation. 1.00

01:18:49.000 So I say out with the crap. 0.99

01:18:50.000 Let's focus on reality. 0.98

01:18:53.000 We 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. 0.76

01:19:01.000 Return to that five years from now after we're semiconductor independent, we're strictly better off.

01:19:05.000 So let me clarify, because I think a lot of people miss this.

01:19:06.000 You are saying that you would switch a stance to, we are officially defending Taiwan, as opposed to this moral ambiguity.

01:19:11.000 And then, when we achieve semiconductor independence, we'll go back to what Biden did.

01:19:11.000 Yes.

01:19:15.000 The status quo is.

01:19:16.000 Yeah, which is kind of like, eh, will we, won't we?

01:19:18.000 The entire Republican establishment, too.

01:19:20.000 Oh, yes, everybody.

01:19:20.000 But we're strictly better off then.

01:19:22.000 And by the way, in the meantime, we should fortify our homeland defenses, cyber defenses, super EMP defenses, border defenses, nuclear missile defenses.

01:19:29.000 Taiwan can spend more of its own military spending on GDP.

01:19:32.000 We've been running destroyers through the Taiwan Strait. 1.00

01:19:34.000 Xi Jinping would have to be an idiot to invade Taiwan. 0.99

01:19:37.000 In the meantime, have that economic gun to our head, forget about it, we're independent. 1.00

01:19:40.000 And afterwards, We're in a better position, and Taiwan's in a better position than they've ever been. 0.99

01:19:44.000 So be more aggressive in the interim.

01:19:46.000 And then go back.

01:19:46.000 Yes.

01:19:47.000 That's, I think, the key point that people missed.

01:19:48.000 That's the key point.

01:19:49.000 They made it sound like you were going, all right, see you Taiwan.

01:19:51.000 No, 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.

01:19:59.000 But this is what I've said at every step of the way.

01:20:02.000 Upgrade from the status quo, and then return to the status quo, but upgrade during the window.

01:20:07.000 Which gives Taiwan some lead time to start getting their act together. 0.99

01:20:09.000 And allows us to get our act together.

01:20:11.000 And we can pull in Afghanistan, and maybe leave one of those destroyers in the strait. 1.00

01:20:15.000 We just forget, has a few pallets of cash, and Uncle Sam's not the wiser.

01:20:19.000 What do you say to somebody's critique, though?

01:20:21.000 And I don't dislike this strategy.

01:20:23.000 My strategy is to go on the defensive for Taiwan, period. 0.99

01:20:26.000 We are going to defend Taiwan.

01:20:27.000 That's what I'm saying, too.

01:20:29.000 No, no, no, I understand that.

01:20:29.000 But 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.

01:20:36.000 Strategic ambiguity is just a term for all of us.

01:20:39.000 We all know that if China invades Taiwan, we're coming to the aid, and so is South Korea and Japan, right?

01:20:44.000 I think we all kind of understand that's likely.

01:20:47.000 I mean, at a time where we're running low on munitions.

01:20:50.000 Got Ukraine, got Israel. 0.98

01:20:53.000 We're running low on our naval capacity.

01:20:56.000 I don't think that China sees a scenario right now, automatically, that the U.S.

01:20:59.000 is going to be in a position to defend.

01:21:00.000 Would you say that they normally do?

01:21:04.000 Normally, outside of the Ukraine conflict right now and outside of that policy…

01:21:07.000 I would say four years ago, they did.

01:21:09.000 Okay.

01:21:10.000 So you're saying the situation's changed.

01:21:12.000 Our naval capacity, we have this silly thing called the Divest to Invest Program, where we're

01:21:16.000 decommissioning ships in the South China Sea. So there's a lot of reason… our economic

01:21:20.000 dependence on China has only gone up over the last eight to 10 years. And if we depend on

01:21:24.000 China for our other modern way of life, the F-35s that we make in this country depend on 1.00

01:21:28.000 China for their parts. So things have changed. And so I do think that the diplomatic clarity,

01:21:34.000 not strategic ambiguity, strategic clarity… That we will defend Taiwan.

01:21:38.000 That's actually really important.

01:21:40.000 Especially because the situation changed.

01:21:41.000 No, that's a good answer for it, because I've heard critique, and I wanted to kind of understand your position.

01:21:45.000 I actually, yeah, and I actually really like that answer.

01:21:47.000 And by the way, Navy was fantastic, till the village people screwed it up for the rest. 1.00

01:21:50.000 I'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.

01:22:02.000 What I don't know is are they going to be able to hear it.

01:22:04.000 You know who else will agree?

01:22:05.000 Japan.

01:22:06.000 Yeah.

01:22:07.000 Absolutely.

01:22:07.000 A lot of people understand it's just a hop and a skip away.

01:22:11.000 So a lot of those economic drivers, right, where they would say, oh, okay, this makes sense.

01:22:15.000 So 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.

01:22:27.000 They 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.

01:22:32.000 Okay, we can now understand what our agreement is.

01:22:35.000 Hey, you know what?

01:22:36.000 Reaching your NATO spending is a good start.

01:22:39.000 That's right.

01:22:40.000 And 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.

01:22:49.000 That's how the media portrayed it.

01:22:50.000 And I think it's a very important differentiation to make, because a lot of people are not aware of how that also ties into Japan.

01:22:55.000 Look, this is something we have to talk about, too.

01:22:57.000 And this is the thing that's frustrating in this process.

01:23:01.000 It's a game.

01:23:02.000 It's a distortion about what gets – I love these formats right here in this discussion.

01:23:07.000 And I was thinking about this in the flight over because it happened in a different context earlier today.

01:23:11.000 The future is going to be media that looks like this.

01:23:14.000 Long form, we're able to explain ourselves, go directly to the actual listener.

01:23:18.000 But right now we're in this intermediate era.

01:23:21.000 Where very few people are doing this kind of format.

01:23:24.000 I'm doing this, the whole campaign was based on this.

01:23:27.000 But we're doing this in an era where the legacy media is still relevant.

01:23:31.000 So what do they do?

01:23:32.000 They'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.

01:23:39.000 But that's the projection that still much of the generally older Republican primary base still gets served to them.

01:23:45.000 So 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.

01:23:51.000 But this is going to be the way of the future.

01:23:53.000 But 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,

01:24:21.000 That the Super PAC is watching this, and is watching what they're going to distort from what came out of this conversation.

01:24:26.000 And 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. 0.99

01:24:35.000 On CNN or Fox News, there'll be a clip of you saying, I, Vivek, Jews, hate, kill Taiwan! 0.98

01:24:41.000 And they'll say, there you go! 0.99

01:24:42.000 Made by AI, exactly!

01:24:45.000 American or not, you decide! 0.90

01:24:50.000 Alright, 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.

01:25:01.000 So what's the G?

01:25:02.000 Is that your middle name?

01:25:02.000 That's my middle initial, because Vivek Ramaswamy's already taken on the Twitter handle.

01:25:05.000 Really?

01:25:06.000 How many are there?

01:25:06.000 Is it like Scott Smith?

01:25:08.000 I mean, it's like, you know, if you go to India, there's not quite like a Scott Smith, but it might be like a Scott...

01:25:13.000 You know, Crowder.

01:25:15.000 Crowder.

01:25:16.000 There are a few of them.

01:25:17.000 That's like Thiago Silva is like John Smith in Brazil.

01:25:21.000 I've known so many Brazilians.

01:25:22.000 I've known five Thiagos and I've known 12 Silvas. 1.00

01:25:25.000 All right.

01:25:27.000 Thank you so much for taking the time.

01:25:28.000 And folks, leave your comments, leave your feedback, because you're a big sample size.

01:25:32.000 And hey, I really do appreciate that you have the fortitude to do this.

01:25:35.000 A lot of candidates are afraid.

01:25:37.000 You know this is going to be unedited.

01:25:39.000 Yeah, that's how I like it.

01:25:40.000 Yeah.

01:25:40.000 Thank you, brother.

01:25:41.000 Thanks, man.

Louder with Crowder - October 16, 2023

How Vivek Plans to Save the World - Ukraine, Israel, Deep State & Donald Trump

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