Ep 177 | Why the 'Anti-Woke Crusader' Is Running for President | Vivek Ramaswamy | The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 14 minutes
Words per Minute
195.18991
Summary
Vivek Ramaswamy announces his presidential campaign and it confused mainstream media. He s someone who understands the serious implications of tech and energy revolutions. He wants to replace the world s in the world economic forums, stakeholder capitalism with excellence capitalism. He realizes what s at stake for America and has some very bold ideas about how to rescue it.
Transcript
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Leading up to the 2024 election, I am devoting an entire series of episodes of the Glenn Beck
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podcast to conversations with presidential candidates. It hopefully will be more than
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one with each candidate. But I want you to understand my job is not to help or hurt any
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candidate. There is no agenda except for asking fair, vital questions. I am who I am. So I,
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you know, I'm not necessarily the best hider of how I feel, but I want you to know it is
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my number one objective to make every single candidate feel comfortable so I can ask the
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questions you want asked. We need candidates to be crystal clear about who they are and what they
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stand for. These are essential conversations that I don't think you'll get on a debate stage.
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The first episode, my guest today in this series, just recently announced his candidacy and it
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confused mainstream media. They can't figure out why the anti ESG guy is running for president.
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He's someone who understands the serious implications of tech and energy revolutions.
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He wants to replace the world's in the world economic forums, stakeholder capitalism with
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excellence capitalism. He realizes what's at stake for America and has some very bold ideas about how
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to rescue it. If you haven't been introduced to this candidate yet, buckle up. Episode one,
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Vivek Ramaswamy. Before we get started, I want to tell you about Eden Pure. They're sponsoring this
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Vivek, when did you first start thinking, maybe I should run for president?
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I mean, in a serious way, December. It's actually pretty recent. It sort of hit me in early December.
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There was something about the way I, I can't say exactly why, but I think it was because I,
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the way I thought I saw the race shaping up, it worried me a little bit that it was going to become
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this battle of biographies, right? I mean, that's at least, and that's at least the media coverage of
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it, right? You got Trump over here. DeSantis says he's going to declare in June. It's going to be this
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political brawl. And to me, that was a lost opportunity where this is a chance to define
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a national identity. It's what I've been trying to do through a lot of my other work, you know,
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taking on the ESG movement and otherwise. So, so it hit me in December, but I'm still running
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strive at full tilt. You know, we, we hit some important milestones in November and December.
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Then we got to Christmas break where that was the first time in a long time that my family and I
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have together gotten to totally unplug. We actually took a trip to Mexico.
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It was, it was divine family time together, but then, you know, you start to take a step back
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and think about why you're doing what you're doing just every day. I mean, I don't mean
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professionally, just why are we going through the motions, right? And this thing about our missing
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national identity. I mean, it just nodded me, right? I mean, I think for me and for my wife too,
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these are, it's deeply personal what this country allowed us to achieve. We've lived the full arc of
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the American dream. We just had kids. That's, you know, three, one's three years old, one,
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seven months old. That changes the way you view the world too. And I thought, look, as much as I was,
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and in many ways I'm continuing to like you address the top down threats to liberty and prosperity,
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this merger of state power and corporate power, that's far more powerful than big government alone.
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Those are important forces to take on, but if we're being honest, they can only sell it if
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somebody's buying it. Correct. Right. And so what is it about our culture? What is it about,
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frankly, my generation? What is it about the next generation, my kids' generation that
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makes us so hungry for this victimhood mentality, makes us so hungry for purpose?
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Well, I think it's, I think it's the black hole in the vacuum actually. I mean, the way I look at
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this, I don't mean to be, get philosophical right out of the bat here, but I just think we human
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beings, we're like bats. We're lost in a cave, we're blind, and we figure out where we are in that cave by
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sending out sonar signals. It's like echolocation. You figure out where you are when you're blind by
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getting a signal back. So there's these pillars of truth in life. Okay. Family is something true.
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It's, it's the unit that brought me into this world or raises me in it. Okay. My belief in God
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is grounded in truth. That's something real. My, my status as a citizen of a nation, that's real.
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My hard work, even the things I create through my hard work, that's real. I mean, whatever these
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sources of identity are, we send out a signal and we get it back and say, okay, that's who I am in
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relation to my nation. That's who I am in relation to my family. That's who I am.
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In relation to God, in relation to what I work hard to create. Well, it turns out we live in a
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moment where those things have all disappeared. Faith is on the decline. Patriotism is, is nearly
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gone in this country. Family as an idea, as an institution is, is under assault. You have to be
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defensive if you talk about family today, hard work. And we've created the conditions for, I think,
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an epidemic of, of laziness and lethargy in our country. But the sources of identity that used to
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fill our vacuum of purpose and meaning and identity, they're gone. So what do you have
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left? You have a black hole, you have a vacuum. And then when you have a vacuum that runs that deep,
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that is when poison begins to fill the void. And that's what lends the entire population to be
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susceptible, to be vulnerable to cynical exploitation by the likes of those who, you know,
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be it the ESG movement, be it DI, be it the rise of wokeism or transgenderism or gender ideology or
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covidism or climatism, which seems to be the biggest one that's here to stay. They're preying
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on that insecurity. They're preying on that black hole. And they're creating that black hole,
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creating it and then preying on it, right? First is the assault. Yeah. And then you have the black hole
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and you fill the vacuum with poison. And so to me, I was, I'm a little bit disappointed in our
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movement in that we're not rising to the occasion to do any more than just stamping the poison out
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to complain about it. We need to fill that void with something more rich and meaningful. I don't
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know if I'm going to do it, but I'm going to give it a try. Right. And that's what I'm called to do.
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Here's the, here's the problem with that. You know, great presidents, uh, Ronald Reagan,
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this is who we are. Government is the problem. We are the solution. That's evil. We're good. Okay.
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John F. Kennedy, we're going to go there and bring somebody back, send them there and bring them back.
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Yep. Could not be done. We don't have anyone giving vision. Everybody, everybody's vision is
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save it. Just save it. Just save it. You're not going anywhere. That's right. If you're just playing
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defense all the time, it's, it's, it's, it's all defensive. And I think that's inherent. So there's
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Reagan was an exception to this, but most of the great, whether or not you agree with their vision,
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but most of the great visionaries as American presidents actually have not come from the
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conservative camp. I mean, FDR had his new deal, right? JFK had his new frontier. Reagan was a
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bit of an exception. It's what made him so special. He had an actual vision, but conservatives are about
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either pointing out problems, which need to be pointed out. And I give Donald Trump a lot of
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credit in 2015 and 2016 for what he did in this country, pointing out problems that no one else
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was willing to point out. He blew walls up. He did. He revealed, I mean, the corruption that we
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wouldn't have seen from China to the media, to the linkage between government and the private
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sector, to the administrative bureaucracy. I mean, he's a hero for that, but it's
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different than saying, okay, that's an actual vision. That's our promised land. That's where
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we're going to go as a people. And for me, I mean, you probably saw it in the, you know,
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where we framed this campaign. That's what I'm trying to do here. The new American dream,
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what we call the new dream. FDR had his new deal. We have our new dream. It's an affirmative
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vision of what America can be. And the good news is it's not as hard as you think, because a lot of
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this just involves reviving the basic ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago. We don't
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have to reinvent it. Correct. We just have to rediscover it. We have to reboot the system.
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I've been saying a lot lately, unplug it and plug it back in. I like that a lot. Get back to factory
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settings. I like that. Sometimes you don't know what's wrong with the computer. It's just the
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thing isn't working. Just like turn it off, turn it back on. And, and we are so far away from factory
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settings. Factory settings are 1776 settings. That's what we need in this country. Yeah,
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it is. 1791. I love, I love that. This is a period in between, right? Yeah. The whole,
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the whole period of it. Yeah. That whole era. The Declaration of Independence. All the way
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through 1789. To the Bill of Rights. Yes, exactly. When you have the Bill of Rights and the Declaration
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of Independence, you have everything you need. That's right. Everything you need. It's,
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it's set it into motion. And I really like that. Factory settings. It is. That's what we need
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to restore. And I think that some of, sometimes political partisanship, I mean, to tell you the
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truth, I was not drawn to partisan politics, right? So, so when I stepped down from my, I
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mean, who is, but you know, I stepped down from my biotech company. I knew I wanted to,
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you know, participate in driving a change in this country. I actually thought about running
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for U S Senate for all of like two weeks and then decided there was an open seat in Ohio.
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I decided, no, no, no, we're going to do it. You know, write, write books, start a new company,
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focus on learning from your lessons in the private sector to apply it through new entrepreneurial
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adventure. But part of what I don't think of myself as entering even politics in this
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presidential race, even though technically, I guess I am, but it's a technical matter.
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I'm going to be on a ballot. But, but, but the thing is this, I think that a lot of Republicans
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and Democrats too, I think are making this mistake to sort of frame the current moment through the
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lens of partisan politics and then play a 50, 50 tug of war. There's 50% of the country on this side,
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50% of this side. And you know, who wins by 51, 49 or whatever.
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I think it basically misses the real political divide in this country. It's a seven. It's kind
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of what you said. It's a 1776 moment where there's the basic ideals that set this nation into motion.
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I don't care if you're Democrat or Republican or black or white or whatever, right? We can debate
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corporate tax rates sometime. We can debate whether Ivermectin treats COVID. We'll have our space for
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that, but those are details. Okay. On the basic rules of the road, free speech, open debate to settle
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political questions. The idea that the people we elect, whoever thought ought to be the people
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who actually run the government, right? Merit, excellence, basic ideas, self-governance over
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this modern aristocracy. Are you on board with those basic ideals or not? And I think that there's a
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lot of people whose answer to that question is that they're not, but it's only about 20% of the country.
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But it is also, I bet you about 5% of that 20 don't know them. They don't know what they are.
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They don't even know what they are. That's right. It doesn't even have to be 20%. It may even be
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smaller. Yeah. It's been twisted and bent to mean something that it didn't mean. Especially if
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they're under the age of 40. I think that's especially true, right? And so I just prefer
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us looking at, let's just say the next 18 months, right? Let's not make this about Republicans
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and Democrats because it would be missing the point. It is about whether you're pro-American
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or dare I say it, anti-American. I mean, that's a word that you're not supposed to. I think there's
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an anti-American strain in our country right now. Big time. But the good news is if we frame this
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that way and make this race about the essence of what it means to be an American, what are the values
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and commitments that define your citizenship and your allegiance and your commitments, your basic
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values as an American. I think the next election can be a landslide. I think 2024 can be like
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Reagan in 1980, can be like Reagan in 84. And I couldn't think of something more unifying for the
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country than an actual tangible result like that to hang our hat on so that we can go back to debating
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corporate tax rates, but do so under conditions of free speech. What does, see, that used to be the
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difference. Take a quick break and talk to you about pain. No matter what kind of pain you're having,
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whether it's just a headache, muscle pain, or a constant nagging pain, I know what it's like.
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I dealt with pain so bad that I really didn't think that, well, let me put it this way. If it
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wasn't for relief factor, I don't think I would be sitting here today. I wouldn't, I just couldn't
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deal with it any longer. I wouldn't have been doing this job. So what got me here, I know much to the
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three weeks. It's a trial pack. If it's not working for you in three weeks, probably not going to work.
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But 70% of the people who try it go on to order more. Relief factor.com 800 for relief 800 the number
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four relief relief factor.com. When I was growing up, my father and everybody else that I knew at the
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time, they could talk to Democrats and Republicans and they'd have huge disagreements. Yeah. But those
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were policies. That's right. They agreed on the principles. We don't agree on principles anymore
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and nobody is talking about them. So let me go to the principles. What, what does it mean to be an
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American? So I think I'm going to go in no particular order here, but I think among other
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things, it means that you believe in the pursuit of excellence and merit. Okay. That you actually get
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ahead in this country. As Martin Luther King said it, not in the color of your skin, but on the
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content of your character and your contributions that your own hard work, commitment and dedication
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get you ahead in this country means you believe in the rule of law. I mean, tangibly, what does that
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mean today? It means that your first act of entering this country can't be a lawbreaking one. We can talk
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about the policies that follow these principles, but back to the principles. It means you believe
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in the rule of law, that we're a nation of laws, not of men. And then perhaps one of the biggest
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ones of all is that we, the people decide how we settle our political differences. We, the people
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decide how we're governed. Not somebody sitting in the back of a palace wall in old world Europe,
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not somebody sitting in a back room of park Avenue today for better or worse. And this is a crucial
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part of the American bargain. And I think we should be open about this sometimes for the better.
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And even sometimes when we get it wrong, maybe for the worse, we, the people as citizens decide
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how we move our political future forward, where everyone's voice and vote counts equally,
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regardless of the number of green pieces of paper you control in the market, regardless of what your
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genetically inherited attributes are, the citizens of this nation govern themselves. I think that's a big
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part of what it means to be American. And I think there's one more piece to this, Glenn, which, which I
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think we've missed in the last 10 years, which is just take those set of ideals. And I could enumerate
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a few more and they're, they're all grounded in the founding of this country, but there's one more
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piece of it that, that, that started at the founding, but it actually is everything that happened since
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then, all the way through the cold war actually is that set of ideals, our conviction that those ideals
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are exceptional, that those ideals make us exceptional, that those ideals are what American
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exceptionalism is actually all about. It's not about the exceptionalism of the geographic space,
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beautiful as our country is. So the exceptionalism of the ideas that set those,
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set this entire nation into motion and just a conviction that we have a responsibility to
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preserve them because the rest of the free world looks up to them as their example. That too
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is actually part of what it really means to be American today, not just in 1776, because those guys
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didn't know that that was going to be the case. They may have had some vision and hope for it,
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but they set it into motion. But part of what it means to be American is to embrace that
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with unapologetic pride and even responsibility to say that this isn't just about making America
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itself. The world, the free world, the world, as we know, it depends on America being itself too.
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And to me, that, that is this idea of American exceptionalism. That's what it means to be American
00:17:43.340
too. Let's talk about American exceptions a little bit. It has been denigrated by people who do not like
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America or who have only focused on the bad things on the flip side. You have people who are raw,
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raw America and it's red, white, and blue and Eagle. And there's an F 16. Okay. Um, and neither of
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those are true. Um, and, and we have, we have so distorted, um, on both sides who we truly are. You know,
00:18:17.260
when I, uh, my favorite person in history is Churchill. Love him, love him. But you read about
00:18:23.460
him from Indian historians. He's a monster. He really can attest to that. He's a monster. So
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which is he? He's both. And we're both. And we have to accept that we're both, you know,
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half the country is losing the faith. I mean, I am so close, so close. I have days. I've never had
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this before. I have days now where I am so ashamed of my country, not for the past, but for right now,
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so ashamed of my country, I would renounce my citizenship. Oh, if there was a better place to
00:19:04.040
go, but there's not, there's not a process of elimination. It shouldn't be a basis for American
00:19:08.280
pride. Right. But I I'd go any place that said the bill of rights. I go to any place that had,
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I don't think you can make a better mission statement. And that's what our declaration of
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independence is. That second paragraph is our mission statement. That is it. Mission statements
00:19:24.840
are never fully accomplished because if they are, you need a new mission statement. You know,
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this is what we're striving for. And we have to have forgiveness for the mistakes,
00:19:36.360
but we also have to learn from those mistakes. And there's zero learning curve. In fact, we're,
00:19:43.680
we are just going back into the darkest places we've ever been.
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I think there's something really deep about what you said, right? I think that it's not just about
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idolatry. American exceptional F-16s and eagles and red, white, and blue flags, right? That's just
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idol worship. You have to understand what does that symbolize? And what it symbolizes has a fraught,
00:20:06.080
history beneath it. Why is it fraught though? Even our worst hypocrisies are only made possible
00:20:13.040
by the fact that we had a bill of rights at all, that we had a declaration of independence at all,
00:20:17.960
that we had ideals. I mean, go to communist China today, you say what you will about them.
00:20:23.060
You're never going to be able to call them a hypocrite because in order to be a hypocrite,
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you have to have ideals. So in a certain sense, the failures that I think the modern left or
00:20:32.420
whatever obsesses over, it's proof of the fact that we have ideals that we measure ourselves
00:20:37.820
against. We are fallen human beings. We're human beings. We're not God. We're not gods roaming a
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divine landscape. This is earth. We're human beings in the real world who fall short of the ideals we
00:20:48.280
set for ourselves. But that's what America is. It's not about perfection. Is it the pursuit of
00:20:53.320
perfection? The pursuit of liberty? The pursuit of happiness? The pursuit of justice?
00:20:57.740
America is, in many ways, it used the word striving. It's a word near and dear to my heart
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too, but we choose that for a reason. America itself is about, it's not static.
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It's about the pursuit. It's about the journey to where we will go and maybe the whole journey to
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take that promised land analogy. Maybe we never get there because the whole promised land was the
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pursuit of it itself. That is the American identity. And our commitment to that, that's part of what
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American exceptionalism is about too, because no other nation in human history has its national
00:21:29.420
identity grounded in principles in the way that we do. And I think that that's a great invention such
00:21:34.800
that, you know what, you know, so I grew up in a Hindu tradition, right? So I was raised Hindu. I'm
00:21:39.600
Hindu today. There's this idea of, you know, the reincarnation of the actual soul. It's a metaphor,
00:21:47.060
really. People read these things very literally, but it's a metaphor for taking the essence of what is
00:21:52.160
true. You know, the flesh, the idol, whatever, that's artificial. Nations don't have to die the
00:21:59.180
way people do. They can be constantly reborn as something else. So if you took, if you told me
00:22:03.260
we were taking the constitution and the declaration of independence and the bill of rights and the
00:22:08.240
vision that set this nation to motion, and it was reborn in something else that you called,
00:22:13.340
you know, what you said on a bad day, a different country that you want to be a part of. Great.
00:22:16.920
That country is America. That's the way I look at it. This is just a hollowed out husk of itself.
00:22:21.120
But you know what? I don't think we're quite there. I actually think there's on a much more
00:22:25.440
practical level with that philosophical backdrop to one side. I think this is an assertion. I don't
00:22:31.460
have polling data to back this up. Only the fact that I've traveled a majority of states in this
00:22:34.720
country in the last couple of years. And I know my neighbors in central Ohio, where if you take a
00:22:38.940
cross section of it, that's a pretty good cross section of the country. Actually, I think that most
00:22:43.940
Americans believe in these basic ideals, the ones you and I just talked about from self-governance to
00:22:48.600
free speech to merit and so on. Most Americans, not all of them, most of them agree on these ideals.
00:22:55.180
And most of them, even further than that, I think deeply believe and think that their neighbors and
00:23:03.000
their colleagues are good and their classmates are good and believe these things to be true also.
00:23:09.020
But they can't be quite sure anymore because you're not allowed to talk about it in the open.
00:23:14.200
Correct. Right. So the first step for me is, and that's what creates this culture of fear.
00:23:19.000
Fear is infectious. I'm going to use an analogy from chemistry here. Okay. But fear is infectious
00:23:25.560
and it spreads automatically. But courage can be contagious too. It just requires a higher
00:23:32.340
activation energy. What does that mean? It requires a greater critical mass of people to
00:23:36.380
exhibit courage. But after you do that, it's a hair trigger away from an epidemic of courage too.
00:23:40.980
I think we can get there. One of the entire premises for, I mean, less this presidential
00:23:46.420
campaign, but that too, but what I've been doing over the last three years, a lot of what you do,
00:23:50.260
I think is in service of getting us over that activation energy, that hump, where once we get
00:23:56.700
there, we're a hair's trigger away from a national revival. Because the reality is, I think 80% of this
00:24:01.820
country agrees on those basic principles. There's been a perversion for all the reasons, you know,
00:24:06.480
you and I are familiar with where the 20% of the anti-American strain through both institutional
00:24:12.020
control, through the culture of the fear they've created, through the perception of a culture that's
00:24:16.760
projected onto places like social media that aren't at all actually reflecting the real culture that
00:24:21.820
they're supposed to depict. And the media. And the media itself. Those are artificial, right? Those are
00:24:26.240
just projections. But the underlying reality, if we're able to actually rediscover the underlying
00:24:32.040
reality, I think we discover that it's not as hard as we might think, actually. That's why I'm
00:24:36.440
optimistic. That's why federalism is so right. Because all of these problems are happening in
00:24:42.480
power centers. That's right. But I go to my town, I go, I live in a small town up in Idaho. There are
00:24:50.120
Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and we could all sit down if it was our town and we could fix it.
00:24:56.380
We could fix it. But this, what they've created is this idea that it's so huge, there's no way to get
00:25:06.380
around it. You will sit down and shut up and take it because we know what's best. And people have,
00:25:15.780
you know, the Tea Party, big movement, but people believe, they didn't know the deep state. We didn't
00:25:22.740
know the deep state yet. We didn't know really what we were up against. We thought we were up
00:25:27.660
against some bad Republicans, you know, and some bad Democrats. Not a permanent state that actually
00:25:33.740
governed the whole show. Not a permanent state. Right? It was the wrong debate to no one's fault
00:25:38.700
because there was a deeper underlying cancer. Correct. But, you know, now we know, right? Okay. So
00:25:44.520
how do you, how do you cut that out? So, so I'll tell you, I mean, this is part of what compels me to
00:25:53.620
run for the presidency. Okay. I don't think even the best intentioned, capable, unifying leader can
00:26:00.880
take on that permanent state while still leaving it intact. I think you need to be willing to take
00:26:06.820
steps and the exercise of executive power as laid out in article to the constitution to do what a
00:26:12.840
president is constitutionally empowered to do. You have to shut down the administrative state.
00:26:17.860
Not. Well, it's under his direction. He can do it. Exactly. So, so this is what a lot of people
00:26:22.100
miss. If you don't mind getting into the details. No, not at all. Because this, this is the how is
00:26:27.480
also. I said the what and the why. Well, the how kind of matters too. Right? So, so the reason Trump
00:26:33.240
wasn't able to do it. Okay. I know a lot of the policy people who have served in the administration,
00:26:37.560
they've taken, you know, I would say delicate views around issues like civil service protections,
00:26:43.100
right? So Congress has these civil service protections that say that you can't be fired
00:26:46.880
for most positions in the federal government. Now, towards the very end, the Trump administration
00:26:50.880
came around to the schedule F sort of, I don't know if you're familiar with some of this stuff,
00:26:54.200
but they said, okay, well, we can be really clever and maybe find more employees we could fire than we
00:26:58.320
otherwise could. But as I'm going to get to in a second, that's the wrong framework. Okay.
00:27:02.200
You have these under Nixon, we have these laws that I think actually created the managerial cancer
00:27:09.880
what are called impoundment prevention provision. So there's a 1974 anti impoundment act that was
00:27:15.660
passed. What does it say? If Congress allocates money for a specific agency, even if the president
00:27:20.940
who's running the executive branch knows that it ought not be spent there, that it's going to go
00:27:25.460
to waste, fraud, abuse, not advancing the interests of the American people, that he still has to spend it
00:27:30.420
there per this congressional law. Then you have public employee union protection. So there's a
00:27:34.480
whole, there's a whole pieces to this edifice where a lot of time Republicans who, you know,
00:27:39.940
get it, get, you know, like I am up on a high horse against the deep state, we'll say that I'm going to
00:27:45.600
do these things, but we need to do it by repealing all of these provisions. I'm all in favor of repealing
00:27:50.920
them. Here's the dirty little secret. Not only Democrats, but even a lot of Republicans resist repealing
00:27:57.260
those kinds of protections because secretly deep down inside, they too are believers in the permanent
00:28:00.760
state. Correct. Well, this is why running for president is actually the right way to have a best fighting
00:28:06.080
chance of fixing this. In my view, I'm really explicit about this under article two of the
00:28:11.620
constitution. All of those laws are unconstitutional. And I bring a perspective from the private sector as
00:28:18.420
somebody who's actually built companies and run companies and fired people and fired people, hired people to
00:28:23.220
it. Exactly. To interpret an obvious fact of article two of the constitution, that if somebody
00:28:29.340
works for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't work for you. It means you work for them.
00:28:38.600
I would go so far as to say, it means you are their slave because you don't know why you're responsible
00:28:43.100
for what they do without even having any ability to direct it. And that's actually the unfortunate,
00:28:49.220
and I feel bad for him. That's an unfortunate position that president Trump found himself in.
00:28:53.820
He thought the people were working for him and he was draining the swamp. The swamp drained him
00:28:58.400
because if you can't fire them or you believe or your advisors and your legal teams, et cetera,
00:29:02.280
tell you you can't fire them, then that means you work for them. And you know what? That's exactly
00:29:06.280
how they view you. I see that in the federal government. I see it firsthand from my last journey
00:29:11.020
at Strive in the 50 states across this country, right? Go to a pension fund investment committee
00:29:16.020
or go to a pension fund board. They view a governor or a state treasurer as nothing more than a
00:29:21.300
nuisance, right? It's sort of a laughing scoff. We sort of say, oh, your attorney general,
00:29:26.140
your governor, and your treasurer had this to say, and yet here you are investing in an ESG
00:29:31.380
promoting BlackRock fund that made these votes. How do you square that? The answer I usually get is,
00:29:36.260
oh, I don't report to them. To which my response is, well, to whom exactly do you report then?
00:29:42.440
In which case you get no answer. Blank stare in responses that were an irrelevant question or
00:29:46.420
almost a cute question. Because obviously- Oh, I remember when I was young and naive.
00:29:50.680
Yeah, and I thought that too. No, no, you don't understand how it works. These guys are figuring.
00:29:54.100
Well, that problem starts with the federal government. And so my answer is, I think, you know, over the next
00:29:59.940
six months, we're going to literally delineate. I've identified one already.
00:30:04.460
Have you talked to a constitutional scholar on this?
00:30:07.040
I have. Yeah. And I think I'm going to be really frank about this. It is not uncontested,
00:30:13.580
right? There are a lot of people who will say that I'm dead wrong on this. I think there are a lot of
00:30:18.440
people who will say that, you know what, actually, though that hasn't been the way that it's been read
00:30:23.040
for the last 30 to 40 years, post-Nixon, post-anti-impoundment, that actually that is just a textual
00:30:29.680
reading of the Constitution. And that makes sense. And we've had textualists on the court.
00:30:33.360
So the other thing I've been doing is then studying up what the current Supreme Court would
00:30:38.060
actually think, because this is not the Supreme Court of 20 years ago. Yes. And so it is my view
00:30:42.440
that there's a real opportunity to not only do this. I'm going to do it by executive. I'm going
00:30:47.040
to be a team player, right? Well, if my prediction that this is going to be a landslide election,
00:30:51.020
let's say I'm the person who wins it, okay, is correct. Great. I'd rather work with Congress and the
00:30:55.640
Senate to do it. But even if it's majority Republicans, I'm not at all convinced that those
00:30:59.660
Republicans are going to come along for this ride, which is actually what matters. Because
00:31:02.660
like I said to you, I could care less about Republicans and Democrats. I care about self
00:31:05.580
governance. So I hope those Republicans will come along. I hope it's not just Republicans
00:31:09.260
in a landslide, but it's the right Republicans. But if it's not, I intend to act by executive
00:31:13.720
authority anyway, not because I'm a despot or I want to be despot, but because the Constitution
00:31:18.440
not only empowers a president to run the executive branch of the government, the Constitution
00:31:23.120
requires its responsibility for the president to run the executive branch of the government.
00:31:26.740
His cabinet. It is. And that means not just complaining to the media about it, as important
00:31:30.900
as exposing the problem was under Trump, it means actually doing something about it. And
00:31:34.780
that basic private sector perspective of just what an employment arrangement looks like reads
00:31:39.740
right onto what the Constitution demands. So then what's going to happen? They're going
00:31:42.660
to sue, right? Somebody who's somebody who gets fired is going to sue. So I can't make
00:31:47.620
any promises. I don't control what the Supreme Court does. But as you know, I'm a student
00:31:52.200
of these things and I like to at least have an educated view going in. I think there's
00:31:57.460
a real opportunity and a likelihood that the Supreme Court will take the same view of Article
00:32:02.840
2 of the Constitution that I do, which you know what that does? It codifies this in judicial
00:32:07.100
precedent. Those laws are gone. If you want to change it and you want a fourth branch of
00:32:11.420
government, be my guest and amend the Constitution. Try that with 75 percent of the states getting
00:32:15.500
behind it. Ain't going to happen because the people in this country believe in self-governance.
00:32:19.160
And in the meantime, the three branch system that we actually set in motion in 1776 is
00:32:23.980
the one that survives. So that's so when you think about like, why am I running for president?
00:32:28.560
Look, there's a part of this that's a cultural component, a cultural leadership component of
00:32:32.340
just reviving an American missing national identity to lead us by way of a national leader
00:32:37.800
who can offer vision and even symbolism of what this country can be. But part of it's the
00:32:42.220
hard stuff, right? Part of it's the actual knit and grit and technical of running the executive
00:32:47.140
branch of the government, which I'm sorry to say we haven't had a president who's actually done
00:32:53.620
Quickly, and then back to the podcast, I want you to listen to something.
00:32:56.860
Nobody thinks that I can take their house and borrow against the house. Oh, no, I have title
00:33:00.740
insurance for that. No, it's in my name or he would have to get some special document. They would
00:33:05.760
call me, you know what he's calling you after I've stolen the title, borrowed against it or sold the
00:33:11.460
property or done whatever I've done with it. It's 60 to 90 days even figure out that they're the
00:33:16.340
victim of this crime. You know, by that point, you start getting foreclosure notices and you realize
00:33:20.620
you've got four mortgages on your house. Not only that, you don't even own your home anymore. It's
00:33:24.880
not even in your name. Okay, this guy got caught forging and refiling people's home titles. But
00:33:31.640
there's a lot of people that do this that don't ever get caught. This guy was caught. Home title fraud
00:33:36.820
is on the rise in this country. And neither your standard identity theft programs nor your homeowner's
00:33:42.240
insurance will protect you from this. That's why I ask you to at least look into home title lock,
00:33:47.580
you might already be a victim and not know it. Go to home title lock.com get a free title scan with
00:33:52.560
sign up. You need to verify your home is still in your name. Use the promo code back you get 30 days
00:33:58.680
free protection at home title lock.com promo code back. You know what happened to Reagan. I mean,
00:34:08.800
Reagan talked about closing up the Fed, closing up the Department of Education, and they destroyed him.
00:34:18.020
I mean, the Fed can do a lot of damage to a report to the president's approval rating.
00:34:25.300
Yeah. Oh, it's in their control, right? So here's my view on I mean, we're talking about monetary
00:34:30.420
policy here. Are you okay to geek out a little bit here? Yeah. So the entire premise behind the
00:34:39.360
modern Federal Reserve just misses the mark. Okay, there's this, you know, there's this thing called
00:34:45.760
the Phillips curve. Okay, the whole thing, the whole the whole modern monetary policy rests on this idea.
00:34:52.440
I don't know if we can see it, but I'll just explain it to you here. Okay, is is that there's a trade off
00:34:57.880
between inflation and employment. Okay. And so the Federal Reserve's job is to optimize across those by
00:35:05.480
playing God with the monetary system. There's so many things wrong with this. But the number one thing
00:35:10.540
that's wrong with it is that the premise is itself false. Actually, it's based on old British data,
00:35:17.320
outdated from a small sample set. And somehow that found its way into the bloodstream,
00:35:22.760
which means the Federal Reserve is actually hostile by definition, to employment in this
00:35:28.660
country. Because by definition, full employment on the Phillips curve model, where there's a trade
00:35:33.120
off between inflation and full employment, full employment is a signal of a humming economy that's
00:35:37.580
a predictor of inflation, which means they need to raise rates into that, and vice versa. So if that
00:35:42.620
whole premise is false, what does it even reveal? That's just the academic mistake. The deeper
00:35:47.580
mistake of hubris is to think that any central planner, and this is a form of central planning,
00:35:52.420
could have played God as the puppet master of how the economy runs from inflation to, you know,
00:35:58.240
to employment in the country's conditions anyway. So I think the Federal Reserve, look, if I was
00:36:03.880
starting from scratch and had a say in all central bank systems in the world, would we even have
00:36:08.860
central banks? No, we would not. Yeah. But, but I'm, I'm not just running as some theorist or like
00:36:14.620
some sort of, you know, idealist here. I'm running to run the federal government of the United States
00:36:20.060
and get us as close to those ideals as we can, short of abolishing the Federal Reserve, which I
00:36:24.580
couldn't, I told you I'm going to shut down the Department of Education. I'm going to shut down the
00:36:27.360
Department of Education. I can tell you the constitutional authority part of what we just discussed to make
00:36:31.180
that happen, and learning from the travails of Reagan and even Trump to do it. I will not tell you
00:36:35.400
that for the Federal Reserve. Here's what I will say. The scope of responsibility of the Federal
00:36:39.360
Reserve should be reduced to doing exactly one thing, and that is making sure that we're,
00:36:44.980
the dollar is a stable currency as measured versus a basket of commodities, period. That is the only
00:36:51.420
job in the Federal Reserve. In two years, I predict we will be at war and we will be introducing a
00:37:00.500
digital currency. The damage that we are doing to the dollar right now, I don't think, I think,
00:37:08.500
I think these people want to reset. Oh, that's what they're called. There's a reason they invented
00:37:14.220
the term. Correct. So they want to reset everything, and they know, unless they know something about the,
00:37:22.040
the polling that I don't know, they know that there's a chance their rule ends in two years,
00:37:29.040
they are going to accelerate and do whatever they have to do to get that dollar to collapse so they
00:37:37.260
can have their digital currency and complete control. That's right. And get it so it's so crazy
00:37:44.220
with war that there's just no way of going back. Just one citizen to another here, okay? Can you,
00:37:49.360
but you're in a position to actually do this. I'll do what I can do. Anybody who's worth their
00:37:55.560
salt as a Republican candidate should be able to, without batting an eye, at least make a simple
00:38:00.000
commitment that they will stand opposed to the adoption of central banking digital currencies in
00:38:03.940
the United States. But here's how it's going to happen. Full stop. But I agree with you. I haven't
00:38:07.560
heard enough Republicans even say it. I just want, I just want, I mean, from Ron DeSantis to Nikki Haley to
00:38:11.520
Donald Trump, I want you, I want, I want you to be on record with me to be at least clear that this is
00:38:17.200
where we are drawing hard lines with respect to the final domino. I think we need to go in the
00:38:21.800
other direction of just constraining the scope of the Federal Reserve itself. But to the extent you
00:38:25.020
talk to these people, I mean, this has to be, some of them may not even know what it is, but we need
00:38:29.200
to actually, that needs to be a hard commitment. I talk to, I talk to people on the Intelligence
00:38:36.100
Committee. I mean, I've talked to so many people. Look, I'm 60, but I'm not dead. These people have
00:38:45.140
been in Washington for so long and they're 60, 70, 80, 90. They have no idea what digital currency
00:38:55.000
even means. We've got to have younger generation running this country. And you know what? Some of
00:39:01.800
the younger generation, I mean, somebody could be 50 and they're still dead inside because they've
00:39:04.880
still been in Washington for 20 years. And I'm not saying it's, it's, but we need a vitality of
00:39:09.920
actually, I mean, speaking of the founding, right? We talked about the principles. We probably skipped
00:39:15.280
an important topic actually, because it relates to this. We didn't talk about the founding culture
00:39:20.300
of the country. There was a culture of curiosity, right? The people who were in the equivalent of
00:39:25.620
Washington DC back then, I mean, Thomas Jefferson sat there and wrote the, took a pen and wrote the
00:39:31.300
Declaration of Independence. He was sitting in this chair. So he said, you know, it's uncomfortable.
00:39:34.100
I need a long time to write it. I'm just going to invent the swivel chair. Well, today what we say is,
00:39:37.900
oh no, no, no, you're not an expert. You're not part of the expert class. You weren't trained as
00:39:41.760
an engineer. He said, screw that. I will actually be an autodidact, teach myself because I'm curious.
00:39:47.000
I'm interested. Benjamin Franklin from the, from the, you know, from the bifocal lens to
00:39:51.500
scientific experimentation, to the fact that he's also a political philosopher.
00:40:01.940
That was a culture. That was one of the principles. It's just, is there something in the water back then?
00:40:05.400
But it was not, it was known the world over. There's a article, um, in the, uh, the London
00:40:15.020
times from the period that says, uh, Benjamin Franklin is back in like 76. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay.
00:40:23.160
Yeah. Like 70, 76, 75, somewhere in that. Benjamin Franklin is coming over and he's on this ship and
00:40:29.540
it's docking at this time. Do not be anywhere near that. He has some sort of a ray gun that he has
00:40:39.000
been, uh, crafting and he's going to decimate, uh, the entire city of, of London. I mean,
00:40:48.420
they were so far ahead that people thought it was like magic. He's doing something with the
00:40:54.760
lightning bolts. I love that. I love that. I know. Good for Benjamin Franklin. I know. And you know,
00:41:00.200
where are the Benjamin Franklin's of our time, right? Where are the Thomas Jefferson's of our
00:41:04.500
time? We have them, but they don't believe in the bill of rights. Yeah. They don't believe in the
00:41:10.560
bill of, but, but, but, but to me, when I ask where are the Benjamin Franklin's or the Thomas
00:41:14.320
Jefferson's of our time, that includes believing in the bill of rights. Yes. Okay. So to me, it's,
00:41:18.220
it's the fusion of those two things, the hunger, the intellectual curiosity,
00:41:21.680
the belief in boundless frontiers that human innovation and ingenuity can power us to go
00:41:26.980
there rather than to forever stay here, but to do so guided by the principles that got us here in
00:41:31.680
the first place. That was our founding culture. That's what we're missing in Washington, DC too.
00:41:36.880
So part of the problem is, I mean, you've got different categories of people back to this issue
00:41:40.460
of digital currencies, right? You'll have people at one camp that will say something like,
00:41:44.660
we got to stay competitive with China. Okay. But this is, and some Republicans will say this too.
00:41:48.980
I mean, is this such a boneheaded argument that I am reluctant to dignify it with even a response,
00:41:55.960
but suffice to say that, ask yourself why China wants digital currencies. Might you suppose that
00:42:01.880
they actually want to turn their social credit system and create a permanent architecture for it?
00:42:06.820
So why on earth would we want to copy them unless actually we wanted to do the same thing?
00:42:09.920
China is the new model. If I hear that from one more business person, I'm going to lose my mind.
00:42:15.580
China, Glenn, China is the new model. I don't want to be that.
00:42:18.320
You don't want to be that because they're doing it for a reason. Now, some people here
00:42:22.280
cynically may be doing it for that reason too, but the rest of them, especially in the Republican
00:42:25.140
party are just doing it to go along for them because they don't, because they don't think
00:42:27.860
any, they're not independent thinkers. They're just going through the motions. So there's that camp.
00:42:31.620
Then there's the camp that'll say something like, you know, I mean, I get this response,
00:42:36.720
right? I've spoken to half a Congress. I've spoken to the Republicans. Every time I'm in DC,
00:42:40.260
we'll, you know, we'll meet with a group of senators or Republican, you know, is in Congress
00:42:44.420
or whatever. And it's sort of just like a, like I'm like, I'm like a over-enthusiastic
00:42:50.380
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But back to talking about, you know, Medicare or social security
00:42:55.680
or whatever. And not to say those aren't important questions, but these are the things that serious
00:42:59.180
people in Washington DC are concerned about what the American people want. And if I hear
00:43:04.580
this phrase, when we're to kitchen table issues, it's just like, everything's a kitchen table
00:43:08.420
issue. If you're, if somebody controls your kitchen, right?
00:43:10.720
Yeah. So, so, so that's, there's that camp. And I think that's a big part of the camp
00:43:15.100
too, which to me is what's missing in that founding culture is, okay, I'm telling you
00:43:19.240
about something here. Do you not have the slightest bit of at least intellectual curiosity
00:43:23.680
to even learn what we just said, as opposed to just giving a pat on the back and say, yes,
00:43:29.360
you know, you need to, thanks for doing great work. You're a great patriot. That means nothing
00:43:34.480
to me because I know you didn't process what we just discussed. And then there's the, there's,
00:43:38.600
there's the camp of people who I think actually are hungry to understand that the threats to
00:43:44.260
liberty present themselves in new forms. And part of why, whether it's ESG or CBDC, that
00:43:50.800
it presents itself in the form of acronyms is that it was designed to bore you into submission.
00:43:56.420
And so that's why we need to wake up to that. And so anyway, I just think that when we talk
00:44:00.600
about the 1776 moment, yes, it's the principles, but we got to study these guys. The spirit.
00:44:05.680
We used to call it the spirit of 76. Oh, you didn't know that? It used to be called the
00:44:11.380
spirit of 76. Cool. That's kind of, that's kind of what it ought to be. The let's stay kind
00:44:19.860
of in this technological area here. I have, I have, I, I'm a wannabe futurist. I read all
00:44:30.960
of, you know, I love tech and I love the future. Dumb as a box of rocks. Can't tell
00:44:37.980
you how any of it works, but I love what's just over the horizon. Okay. And it's either
00:44:45.680
going to be fantastic or it is going to be the strongest prison man has ever seen. Apocalyptic
00:44:54.660
man will be over. And I've been saying it for 20 years. We have got to have philosophical
00:45:02.040
and ethical discussions about these things. That's right. And people are just starting
00:45:08.420
to get it. Unfortunately, this is exponential growth. You get it today. You're not going
00:45:14.960
to understand if you don't keep going, you're not going to understand what's happening in
00:45:18.900
12 months from now. Totally. I mean, the emergence of the metaverse is a big topic worth worthy of
00:45:24.360
discussion. I mean, the rise of AI and, you know, chat GPT is the latest thing in town.
00:45:28.460
So the, the moral framework for the rise in absence of that more in absence of filling
00:45:33.520
that moral vacuum we talked about earlier, right? We have that moral vacuum.
00:45:38.420
You would talk about the, the woke left or whatever that wants to prey on that vacuum.
00:45:42.880
Now imagine doing that with the supercharged turbo power of algorithmic force as well with
00:45:49.380
artificial intelligence. Then we're really working with something that we can wrap our
00:45:53.460
hands around. So, so, and Mark Zuckerberg was actually a year ahead of me at Harvard.
00:45:57.180
I, you know, adopted Facebook during its first year. I was a, as a freshman or sophomore back
00:46:02.320
then too. His insight wasn't a technological one. He is a brilliant technologist and recruited
00:46:08.680
even more brilliant ones to work for him to turn that into say what you will about the
00:46:12.540
company, at least a successful, you know, massively successful technological enterprise.
00:46:16.600
But his fundamental insight at the heart of the company wasn't even, it wasn't a technological
00:46:21.040
insight. It was an insight about human nature. The insight about human nature was that, you know
00:46:27.300
what, if I could get someone to let their insecurities click on one thing faster than
00:46:34.220
another thing, then that gives me a window into their soul. That's far deeper than they have
00:46:40.100
into their own. Actually, the first version of Facebook, you might remember this was actually
00:46:43.220
this, you know, he had this hot or not, right? Whether or not this was a hot picture or that
00:46:47.720
was a hot picture of some other classmate that he pulled from Harvard's own, you know,
00:46:50.780
directory of database of students. That was, that was the founding premise of Facebook.
00:46:54.420
It was calling a bluff on human nature. Okay. To say that you could bring out the base instincts
00:47:00.740
in us, but use the speed of somebody's action, click of a finger to gain a window into their soul
00:47:08.520
because they don't have a window into their own soul because they're suffering from that
00:47:11.080
vacuum as it exists. That was the back, that was the fundamental insight that formed the
00:47:16.020
backbone of the social media industry as we know it. Multi-trillion dollar industry to this
00:47:20.580
day to day. Twitter and everything came later and preying on the same vacuum. So, so I, that's
00:47:25.660
a long way of saying I agree with you that we have to actually get our moral foundation
00:47:30.400
straightened out as human beings in the offline world in order to fully harness the power for
00:47:38.060
human flourishing and prosperity, which I share your belief and interest in, but in order to get
00:47:42.720
it right, rather than to be consumed by it, we have to start with those basic rules of the road
00:47:47.660
and human first principles or else where AI and the algorithms will take us actually just exploit
00:47:51.980
and prey on our absence of actually doing it. In the news this week, uh, they are actually fighting
00:47:58.120
over cucumbers in, uh, in grocery stores in London. There is a vegetable and fruit shortage and in
00:48:07.960
England, their prices of food year over year are up 17%. Now, let me tell you that our, um, meat prices
00:48:17.620
are expected to go up another 15% by the end of the year. I want you to go to good ranchers,
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good ranchers.com. Use the promo code Glenn. You're going to get a box of a hundred percent
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claim your free bacon. Promo code Glenn. You know, and I know two years from now is an election.
00:49:23.460
Then another six months, the president gets in that in the AI world is huge, is huge. Um, social media,
00:49:35.380
uh, uh, is, has destroyed, I think in many ways, our family, our children, our ideals,
00:49:43.480
it's exploited and brought out the worst in people in many ways. Um, AI is being programmed
00:49:52.140
by the same people. Of course it is. Okay. And I'm a capitalist, but you know, the capitalist system
00:50:00.500
with something that reaches inside of you and just exposes who you are and they keep it and you
00:50:08.720
don't know is so dangerous. So dangerous. The difference between decentralized capitalism
00:50:15.120
versus capitalism as a tool that's deputized by central authority. That's a, those are two
00:50:20.300
different. It's a shame. It's a shame that we use the same word capitalism when they're in the two
00:50:24.820
fundamentally different things. One is the use of market mechanisms wielded by a central body.
00:50:30.640
Fascism. Fascism. The other is a decentralized system of commerce against the backdrop of a
00:50:35.540
decentralized democratic self-governing nation. Right. Right. So those are two different things
00:50:39.280
and it's a shame we use the same word and that creates some confusion. But you know, let's talk
00:50:43.080
about the, on the, on the AI question here, what I'm seeing playing out just in plain sight,
00:50:48.340
even in the issue of censorship or idea censorship, et cetera, is this waterfall of political
00:50:52.880
accountability? Okay. So first the constitution sets into, into motion, a three part, three branch
00:50:58.260
system of government, separation of powers, all that stuff you and I love in the constitution.
00:51:03.160
They then delegate because of the inconveniences of actually passing laws. Yep. Who'd have ever
00:51:08.060
thought the system was designed to actually limit the passage of laws. Anyway, uh, delegates then its
00:51:13.220
authority to the administrative state, the alphabet soup, right? The FTC, SEC, FDA, you know, DOJ just goes
00:51:19.780
on, right? EPA, FAA, that alphabet soup. That's where 1.0 post-Dragon conservatives were focused
00:51:27.480
in and in an appropriate place to remain focused. But what's happening in plain sight is that ball
00:51:32.540
is moving. Okay. It's moving several steps down the cascade. That alphabet soup now delegates
00:51:37.800
political authority to a new alphabet soup of human actors at AMZN, MSFT, FB, GOOG, BLK,
00:51:46.880
BlackRock sticker, right? That, that's the new alphabet soup getting done through the back door.
00:51:52.180
What even the administrative state couldn't accomplish through the front door. But then
00:51:55.400
what are those guys doing? Cause, cause, cause we're always on the conservative camp playing
00:51:58.480
catch up. It's always a game of catch up. We're anywhere between one and two steps behind.
00:52:02.680
They're now using the final, uh, delegation of authority by decentralizing it and put it by, by
00:52:09.960
decentralizing it and just pinning it to AI. So that's the, no, no, no, we're not making those
00:52:14.600
decisions at all. Whatever those might be, it's just, it's just AI. So you'll see that in the
00:52:18.660
realm of censorship, but you'll see it in the realm of even financial decision-making through our,
00:52:22.560
one of our favorite topics, ESG. ESG meeting AI is just actually ceding authority to what appears
00:52:29.980
to be objective. And that goes back to human beings. What causes us to bend the knee? I'll tell
00:52:34.680
you a little funny story here that has nothing to do with politics, but I'll bring it back to this
00:52:37.920
conversation is, so I'm a tennis fanatic actually. Uh, do you watch, have you watched professional
00:52:43.000
tennis? Okay. So one of the things that happened in professional tennis in the last five years is
00:52:47.200
that they got rid of line judges. Human line judges no longer make the calls. It's just all done by
00:52:53.300
machine. But the funny thing was that actually in the first year, when they rolled this out,
00:52:58.780
you could literally see just on like instant replay with just like a video camera that like records it.
00:53:05.460
It was wrong because the system that was making the line calls, the way that technology works is it
00:53:11.520
doesn't actually take a photographic image of where the ball lands. It's making a, a computational
00:53:16.560
prediction of where the ball will land. And it took a while. So now it's super precise, but in the
00:53:21.960
first year it would get it wrong. But here's what would, here's what you'd see is the players didn't
00:53:26.620
argue. They used to argue with the line judges, right? You get John McEnroe, you get all the drama,
00:53:31.560
but once you got rid of the line judges, you pinned it to the AI, even when it was clearly a wrong
00:53:35.780
call, you don't argue because Hey, it's just the AI telling us. Correct. I just use that as a fun
00:53:39.860
analogy, but it's, but it's about a serious topic that when you do that for this waterfall
00:53:45.120
of political questions or moral questions or ethical questions and pin that to the AI to say
00:53:49.160
that who gets, who has in the social credit scoring system, it's not Larry Fink deciding,
00:53:54.480
it's not Joe Biden deciding, and it's just the AI deciding that this is the interest rate that you
00:53:58.820
ought to pay for your home loan or for your small business loan, or whether or not you get to say this
00:54:03.040
on the internet without actually being either explicitly censored or just algorithmically suppressed,
00:54:08.120
right? That's just the AI doing it. We as human beings have somehow this innate human instinct
00:54:14.160
to say that, well, if it's the AI, it's like converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. That's just a
00:54:18.680
question of objectivity. When in fact, they're using the equivalent of converting Celsius to
00:54:24.900
Fahrenheit to apply that same rubric to actually settling the questions that we ought to settle
00:54:30.400
as human beings, the old fashioned way through free speech and open debate. And we need to be prepare
00:54:35.000
ourselves to see the difference before we enter the brave new world of automatically ceding that
00:54:40.640
authority to algorithms. And that's what this whole metaverse is all about. The metaverse is
00:54:45.040
basically about dissolving the boundary between the online world and the offline world.
00:54:51.040
If you want to get, you know, drawn analogy here, that's actually part of the project of the
00:54:54.960
great reset, which I know is a passion of both of ours to analyze. It's actually about the
00:55:01.340
dissolution of boundaries between the public and private sector, the dissolution of boundaries
00:55:06.380
between nations, right? To say that these boundaries create inconveniences, that leaders can't solve
00:55:11.040
global problems unless they dissolve those boundaries. Well, this is the next frontier,
00:55:14.860
dissolving the boundary between the online and the offline world. Because once you dissolve that
00:55:19.160
boundary, it's a one-way ratchet. We don't go back in the other direction. We need to at least
00:55:23.640
prepare ourselves psychically, morally, ethically as human beings to fill our deepest needs for meaning
00:55:32.820
before that dissolution happens. Because once that happens, it's preying on that vacuum and it's game
00:55:38.980
over. So that's kind of how I see this two bifurcation. Either we're going to apocalyptic hell
00:55:44.780
or we're actually going to potentially a better place where we can still harness technology
00:55:48.640
to advance our human needs. So I know you're on a tough schedule. So I've got a couple of things I
00:55:54.880
just really want to hit with you that I'd love to hear your answers. You are, one way or another,
00:56:04.480
one of the big topics in the general will be abortion. How are you going to deal with that?
00:56:09.700
I'm pro-life. I don't know where your position is.
00:56:11.500
I'm pro-life. Okay, yeah. So I'm unapologetically pro-life. I think I picked it up in my Catholic
00:56:16.600
upbringing, in my Catholic education. I brought up Hindu, but I went to St. Xavier High School.
00:56:20.640
It's a moral issue for you. It's a moral issue for me, but it's not grounded in just because
00:56:26.580
the Pope said it, right? Because I'm, you know, that's not the reason. Logic gets me there. Okay,
00:56:31.740
when does, when do you treat someone, forget children or the unborn child, when do you say
00:56:39.280
that someone is dead, actually, on the back end of life? It's when brain activity stops.
00:56:44.160
Somebody will go to prison for ending the life of playing a role in ending the life of somebody who
00:56:50.420
still had brain activity. And there's a reason for that moral commitment, how he got there,
00:56:54.640
whether it's through a religious path or a secular path, that's where it is. When does brain activity
00:56:58.160
begin? At least at about six weeks, right? So it's completely inconsistent the way we treat,
00:57:03.660
I mean, our own intuitions, right? In the way we live our life on any other question other than
00:57:07.860
the question of pre-born life says that that's a life worthy of dignity and respect.
00:57:13.500
The full human respect that we accord to human beings here anyway. Clarence Thomas actually brought
00:57:18.540
it up pretty well in the Dobbs case. I don't know if you remember his Q&A and his exchange,
00:57:23.300
but nearly everyone agrees that, let's say there's a pregnant woman,
00:57:26.700
she's, you know, assaulted or battered, God forbid, things like this happen.
00:57:33.060
Should the perpetrator bear additional liability if it results in the death of the fetus?
00:57:38.120
You'd be hard pressed to find an American where, if you weren't in the middle of an abortion
00:57:41.740
debate, but you just asked them that question in a vacuum, 99% of people are going to tell
00:57:45.900
you absolutely. And they'd be enraged at that person. Well, what does that tell you? We have
00:57:50.960
this basic intuition that that's a life. And so what's confounding it here is this idea of,
00:57:56.700
of, of sort of woman's autonomy over their own body, which, you know, we conservatives have
00:58:01.180
to grapple with. I think that what conservatives need to do better is own the issue of adoption
00:58:05.280
better, own the issue of childcare better. I think that, you know, the religious path to
00:58:10.880
get there for some would sort of say no to contraception. I just think that if you, depending
00:58:14.420
on what your paths are to being pro-life, I think being unapologetically pro-life involves
00:58:18.240
actually affirming the importance of what we can do, you know, to provide greater avenues
00:58:25.060
for painless adoption, painless even, or at least, at least with minimal sacrifice, childcare.
00:58:31.400
So I think we should talk more about that than we already do, but, you know, that won't be,
00:58:36.180
that won't be an issue where, you know, I have, I have something groundbreaking to say other
00:58:40.880
than to say, I'm happy with where Dobbs landed. And I'm glad that we finally resolved this
00:58:50.880
So I reluctantly already said that I would, on the expectation that every other candidate
00:58:56.880
does the same thing in the, I'm not a party man, I could care less for the GOP party apparatus,
00:59:02.720
but I think the debate stage is important. And I think that that's where we actually flesh
00:59:06.920
out this question of the what and the why. And you know what, if everyone on there in order
00:59:11.640
to get into that debate, Ronna McDaniel sets the rules, great. I think it's important we have
00:59:15.360
that debate on the expectation that everybody else makes the same commitment. Sure. I'll
00:59:21.080
Have you put any thought into, um, Teddy Roosevelt is the guy who started the progressive party,
00:59:27.640
the bull moose party. He was a Republican. People don't get that. Progressivism is a disease
00:59:33.840
that eats the constitution and it's in both parties. It's in both parties. Um, however,
00:59:41.220
it's the system that we have. Uh, and some are looking at this and saying, please, let's not have
00:59:50.060
a whole bunch of people up there because it can really determine, uh, who wins at a much lower,
01:00:00.660
uh, uh, number. You know, if you've got eight people, I've heard this from DeSantis supporters.
01:00:07.740
Okay. They're saying, if you have a bunch of people, if it's just Donald Trump and him,
01:00:11.680
I hate the politics. I really dislike the, uh, the armchair political analysis. Let's talk about
01:00:17.600
the what, who cares about the politics in this, in the, in the numerical analysis of this and who
01:00:22.800
the heck knows anyway. Right. But put that to one side. And it also presumes that it should somehow
01:00:28.460
be a national objective to not get Donald Trump elected. I agree. Right. Like who said that was
01:00:33.280
somehow codified in stone. If Donald Trump is the peep is the person who the educated populace of
01:00:38.720
this country, when knowing all the facts without having the debates tilted or scales of debate
01:00:43.160
tilted by big tech, hiding information on the eve of an election. And I'm not, that's not a
01:00:47.960
theoretical that actually happened in the last election, but with, with free and fair flow of
01:00:52.080
information and free and fair elections of Donald Trump is the person who wins the, who the people
01:00:56.180
of this country want to run the country around the country. And it does irritate me a little bit.
01:00:59.740
There is this thing going on in the Republican donor class right now. And I get a little bit of
01:01:04.580
the, of the back chat from this too is, Hey man, you're, you're taking, you know, you're, you're
01:01:10.380
saying the things that Ron should be saying he's, he's, this is the time to say it. This is the time
01:01:17.300
to clear the slate. Let's elevate that. Right. And so I care about the what rather than this weird
01:01:23.940
obsession with sort of the puppet mastering that's quietly going on in the establishment or whatever
01:01:28.620
class of the Republican party, the people, what do we, what do we say? Self-governance over
01:01:33.600
aristocracy. I am bringing an agenda and a vision to the table that if I may say it, I don't like
01:01:39.840
to boast, but I just think it is factually true that is missing in the Republican party. Let's air
01:01:43.760
that and let's make that the objective of this year. Next year, the voters get to decide. Maybe
01:01:48.080
it's me, maybe it's DeSantis, maybe it's Trump, maybe it's somebody else. That's up to the voters
01:01:52.080
to decide, not somebody else who's a puppet master trying to play the engineering game of limiting the
01:01:56.280
candidates, the number of candidates on the debate stage. And that's actually how we revive a national
01:02:01.180
identity is by actually living it in the way we even run and conduct this party or this primary
01:02:06.440
process. You have made me think of Thomas Jefferson several times. He said, in the end, trust the
01:02:13.960
American people. They may get it wrong, but eventually they'll get it right. Trust the people. And that's
01:02:18.560
the problem with the parties, with on both sides, with the elites, they don't trust the people.
01:02:23.700
That was the 1776 bet. Yes. Um, so, uh, you know, you also just said, uh, I think you,
01:02:32.720
you have to live it, um, and live the principles. Um, when you look at your, um, biotechnology
01:02:44.200
background, people will say, uh, well, he's part of biotech. I love this. The people who hated
01:02:52.600
pharmaceutical companies now love them. And the people who said, no, I don't love pharmaceutical
01:02:58.320
companies, but they do a lot of good now hate them. Um, and then you, um, you also have the
01:03:04.980
thing with, uh, China where you're saying, what is your China policy? You're going to ban.
01:03:09.520
Yeah. I have a, I have a detailed China policy, but broadly speaking, speaking of our Thomas
01:03:13.600
Jefferson analogy, declaration of independence from China. That is the declaration of independence
01:03:20.740
in 2024. So, so it means economic decoupling from China until the CCP either falls or radically
01:03:26.700
reforms its behaviors. I think the latter is unlikely. I think the former is likelier than
01:03:30.560
people think. So I think China is in a vulnerable moment. And this is one where we got to get
01:03:34.720
into the geopolitics of this for this to be more than a talking point, but China is in a vulnerable
01:03:39.540
position right now. They are. Okay. Xi Jinping does what autocrats do. He shot himself and China in
01:03:45.580
the foot as part of his quest to hold onto what autocrats do hold onto power. Last October,
01:03:51.760
he took that unprecedented third term. He broke the chain of succession. You watched Hu Jintao
01:03:56.160
walk, get booted from that room. You know what I'm talking about, right? Get booted from that room
01:03:59.960
and that party meeting when Xi Jinping took that third term, right next to him, right? And Jack Ma
01:04:06.240
basically sends him to re-education camp now where Jack Ma is nowhere to be seen for even daring to
01:04:11.780
question a Chinese financial regulator. So what did he do though? In the process, he spooked a lot
01:04:17.260
of people. He tanked the Chinese economy, tanked the Chinese stock market, the COVID policy.
01:04:22.080
The COVID policy had as much to do with about COVID in China as our climate policy has to do with the
01:04:26.140
climate, which is nothing at all. It's just another gambit for control. But that leaves China pretty
01:04:30.420
vulnerable right now. And so I think we're working as part of what gives me the sense of urgency to make
01:04:34.860
sure I get in that office two years from now to actually do something. So how do you,
01:04:39.060
so what do we declare independence mean? Yeah, I didn't, I didn't answer your question yet,
01:04:42.320
which I can't, but I think there's a lot of things we can do.
01:04:45.640
Wait, wait, wait, wait. I want to, cause I think I know what it means. So if I have it right,
01:04:51.680
you have to answer the question. We get a lot of our, just our antibiotics, let alone all of our
01:04:56.820
medicine. Taking China out, which I agree with, causes unbelievable pain here. So how do we,
01:05:09.620
Yeah. So I'm making a calculated bet here. And I think that whether or not you know it,
01:05:15.100
you're taking an uncalculated risk is what we're doing right now. I'd rather turn that into a
01:05:18.700
calculated risk. Churchill, not Chamberlain. Okay. Let's think on the time scales of history rather
01:05:24.100
than electoral cycles. I was referring to Churchill because you brought him up earlier, right? That's
01:05:27.520
what I think the current American moment demands. And I think it requires willingness to make some
01:05:34.080
sacrifice. Now I can't guarantee this, but I think the more willing we are to make a sacrifice,
01:05:40.680
the less likely it is that we'll actually have to make one. I agree. So, so, so I can't,
01:05:45.500
I can't make any promises, but we put the best person in office. We have Churchill, not Chamberlain.
01:05:49.380
We get, but we're willing, what is willingness to make a sacrifice required? It requires knowledge
01:05:54.340
of what you're sacrificing for, which is what comes back to the 1776 moment, which is what comes back to
01:05:59.140
this missing national identity that I'm reviving. That's why I think this foreign policy and domestic
01:06:03.480
policy are inextricably intertwined, but specifically on China, there's some easy things we can do.
01:06:08.040
The first is abandoning climate religion. Okay. Which I don't get it, Glenn, why more Republicans
01:06:14.140
who privately agree with me will not say this out loud. I don't think there's a candidate in this
01:06:17.240
race who's yet said it out loud. Good thing about having me on the debate stage is this is going to
01:06:21.940
be the agenda by the end of the year, whether I'm the standard bearer or not. I'm running because I
01:06:25.580
want to be, but abandoned climate religion that shackles the United States while leaving China
01:06:30.880
untouched. That's low hanging fruit. That's low hanging fruit. Get China out of the WTO
01:06:35.380
accountability for COVID-19. Now we know it began in a Chinese lab. Well, if you don't deliver
01:06:40.980
accountability, you can expect even worse in the future, right? Shame on me. First time, fool me
01:06:45.380
once. Shame on me. Fool me twice. Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me. That's the
01:06:50.320
United States moment here. But, but I, but I like to also be transparent about it. Okay.
01:06:54.820
Okay. You're not making me go here, but I'm going to go here because I think I need to
01:06:58.980
be explicit and honest about what this policy actually means. It means we have to be willing
01:07:03.980
to ban most U.S. businesses from doing business in China until the CCP reforms its behaviors as a
01:07:14.760
mercantilist actor. Have you already done that with your businesses, any of your companies?
01:07:19.640
Yes. So strive when I started strive, not as a virtue signal. I'll tell you why I did it. We had to do it
01:07:24.820
for strive business model to work. I committed that strive would not do business in China,
01:07:30.580
period. That's something that no other asset manager or financial major financial institution
01:07:35.400
in the United States has ever done. And why did I do it? Is it because I dislike China or whatever?
01:07:39.000
I have my own personal feelings. That's not why strive's whole premise. And you know, this was
01:07:43.220
to be a fiduciary for us clients. That means looking after their best interest when you vote their
01:07:48.980
shares. And when you, when you deliver shareholder mandates to corporate America, you can't do that.
01:07:52.780
If you have two masters and the BlackRock's problem or Invesco's problem is that they have
01:07:58.540
the boot of the CCP on their neck, where if BlackRock tells a company like Intel and puts them in their
01:08:05.380
China, Taiwan risk focus universe, which they don't have, that's going to be a problem for their line
01:08:11.420
of business in China because BlackRock sells mutual funds in China. But you know what BlackRock's done
01:08:16.100
instead? They put Intel, one of America's leading semiconductor manufacturers, in their
01:08:21.860
climate focus universe. The list of companies that ought to focus on addressing climate related
01:08:28.420
issues. This is a semiconductor company. This is a company that's potentially whose semiconductors
01:08:33.780
are vital to protecting us against the risk that China invades Taiwan. And yet we're talking about
01:08:38.420
the climate focus universe? On what earth? It's not an accident. It's because, you know what?
01:08:44.240
The CCP gives them an attaboy when they constrain the United States without laying a touch in Petro
01:08:49.640
China, where BlackRock's also one of the largest shareholders, doesn't apply those emissions caps
01:08:53.600
over there. So anyway, back to starting Strive. I could not in good conscience say that even though
01:08:59.560
that's a big market opportunity for the shareholders of Strive, we can't pursue that opportunity and also
01:09:06.940
claim to be a good vocal fiduciary for American clients in the boardrooms of US companies. And that's
01:09:12.060
really important. And I've seen this firsthand. I'm not, I'm not, this is not coming from reading
01:09:16.300
in a book, right? I was an exchange student in China. I went to Harvard for college. I did an
01:09:20.260
exchange program. I was a student at the Peking University, which is the Harvard of China. Mayda,
01:09:25.540
they call it over there. I was an exchange student at Hong Kong University for another one of those
01:09:29.420
springs. I've done business in China in my, in my dealings as a biotech CEO, as Elon Musk,
01:09:34.980
others have people who have done business in China and who have been even educated at Chinese
01:09:39.980
universities and also have studied, you know, at Yale, you want to know there's a big center
01:09:43.360
that's paid for by China, right? You go there, you get your own re-education that the funding to
01:09:48.280
American universities, look at what's happening at UPenn. I understand this not as some sort of
01:09:53.320
scholar. I've tried to study this as much as I can, but first personally, based on my experiences,
01:09:58.120
and I think it is with that backing that I say that you need a US president who's willing to do the
01:10:04.020
hard thing. Yeah. To ban US businesses from doing business in China until the CCP reforms its
01:10:08.780
behaviors, that requires willingness to make sacrifice. We can do that if we know what we're
01:10:12.800
sacrificing for, but the best case scenario of all is if you're actually willing to,
01:10:16.620
then you don't have to, because they're more economically vulnerable than we are.
01:10:19.520
You pull that economic rug out. This might be the fall of the CCP in the next six years,
01:10:23.100
as we know, you don't ever make a threat. You make a promise. Yes. When you are promising
01:10:29.800
something, you don't ever have to threaten. Look, you guys have to change or we're not going to do
01:10:35.140
business with you. Exactly. That's much different because then they look at you and go,
01:10:39.200
I think he's serious. They really mean that. When that happens, then your negotiating power
01:10:44.580
completely changes. And that's how to run foreign policy. Guys, I can give you one more example
01:10:47.980
because it fit the bill so perfectly. That's the phone call to President Obrador. Actually,
01:10:51.560
it'll probably be a new president by January, 2025, but the president of Mexico, which is the same
01:10:55.840
thing for a fraction. And by the way, when I say fraction, I mean tiny fraction of what we are
01:11:01.560
spending protecting somebody else's border on the other side of the world, we could actually not
01:11:06.460
only protect our own border, but actually have a proper use case for the U.S. military to decimate
01:11:11.480
the cartels. And I think that phone call is, again, a promise. It is a promise to say that for a
01:11:16.120
fraction of what the last guy spent in God knows where in Ukraine, for a fraction of that, we can help
01:11:23.400
you and arm you to decimate the cartels. I know they're your sugar daddy. There's a new daddy in town.
01:11:28.760
We're going to help you solve this problem. And if you don't, we'll make a promise. We're gonna
01:11:33.400
solve it for you. We're gonna solve it for us. Because that's what's resulting in 80 to 100,000
01:11:38.340
fentanyl related deaths per year, not to mention the homelessness crisis, not to mention actually
01:11:42.660
even the violence increasingly on our side of the border from your failed narco state on the other
01:11:46.300
side of the Rio Grande. And if there's one job for the U.S. military, we believe it is to actually
01:11:50.740
protect our own soil. We're going to do it. That's not a threat. That's a promise. So I think that we
01:11:55.300
need leadership that takes that national identity. You can only do that if you're standing on strong
01:12:00.220
footing and believing in your nation, the ideals that your nation stands for, both to the rest of
01:12:04.440
the world and even to human history and posterity. But if we're doing that, that's what we're
01:12:08.500
protecting. We can declare independence from China. We can actually protect who would have ever thought
01:12:13.100
our own border with our own military. And I do believe that is a top use case for the U.S. military.
01:12:18.080
And I think this doesn't have to be that hard. I fully expect it to be harder than, you know,
01:12:24.300
the implementation. But if you're guided by a simple vision, I think everything that you and
01:12:29.920
I have talked about, and you can add ending affirmative action to the list because that's
01:12:32.680
also by executive order, but just take the set of things we've talked about. That's first six months
01:12:36.740
stuff, actually. And what if you're if you're not addicted to saying that I'm not I'm not hell bent on
01:12:42.880
saying this, that has to be two terms or whatever. I just want to get these things done.
01:12:45.840
That's what I care about. I care about the agenda. Get these things done.
01:12:50.980
Pass on the baton. That's fine. I hope I'm 37 years old. I hope there's going to be things that
01:12:55.440
I do after my presidency that are important for humanity, for the country in ways that go far
01:13:00.280
beyond politics. But getting these things done, we're working within a window now where
01:13:03.600
actually delivering those things gets us not to a national divorce, but to a national revival.
01:13:09.980
And I think we need to know where we're going in order to have that national revival. And we're at
01:13:14.160
this moment where national divorces comes up from time to time as a topic of conversation.
01:13:19.220
The more we talk about it, the more it might speak itself into existence. But I think we have an
01:13:22.980
alternative sitting hiding in plain sight. That is this national revival. And crazy it is, it is for
01:13:29.900
37 year old guy who's never held political office to say, I want to lead it. I think somebody's got to
01:13:34.840
it's not about me. Nobody's coming from on high to save us. If we're going to save this, if we're to be
01:13:40.560
saved, it's going to be, we're going to do it ourselves. But this would be the role that I
01:13:44.800
will volunteer to play. And, you know, if, if called by the people to do it and by God to do
01:13:49.220
it, then, then that's what I got to do. And that's, that's kind of what led me to this crazy idea.
01:13:57.400
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