Timcast IRL - Tim Pool - Timcast IRL - MTG Shares EXPLICIT Images From Hunter Biden's Laptop w- Vivek Ramaswamy

00:00:00.000 you you

00:01:26.000 you ladies and gentlemen boys and girls welcome back to another

00:01:53.000 exciting episode of ShimCast IRL.

00:01:56.000 I am filling in for Tim, who wrote us a letter saying he's having a lot of fun at camp.

00:02:02.000 Before we dive into tonight's stories, I want to make two really awesome announcements.

00:02:06.000 I think you guys are going to be very excited to hear both of these things.

00:02:09.000 The first announcement is great, not as good as the second one, but my YouTube channel and my access to my YouTube channel and all of my channels has been restored as of earlier today, so Freedom Tunes is back.

00:02:21.000 Thank you to the people at YouTube for getting this cleared up.

00:02:23.000 Thank you to Tim for helping me get in touch.

00:02:27.000 And also, the second bit of good news I want to share is that a little while ago on the show, I mentioned that there was a young boy, a little child at my church, who was born with skeletal dysplasia, who needed a very difficult and dangerous surgery.

00:02:42.000 I asked you all for prayers.

00:02:43.000 He has gotten the surgery.

00:02:45.000 He is good.

00:02:47.000 Thank you all so much for your prayers.

00:02:49.000 I massively appreciate it.

00:02:52.000 In terms of tonight's stories, Marjorie Taylor Greene shares explicit photos of Hunter Biden in front of a House Select Committee and also alleges that he has violated the Mann Act.

00:03:05.000 Jason Aldean's new music video has been pulled for being supposedly racist.

00:03:11.000 Then again, what doesn't the left call racist?

00:03:13.000 And RFK proposes backing the US dollar with Bitcoin and gold.

00:03:19.000 Before we get into all those things, I want to ask you all to smash the like button, please

00:03:23.000 and thank you.

00:03:24.000 Go to TimCast.com, become a member.

00:03:26.000 If you become a member, you're going to get to watch the after shows.

00:03:28.000 You're also going to be supporting the empire that we are building here to try to bring

00:03:32.000 truth to media.

00:03:33.000 So I'm going to ask all of you to do that.

00:03:36.000 But first, go over to Cast Brew.com, buy yourself some cast brew coffee.

00:03:41.000 Building culture has never tasted so good.

00:03:43.000 We're very excited to sponsor ourselves and offer this product to all of you.

00:03:47.000 So if you want to help us out, you want to help us with what we're doing, pick up a bag.

00:03:51.000 And tonight, I am very excited to announce that we are joined by presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy.

00:03:57.000 It's good to be here, man.

00:03:58.000 It's great to have you.

00:03:59.000 Thank you so much.

00:04:00.000 Yeah, glad to be here.

00:04:01.000 It's, it's, uh, I did this show, I think a little over a year ago and I had so much fun.

00:04:06.000 We had to come back.

00:04:06.000 So, Here we are.

00:04:08.000 Yeah, you had fun because I wasn't here, man.

00:04:09.000 I'm going to drag all of it down.

00:04:10.000 That's good.

00:04:11.000 As soon as Tim left, he was like, oh, we can't get anyone better than Seamus, but here I am.

00:04:15.000 So we're going to make the best of it.

00:04:16.000 That's actually true.

00:04:17.000 That's actually true.

00:04:18.000 He cried.

00:04:19.000 I forced him out.

00:04:19.000 I said, I'm the one who gets to do this.

00:04:21.000 Of course, we also have our good friend, Hannah Clare.

00:04:23.000 Hey, I'm back.

00:04:24.000 I'm Hannah-Claire Brimlow.

00:04:25.000 I'm a writer for TimCast.com.

00:04:26.000 I'm so glad to be here tonight.

00:04:28.000 I think it's going to be a great conversation.

00:04:29.000 And of course, we're here with the fitness builder himself.

00:04:32.000 I'm Ian Crosland.

00:04:33.000 I gained another pound today.

00:04:34.000 I'm doing protein shake right now as we speak, so I'll keep my mouth off the mic.

00:04:37.000 That's good.

00:04:37.000 Vivek, when you're president, I want to help you, man.

00:04:39.000 I'll take it.

00:04:40.000 I'll work on science.

00:04:41.000 I want to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, turn it into graphene, and revitalize the union.

00:04:45.000 While becoming fit yourself?

00:04:48.000 Yeah, dude.

00:04:48.000 Bigger, stronger, faster, man.

00:04:50.000 Then we'll make a movie.

00:04:51.000 Let's do this.

00:04:52.000 Yeah, I love the spirit, man.

00:04:53.000 Let's go, and I also have Mr. Dupri on the side.

00:04:55.000 What's happening, dawg?

00:04:57.000 Hey! 0.99

00:04:58.000 Ready to start?

00:04:58.000 When you are, Seamus, I'm Serge.com.

00:05:00.000 Excited to meet you, Vivek.

00:05:01.000 Pleasure.

00:05:01.000 I missed you last time for the Culture War, so I'm glad I'm in town this time.

00:05:05.000 Yeah, let's get rolling, Seamus.

00:05:07.000 Alright, yeah, so we have Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene holding up explicit images of Hunter Biden during a House Oversight Committee hearing.

00:05:15.000 So the hearing featured two IRS whistleblowers who alleged that the President's son received special treatment during their investigation into his business dealings.

00:05:22.000 Those of you who are regular watchers of the show will probably remember that we talked

00:05:25.000 about this story a few weeks ago, at least the story in reference to the two IRS whistleblowers

00:05:29.000 who were saying Hunter was receiving special treatment.

00:05:32.000 The investigation was being slow walked and every effort was made to ensure that it wasn't

00:05:35.000 taken care of effectively and competently.

00:05:38.000 Marjorie Taylor Greene showed pictures that were leaked from Hunter Biden's laptop.

00:05:43.000 She also alleged that he purchased a ticket and essentially brought this woman across

00:05:49.000 state lines, which she argues would be a violation of the Mann Act, which is obviously a massive

00:05:55.000 allegation.

00:05:56.000 And Greene also alleged that the president's son used his business to write off payments to prostitutes illegally. 0.58

00:06:03.000 Not a very good look.

00:06:06.000 No, especially not when you're the president's son, right?

00:06:08.000 I mean, I think James Comer pointed this out that the testimony that we heard today isn't necessarily going to say anything we didn't already know, although I argue that it's important to have an official record of these things.

00:06:20.000 But rather, these two IRS agents were able to say or testify to the fact that the DOJ did intentionally slow walk their investigation and treated Hunter the way no one else would get to be treated.

00:06:31.000 We make special exceptions for him.

00:06:33.000 Well, I mean, I think there are definitely two standards of justice in this country right now.

00:06:38.000 And this is not specific to Biden and Trump alone.

00:06:41.000 I mean, there's one standard for Julian Assange, who sits in a foreign prison, still in exile.

00:06:46.000 I'm going to try to see him later this year.

00:06:49.000 Another one for Chelsea Manning, who is the government agent who actually leaked information to him because she's transgender.

00:06:57.000 So then I see one standard for Hunter Biden, a different one for somebody who has a different last name, be it Trump or otherwise.

00:07:03.000 Part of the problem is we have this bureaucracy, the IRS is one example of it, but a bureaucracy that really abandons the rule of law to decide what it feels like doing on a given day.

00:07:15.000 And so those two stories between what Marjorie Taylor Greene saying about Hunter Biden, about the testimony of the two IRS whistleblowers, These are deeply linked.

00:07:25.000 They're both symptoms of a managerial class, a bureaucracy in this country that does whatever it sees fit and is going to effectively politically protect whichever party is actually protecting them and preserving them and their existence.

00:07:42.000 And right now that's the Democrat Party, so they happen to be protecting them.

00:07:45.000 If that changed in the future, they'd protect whoever paid for their continued existence.

00:07:49.000 But that's exactly what's happening today.

00:07:50.000 Yeah, this is absolutely nothing new.

00:07:52.000 I think some people who are just waking up to these things think that it's the first time any of this has happened.

00:07:56.000 I mean, this goes back a very long time, but just to give a specific example, 10 years ago, I believe a little longer ago than that, we knew that the IRS was targeting conservative groups for audits.

00:08:05.000 under the Obama administration.

00:08:07.000 This is something which has happened numerous times in the past.

00:08:10.000 We also know that there were two whistleblowers that actually spoke up about this,

00:08:14.000 which I very much appreciate here.

00:08:16.000 And that also lends credibility.

00:08:18.000 The fact that you had two people at the IRS stepping up and saying something fishy is going on here.

00:08:22.000 So this wasn't one individual person whose testimony might have a little bit less credibility.

00:08:27.000 But what I'd like to ask you is if you were elected president,

00:08:30.000 what would you do to dismantle these bureaucracies?

00:08:33.000 And what would you do to ensure that there were two different tracks within the justice

00:08:37.000 system.

00:08:38.000 Yeah, so I think that a lot of Republicans end up making a false promise without knowing that they're making a false promise.

00:08:46.000 They think it's a true promise.

00:08:47.000 They'll say, we're going to come in and reform the bureaucracy.

00:08:49.000 Yeah, good luck.

00:08:50.000 It is impossible, right?

00:08:52.000 Because this is a beast.

00:08:53.000 It's like a creation, a monster unto itself that existed long before we arrived as somebody who ever got elected and long after we're gone.

00:09:02.000 And so I'm not going to make that false promise to say that I can reform that bureaucracy.

00:09:08.000 But what the president can do is actually shut it down.

00:09:13.000 And I think this is where, you know, even Trump, who was the closest we ever got to at least identifying this problem, stopped short because the traditional wisdom is that there are these things called civil service protections, which say that members of the bureaucracy cannot be fired Absent some extreme finding of misconduct.

00:09:38.000 Actually, if you read the rules carefully, it doesn't work that way.

00:09:41.000 The way it works is you can't fire individuals, right?

00:09:43.000 You can't have backlash against, you know, any one individual in that bureaucracy at one at a time.

00:09:50.000 But that's why what I'm bringing to Washington DC is mass layoffs, because the civil service protections do not apply on their own terms to mass layoffs.

00:09:58.000 And mass layoffs is what we're bringing to the federal government.

00:10:01.000 I think it takes somebody who's willing to break the glass coming in from the outside without inhibition.

00:10:07.000 And I think Trump brought an element of that.

00:10:09.000 I'm definitely bringing it.

00:10:11.000 But you have to combine that with an actual understanding of the law and the Constitution.

00:10:16.000 And together, that's what it's going to take to shut this thing down.

00:10:19.000 What concerns me about shutting it down, just stopping it, is getting a resurgence of what they did with the Ba'ath Party in Iraq.

00:10:25.000 Because they went in there, they conquered it, and then they fired them all, and then they formed ISIS. 0.83

00:10:29.000 These people have connections with DARPA, with Boeing.

00:10:32.000 They are the military.

00:10:34.000 So if we fired them, they'd just start their own secret government, I feel.

00:10:38.000 You know, I think that it's not a destination, right?

00:10:42.000 I'm not saying that we all have a party, there's one silver bullet solution and then we're done.

00:10:47.000 That's how we get to the start line.

00:10:49.000 Right?

00:10:49.000 We're not even at the start line right now.

00:10:51.000 We're playing a different game.

00:10:53.000 Come in with some puppet claiming to be the elected official sitting on top of the managerial class.

00:10:58.000 That's a different game.

00:10:59.000 I'm talking about how we get to the start line of at least restoring political power to the people who are actually elected by the governed to actually exercise it.

00:11:09.000 So that's the starting point.

00:11:11.000 It's like a hydraulic pump or like a water balloon.

00:11:13.000 You squeeze it into one place, it'll pop up somewhere else.

00:11:16.000 But at least with acknowledging the rules of the road being the people who we elect to run the government are actually the ones who ought to run the government.

00:11:23.000 Yeah, this managerial bureaucracy, they'll find their own private sector version of that that emerges or some quasi governmental version that emerges even at the agencies that exist.

00:11:33.000 Yeah, we need to be watchful of that.

00:11:34.000 But right now, we're not even playing the start line of that game.

00:11:37.000 What would you replace it with?

00:11:39.000 So it depends on what the it is.

00:11:41.000 If the it is the Department of Education, I'm not going to replace it with anything.

00:11:45.000 If the it is the FBI, I'm going to shut it down and I'm not going to replace it with anything.

00:11:49.000 A lot of those functions are already being performed by the U.S.

00:11:51.000 Marshals, by the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency.

00:11:55.000 And so you go on down the list, that's the reality.

00:11:59.000 There are certain other functions like, you know, that you would say have to continue to exist in some form, say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

00:12:07.000 I said I would shut that down because we haven't had a nuclear power plant built in this country in 35 some odd years because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is fundamentally hostile to it.

00:12:17.000 In that case, I think you can't reform the culture of that agency.

00:12:20.000 You have to shut it down, but we'd rebuild from scratch an agency that was actually committed to a rational evaluation of the risks and benefits of a given nuclear power plant.

00:12:31.000 So some cases, shut it down.

00:12:32.000 It stays shut down.

00:12:33.000 Certain cases, you shut it down and then rebuild something skeletal from scratch to perform the basic function.

00:12:40.000 And then certain other agencies, you know, let's talk about the FDA, let's talk about the SEC, let's talk about the US Federal Reserve.

00:12:49.000 I'm talking about a 75% layoff of the people who already work there and that I think will get the job done.

00:12:54.000 How did we get here?

00:12:55.000 What made the American people so willing to have such an bloated administrative state?

00:13:00.000 Yeah, it was a sort of laziness in our culture.

00:13:03.000 It actually started with laziness of the elected officials, right?

00:13:07.000 Initially, the way it was supposed to work was the people who showed up in Congress and in the U.S.

00:13:11.000 Senate, they're supposed to have the actual lawmaking authority, but also accountability.

00:13:19.000 They started to get a little lazy with that accountability.

00:13:21.000 These bills, getting into the specifics of those details, that's a little too hard to deal with.

00:13:25.000 Presidents who we elected in the White House started to similarly get lazy, saying that, well, you know, the budgeting process, I'm supposed to ask Congress for permission to spend money.

00:13:33.000 It's a little too complicated.

00:13:34.000 Let me delegate that down.

00:13:36.000 So it was sort of a dual delegation.

00:13:39.000 The President of the United States started to get a little lazy.

00:13:40.000 Congress started to get a little lazy.

00:13:42.000 They said, let's just create this third-party apparatus, three-letter agencies, where we don't actually have to be accountable for the result because we can blame it on them if things go badly.

00:13:55.000 But if things go well, we're still the people who the public knows.

00:13:59.000 And I think they started attracting very attention-hungry people to those roles as well.

00:14:05.000 That's what created it, is people who wanted the glory without the accountability.

00:14:10.000 They shunted the accountability to a third unspoken class.

00:14:13.000 So the Capitol is a beautiful building.

00:14:16.000 Right?

00:14:16.000 But the U.S.

00:14:17.000 Department of Education or the IRS or the FBI, these are drab government buildings.

00:14:22.000 Nobody visits that when they visit Washington, D.C.

00:14:24.000 Let's put the real accountability over there.

00:14:27.000 But then the people who actually say, OK, we're going to assume that position, they're not the people who actually needed the fame or the glory.

00:14:32.000 They're the people who actually needed the exercise of power.

00:14:35.000 And so in a certain way, everyone got what they needed out of the trade, right?

00:14:39.000 The people who are running for elected office today, many of them just want to get on cable news on a given night of the week.

00:14:45.000 Well, the same principle applied to actually the people who didn't necessarily care about getting attention, but just actually wanted to exercise raw power.

00:14:54.000 And so there was a division of those who got attention, that's what they wanted, versus those who got power, because that's what they wanted.

00:15:01.000 And that's steadied in this new equilibrium of having this administrative state that said, okay, we'll exercise all the power.

00:15:07.000 You guys just get to get to pretend like you have it and get your dopamine hits from getting on television or getting your attention along the way.

00:15:13.000 That's a long story short a big part of what happened.

00:15:16.000 Part of what I really appreciate about that explanation is you mentioned it just starting with a little bit of laziness.

00:15:21.000 Elected representatives not wanting to do their job to the fullest and most rigorous possible extent and essentially abdicating by trying to delegate to people it shouldn't have been delegated to in the first place.

00:15:33.000 And so part of what I try to stress and a thing that I've talked about pretty frequently on the show is that simply slipping a device and having a people who are not aspiring to something higher in a spiritual and moral sense ends up creating a tangle of problems that you never would have anticipated.

00:15:48.000 Who would have thought at the time That an elected leader just being a bit lazy, just not wanting to do what he had to do that day, could result in such a massive and bloated bureaucratic state to the point where we ended up having a duly elected president being unseated, or at least having an attempt to unseat him, committed against him by the administrative state.

00:16:10.000 Well, I mean, I think that there is something deeper going on in our culture.

00:16:13.000 It's probably the deeper explanation to the question you asked as well.

00:16:18.000 Which is that we are all so starved for purpose and meaning and identity right now that, you know, if you don't bend the knee to the real thing, you're gonna bend the knee to something, right?

00:16:32.000 So, you know, a lot of us, myself included, right, get into this habit of complaining about tyranny in the United States.

00:16:41.000 Abuse of governmental power, but that trick only works if you have a population that quietly is hungering to bend the knee to something.

00:16:48.000 You don't pledge allegiance to that flag, you're going to pledge allegiance to something.

00:16:52.000 There's an old saying, it goes, if you have a hole the size of God in your heart and God does not fill it, something else will instead.

00:16:59.000 Like the Israelites are lost in the desert.

00:17:01.000 Book of Exodus stuff here, what do they say?

00:17:05.000 We want to go back and be ruled by the Pharaoh. 0.98

00:17:08.000 So in a certain sense, absolutely, absolutely.

00:17:11.000 Moses comes down from the mountaintop, what do they do?

00:17:13.000 By the time he's come back, they've already got the golden calf.

00:17:16.000 So part of this is a culture that sort of demands obeisance.

00:17:23.000 And when we think about freedom from the administrative state or the autocracy of government, We owe ourselves a long hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves how we achieve freedom from our own impulse to bend the knee because we are hungry for a higher purpose that we're lacking.

00:17:38.000 I think that's the deeper answer to your question.

00:17:41.000 I find it really interesting.

00:17:42.000 I'm going to cut James off.

00:17:43.000 He's signaling at me that he has a point.

00:17:44.000 Unbelievable.

00:17:45.000 But it's my show now.

00:17:47.000 Are you kidding me?

00:17:48.000 Is this a mute me right now?

00:17:49.000 Direct challenge.

00:17:49.000 We'll see about that.

00:17:51.000 No, I think what you're saying is so interesting in context of this whistleblower testimony.

00:17:55.000 You know, Joe Ziegler came out and said, you know, I'm a gay man, I'm a Democrat, and I have received threats.

00:18:01.000 I've been told I'm a traitor to the Democratic Party because I am disrupting the order and I'm creating division in our country by bringing forth this information.

00:18:09.000 And I can't imagine what kind of pressure you must feel, especially because so many people, right and left, but definitely a lot of people on the left, feel as though their membership to the Democratic Party fills these voids.

00:18:20.000 It gives them a sense of purpose and identity that really they crave.

00:18:23.000 You know, I would say the left has been masterful at filling this void of identity and purpose.

00:18:31.000 I don't agree with the prescription, but race, gender, sexuality, climate.

00:18:38.000 Right?

00:18:39.000 These are the left's prescription for that void.

00:18:44.000 And I think where conservatives have erred, to be honest with you, this is part of what pulled me into this race, where conservatives have gone wrong is that we've gotten complacent with saying that Well, we're going to criticize that vision and point out all of the things that are endlessly wrong with it.

00:19:01.000 There's a lot we could do.

00:19:01.000 My first book is about a lot of this.

00:19:03.000 My second book is about a lot of this.

00:19:04.000 Woke Inc.

00:19:04.000 Nation of Victims.

00:19:06.000 Here's what's wrong with that vision of identity grounded on your genetic attributes.

00:19:12.000 But where we've fallen short is that we haven't yet offered our own alternative vision.

00:19:18.000 I think that's important.

00:19:20.000 Before Hannah stole my point, that's right, you're getting called Hannah from now on.

00:19:26.000 So aggressive here tonight, we have a nice guest.

00:19:29.000 She started it.

00:19:30.000 Okay, so there's a couple different things I want to say.

00:19:34.000 Firstly, your last response reminded me of three quotes.

00:19:38.000 Firstly, a great quote from Chesterton, that when a man stops believing in God, it's not that he believes in nothing.

00:19:43.000 In fact, he often will believe in anything, and that's huge.

00:19:47.000 Another quote is from Augustine.

00:19:48.000 You were sort of mentioning people looking at political tyranny and not their own lives.

00:19:51.000 Augustine said, a man has as many masters as he does vices, and we as a people have unlinked Freedom and virtue from each other, as if freedom has nothing to do with your individual capacity to choose to do good and is merely the circumstance of having many alternatives.

00:20:09.000 And then the final quote that it reminded me of was when Solzhenitsyn said, the battle between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

00:20:18.000 Why just look at the administrative state?

00:20:20.000 Why just look at the bureaucracy?

00:20:21.000 Why just look at tyranny?

00:20:23.000 When the evil exists inside of you as well, and you have to do the work to become a more virtuous person if you ever want to fight the evil in the system.

00:20:31.000 That said, you made another point here about the left doing a very good job of offering up this counter-narrative to people so they can fill that void.

00:20:42.000 I would argue it's even a bit more malevolent than that, and I don't think it's necessarily intentional on the part of all left-wing people who are promoting this, but all of the structures that they've Taken away from us and tried to shame us for caring for

00:20:54.000 whether it's a sense of patriotism Whether it's a faith in God and divine revelation

00:21:00.000 Whether it is the cherishing of your own family unit all of these things are very important

00:21:06.000 They're things man needs but they're also things that man has come to an

00:21:10.000 understanding of being important through the exercise of virtue all of these other things like sex or

00:21:18.000 race or even this strange kind of reversion to a weird worship of the weather and in signing intentionality to

00:21:24.000 climate events is Really incredibly primitive

00:21:28.000 I think these are the things that human beings just fall back into or When they don't have a rational way to orient themselves towards the good.

00:21:34.000 I actually think there's something instinctual there.

00:21:37.000 And as we've torn away the social conventions that have helped us to behave more virtuously, we're falling back into things like group identity or seeing weather patterns as an indication of immoral behavior that needs to be settled, even through things like population reduction, which is really another method of human sacrifice in a somewhat abstracted sense.

00:21:58.000 I actually think there's a lot to that because In a certain sense, the thing that separates us from animals is our ability to believe in something bigger than ourselves.

00:22:11.000 Animals, as best we know, or non-human animals, don't have that same ability to have faith.

00:22:17.000 Yes.

00:22:18.000 And so, the fact that that's essential to our humanity, also, the flip side of that, makes it something that we really badly need to fulfill.

00:22:25.000 Yes.

00:22:26.000 So long as we are actually fully human beings.

00:22:30.000 And if we're not going to fill it with the real thing, we're going to fill it with something else.

00:22:33.000 And so, my definition of a cult is, in many ways, a religion that has not withstood the test of time.

00:22:41.000 And I think that we have the rise of these different secular cults in America that have oddly arisen at the same time in our national history.

00:22:51.000 You think it's a coincidence that we bow to the god of climate, as you said.

00:22:56.000 I like the way you put it.

00:22:57.000 Worshipping or sort of sensing changes in weather patterns as something that we have to use as an atonement for our sins.

00:23:04.000 It's an interesting question.

00:23:06.000 It's a separate question of, do you see that at the same time that your identity is based on your race, your gender, your sexuality, and that you're on some intersectional pyramid, higher or lower, based on the combination of those attributes you inherit on the day you're born?

00:23:20.000 Or a religion that says the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born at the same time that you have to believe that your own biological sex is completely fluid over your life?

00:23:30.000 I bring that up because what is a faith-based system or a religious system?

00:23:34.000 It's a system where you could espouse otherwise illogical beliefs, right?

00:23:39.000 Logic and reason could not lead you to these beliefs, but it has to be a different way of believing them.

00:23:44.000 That's what we as a human being have a need for.

00:23:48.000 We have a need to have beliefs that defy logic.

00:23:51.000 And so if it's not going to be grounded in belief in a traditional religion, belief in God, even belief in a nation, a commitment to a nation is not something that flows out of logic, flows out of something that we as human beings have a desire for, a need for, something bigger than ourselves.

00:24:08.000 We're going to channel that impulse to something else.

00:24:12.000 But the problem, and this is the danger of it, is not that it's not the time-tested faiths.

00:24:16.000 It's the fact that we then trick ourselves into thinking that it isn't faith at all.

00:24:20.000 Right?

00:24:20.000 Because when you go to church, you know what you're doing.

00:24:22.000 Right?

00:24:23.000 You go to a temple, you know what you're doing.

00:24:24.000 You're praying to God.

00:24:25.000 You're exercising a side of your brain that's different than that which you're exercising if you're pouring chemicals in a lab and measuring things.

00:24:33.000 But I think what's happened is, in absence of traditional faith and traditional beliefs, where we recognize that we're exercising our faith to believe in these things, we see the rise of new secular religions, secular cults instead, which we fail to recognize are actually religious belief systems.

00:24:49.000 Exactly.

00:24:49.000 Like the climate belief system.

00:24:51.000 And I think the most dangerous religions are the ones that we fail to recognize As religions in the first place, and delude ourselves into thinking that it's actually logic or reason that led us there. 1.00

00:25:03.000 Exactly.

00:25:04.000 And that's exactly what's happening in the country today.

00:25:05.000 Well, there's a few things I'd say in response to that.

00:25:08.000 Firstly, ultimately I do agree with the point that these ideological systems are more or less religions, but rather than having a personal god, they have a much more abstract god, and it generally ends up boiling down to a form of self-worship, usually.

00:25:21.000 But I would push back against one part of this.

00:25:23.000 I agree that there are many religious systems where the faith does conflict with reason.

00:25:27.000 I don't believe faith has to conflict with reason, and I would say part of what's so insidious about this kind of left-wing cult we're seeing and a lot of these bizarre new ideas is it directly does conflict with reason.

00:25:37.000 I think there are elements within divine revelation that a person could not have reason to on

00:25:41.000 their own, but it doesn't contradict reason.

00:25:45.000 Or it's not asking you to accept something which is completely and totally absurd, such

00:25:48.000 as your biological sex can change on a daily basis.

00:25:54.000 It gives you, ideally, the tools, and this isn't its singular purpose, but it does give

00:25:59.000 you the tools, if it's the right system, to interact with the world in a way which is

00:26:05.000 actually productive and helpful.

00:26:07.000 And these new, kind of cultist beliefs don't.

00:26:10.000 So I would definitely agree with you on that second part.

00:26:13.000 Yeah, I think we actually agree on the whole part, because the religious belief systems

00:26:21.000 don't have to conflict with reason.

00:26:22.000 Of course they don't.

00:26:24.000 And so what I said is a cult is a religious belief system that has not withstood the test of time.

00:26:28.000 Part of withstanding the test of time is that I think you do, you withstand the test of time better if it is compatible with reason.

00:26:35.000 It's not totally incompatible with reason.

00:26:36.000 The problem with these near-term cults, right, the same cult we talked about, the biological sex being fluid versus sex of the person you're attracted to being fixed, call that the cult of LGBTQIA+. 0.54

00:26:47.000 The cult of climate effectively says that carbon emissions are bad if they come from the United States, but not if they're coming from China.

00:26:54.000 Exactly!

00:26:55.000 You can't believe those two things at the same time.

00:26:57.000 And so it's the religions that haven't withstood the test of time that are the ones that actually run most contrary to logic and reason.

00:27:02.000 When it comes to climate science, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that humans could destroy the Earth's atmosphere.

00:27:07.000 We easily could.

00:27:08.000 Nuclear war is one way to do it. 1.00

00:27:09.000 We could do it lots of ways.

00:27:10.000 Comets could destroy the Earth's atmosphere.

00:27:11.000 But what's unreasonable is to tell people they have to stop producing waste.

00:27:15.000 And that's the way to solve it.

00:27:16.000 Like, people are gonna poop.

00:27:18.000 We're gonna make waste.

00:27:19.000 We're gonna burn stuff to stay warm.

00:27:21.000 So, we need to figure out a way not to stop.

00:27:24.000 I believe it's unreasonable to expect people to stop producing the carbon dioxide.

00:27:28.000 And we have to be reasonable about the climate.

00:27:30.000 We need to reuse the waste.

00:27:31.000 This is why I'm obsessed with pulling the carbon dioxide out of the air.

00:27:34.000 It'll create another climate crisis where we start to pull too much carbon dioxide out of the air and then we start to compete with the trees and we need like a united global coalition that's working together to not pull too much methane and carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere because that is a valuable resource.

00:27:50.000 Yeah, well, it's an interesting idea.

00:27:52.000 I think kind of touching on this concept of old ideas and new ideas that Vivek was mentioning, I'm curious, Ian, where do you sort of stand?

00:28:03.000 I'll sort of launch into my perspective on this, but I've talked about it before, so I'm curious where you are on this.

00:28:07.000 When someone says this is a new idea or that idea is old and conservative and retrograde, what's your response to that?

00:28:12.000 Well, what's an example?

00:28:13.000 What do you mean?

00:28:13.000 Well, often people will try to label liberalism and conservatism as a war between old ideas and new ideas, and conservatives just like the old ideas and liberals like new ideas.

00:28:22.000 Uh, geez.

00:28:24.000 Well, I mean, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

00:28:27.000 Nothing's new.

00:28:28.000 We have new data.

00:28:28.000 We can see things from different perspectives with microscopes and telescopes and things.

00:28:32.000 Like, when you get a radio telescope and you see the cosmic microwave background radiation, for instance, it's this web of radiation left over from the Big Bang out in the universe.

00:28:40.000 It looks like a neural net.

00:28:41.000 Like, that is God.

00:28:42.000 To me, that is a...

00:28:43.000 Evidence that there is a God in our universe.

00:28:45.000 And I've been agnostic my entire life.

00:28:47.000 But when you see that, how can you deny that that is not sentient?

00:28:51.000 Or that it is?

00:28:52.000 I mean, it is.

00:28:53.000 It is functionally active.

00:28:56.000 So that's like an old idea that is now seen in a new way.

00:29:01.000 It doesn't have to be liberal or conservative.

00:29:03.000 It's like we're just human, seeing things from different perspectives.

00:29:06.000 And if you can I don't know, maybe if you can accept that some people don't see it the way you see it, it'll be a lot easier to convince them of the way you see it.

00:29:15.000 I think that's an interesting point.

00:29:16.000 Obviously, I would disagree with some of the spiritual proposals that you're making there about the nature of the universe, but what I will say is, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said there's nothing new, and I firmly believe this.

00:29:28.000 There's nothing new under the sun, and Vivek, you described a cult as a religion that has not passed the test of time.

00:29:34.000 I think that that is a very good way of describing it and it's certainly a helpful way of understanding it.

00:29:39.000 The way I've always sort of conceptualized the, you know, war between traditionalism and progressivism is not that you have, you know, old ideas trying to fight new ideas.

00:29:49.000 It's that you have ideas that have stood the test of time against ideas that have been tried and have failed so miserably that people forgot about them and now they're trying them again.

00:29:58.000 I think it's very hubristic to say that man has been Thinking about such matters for virtually all of human history, and now we've discovered something which is totally unique and totally new.

00:30:07.000 I think in terms of technological development, there are certain things we can discover that are unique to our place and time, but when it comes to human moral behavior, these things are constants.

00:30:16.000 But you know the problem, and you mentioned this too Vivek, that the big problem that's happening in the conservative movement I see right now is that people are screaming no at these things that are rallying people in the liberal, whatever, economic movement that are like climate science, whatever, whatever, and rather than offer another idea it's just no that's bad, that's bad, and that's not functional, it's not inspiring.

00:30:35.000 And that doesn't move people.

00:30:36.000 That doesn't move people towards Being the true version of themselves they want to be, which is what we all hunger for.

00:30:43.000 And so, you know, when I say the left offers this narrative grounded in race, gender, sexuality, climate, well, what I'm in this race doing, hopefully, is articulating a different vision, grounded in the individual, the family, nation, God.

00:31:03.000 Amen.

00:31:03.000 Right?

00:31:04.000 So now you have a different vision.

00:31:05.000 We have competing choices, race, gender, sexuality, climate.

00:31:08.000 Individual, family, nation, God.

00:31:11.000 At least it's a different alternative vision, which is what conservatism used to be about.

00:31:15.000 It used to be about conserving those things, right?

00:31:19.000 Those pillars of human identity.

00:31:23.000 Why do we need those pillars of identity?

00:31:24.000 The way I look at it is we are, in many ways like human beings, the analogy I would use, we're like blind bats, lost in a cave, trying to figure out where we are.

00:31:37.000 So how does a blind bat figure out where it is? 1.00

00:31:40.000 Sonar.

00:31:41.000 Echolocation.

00:31:42.000 Right.

00:31:42.000 It sends out signals.

00:31:43.000 So say we're in this cave.

00:31:45.000 Bounces off that wall.

00:31:46.000 It's something fixed.

00:31:46.000 It bounces back.

00:31:47.000 It says this is where I am.

00:31:49.000 Let's say I'm a human being.

00:31:50.000 I do the same thing.

00:31:50.000 I bounce off that wall.

00:31:51.000 Say my family.

00:31:53.000 The two parents, mother and father, who brought me into this world.

00:31:56.000 That means something to me.

00:31:56.000 That bounces back.

00:31:57.000 It says this is where I am.

00:31:59.000 Send out a signal.

00:32:00.000 It bounces off my belief in God.

00:32:01.000 That is a true faith to me.

00:32:03.000 That bounces back.

00:32:04.000 It tells me this is where I am.

00:32:06.000 Off of my belief in this nation, that I'm a citizen of this nation, not some nebulous global citizen somewhere, but that I'm a citizen of this nation, in our case, the United States of America.

00:32:16.000 That means something to me.

00:32:17.000 That bounces back and says, this is where I am.

00:32:19.000 I work hard.

00:32:20.000 I create something in the world.

00:32:21.000 You make music.

00:32:21.000 That's great.

00:32:22.000 Whatever it is.

00:32:24.000 That is real.

00:32:25.000 It is true.

00:32:26.000 That bounces back.

00:32:27.000 I'm proud of that.

00:32:28.000 It tells me this is where I am.

00:32:32.000 What happens when those things each disappear?

00:32:37.000 We send out these signals, and then nothing comes back.

00:32:43.000 That's when we're lost in that abyss.

00:32:46.000 And so we will latch on to anything.

00:32:48.000 Race, gender, sexuality, climate.

00:32:50.000 And the conservative movement is a bit of a paradox here.

00:32:55.000 Because we're supposed to be conserving something, but when the thing we're supposed to be conserving does not exist, Now we have to be in the business of actually recreating something.

00:33:04.000 Or if it exists, but the signal is blocked or distorted because of pharmaceuticals like 14-year-olds on Xanax or something crazy.

00:33:13.000 You can't experience God properly if your mind is tweaked by drugs.

00:33:17.000 I mean, I don't think you can have a healthy baby if you've got amphetamines flushing through your system.

00:33:23.000 Like, how can you even learn to love if you're in pain?

00:33:28.000 So, not only is it if something is missing, but You need a clear mind.

00:33:32.000 What do you think about colonizing Mars?

00:33:35.000 What a segue!

00:33:36.000 That was the best of the week!

00:33:38.000 I like this.

00:33:38.000 I really like the smooth transitions.

00:33:41.000 This is great.

00:33:42.000 This is not a topic we selected, by the way.

00:33:44.000 We're fine to talk about colonizing Mars.

00:33:47.000 I'm in favor of exploration.

00:33:49.000 I'm in favor of new frontiers.

00:33:51.000 I do think that there's a – so should particularly the United States of America lead the way in establishing roots on Mars?

00:34:00.000 Absolutely.

00:34:00.000 I'd like to see that.

00:34:02.000 But I do think that it's an interesting point I'm going to tie to the discussion we just had.

00:34:08.000 There is a bit of escapism in that.

00:34:10.000 To say that I'm going to find my sense of meaning by going somewhere else when I actually could have it right here at home, right?

00:34:19.000 There isn't anything we couldn't understand at the atomic level that wouldn't be more edifying and liberating for us that would require us to go to Mars to do instead.

00:34:28.000 I'm not denigrating the value of going to Mars.

00:34:30.000 Support it.

00:34:31.000 I think as a spirit of human advancement and human achievement and a down payment on a future that's much longer than I believe our past has been, that's great.

00:34:41.000 But I do, whatever the case may be, I see one serial substitute after another arising saying that, oh no, maybe the thing that's going to give me fulfillment is going to Mars.

00:34:52.000 Yes, it's that thing.

00:34:53.000 Let's get behind that.

00:34:55.000 versus being grounded in the things that have, for most of our history, grounded us and given us meaning as human beings.

00:35:03.000 So work out, eat healthy, get to know your neighbors.

00:35:06.000 Yeah, that could be it.

00:35:07.000 All of those things could be on the list.

00:35:08.000 That's like the individual, the family, and the nation.

00:35:10.000 Absolutely.

00:35:10.000 Take care of yourself.

00:35:11.000 Take care of the people around you, right?

00:35:13.000 I think that we'll hear a lot more people worrying about taking care of somebody in the Congo, which I have no problem with somebody in the United States taking care of someone in the Congo, but What's your relationship with your own family?

00:35:26.000 Exactly.

00:35:26.000 Or your neighbors, right?

00:35:28.000 And I think that in the same way there's an impulse to say, let me go to Mars as a substitute for self-discovery here at home.

00:35:34.000 I'm going to Mars to look for something that I could have found by just taking a long, hard look in the mirror myself, which is actually a deeper journey into the harder question of who I really am and who we really are.

00:35:46.000 And I think that's the hard work we sometimes sidestep in terms of talking about the climate or talking about curing hunger on a continent halfway around the world before we actually ask ourselves who we really are and what we're really doing here at home.

00:35:59.000 And I think that characterizes the American moment, characterizes why much of the modern left is lost.

00:36:05.000 But it also characterizes the work cut out ahead for conservatives, or you don't have to use the label conservatives, but leaders who want to fill that vacuum of purpose and meaning in our country.

00:36:15.000 I would totally agree with you.

00:36:17.000 And piggybacking off of what you said here about looking at home for problems that you can solve, this is something I believe that Mother Teresa said when someone asked her about traveling to some other part of the world and helping the poor.

00:36:29.000 She was she your response was basically to say what about the spiritual poverty that exists around you?

00:36:35.000 What about helping to meet the spiritual needs of the people in your own life who are impoverished in that sense?

00:36:41.000 Another thing that you mentioned was caring a lot about your Country having some sense of patriotism and a national identity people having certain values that they stand for As a result of their citizenship in a nation as great as the United States and how a lot of that has been taken away from us Recently there was a song that was released by Jason Aldean he

00:37:07.000 He had this music video he put out there.

00:37:09.000 It's really making the rounds, and there's been a lot of controversy surrounding it.

00:37:13.000 And the song is called Try That in a Small Town.

00:37:16.000 And the whole purpose of the song is basically to say, if you're behaving in the disrespectful ways which are generally tolerated in large cities, in which we have been told as a population for decades are morally acceptable, you're going to have some trouble in a small town.

00:37:30.000 So the lyrics are, cuss out a cop, You know, he's describing doing things that are violent or unacceptable.

00:37:39.000 And then he says, try that in a small town and see how far you make it down the road.

00:37:43.000 We take care of our own here.

00:37:45.000 You cross that line.

00:37:46.000 It won't take long.

00:37:47.000 And, you know, find out or for you to find out, I recommend you don't try that in a small town.

00:37:52.000 So, this is a music video where someone's essentially saying, don't come to our town and cause problems.

00:37:59.000 I think it's a great message.

00:38:00.000 There are people in the media who have literally referred to this as a pro-lynching anthem, which is the most bizarre, insane, and ridiculous stretch of an interpretation I could possibly imagine.

00:38:15.000 So, this idea that traditionally American values are racist, that wanting to protect your community and your town means that you're in favor of lynching and that we need to abandon our American values is so pervasive that a song like this is criticized, whereas you have gangster rap which talks about committing actual crimes and harming innocent people and treating women poorly and doing drugs, and the media never decries that.

00:38:40.000 It looks like these lyrics should have had the word if.

00:38:45.000 If you cuss out a cop or spit in his face, if you stomp on the flag and light it up, you're gonna pay for it in a small town.

00:38:52.000 But the way it sounds, stomp on the flag, cuss out a cop, stomp on the flag, you're gonna pay for it.

00:38:58.000 It doesn't have the supposition, so people might be reading into it as if he's telling people to do that stuff.

00:39:03.000 I don't think that's the problem.

00:39:05.000 They're upset me saying don't do that because gangsta rap tells people to do horrible things like that all the time and there's never a controversy.

00:39:10.000 Right, I think part of the problem is we live in a culture where we're not supposed to expect our neighbors to share values with us.

00:39:17.000 We're supposed to live and let live and I used to love that phrase when I was younger, right, because it's libertarian ideals and it's not that I don't now but I think Ultimately, the fabric of our society is strong when we have an understanding of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.

00:39:32.000 So some of the stuff he's describing here, right?

00:39:34.000 Like, don't come to my town and attack law enforcement.

00:39:38.000 And we can have all kinds of debates about law enforcement, but we should all mutually agree that we expect one another to preserve our safety, right?

00:39:45.000 We don't want that as a social contract to be violated.

00:39:49.000 All of these ideas that he's promoting are actually completely reasonable.

00:39:53.000 It's just that He is presenting them in a way that people don't like.

00:39:56.000 And you're not supposed to tell other people, well, you're not supposed to do this.

00:39:59.000 This is against what we're allowed to do.

00:40:01.000 We're supposed to let people live and let live however they see fit, which is just toxic ultimately.

00:40:06.000 We function the best when we are able to say, I know that my neighbor shares my values and therefore will not look at me and say, well, I'm allowed to do whatever I want and I'm going to.

00:40:17.000 Yeah, so I want to ask Vivek how he feels about this, and what your response to this song has been, and also, just in general, the denigration of American values into national identity and how it's brought us to this point.

00:40:32.000 Yeah, so I think there's the superficial element of this, which, you know, frankly, others have covered over the course of today as well, which is something I agree with.

00:40:40.000 I said it this morning.

00:40:42.000 is that anytime you have a song that actually celebrates who we really are, something that a majority of Americans, by the way, at least until very recently, the values enshrined in that song would have united all Americans.

00:40:57.000 That's actually what is subject to censorship and cancellation, when in fact, songs that glorify violence or other kinds of undesirable behavior are the ones that we actually end up culturally venerating.

00:41:09.000 So there's a bit of a paradox there.

00:41:11.000 I do think there's something deeper going on, and it ties to our earlier conversation in the country, which is this idea of whether we believe in concentric circles of loyalty or not, right?

00:41:23.000 The song was about a small town, and I think that we were having a discussion earlier about the community.

00:41:30.000 I mean, how do you take care of yourself or your family before you're solving global poverty in Ethiopia or whether you're addressing the climate?

00:41:41.000 And I think that that's one of the questions we have to regain alignment on.

00:41:46.000 I think it's an interesting question.

00:41:47.000 I'm offering one view.

00:41:48.000 I'm clearly biased to that view.

00:41:51.000 But I think that there's a legitimate question of saying that, no, no, no, we don't necessarily have to solve problems at home before we solve them somewhere else.

00:41:58.000 Or do we actually take care of the problems on our own street?

00:42:02.000 If you try that in a small town, it's like almost, I'm going to stand for my people first.

00:42:06.000 I'm going to stand for my family first.

00:42:08.000 I'm going to stand for my town first.

00:42:09.000 I'm going to stand for my nation first.

00:42:11.000 Is that the right way to think about our commitments or do we have transcendental commitments that go beyond those traditional boundaries somewhere else.

00:42:20.000 And I think that's in many ways, it's not a right or left question, it's an interesting question to ponder.

00:42:26.000 And I think that that's part of what's going on when we make up these new abstract religions to substitute for the hard thing, which is look in the mirror and ask myself who I am.

00:42:35.000 Actually do something kind for my parents or for my family members or my neighbors.

00:42:42.000 In some ways, Ukraine has actually become a substitute for this, right?

00:42:45.000 Ukraine is a substitute religion. 0.93

00:42:46.000 I mean, if this song was called Try That in Ukraine, I don't think anyone would be complaining about it.

00:42:50.000 Exactly!

00:42:51.000 Because what are we trying in Ukraine or Russia?

00:42:55.000 On one hand, last year, the thing that we said, cluster bombs, that were going to be war crimes are now the very things that we will send over to Ukraine. 0.86

00:43:02.000 And so it just becomes a...

00:43:05.000 The re-emergence of a new kind of religion.

00:43:08.000 And we have a new one every couple years.

00:43:10.000 I mean, a couple years ago, we were all posting black squares.

00:43:13.000 And there's always a symbol.

00:43:14.000 There's always something.

00:43:15.000 And it's a test, right?

00:43:16.000 Do you comply?

00:43:17.000 Can I give you an outward symbol that I line up the way that a dominant culture wants me to?

00:43:23.000 And I think that's why songs like this are so interesting, is because They make people so- I mean, Variety has this article out saying that it's the most cynical song when really it's a call to action and actual protection.

00:43:34.000 This is- I mean, like, look, if you want to argue there's something wrong with the song, I think you're incorrect, but this is the most cynical song of all the songs on air today, of all the songs on the radio?

00:43:44.000 This is the most cynical?

00:43:46.000 You're out of your mind.

00:43:46.000 It seems like a psychological... I don't want to be too, like, conspiracy, but it seems like a psychological operation with the internet now.

00:43:52.000 We've got all the nations of Earth influencing our nation.

00:43:56.000 We're all influencing each other, of course, but there are, like, overt applications to corrupt and disband the United States because it's the global leader.

00:44:04.000 Who's seeding this, that that's a bad thing to protect your neighbors?

00:44:09.000 Who's doing that?

00:44:10.000 Is it the Chinese? 1.00

00:44:11.000 I don't want to be crazy conspiracy because I don't know.

00:44:13.000 But like, who wants the U.S.

00:44:15.000 to follow the money?

00:44:16.000 I don't know.

00:44:17.000 But I get a vibe that this is not a natural phenomenon from within our country.

00:44:22.000 The reaction to this is what you mean?

00:44:24.000 Yeah.

00:44:27.000 It's plausible to me.

00:44:28.000 It's almost so bizarre that that is a very fair question to ask.

00:44:32.000 In some ways, China is absolutely responsible for a lot of this, right? 0.95

00:44:36.000 Because China, you know, the game they have played, I'm going to come back and say that's not the entire explanation, but I think there's a lot of truth to it, though.

00:44:43.000 Because China has played this game on our culture for the last 20 some odd years, which is they want our psychic insecurities to flourish. 0.99

00:44:51.000 They want us to be psychologically insecure, and here's how they do it.

00:44:55.000 The spread of global capitalism in the 1990s was actually their way of accomplishing this, where we fell into this trap that said we were going to export Big Macs and Happy Meals, and Western music was a big part of this too, to places like China to spread democracy.

00:45:10.000 That was our vision of democratic capitalism in the 1990s.

00:45:13.000 Bipartisan consensus, by the way, Republicans and Democrats alike.

00:45:18.000 What they realized is, oh, wait a minute.

00:45:20.000 We can use these vehicles as a way to actually spread our values back to them.

00:45:27.000 They thought they could use our money to get them to be more like us.

00:45:30.000 China says, okay, we're going to use access to our market to get America to be more like us. 0.75

00:45:35.000 How did that work?

00:45:37.000 What they basically said is you can't enter the Chinese market, be it a music company, a movie company, etc.

00:45:43.000 A lot of entertainment fits this description.

00:45:45.000 You can't enter Disney fits this description.

00:45:48.000 The NBA fits this description.

00:45:50.000 You can't enter the Chinese market unless and until you abide by the CCP's way of doing things.

00:45:58.000 But we will roll out the red carpet If you criticize the United States.

00:46:03.000 Yeah.

00:46:03.000 So this idea of self loathing of large companies, institutions, entertainment institutions in particular, relentlessly criticizing the United States, while actually staying silent about the actual human rights atrocities in places like China, that started in some ways as a form of a psyop, right by China on the United States to say, we're going to get those institutions that you guys venerate over there, many of them are companies, Or entertainment providers to relentlessly criticize the US because the more you do that, while also staying quiet and criticism on China, the more they're going to roll out the red carpet for those companies and institutions to be able to expand into the Chinese market, which means more money.

00:46:46.000 Yeah.

00:46:47.000 So certainly there was a PSYOP component to this, but that trick only works If we have a culture that's still willing to buy up what they're selling, which goes back to that earlier absence of purpose and meaning and identity in our culture.

00:47:05.000 I think you're absolutely right about the fact that the Chinese government has a much better grasp on what is going to tug at the heartstrings and what will upset the sensibilities of the American people, as opposed to the American people's understanding of what is going to upset people in other nations.

00:47:20.000 Or in our own!

00:47:21.000 That's a very fair point.

00:47:23.000 So one story I usually bring about the Biden administration with respect to how effective I think he's been as a leader on the foreign stage is he told this story and again this is him telling this story.

00:47:37.000 He thought this made him look good.

00:47:39.000 The story was he met with Vladimir Putin and he said to Vladimir Putin, I don't think you have a soul, man.

00:47:46.000 And according to him, Vladimir Putin responded, we understand each other.

00:47:51.000 Okay, I hear this story and I go, the President of the United States just told a foreign leader who was waging a war that he thinks he's mean.

00:48:00.000 This is not going to upset that foreign leader if this ever even happened.

00:48:05.000 On the other hand, what is China doing?

00:48:07.000 China tells the United States of America that the United States of America is racist and needs to apologize for being racist, despite the fact that in order to market a film in China, you have to reduce the size of black characters on the poster.

00:48:21.000 China doesn't care about racism, but they know that the United States has a hyperfixation on it, so they try to manipulate us with it. 0.93

00:48:30.000 You touched earlier on- They turn our psychic insecurities against us.

00:48:34.000 As weapons back against us.

00:48:35.000 And then they use capitalism as a vehicle to enforce it.

00:48:38.000 Exactly.

00:48:39.000 Because companies don't get to play ball in China unless they actually carry out that dictates.

00:48:45.000 It's just the game.

00:48:45.000 It's how they play it.

00:48:46.000 This is actually why I've loved talking about the Nine-Dash Line in relation to the Barbie movie.

00:48:51.000 I think so many people are not aware of the subtle games that China plays.

00:48:55.000 So having this line on a map that probably a lot of U.S.

00:48:58.000 students are used to seeing there.

00:49:00.000 But as soon as someone in Vietnam says, hey, by the way, that's actually a claim to land that belongs to us, a bunch of Americans suddenly have to go, oh, wait, I've never ever thought about anything that affects you because I take the information that is provided to me without question.

00:49:15.000 And they have no culture.

00:49:15.000 I mean, there's a lot of reasons why someone in America may not be aware of the territorial map of the South China Sea.

00:49:21.000 On the other hand, how interesting that the Barbie movie is suddenly this thing that calls attention to the subtle claim from China to this historical area.

00:49:30.000 Yeah, it's fascinating.

00:49:31.000 You use the example of a movie Top Gun, the recent release of Top Gun had a lot of those attributes to it, too.

00:49:37.000 Where I don't know if you guys noticed, but the Enemy was some nebulous, vague other nation.

00:49:43.000 We don't know who it is.

00:49:45.000 With snow.

00:49:46.000 And by the way, the old Top Gun, the Maverick jacket that had the Taiwan and the Japanese flag on it, in the revised cut of the movie, that had disappeared.

00:49:58.000 In the original cut, you know, it was actually real.

00:50:00.000 In the original movie, it was actually the original version.

00:50:03.000 There was actually an identified enemy nation.

00:50:04.000 We're talking about the US and USSR, an actual rival.

00:50:08.000 Here it's a nebulous nation.

00:50:09.000 Why is that?

00:50:10.000 China's first read was that this movie was too patriotic for the US to be played in China.

00:50:17.000 So they come back and make those concessions.

00:50:18.000 So part of that, that's micro, that's at the margin, right?

00:50:22.000 Well, the Japan flag and the Taiwan flag no longer show up.

00:50:25.000 It's a nebulous, alternative enemy arrival, as though it was disconnected with the present reality in the United States, made it slightly less patriotic than it otherwise was.

00:50:37.000 Is it any surprise that you then see the same types of reactions from the same movie industry associations or recording industry associations that then are engaged in self-flogging here in the United States, even as they will expand into the Chinese market without a peep?

00:50:54.000 So I do think that there is a cynical force at work here, Ian.

00:50:57.000 I think you're totally right about that.

00:51:00.000 But I don't think it's the whole explanation.

00:51:03.000 That just amplifies A deeper insecurity that still existed in the first place.

00:51:08.000 Yeah, I think a lot of insecurity comes from drug abuse from the pharmaceutical industry.

00:51:11.000 We've been broken by the opiate crisis in the nineties into whatever's going on now with fentanyl.

00:51:15.000 I mean, I've been through drug abuse, I know, and it wasn't hard drugs, it was weed for the most part, and I've been through alcohol, some alcohol abuse.

00:51:22.000 I was a shell of a human being.

00:51:24.000 I had to find, I started minds because I didn't know I was asked to be a part of it, thank God, and I found purpose and I'm beginning to claw my way back to be Being able to love myself again, but these kids that are on the drugs!

00:51:36.000 There's kids on amphetamines! 0.99

00:51:38.000 Like, I agree with you that destroyed, shaken humans are very susceptible to psychological operations.

00:51:45.000 Yep.

00:51:46.000 Yeah.

00:51:46.000 How do you propose that we disentangle... Seamus, I'm sorry, do you have a question you want to ask right now?

00:51:50.000 Uh, no, no, no.

00:51:51.000 I'm gonna ask more about China.

00:51:52.000 I would actually like to hear an answer to the question you asked.

00:51:53.000 How do we disentangle from China without... 1.00

00:51:57.000 While maintaining our alliances with them, while still maintaining friendly relations.

00:52:00.000 So I think that in the next instance of that, that's going to be very difficult to do.

00:52:06.000 But what friendly relations do we need to maintain?

00:52:08.000 Some of the other ones we've cut off.

00:52:10.000 So if I'm US President, I'm thinking January 2025, I'm taking office.

00:52:14.000 Here's how it's going to look.

00:52:16.000 All right, I think we have to actually re-enter some of the deals we exited, trade deals we exited, with places like Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, Vietnam.

00:52:27.000 You go straight around the Pacific Rim.

00:52:29.000 I think we have to re-enter that to say that I'm now in a position to sit across the table

00:52:34.000 from Xi Jinping and say we're cutting the cord.

00:52:36.000 There was one though, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

00:52:38.000 I'm not sure if that's...

00:52:38.000 Yes, the TPP, yeah.

00:52:39.000 The investor state dispute settlement clause within that allows Malaysian oil companies

00:52:43.000 to sue American citizens if they discriminate.

00:52:46.000 Which I think is messed up.

00:52:47.000 Yeah.

00:52:47.000 So what I would say is, I'm a big fan of using silver linings in our favor.

00:52:51.000 So that was the TPP.

00:52:52.000 Now we have the revised CPTPP.

00:52:55.000 They want the US in, right? 0.96

00:52:57.000 So I would use the fact that Trump pulled out as leverage to say, hey, we're coming back.

00:53:01.000 But here are the concessions we need from Malaysia to Japan subsidizing their state-owned enterprise.

00:53:05.000 There's some tweaks we'll need there.

00:53:07.000 But believe me, now that we're not in it, we have the leverage to say we're coming back in on these terms.

00:53:12.000 We come back in.

00:53:12.000 But those are largely still with friendly nations.

00:53:15.000 Yeah.

00:53:15.000 That then puts me in a position as the president to sit across the table from Xi Jinping and he'll know I mean it when I say we're cutting the cord.

00:53:24.000 We're declaring total independence.

00:53:26.000 We're banning U.S. 1.00

00:53:27.000 businesses from doing business in China.

00:53:29.000 You will not buy land in our country if you're affiliated with the CCP.

00:53:33.000 You won't donate to universities in our country.

00:53:35.000 We're decoupling.

00:53:37.000 Unless you either radically reform and play by the same rules, no IP theft, no data theft, but also no turning companies into your one-sided cultural and political lobbying pawns in the United States, And if you don't meet our conditions, then we're out.

00:53:53.000 I actually think Xi Jinping meets our demands.

00:53:55.000 That's, I think, what happens.

00:53:56.000 Yeah, and I think that's a very good point.

00:53:59.000 There's something you mentioned there a little bit earlier about global capitalism and how this neoliberal vision has resulted in us allowing ourselves to be susceptible to the economic leverage of hostile nations.

00:54:12.000 There was this idea that was very popular that I became familiarized with heavily in my libertarian phase.

00:54:17.000 Known as the Golden Arches Theory, basically this idea that two nations with a McDonald's have never gone to war with one another.

00:54:22.000 Well, surprise surprise, Russia and Ukraine both have McDonald's there in operation.

00:54:28.000 Now on this question of countries that we are allied with decoupling or just tension growing with nations that we're hostile to, it seems as if we're seeing something similar in the U.S.

00:54:42.000 just with respect to our own States, which is kind of a segue here into a story about another bus of migrants which was carried from Texas to Los Angeles.

00:54:53.000 So this is something we've seen in the news repeatedly.

00:54:57.000 In this instance, the bus left Brownsville, Texas on Monday at 425 local time and arrived at Union Station at 630.

00:55:02.000 It had 45 asylum seekers from various countries, including Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, and Venezuela, according to the coalition For humane immigrant rights, I apologize.

00:55:16.000 mentions here in the article that the bus included 37 adults and eight children with the largest group of

00:55:20.000 migrants 23 people hailing from Venezuela, so it seems to me as if people who are in states

00:55:28.000 that are more wealthy and further from the border Don't have as much of a problem with unfettered migration

00:55:34.000 And of course people in border towns who are actually directly affected by it do have an issue with it

00:55:41.000 Now what we often hear from left-wing activists on this issue is there's simply a failure of empathy on the part of

00:55:46.000 people who believe The federal government should have any oversight over who's

00:55:50.000 crossing the border or that border patrol should be able to do its job in securing

00:55:53.000 our border. Of course, the irony is they're totally incapable of being compassionate towards people

00:55:59.000 who live in border states and actually have to wrestle with the struggles of unfettered migration.

00:56:04.000 You know, look, it's actually an area for national unity that I see here.

00:56:08.000 So I ended up visiting a couple months ago now I visited the south side of Chicago.

00:56:13.000 Not a which part?

00:56:16.000 I went to South Shore.

00:56:17.000 Okay.

00:56:17.000 Went to other parts of South Shore.

00:56:19.000 He's from Chicago.

00:56:19.000 Yeah, Chicago originally, yeah.

00:56:20.000 Yeah, so South Shore High School right now is being converted into an encampment for migrants, actually.

00:56:29.000 By the way, $7,000 per person per month is roughly what that costs.

00:56:35.000 That's like $90,000 a year, by the way.

00:56:36.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:56:37.000 If you were making $90k a year and spending all of it each month without saving anything, and not paying your taxes, that's how much you'd be spending each month.

00:56:45.000 It is untaxed, right?

00:56:46.000 Because these are illegal migrants by definition. 0.76

00:56:48.000 And so people in that town—and by the way, this is far-left, supposedly far-left territory, hard Democratic stronghold, not a place where Republican politicians go.

00:56:58.000 Frankly, not even a place where many Democrat politicians go.

00:57:01.000 Who were probably more strongly in favor of closing the border than even many traditional Republican donors who I meet with on a given basis.

00:57:13.000 And that's interesting to me because that's that's an America first principle, right?

00:57:19.000 It doesn't fit in the Democratic Republican boundaries, but they're asking a legitimate question which goes back to that earlier conversation.

00:57:25.000 We were having why are we taking care of somebody else first instead of starting right here?

00:57:31.000 At home.

00:57:31.000 Yep.

00:57:32.000 And so their question was, look, I had trouble getting baby formula or sneakers.

00:57:35.000 You've got sneakers and baby formula for people who are showing up illegally into this country, breaking the law. 0.99

00:57:39.000 They're getting $7,000 checks.

00:57:41.000 What am I getting?

00:57:42.000 Which I think is not an unreasonable question to ask.

00:57:46.000 And so anyway, this issue around border security, I think there is far more consensus in this country across traditional boundaries than the media would have you believe.

00:57:57.000 Traditional media would have you believe, certainly.

00:57:59.000 I think that most Americans who I've met support the idea that I've advanced, which is that building the wall isn't enough.

00:58:06.000 I mean, look, you want to talk about how fentanyl gets into this country?

00:58:09.000 There's cartel-financed tunnels underneath those walls now.

00:58:14.000 Much of what people think they're buying is Percocet or weed or whatever is often even laced now with fentanyl.

00:58:21.000 But the way we solve that problem and the migrant crisis along with it is use our military to secure that southern border.

00:58:28.000 We're now using our military equipment and resources to secure somebody else's border halfway around the world.

00:58:34.000 Let's use our own military to secure our own southern border. 0.98

00:58:36.000 I think we do it for our northern border too.

00:58:39.000 That's how you address the actual crisis.

00:58:42.000 And I think that there's broad consensus around that because just walk down the list.

00:58:46.000 Do you believe that nations should have borders?

00:58:49.000 Some people haven't... It's not a nation without borders.

00:58:52.000 It's not a nation without borders.

00:58:53.000 That's certainly my belief, but there are certain people who will say we shouldn't have borders and whatever.

00:58:56.000 Okay, fine, let's smoke that out and get that on the table. 0.99

00:58:58.000 But that's a tiny fringe minority of people.

00:59:01.000 Most people in this country say they want borders, but then if you want borders, then... Okay, if you believe in a border, then have a border.

00:59:07.000 And if we can't use our own military to secure our own border, that means we don't believe in the existence of the importance of that border in the first place, which is why I said I would close that loop.

00:59:15.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:59:16.000 Would you end birthright citizenship?

00:59:18.000 I see birthright citizenship as a danger to the people who are being trapped across the border, right?

00:59:23.000 This promise that if you are born in America you get to stay means that you're going to be willing to take huge risks to get here, which we know are incredibly dangerous to everyone involved. 0.65

00:59:33.000 Yeah.

00:59:34.000 So I would end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants. 1.00

00:59:37.000 But not for legal immigrants? 0.95

00:59:38.000 And the children of illegal immigrants. 0.99

00:59:39.000 Well, what does it mean for everybody else?

00:59:41.000 I mean, we're all citizens, whether sixth generation or first generation.

00:59:45.000 In my case, if you're born in this country, you have citizenship if you're born under legal circumstances.

00:59:50.000 But I think that if somebody comes to this country illegally and has a child while here, I do think we have to end birthright citizenship. 1.00

00:59:57.000 But does that mean you deport like a one-year-old?

01:00:00.000 I think you would do the family.

01:00:01.000 You take the whole family unit.

01:00:02.000 So I'm strongly opposed to policies that would separate kids from their parents.

01:00:09.000 I think that that was discussed even in the Trump administration and otherwise as a tactic for deterring people from coming.

01:00:18.000 As a pro-family leader, I will not adopt such a policy, but we will send back the family unit as such.

01:00:26.000 And I think that if you came to this country illegally, the right answer is you have to be sent back to your country of origin, come back through the same legal means, getting in the same line that everybody who's coming into this country legally is already pursuing. 0.88

01:00:41.000 I would tend to agree with that.

01:00:42.000 And what a lot of people will say is deportation is so cruel, it's so horrible when it happens.

01:00:46.000 Alright, yeah, I would agree.

01:00:47.000 It's not the optimal solution or circumstance.

01:00:50.000 That's why we have to have strong border security to ensure people do not come here illegally so that we don't have to deport people.

01:00:56.000 If you're against deportation, you should be in favor of having very strong borders.

01:01:00.000 The crazy thing about borders and walls is they are not, that's not where you defend.

01:01:04.000 The Romans knew that.

01:01:05.000 That's why the Romans invaded their neighbors, because you had to create a perimeter of defense. 0.85

01:01:09.000 And I don't want to see, I don't want a war with Mexico, but if they're going to allow an invasion, it's like, what other choice have they left us with?

01:01:18.000 So I think there's a couple things that I would make as hardline policies here.

01:01:23.000 End any form of foreign aid to Mexico or Central America until the border crisis is dealt with period.

01:01:30.000 Yeah, right.

01:01:31.000 I think that they have not yet borne the consequences.

01:01:34.000 of actually a border crisis that actually many of those illegal migrants crossing over aren't even

01:01:40.000 originating in Mexico, they're originating in countries...

01:01:42.000 The majority are not.

01:01:43.000 I mean, we just saw an article...

01:01:44.000 The majority is overwhelming.

01:01:45.000 ...crossing the border are not from Mexico.

01:01:46.000 The overwhelming majority, right?

01:01:47.000 Yes.

01:01:48.000 And so Mexico doesn't face any of that accountability, yet they're still a recipient 0.92

01:01:51.000 of that foreign aid. And so I think we have to use economic levers, in this case, just turning

01:01:55.000 off foreign aid unless and until they've solved that problem over there.

01:01:59.000 I would end sanctuary cities and funding for sanctuary cities, driving the demand side of this here in the United States.

01:02:05.000 I would use our military to literally station undeployed troops.

01:02:08.000 We don't need to fight a war somewhere else on the other side of the world.

01:02:11.000 Station them along our own southern border. 0.89

01:02:14.000 This is if we intended to solve that problem, and as President, I do.

01:02:18.000 This is how we actually end that migrant crisis, the fentanyl crisis.

01:02:23.000 Talk about the human trafficking crisis in this country.

01:02:25.000 That's how we do it.

01:02:26.000 Would you cap legal immigration?

01:02:29.000 Do you have any feeling on restrictions for legal immigration?

01:02:33.000 I think there should be restrictions.

01:02:35.000 The restrictions are not a specific number that we want to fetishize.

01:02:37.000 The restriction is twofold.

01:02:40.000 Both are merit-based restrictions.

01:02:44.000 Are you going to make a contribution to this country?

01:02:47.000 And then crucially, there's a second element to this too, for me.

01:02:50.000 Do you actually know something about this country and demonstrate a desire to be a part of it?

01:02:56.000 And so this was where the question of birthright citizenship goes deeper for me, is I don't think citizenship should be something that anybody automatically takes for granted, born here or not.

01:03:07.000 I think every 18-year-old should have to pass the same civics test that an immigrant has to pass in order to become a naturalized citizen in this country. 0.81

01:03:18.000 I love that.

01:03:19.000 I think you've got to know something about the country if you want to actually call yourself a citizen of that nation.

01:03:25.000 I think that ought to be true if you're an immigrant. 0.95

01:03:27.000 I'd pull up that civics test, not just from the citizenship side.

01:03:30.000 I'd pull up a version of that to the front end to even get into this country.

01:03:33.000 It selects for people who have taken the time to learn something about the country, who

01:03:36.000 have demonstrated themselves to want to be part of the country.

01:03:39.000 And then yes, to work hard and be an industrious member of our society, contributing to our

01:03:43.000 country.

01:03:44.000 And so I think that should be the limit.

01:03:47.000 But I think that the idea of using a number, then we're just playing tug of war argument

01:03:50.000 numbers, that misses the point.

01:03:52.000 This is the way we have to filter for the kind of people who should and should not be

01:03:56.000 able to enter this country.

01:03:57.000 And then just because you're born here, doesn't mean that the act of just being born today,

01:04:02.000 born and happened to have arbitrarily been in the United States of America.

01:04:06.000 There's something beautiful about birthright citizenship in the American experiment, which is to say that your citizenship in this country is not based on your ethnicity or your allegiance to a monarch or even your religion.

01:04:20.000 That it's anybody who's born here can be a citizen.

01:04:23.000 I would take that to the next level to say it's not just about being born here, but anybody who truly makes contributions to this country and pledges allegiance to this country and knows something about the country.

01:04:33.000 They're the ones who actually are the true capital C citizens.

01:04:37.000 And that's, I mean, many people find that view radical, maybe it is?

01:04:40.000 It's not.

01:04:41.000 I don't think that's radical at all.

01:04:43.000 I've heard your plan before.

01:04:44.000 I don't think radical's bad.

01:04:45.000 Yeah, well, this is something I've heard you say in the past, that you would have people who are over the age of 18 take a civics test before they're able to vote, and then once they get to 25, they can vote in general, but you would restrict voting between that age gap.

01:05:00.000 I actually happen to think that that's a good idea.

01:05:02.000 I don't know that I'm saying I would specifically endorse that exact policy or how it would flesh out, but when I hear it, it sounds right to me.

01:05:08.000 Because historically in this country, the voting age was 21 years old, and this was at a time when you were expected to be on your own taking care of yourself at the age of 16.

01:05:16.000 So by the time you got to voting age, you knew a thing or two about the world.

01:05:21.000 You'd survived on your own.

01:05:22.000 You'd paid your rent, so to speak.

01:05:24.000 You knew what life was like for other people.

01:05:26.000 I remember when I was in high school.

01:05:27.000 I graduated 10 years ago.

01:05:28.000 I hadn't turned 18 by the time the election happened, but I remember a friend of mine went out and he voted for Obama.

01:05:33.000 Why?

01:05:33.000 Because he didn't know anything about Obama.

01:05:36.000 He didn't really listen to any of his speeches, but, well, I think he's the guy who wants to legalize weed, so I'm voting for him.

01:05:40.000 I'm sorry.

01:05:41.000 Eighteen-year-olds are not in a position where they know enough about the world where they're qualified to vote, and if they are in that position, they are a minority, and we should have a kind of test to vet for those people. 0.60

01:05:50.000 I think that's perfectly legitimate.

01:05:51.000 And it's the exact same test.

01:05:53.000 I'm not making up some new test from scratch.

01:05:55.000 It's the exact same test we've decided that an immigrant has to pass in order to become a voting citizen of this country. 0.94

01:06:03.000 I'll give you examples of what they ask in the test.

01:06:05.000 I mean, how many branches of government are there?

01:06:06.000 What are they?

01:06:07.000 What branch of government does the U.S.

01:06:09.000 president lead?

01:06:10.000 Is it so objectionable to say if you're voting for U.S.

01:06:13.000 president that you know what branch of government the U.S.

01:06:16.000 president actually leads?

01:06:17.000 I think it is not.

01:06:18.000 No.

01:06:19.000 And so the implementation of this proposal, it's been a little while since I talked about it, and it wasn't Believe me, I think people will believe me when I say this.

01:06:28.000 I was not doing this to score political points.

01:06:31.000 This did not poll particularly well as an idea.

01:06:34.000 My job is to persuade people that this is what we need to revive in our country.

01:06:39.000 So right now, I'll remind you of something that a lot of people forget.

01:06:44.000 We have a selective service requirement in the US.

01:06:46.000 That's right.

01:06:48.000 Men between the age of 18 and 25 have to, on pain of criminal penalty, that means potentially going to jail, register for selective service.

01:06:56.000 That's the draft.

01:06:57.000 We don't have an active draft.

01:06:59.000 But if you don't register between the age of 18 to 25, you're doing so at behest of criminal penalties.

01:07:05.000 I would decriminalize that.

01:07:07.000 I don't think that that should be the way we do things here.

01:07:10.000 But in replacement of that, I say, you're free.

01:07:12.000 You're not going to jail whether or not you register for selective service. 0.98

01:07:15.000 But if you want the ultimate civic privilege in this country of voting before the age of 25, then pass the darn civics test.

01:07:22.000 And if tests aren't for you, then serve the country for six months, either in the military or in a first responder role.

01:07:28.000 And I think that is an absolutely fair thing to ask.

01:07:32.000 But it's also, and I'm going to make a prediction on this, voting rates in this country amongst young people, which are already really low, We'll skyrocket after you actually make the act of voting mean something. 0.63

01:07:48.000 It's been a long time since we've done that.

01:07:49.000 I completely agree with you.

01:07:51.000 And one thing that I find particularly suspicious about the Democratic establishment today is that so many of their efforts are catered towards people they know are going to be uninformed voters.

01:08:01.000 So, for example, you see these get out and vote commercials on television where a celebrity tells you that you should go select a certain candidate, and they won't necessarily tell you to vote for the Democrat.

01:08:10.000 But the question is, if a person wasn't going to vote until Will Ferrell told them to, is this really someone we want voting in our elections?

01:08:19.000 And I think the answer to that question is genuinely no.

01:08:22.000 If you're only going to vote because a celebrity told you to, You probably don't know or care enough to be in the voting booth.

01:08:27.000 So we're constantly hearing about the civic duty to vote.

01:08:30.000 Well, what about the civic duty to be informed?

01:08:32.000 I think that exists as well.

01:08:33.000 And I think it's a really good idea to have a test that tries to select for people on the basis of how much they actually know about the system.

01:08:41.000 Yeah, and I think studies bear out that when people are bought into something, when they have to govern it and protect it, they have to participate through civic participation, they have to take a test to show that they are part of the system, they are more likely to feel the sense of duty.

01:08:54.000 And that's so important.

01:08:56.000 We've talked earlier about sort of reinvigorating our culture to feel a sense of

01:09:00.000 patriotism to feel a sense of purpose. And this is one of the

01:09:03.000 ways we do it. We have to institute. I mean, obviously, this isn't a micro change, but we have to institute these

01:09:07.000 changes that ultimately direct the young people in America towards a more purpose-filled life.

01:09:13.000 I got just to clarify. Are you saying that in order to vote at the age of 80, you either take a test or join the

01:09:18.000 Selective Service?

01:09:19.000 I say that if you want to vote between the ages of 18 and 25, you either have to pass the same civics test that every

01:09:27.000 immigrant has to pass in order to become a voting citizen of this country. 0.97

01:09:31.000 Or else, serve for six months, either in a military or first responder role.

01:09:36.000 Okay, because there's like a, I don't want to call them an underclass, but there's people with low nutrition that their parents have been very poor, raised the descendants of slaves, for instance, that didn't have access to money, wealth, education, and nutrition.

01:09:48.000 And the IQ, I mean, that can affect IQ, you know, not having good nutrition.

01:09:52.000 And we should fix that.

01:09:53.000 But here's one standards I believe in consistency.

01:09:57.000 So there is actually a particular schedule of exceptions, even for immigrants who come to this country to be naturalized citizens.

01:10:04.000 So, you know, there are mental handicaps or otherwise, that stop someone from being able to take a test.

01:10:09.000 So I would apply that same framework.

01:10:12.000 I'm a big fan of not reinventing wheels when they don't need to be reinvented.

01:10:16.000 We've already had a process.

01:10:18.000 It's one that's active in place today to say that if you're an immigrant to the country, even if you've paid taxes for 10 years or whatever, There's a process required to go through being a voting citizen of this country.

01:10:29.000 For 99.9% of people, it means taking that test and passing it.

01:10:32.000 Are there 0.1% exceptions, you know, handicapped of various kinds?

01:10:36.000 Of course there are.

01:10:37.000 Follow the same rubric that you do for immigrants. 0.98

01:10:40.000 But my point is, at the age of 18, you shouldn't just passively age into citizenship, just like someone who comes to this country doesn't passively get to enjoy the privileges of citizenship.

01:10:51.000 And I want to use that to just raise a deeper point.

01:10:53.000 I haven't brought this up before in conversations about this, but I like this format.

01:10:57.000 We're actually having a real conversation, and this is not like a two-minute TV hit where we're just checking off boxes.

01:11:03.000 Those are awful.

01:11:04.000 You know, I mean, there's a time and place for everything.

01:11:07.000 He likes us better.

01:11:07.000 Take that, mainstream media.

01:11:09.000 You hear that, Don Lemon?

01:11:10.000 What up, Pierce?

01:11:10.000 Just kidding, I love you.

01:11:11.000 No, I mean, I think this is good.

01:11:13.000 This is good.

01:11:13.000 I think this is the direction of where we're going to have to go, if we're reviving the country, to actually have open and unfiltered conversations.

01:11:22.000 What you should do as president is have these things daily.

01:11:24.000 Oh, I will do podcasts.

01:11:25.000 I will continue participating in podcasts.

01:11:27.000 Podcasts from the Oval Office, here we go!

01:11:29.000 Why not, right?

01:11:30.000 I would love it.

01:11:30.000 We should have with everyday citizens who are randomly selected.

01:11:36.000 It's like the old fireside chat, right?

01:11:38.000 It's the modern version of bringing that back.

01:11:39.000 But the point I was going to make was this about citizenship.

01:11:43.000 It's such an interesting concept to ponder.

01:11:45.000 What does it mean to be a citizen?

01:11:48.000 The way we think about it today, I think it's a feature of the modern moment we live in.

01:11:54.000 We're taught to think about it in terms of what do I get?

01:11:58.000 What do I get if I'm a citizen?

01:11:59.000 It's something that I go get.

01:12:00.000 What do I enjoy?

01:12:02.000 What does that give me?

01:12:03.000 I'm going to challenge that.

01:12:07.000 It may be a little bit uncomfortable, but it should be more familiar than strange.

01:12:14.000 What does it actually mean to be a citizen?

01:12:16.000 For most of our history, for much of our history, women couldn't vote, right? 0.99

01:12:19.000 So you might say being a citizen means you vote.

01:12:21.000 I get this thing.

01:12:22.000 I get to vote.

01:12:23.000 Well, for much of our history, you know, let's use the case of women. 1.00

01:12:27.000 Women couldn't vote, but they were still citizens. 1.00

01:12:32.000 So, huh.

01:12:33.000 Maybe there's something else going on here with respect to citizenship that isn't entirely about or even mostly about what I get.

01:12:44.000 Maybe, just maybe.

01:12:45.000 Think about it for a second.

01:12:46.000 Try it on.

01:12:47.000 What I say to people who might disagree with me, and I try to practice what I preach too, is you get a new idea, try it on like a set of clothes.

01:12:56.000 See if it fits.

01:12:56.000 If it doesn't fit, you can put it back on the rack.

01:12:58.000 Full refund policy, okay?

01:12:59.000 But just try it on like a set of clothes for a second.

01:13:03.000 Maybe citizenship is actually about obligation.

01:13:06.000 I like that a lot.

01:13:07.000 Maybe citizenship is actually about duty.

01:13:09.000 Maybe that's actually what the whole thing is about in the first place, is to say that, you know what, I live in a free society that allows me, people like me, a kid of parents who came to this country as immigrants with no money in their pocket, who goes on to found multi-billion dollar companies at the age of 37 and self-finance a presidential run by putting tens of millions of dollars of my own hard-earned money to it.

01:13:31.000 That's the American dream.

01:13:32.000 That's what I got to live.

01:13:34.000 But maybe citizenship is about something else.

01:13:37.000 Yeah.

01:13:37.000 Citizenship's about duty.

01:13:40.000 I mean, that's the Reagan quote, right?

01:13:41.000 Ask not what your country can do for you.

01:13:43.000 JFK.

01:13:43.000 JFK, sorry.

01:13:44.000 Mixed up all my presidents today.

01:13:45.000 Reagan probably said it too.

01:13:48.000 Not in so many words, but he said it, right?

01:13:50.000 Ask what you can do for your country.

01:13:52.000 And there is a lack of duty.

01:13:54.000 I think there is a culture that demands that it be given and it be allowed to take, but it does not give back.

01:13:59.000 And so I completely agree with everything that you just said there.

01:14:04.000 There's a conception of rights which was, I would say, much more common historically than it is today, but it's basically the idea that rights are a product of duties and not vice versa.

01:14:18.000 So today, our understanding is basically as follows.

01:14:22.000 Well, you have rights, and you just have them.

01:14:24.000 We can't explain how or why.

01:14:26.000 Maybe we'll reference God.

01:14:28.000 Maybe, you know, if we don't believe in God, but we do believe in rights, it's like the invisible morality particles that float around us.

01:14:34.000 I have no clue.

01:14:35.000 But we just have these rights, and then...

01:14:37.000 When you exercise your rights, sometimes you incur responsibilities.

01:14:40.000 I believe it is the exact opposite.

01:14:42.000 There are things you are made to do as a person.

01:14:44.000 And because you are made to do these things, you have an obligation to do them.

01:14:48.000 For example, a man has an obligation to care for his family.

01:14:52.000 Because he has an obligation to care for his family financially and provide for them, that means He has a right to seek out licit methods of providing for them uninterfered with, or a person has a duty to protect themselves.

01:15:04.000 If you have a duty to protect yourselves, then you have a right to the best possible tool necessary for protecting yourself, which is why we have something like the Second Amendment.

01:15:12.000 But I find that almost everyone in politics gets this entirely backwards.

01:15:16.000 They say you have the right and then the duty, but the truth is, no, you have the right because you have a duty.

01:15:21.000 Yes, and that is, so in a simple framework, that's what I'm saying is, At the age of 18, you think about, OK, I have an obligation to at least serve or at least to know something about the country.

01:15:30.000 And then I have an equal voice and vote in determining that direction.

01:15:35.000 But that policy, like, you know, I've gotten into a lot of discussions in the last few months about it.

01:15:39.000 It's almost obsessing over the detail with false precision about one idea that's part of a broader worldview that I bring to the idea of citizenship in this country itself.

01:15:52.000 I think we need to revive that idea of civic duty.

01:15:57.000 Fallen into the trap of thinking that American identity is all about individualism, right?

01:16:01.000 That it's just about me, me, me.

01:16:04.000 And I don't apologize, by the way, for free market capitalism.

01:16:07.000 I'm an unapologetic embracer of free market capitalism, the best known system to man to lift people up from poverty.

01:16:14.000 But I just don't think that's the whole story.

01:16:15.000 I think there's a separate and important equally co-equal story that we're also part of a nation that's bigger than the sum of its parts, that we as citizens, not as capitalists, But as citizens owe a duty to that nation.

01:16:31.000 Right?

01:16:32.000 So 1776 was the year of the birth of the nation.

01:16:34.000 That was the year of the wealth of nations.

01:16:36.000 That was Adam Smith's famous text.

01:16:38.000 It was also the year of the Declaration of Independence.

01:16:41.000 And I think that both of these are America's parents.

01:16:46.000 And the only other fine point I wanted to put on this, this actually relates to our earlier discussion about religion.

01:16:52.000 Is that you hear a lot in this country, people invoke this term, the Judeo-Christian values that this nation was founded on it.

01:16:57.000 This nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values.

01:17:01.000 But nobody ever stops to talk about what are those values.

01:17:03.000 That's exactly right.

01:17:04.000 And one of those values, it's fundamental to this conversation, is the idea of duty.

01:17:09.000 To discharge a duty involves making a sacrifice.

01:17:12.000 Amen.

01:17:14.000 God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

01:17:19.000 He didn't have to follow through with it, it turned out.

01:17:22.000 But he was willing to make that sacrifice.

01:17:24.000 And then in the New Testament, when God sacrifices his son, For the people.

01:17:29.000 Yeah.

01:17:30.000 Christ gives himself up willingly to death for us.

01:17:33.000 And that idea is woven into the idea of citizenship itself, is that there's a certain sacrifice required to be a citizen.

01:17:40.000 That's an example of a Judeo-Christian value woven into, not a direct democracy, but a constitutional republic, which involves those civic duties.

01:17:48.000 Absolutely.

01:17:49.000 I couldn't agree with you more.

01:17:50.000 And you have mentioned capitalism here a few times.

01:17:53.000 You've also mentioned spirituality.

01:17:55.000 And I think something very insidious has happened here with a decoupling of markets from an understanding of what man is.

01:18:02.000 The fact that man is not merely matter.

01:18:05.000 He is matter and spirit and he has spiritual needs.

01:18:09.000 Capitalism, stripped of any reference to the supernatural, to our creator, to spirituality, and communism both suffer from a massive flaw, which is that they essentially promote the idea that if we just rearrange matter properly, we will unlock utopia.

01:18:31.000 The physical world is just a combination lock.

01:18:34.000 And if we can arrange things in the exact right manner, we're gonna unlock the gates of heaven and everyone will be happy for the rest of history.

01:18:41.000 We'll reach this kind of Hegelian, pseudo-eschatonical end to everything.

01:18:47.000 And of course, that's complete nonsense.

01:18:49.000 If you ignore what man is and you only focus on production and moving forward raw economic forces without reference to what is good for man, you end up in an A horribly, unbearably spiritually impoverished environment, and often a very materially poor environment as well, because when people don't cultivate those virtues, as it turns out, they don't even end up retaining their ability to produce as well.

01:19:13.000 You talked about Judeo-Christian values.

01:19:15.000 I was thinking about the second commandment.

01:19:16.000 Thou shalt have no false idols.

01:19:19.000 And yet we have money.

01:19:20.000 The obsession with...

01:19:22.000 This false idol of money.

01:19:24.000 And so these international banks, the Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserves, Bank of England, Bank of Australia, they're waving us around with like a carrot.

01:19:31.000 Like, you want a loan?

01:19:33.000 You want to play our game?

01:19:33.000 ESG?

01:19:34.000 You want to be part of this false idol?

01:19:36.000 Like, they're dangling the false idol there.

01:19:38.000 So, I've heard you talk about redirecting our investments away from indexes that play the black rock game and into some sort of, I don't know what you call it, a national index or something that is like a, that values Not Christian values, but just values like – not even American values, man.

01:19:54.000 Values that incur freedom, like natural American-born freedom.

01:19:58.000 How would you do that?

01:19:59.000 Yeah, so let me – this is such an interesting topic here.

01:20:04.000 So let's just pick up from – Adam Smith's first book was actually about ethics.

01:20:08.000 The second book was actually about the wealth of nations and his view is there has to be a moral society for capitalism to be able to work its magic on.

01:20:17.000 Yes.

01:20:19.000 And I believe the same thing, by the way.

01:20:21.000 I think that capitalism is the best system known to organize a society's affairs if our, it's the perfect system, if our wants actually match our needs.

01:20:35.000 And the difference, the little daylight between our wants and our needs might be a crude definition of this thing we call virtue.

01:20:42.000 So I think capitalism against the backdrop of a virtuous society for organizing stuff, you know, Things, tangible material goods.

01:20:51.000 It's a perfect system for organizing the distribution of goods against the backdrop of a virtuous society where our wants match our needs.

01:20:58.000 But modern social media or otherwise has called that bluff.

01:21:01.000 That our wants, the modern pharmaceutical market, drug market, our wants don't always match our actual true needs as human beings.

01:21:09.000 So then, this is actually what temptingly led to the birth of a movement that I strongly disagree with.

01:21:15.000 A movement that had an answer to that question, nonetheless.

01:21:18.000 That was what gave birth to the rise of stakeholder capitalism, right?

01:21:23.000 I say this as someone who's a critic, probably the most unsparing critic of stakeholder capitalism in America in the last four years, but I say this to give the best shake to the view, is it says that capitalism was made for moral people, and so we need to re-infuse the morality into capitalism itself to say that when we're allocating dollars, we're taking environmental or social factors into account, not just the fetishization of green pieces of paper, that there's more to the story.

01:21:56.000 I'm giving as charitable and, you know, true, truly empathetic account as I can.

01:22:03.000 I have a different worldview of how to deal with it, right?

01:22:06.000 My view is let the green pieces of paper be the green pieces of paper.

01:22:11.000 That's okay if it's just about stuff.

01:22:14.000 But there's a separate sphere of our lives in our body politic, in the civic sphere of our lives, or the spiritual sphere of our lives, Where that money ought to have no influence whatsoever.

01:22:27.000 That's right.

01:22:28.000 Right?

01:22:29.000 And so, I'm one of these people who resists the idea of infusing those moral judgments into how the dollars are allocated, but instead to make sure the allocation of dollars in that sport of capitalism is just one of many spheres, maybe even one of many small spheres, of a total life well-lived and a society well-functioning.

01:22:50.000 And so part of my objection to stakeholder capitalism is that it wrongfully marries our body politic with our system of allocating goods and services and stuff, when in fact I don't think we need Capitalism and democracy to share the same bed, what I think we actually need is a clean divorce.

01:23:10.000 And both of those are part of what it means to be American.

01:23:13.000 So anyway, to your question, what was happening with these index funds, BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard, what they said is, not only are we going to use your money to buy stocks in the overall stock market, but we're also going to use your money to vote for certain environmental and social agendas that it turns out many people, most people in this country do not agree with.

01:23:34.000 Racial equity audits, we could go down the list.

01:23:36.000 Quota systems on boards.

01:23:40.000 And that's co-mingling a social agenda into capitalism, where you're supposed to, your investment dollars are supposed to go to the best investments they could find and vote for the best policies they can to maximize profit.

01:23:52.000 So actually what I started was a separate way of creating index funds, a company called Strive that said the same investments but with a different philosophy of voting, focusing on excellence over political agendas.

01:24:05.000 Define excellence.

01:24:06.000 Yeah, so this is an important question.

01:24:09.000 So at the individual level, I think excellence or meritocracy refers to any system in which you are free to realize your maximal potential without anybody standing in your way, whatever your God-given potential is.

01:24:26.000 Maybe it's on the basketball court, maybe it's As a musician, maybe it's in the classroom or in mathematics, that you're able to achieve your maximal potential.

01:24:34.000 That's what excellence means at the individual level.

01:24:36.000 At the level of a company, I think it means that you have a mission, a worthy mission, and that your job is to exclusively excel at that mission.

01:24:47.000 That doesn't mean that there aren't other worthy missions for other companies or institutions to pursue, but let another company or another institution pursue it.

01:24:55.000 But your company Your job is to achieve your mission, and yes, unapologetically, create value for the people who back you in the process.

01:25:05.000 If their mission is to, you know, stop climate change, like, these vague or weird, like, racist missions, do you still support the excellence of those?

01:25:15.000 So those are very unlikely to survive in a system of capitalism because the way capitalism works is you have to provide something of tangible value to someone that exceeds the cost of what it takes for you to provide it to them.

01:25:31.000 So somebody's free to do that, right?

01:25:33.000 And if they were able to provide something of value in the process, then I have no problem with that being the mission.

01:25:39.000 So wearing my hat of being, let's say, back when I was running Strive, my hat was, I'm not going to pass judgment on your mission.

01:25:46.000 Maybe it's to be the world's most successful restaurant chain that delivers delicious food to people and brings them delight.

01:25:52.000 Maybe your mission is to go to Mars.

01:25:55.000 Whatever it is, if it's a worthy mission and you stick to your mission, Great, that's how you actually maximize long run value for shareholders.

01:26:03.000 But my problem is you say your mission is to develop medicines to save people's lives, or to develop notebooks that people can capture their thoughts in.

01:26:13.000 And yet, you're also claiming to solve climate change and racial injustice at the same time.

01:26:20.000 That is something other than what I would call the pursuit of corporate excellence.

01:26:24.000 When you are looking for corporate excellence, like a bigger return than what you're putting into it, what's the time scale?

01:26:29.000 Because a lot of people argue, well, we're just going to put money in at a loss for 20 or 40 years until you see that the world is now better because there's less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

01:26:38.000 Is it a year?

01:26:38.000 One year?

01:26:39.000 So I think each investor has to define for themselves what their time horizon is, but I believe that we're talking over long-term time horizons.

01:26:46.000 Now, this long-termism argument has become A cover, a smokescreen for effectively advancing agendas that had nothing to do with excellence or value creation, but in the guise of saying, but 500 years from now, when we and our kids and our grandkids are dead and gone, it will have created value.

01:27:04.000 That becomes mythology.

01:27:05.000 That becomes a new religion in its own right.

01:27:07.000 So I reject the jujitsu and the falsehood of that.

01:27:10.000 But in principle, I'm talking about long run value creation.

01:27:13.000 Can I ask a question?

01:27:14.000 Why do you think it's trendy among, I'm gonna say young progressives, but maybe a lot of people, to say that, you know, capitalism is bad?

01:27:20.000 Why is there so much antipathy towards capitalism?

01:27:23.000 Yeah, I could give you a somewhat cynical and somewhat historical account here.

01:27:29.000 Okay, I'm excited.

01:27:31.000 So let's start with an old quote from, have any of you heard of Ludwig von Mises?

01:27:36.000 Yeah.

01:27:37.000 Okay, got it, got it.

01:27:38.000 Not everyone has.

01:27:39.000 We're a weird room.

01:27:41.000 As he is called the Mac Daddy of communicating Austrian theory.

01:27:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:46.000 He and Hayek are the Mac Daddies, I would say.

01:27:50.000 I'm not going to get this exactly right, but I'll get you off the top of my head at least approximately right.

01:27:57.000 He said there's two ways for the son of a great man and, you know, man, woman, girl, doesn't matter, whatever.

01:28:02.000 I like the picture, I'm not gonna worry about it.

01:28:04.000 Doesn't matter.

01:28:06.000 Very inclusive of him.

01:28:07.000 The point stands regardless, but I'm talking to you.

01:28:09.000 So the son of a great man can exceed his father in one of two ways.

01:28:15.000 One of them is to exceed his father on his own terms, which by definition, in the thought experiment of a great man, is hard to do.

01:28:23.000 The second is to exceed his father, not on his own terms, but on subjective terms of moral superiority.

01:28:33.000 And that one's a lot easier because that morality is subjectively defined.

01:28:37.000 Why did I bring up this random quote from von Mises?

01:28:39.000 I'm trying to explain why it's trendy to say that we hate capitalism.

01:28:43.000 That we hate our dads, basically.

01:28:44.000 I'm at a deeper level.

01:28:46.000 I'm mad at my dad.

01:28:47.000 You got it.

01:28:47.000 We are now in the middle of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history.

01:28:54.000 From Baby Boomers to Millennials and Gen Z. That's what's happening right now. 0.67

01:28:59.000 So there's two ways to exceed your father.

01:29:01.000 One is on his own terms.

01:29:01.000 That's really hard because he's already set a high bar and that's hard work.

01:29:06.000 But the other is Maybe let's just call the whole game immoral and we're going to exceed him on morally superior terms.

01:29:16.000 That's a big part of I think what's going on is a sort of psychic apologism as a substitute for achievement.

01:29:24.000 Now that's a cynical account.

01:29:25.000 I think there are some real factors to it.

01:29:27.000 I got my first job in the fall of 2007.

01:29:31.000 at a hedge fund in New York City on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis.

01:29:35.000 Rough times.

01:29:35.000 Right?

01:29:36.000 I mean, I ended up getting, I know things worked out for me, but a lot of my peers who entered the workforce at the same time are jaded and cynical, saying that, hey, it was supposed to be that if you worked hard, and you did your part, that you could get ahead through your own dedication.

01:29:49.000 Well, that's not the way it worked out.

01:29:50.000 And the guys who got bailed out weren't the guys who did any of that at all.

01:29:53.000 So I do think that there's a jaded generation that has good reason.

01:30:01.000 I was told that I get a four-year college degree, I take on all this debt, I'm going to get that job, enter the workforce, pay that back through my unheard work, but then there's this 2008 financial crisis.

01:30:09.000 Oh, and the guys who get bailed out are the guys who actually made tens of millions of dollars to their drivers, drive them home from the 85 Broad Street downtown to Goldman Sachs or wherever it is, musing about how terrible the financial system is while they go to their penthouse on the Upper East Side in their car service while I'm still just joined Without with college debt, no money in the bank being told that if I work hard, I just got laid off.

01:30:29.000 So I think that there's a there's a version of this that the seer timing of when many millennials.

01:30:35.000 I'm 37, right?

01:30:35.000 People my age entered the workforce.

01:30:38.000 They were given good reasons to be jaded because they were promised and told one thing about the American dream, and what they actually lived was another.

01:30:48.000 And so that's the charitable and sympathetic account.

01:30:50.000 The cynical account is, well, we're still in this hating your prior generation of baby boomers that you're not going to stack up to, so you might as well claim to be morally superior to them. 0.82

01:30:59.000 I think it's a little bit of both going on.

01:31:03.000 My own philosophy, and I'm not tooting my own horn here, I'm just saying this in the small hope that this gives some inspiration to people who may be able to live the same dream that I have.

01:31:16.000 Hardship is not a choice in life.

01:31:20.000 Right?

01:31:20.000 Hardship is something that happens to you.

01:31:21.000 My parents actually encountered plenty of it as we were growing up.

01:31:25.000 My dad faced You know, I think a ruthless round of layoffs at GE under Jack Welch's tenure when my dad was, you know, 10 steps down the totem pole in their org chart.

01:31:36.000 But what did he do?

01:31:37.000 He went to night school at law school for four years.

01:31:40.000 I was in sixth grade.

01:31:41.000 I used to go with him and sit with him in the back of the classroom because we didn't have childcare or anything else.

01:31:44.000 Full day at work, 45-minute drive north of Kentucky, but he kept his job that way because they had a shortage of patent attorneys.

01:31:50.000 I say this because I grew up in a household where that was the example that was set for me.

01:31:54.000 So when I entered the workforce, yeah, 2008 financial crisis hit six months into my job.

01:31:59.000 We had some problems.

01:32:02.000 But I remember the example my parents set.

01:32:04.000 Hardship is something that happens to you.

01:32:07.000 It's not something you choose.

01:32:10.000 But victimhood is a choice.

01:32:13.000 We choose to be victims.

01:32:15.000 You don't choose your hardship, but you do choose victimhood.

01:32:18.000 You can choose not to be a victim.

01:32:20.000 And hardship is not the same thing as victimhood.

01:32:24.000 And I share that because there are legitimate grievances that many Millennials and Gen Z members growing up in our American economy can have.

01:32:31.000 But honestly, for most of human history, most people of any skin color or whatever, we all have some grievance we can latch on to.

01:32:38.000 But I think a big part of where we landed in this case of self-loathing was this deeper psychic insecurity, that we're actually afraid of trying to realize our full potential, because if we fail, we're afraid of that failure.

01:32:53.000 We're afraid to match up to the standards set by the great man or baby boomer generation that came before us. 0.96

01:32:59.000 That's a long answer to your question, but...

01:33:01.000 No, it's a good answer.

01:33:02.000 It's a really good answer.

01:33:02.000 I think the idea of choice is really important.

01:33:04.000 I think, you know, I'm also a first-generation American and I think about that regularly when you have the choice to be here, when you have the choice to be in America and to live your life this way and to raise your family here.

01:33:14.000 So I think that's such a good theme to close on.

01:33:17.000 Where'd your parents come from?

01:33:19.000 Canada and England.

01:33:20.000 So it's English speaking for sure, but definitely there are cultural differences.

01:33:24.000 And I think growing up without family support, it's just a whole mindset that you chose to be here.

01:33:28.000 And I remember this idea of young celebrities saying, well, if Trump wins, then I will move to Canada and being like, You have no idea what you were born into.

01:33:36.000 You guys are so privileged you can't see it.

01:33:38.000 And I don't use that word lightly.

01:33:39.000 I got one final question.

01:33:40.000 We're going to go super chats pretty soon.

01:33:42.000 Has this been like two hours already?

01:33:43.000 It's an hour and a half.

01:33:45.000 Is this an hour and thirty?

01:33:46.000 Yeah.

01:33:47.000 Already?

01:33:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:48.000 Time flies.

01:33:49.000 Yeah, it's been great.

01:33:50.000 Yeah, dude.

01:33:50.000 It's been great having you.

01:33:51.000 Again and again.

01:33:52.000 So are we even in a system of capitalism with fractional reserve banking and in March 2020 infinite reserve currency?

01:33:58.000 Like is that even capitalism?

01:33:59.000 It's not.

01:34:00.000 So that's a good question.

01:34:01.000 You're asking the right questions.

01:34:03.000 It is a hollowed out husk of this thing we call capitalism.

01:34:06.000 Is it capitalism where we're engaging in global free trade with a mercantilist actor in the form of the Chinese Communist Party that has non-financial political demands as a condition for expanding and doing business there?

01:34:18.000 Is it capitalism for Airbnb to hand over the user data of American users as a condition for expanding into the Chinese market?

01:34:25.000 It's not, but let me answer your question.

01:34:27.000 Is it capitalism when you have the Federal Reserve printing and raining money from on high like mana from heaven?

01:34:33.000 It's like, is it really skiing if you're skiing on artificial snow?

01:34:36.000 Yeah.

01:34:37.000 Well, you're not skiing anymore if they turn off the snow machine, which is what's happened now with tight monetary policy.

01:34:41.000 So, as a side note, and I think I'm the only, certainly on the Republican side, the only presidential candidate talking about this, I think we have to restore dollar stability as the sole mandate of the U.S.

01:34:55.000 Federal Reserve.

01:34:56.000 Cut the playing God game.

01:34:58.000 Managing inflation and unemployment, trying to hit two targets with one arrow, disastrously missing both.

01:35:04.000 Cut that game out.

01:35:05.000 We're done with it.

01:35:07.000 And to say that we're restoring a single mandate of stabilizing the U.S.

01:35:11.000 dollar.

01:35:11.000 You mentioned this earlier in the context of a different storyline.

01:35:15.000 Stabilize the dollar as a unit of measurement against commodities.

01:35:19.000 Yes, exactly.

01:35:20.000 Gold, nickel, silver.

01:35:21.000 Bitcoin?

01:35:22.000 So I think that Bitcoin, for me, for a number of reasons, does not yet meet that commodity basket.

01:35:27.000 I'm a Bitcoin fan.

01:35:28.000 I spoke at the Bitcoin conference.

01:35:30.000 I just want to stabilize the dollar against agriculture and farm commodities, gold, silver, nickel.

01:35:35.000 And there could be a point in time where Bitcoin becomes part of that commodity basket.

01:35:38.000 There's some technical reasons why I wouldn't include that today.

01:35:41.000 But the main point is stabilize the dollar as a unit of measurement, rather than trying to actually play financial god from on high.

01:35:48.000 Yeah, no, I massively appreciate that.

01:35:50.000 You made this analogy about it like raining down like manna from heaven.

01:35:53.000 I guess the only caveat is if the manna was just like less filling, the more of it rained out.

01:35:57.000 It's really more like splitting the manna into smaller pieces.

01:36:00.000 Yeah, shredding it.

01:36:01.000 Yeah, the way I like to think of it is it's almost like we're running this casino and then we're going, people aren't spending enough money at the casino.

01:36:08.000 We'll make more chips.

01:36:09.000 It's like, no, that's not how this works at all.

01:36:11.000 So in the fall of ancient Rome, right?

01:36:14.000 There's some deep parallels to what we see in the United States today.

01:36:18.000 So Septimius Severus, well, it's a fun story about Septimius Severus.

01:36:23.000 He's weirdly an emperor that now, in contemporary modern, contemporary Western history, we've somehow decided to celebrate because HBO, or I can't remember which network it was, created the series calling him the Black Emperor.

01:36:35.000 He apparently had darker skin than the other Roman emperors.

01:36:38.000 And so, anyway, we remember him really well.

01:36:41.000 They made the series that's the first Black man to walk on England soil came not as a slave, but as a conqueror.

01:36:49.000 And so they glorified him.

01:36:51.000 But actually, it turns out he was a disastrous emperor. 0.61

01:36:53.000 As a side note, the Romans didn't see him as a black emperor.

01:36:56.000 They just saw him as a guy who had slightly darker skin, just like, you know, we have different shades of eye color today.

01:37:01.000 That's the way they looked at people who had different skin colors.

01:37:02.000 They were all Romans as citizens, by the way, to tie up our earlier conversation.

01:37:08.000 But anyway, this guy, he was a terrible emperor.

01:37:09.000 One of the reasons he was terrible is he just kept diluting the value of silver in the denarius.

01:37:14.000 And he would just go on spending sprees for money they didn't have, and it was like 160th, and then it was like 1,600th of the amount of silver was left in the denarius.

01:37:25.000 But back in his day, the way they would do it, replenish it, was the Black Emperor would go to Northern Africa and just plunder a bunch of silver, you know, rape and pillage, and then come back. 1.00

01:37:35.000 We don't do things that way anymore, and so in a certain sense, The parallels between the end of the Roman Empire or, you know, one of the many ends of the so-called ends of the Roman Empire and where we are today are somewhat striking, but we don't even avail ourselves of the same tactics that Septimius Severus or others would have used in the ending days of the Roman Empire today.

01:37:56.000 So this is timeless principles is my point.

01:37:59.000 It's not specific to America.

01:38:00.000 It's timeless across nations.

01:38:02.000 Well, in the spirit of getting more silver, let's move on over to Super Chats.

01:38:08.000 That was a good transition and I'm not going to hear you grunt.

01:38:10.000 That was a really good transition.

01:38:13.000 My transitions are incredible.

01:38:15.000 They're all really good and the audience loves them and they're ranting and raving about them.

01:38:20.000 So we just take questions?

01:38:21.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:38:21.000 So we take some questions.

01:38:23.000 If you want to chime in with it, you can.

01:38:25.000 So if you don't want to, you don't have to.

01:38:27.000 It's just whatever is interesting to you.

01:38:30.000 And we usually just kind of go around.

01:38:32.000 Christina H. says, Shamus, please tell Hannah Clare that she was pronouncing Nevada wrong last night. 1.00

01:38:37.000 Thank you.

01:38:37.000 Incorrect.

01:38:38.000 Sincerely, a lifelong Nevadan.

01:38:39.000 I don't know how she's pronouncing it, but it's Nevada and not Nevada.

01:38:42.000 I'm saying Nevada, but maybe you can just say my accent.

01:38:45.000 You like being wrong about things, and that's totally acceptable.

01:38:47.000 That's your freedom.

01:38:48.000 If you get coached on how to say that state's name, how would you pronounce it?

01:38:51.000 Nevada.

01:38:52.000 There we go!

01:38:53.000 I just want to say something about Nevada.

01:38:54.000 You're from East Ohio.

01:38:55.000 I'm from Ohio?

01:38:56.000 That's right, Nevada.

01:38:57.000 Are you from Ohio?

01:38:58.000 Yeah, we're all Midwesterners.

01:38:59.000 I didn't know that.

01:39:00.000 So I'm on the other side of the state from Cincinnati.

01:39:01.000 That's where I grew up.

01:39:03.000 My favorite restaurant in the country is in Nevada.

01:39:06.000 It's called Bertha Miranda's in Reno.

01:39:09.000 And it is the best Mexican food I've ever had.

01:39:12.000 And that's all I'll say about Nevada.

01:39:15.000 Wow.

01:39:17.000 And it is Nevada, not Nevada.

01:39:20.000 Raymond G. Stanley Jr.

01:39:21.000 says, Vivek, thank you for coming.

01:39:23.000 If you win the presidency, would you pardon Seamus if the truth was that he did in fact steal Tim's spoons?

01:39:30.000 So just so you know, there's been an ugly lie going around, a smear, that I stole spoons from Tim Pool.

01:39:37.000 There's no evidence that this ever occurred.

01:39:39.000 You guys know me.

01:39:41.000 You know I wouldn't do something like that.

01:39:43.000 I'm not that kind of guy.

01:39:46.000 But this person's question I think was more to cast doubt on my repeated denials of this crime.

01:39:53.000 I guess the question is would you pardon me if I had done this?

01:39:56.000 Yeah, I've got to get to the truth of the matter, man.

01:39:58.000 I was about to say I trusted you.

01:40:00.000 You're making eye contact with me.

01:40:01.000 Oh my goodness.

01:40:02.000 But then you started looking straight at the camera.

01:40:04.000 Vivek, I wouldn't do that.

01:40:05.000 Vivek, I wouldn't do that.

01:40:07.000 I'm not that kind of person.

01:40:08.000 You know that.

01:40:09.000 I don't know if I know that.

01:40:10.000 I don't know if I know that.

01:40:11.000 We have to see how the trial bears out.

01:40:14.000 I'm telling you.

01:40:14.000 We've got to count all the spoons and make a decision after that.

01:40:16.000 I kind of feel like mercy is upon us.

01:40:18.000 We're at a time of forgiveness.

01:40:20.000 How do you feel about mass pardons?

01:40:21.000 I'm talking about Hillary Clinton's emails, Joe Biden's son, Donald Trump.

01:40:25.000 Just let the past go.

01:40:26.000 Move forward.

01:40:28.000 So you're asking a deep question.

01:40:32.000 We're getting back into serious mode here.

01:40:35.000 I love that you just break stuff.

01:40:36.000 We're going light.

01:40:37.000 You just get real serious, real fast.

01:40:38.000 So this is important.

01:40:42.000 I take a lot of inspiration from Nelson Mandela.

01:40:45.000 Okay, Nelson Mandela was a guy who brought together a nation who was far more divided than ours is today.

01:40:53.000 And one of the things, I mean, I've been very vocal about this in this presidential campaign.

01:40:57.000 I've said that I would pardon Donald Trump if I'm elected president.

01:41:00.000 I do not want to see my competition eliminated.

01:41:03.000 I want to win this election by convincing the voters of this country that I'm best positioned to take the America First agenda forward, not by having the federal administrative state eliminate my competition.

01:41:15.000 I think there will come a time when once we have spoken the truth, and I don't think we're there yet, I think there are truths that yet still need to be exposed, where I would be willing to say that we go around the table 360 degrees, we acknowledge the truth, we will not lie, we will not sweep it under a rug.

01:41:37.000 But we will lay down arms and say we are moving forward as one nation.

01:41:42.000 And I know a lot of people aren't going to be thrilled about me saying that, right?

01:41:45.000 Because I think we're in a mood, a national mood right now to say that, no, no, no, our goal, we are at war internally in the country and we want to pummel the other side into the ground using the same means that they've been exploiting in the other direction. 0.69

01:41:58.000 And I understand that.

01:41:59.000 And I am all in for exposing exactly how deep that rot runs.

01:42:05.000 But there will come a time in this country where it will take a leader to say that we're done with that phase of our recent past.

01:42:15.000 We're done with that chapter of our national life.

01:42:18.000 We're done with the weaponization ping pong.

01:42:22.000 Right now it's ping before it goes to the other side of pong.

01:42:25.000 We say we're done playing that game.

01:42:27.000 And so in my journey, take office of January 2025, I'll be leading a nation and not a political party.

01:42:38.000 And that is an idea that I am very open to after we've gotten to the truth of the matter of all of the ways in which the government has actually lied to us.

01:42:48.000 Yeah, good answer.

01:42:51.000 T-Rex Pet Shop says, Vivek, your comments on Trump's indictment were based, we should not allow political persecution.

01:43:00.000 Is your motivation to destroy three-letter agencies true?

01:43:04.000 Stop supporting woke pet stores like PetSmart, Petsco, and Chewy.

01:43:09.000 We're We are an anti-woke alternative.

01:43:11.000 Now, I don't think they're accusing you of supporting those woke pet stores, just to be clear.

01:43:15.000 I think they're promoting their own brand.

01:43:18.000 Which they're allowed to do.

01:43:19.000 Yeah, of course.

01:43:20.000 That is what the United States is all about.

01:43:22.000 But yeah, so did you have an answer to that?

01:43:25.000 I think you kind of addressed a lot of that during the show.

01:43:27.000 Yeah, I mean, I am fundamentally anti-government.

01:43:33.000 But a limited government that we the people cause to come into existence, that's the bargain of its existence.

01:43:39.000 And my problem today is that we tell ourselves we live in a three-branch constitutional republic when in fact the political power is exercised by that fourth branch of government.

01:43:50.000 So actually I'm flying literally minutes after that we're done here to New Hampshire where tomorrow I will be delivering a speech laying out exactly how I will shut down the administrative state on strong constitutional and legal authority.

01:44:06.000 And I don't like to boast and brag and whatever, but I'm just going to state something that I think is true.

01:44:09.000 I don't believe in false humility either.

01:44:12.000 I think I'm the single presidential candidate who has run in this country in either party in the last 30 years who has the best understanding of how to actually shut down that fourth branch, shut down the deep state, shut down those three-letter agencies.

01:44:26.000 And that's what I'm going to be talking about in a pretty extensive speech in New Hampshire tomorrow night.

01:44:32.000 Um, we have, oh I'm so sorry here, um, from Alberto Chipres, um, or Chipress, I'm sorry, uh, I'm still, I'm still, excuse me, carrying up in episodes, or I think they meant to say catching up, yeah, I'm still catching up in episodes from last week and couldn't believe how surprised the crew was at the thought of Vivek running as VP.

01:44:56.000 I'm still learning about him, but I see him as Trump's VP running mate.

01:45:00.000 Well, I don't think you're running to be VP, but I'll let you speak for yourself here.

01:45:04.000 Yeah, so I'm not running to be anything other than Vivek President.

01:45:08.000 So maybe that's the VP they were talking about.

01:45:11.000 How long did you rehearse that joke?

01:45:12.000 Not at all.

01:45:13.000 I just came to mind, actually, when he was saying VP.

01:45:16.000 I was like, all right, well, there we go.

01:45:18.000 So the truth is not an ego thing.

01:45:21.000 I just don't do well in a number two position, right?

01:45:24.000 And I think we've all got to each look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves, how are we going to make a maximal contribution to this country?

01:45:32.000 Believe me, there are meaningful ways, big, maybe even more meaningful ways of impacting this country than doing it through politics, including even through the presidency.

01:45:40.000 I've written three books in the last two years.

01:45:41.000 I've built businesses.

01:45:42.000 I built Strive to compete against BlackRock.

01:45:45.000 I've built other companies in the past, employed thousands of people in this country.

01:45:49.000 There's many ways of driving change in this country.

01:45:52.000 And there are actually a lot of other talented politicians in the Republican Party that, you know, I think has a deeper bench than it gets credit for.

01:45:59.000 One of those people should take all of the cabinet slots if it's not me.

01:46:04.000 I think one of my unique gifts is the ability to be a successful builder and executive and leader.

01:46:11.000 And I can't do that from a position where I'm reporting into somebody else.

01:46:14.000 I don't think Donald Trump would be particularly effective in a cabinet position either.

01:46:19.000 I think certain people are just wired and cut out to do things in a certain way.

01:46:23.000 And so when I think about how do I want to use my talents best to advance the interests of this nation?

01:46:29.000 And the conclusion I came to is, I think I'm best positioned to reach the next generation, to deliver national pride, to, as an outsider but also somebody who understands the Constitution, shut down that deep state, administrative state, in a way that Trump didn't quite get to.

01:46:43.000 I know how to do these things.

01:46:45.000 I think it's going to take an outsider to do it.

01:46:46.000 I'm independent financially.

01:46:48.000 I don't have to pay any heed to a donor class.

01:46:51.000 I've put, you know, $15 million plus already of my hard-earned money, and we're going to stop at nothing to stay independent.

01:46:58.000 But we're not doing that to go through the motions.

01:47:02.000 Are you starting to think about who you would want in a vice president?

01:47:04.000 Like, what are you looking for?

01:47:05.000 Yeah.

01:47:06.000 So there's a couple different models, actually.

01:47:08.000 I'm actually thinking a lot.

01:47:10.000 Well, first, we nailed the federal judges, which I released this last week.

01:47:13.000 That's really important.

01:47:15.000 Now I'm actually thinking more about cabinet level positions and then also who I'm going to put in positions like the Office of Personnel Management and who's going to lead the Office of Management and Budget.

01:47:25.000 Those two positions I think are more important than cabinet level positions.

01:47:28.000 They're like the plumbing of the federal government and there I don't want policy wonks.

01:47:34.000 I want bulldogs who are going to not try to mediate between me and the administrative state.

01:47:39.000 I think this is where some other Republican presidents have fallen short.

01:47:42.000 They end up putting people who are ambassadors for the administrative state back to them.

01:47:45.000 No.

01:47:46.000 These people are going to be my bulldogs.

01:47:48.000 They need to be fundamentally anti-government.

01:47:51.000 I think to succeed in shutting down the administrative state, the person who runs the Office of Personnel Management, the person who runs the Office of Management and Budget, they need to be in their bones fundamentally anti-government to be able to see that through unidirectionally.

01:48:05.000 And I don't even want to hear what the administrative state has to say back and using them as a back channel to get back to me.

01:48:11.000 That's what I think what happened to Trump, happened to Reagan.

01:48:14.000 Happened to many other presidents with the best of intentions. 0.77

01:48:16.000 These people are going to be bulldogs.

01:48:17.000 They're going to go in there, intentionally break it.

01:48:19.000 They're going there to break it.

01:48:20.000 So I think a lot about those positions.

01:48:22.000 I have some ideas.

01:48:23.000 They're not going to be people with government experience.

01:48:24.000 That's a good thing.

01:48:25.000 And then the cabinet level appointments, I have some good ideas of who are going to, those will be people with more government experience.

01:48:31.000 Then I get to vice president.

01:48:33.000 There's a couple different models of the role.

01:48:37.000 One is somebody who actually could give me a sense of I don't want to say spiritual grounding, but centering, right?

01:48:48.000 And there's a couple people who would fit that description for me.

01:48:51.000 You know who's really good in this respect?

01:48:55.000 He wouldn't take this job, but I actually really respect my relationship with, every time I hear him speak, with Tucker Carlson.

01:49:02.000 He's great.

01:49:02.000 Deep insight.

01:49:03.000 I may have just happened to have seen him in Iowa a few days ago, but deep insight into What's really going on in the American psyche?

01:49:13.000 And that's part of the psyche I share.

01:49:15.000 And so, you know, I think that you could think of someone anyway, like that sort of a A political priest style figure, right?

01:49:24.000 You could then have somebody who's actually going to be a supplement to the Office of Management and Budget or OPM, an executor.

01:49:32.000 So you're just bringing additional muscle in.

01:49:33.000 I think that's an appealing way to use that position because you're going to need – it's going to require more people who are actual muscle doers to shut down the federal government The executive branch of it than people who are just pontificating about it.

01:49:49.000 So I think that's the second model that I think I could use.

01:49:52.000 And then the third model would be somebody who's just a domain expert in an area where I lack domain expertise the most.

01:50:00.000 And I think that's another model that's worked for me.

01:50:02.000 What would that be for you?

01:50:03.000 So for me, it's actually foreign policy in areas outside of the areas of foreign policy.

01:50:07.000 I have paid close attention.

01:50:08.000 I mean, on the foreign policy issues that matter most to the United States, starting with China, I'm deep.

01:50:15.000 Yeah.

01:50:15.000 Very deep.

01:50:16.000 I'm not going to be taking secondhand advice from China to how to end the war in Ukraine, to rethinking our alliances with the UN or NATO, both of which I think have outlived their purposes there.

01:50:25.000 I'm good.

01:50:26.000 But when you think about the other areas of foreign policy, our relations with South America, parts of the Middle East, You know, these are just areas where no human being is going to have expertise in everything.

01:50:36.000 But we might bring somebody who has a similar worldview but is able to channel that to other parts of the world.

01:50:40.000 So those would be the three different models for Vice President.

01:50:43.000 But I want to staff out what the rest of the apparatus looks like because then it'll show which of those three is really the rate limiter that I need.

01:50:51.000 And I think any one of those three is a viable choice for the type of person that I'd put in a VP

01:50:57.000 role.

01:50:57.000 We have from Joshua Braugh, the leftist cult worships at the altar of Planned Parenthood.

01:51:04.000 This is definitely something I agree with. I've been saying this for a while.

01:51:07.000 I would not say that I'm the first person to have come up with this observation, but to

01:51:12.000 the left, abortion really is kind of their blessed sacrament.

01:51:15.000 It's the thing that they hold in highest esteem I think it it embodies a lot of these values of selfishness and rather than sacrificing One's own pleasure or or comfort or you know lack of desire to face adversity one simply throws another person into the flames or maybe a better way of putting this is Effectively fails to consider the well-being of another, and

01:51:44.000 particularly a person who they actually have a strong connection to on the basis of a

01:51:47.000 parent-child relationship so they can pursue their own selfish ends. To 0.99

01:51:51.000 me, that's kind of at the core of everything that leftism values.

01:51:54.000 I don't think it's a coincidence that that's the issue that they seem to get most worked up about.

01:51:58.000 Yeah.

01:52:00.000 I get concerned about calling things leftist and rightist because that was a malice tactic, man.

01:52:04.000 He talked about rightists.

01:52:06.000 We gotta unify.

01:52:07.000 I know what you mean, but I don't like segmenting people into groups.

01:52:11.000 But then what about Maoists and non-Maoists?

01:52:13.000 Because you're saying you don't want to be like a Maoist here.

01:52:15.000 Well, Mao was like, the rightists are a problem.

01:52:18.000 And he divided his country to get people to go at each other on either side so that it was easier to manipulate them.

01:52:23.000 But anyway.

01:52:24.000 I think there's something deep in what you say.

01:52:26.000 I mean, I think that labels are confining, actually.

01:52:30.000 And I think that we should, if I'm getting your point, your point is talk about the content of what your actual beliefs are, don't use the labels to describe it, because then you end up in a circular loop.

01:52:39.000 I mean, that's a fair statement.

01:52:40.000 Yeah, but understanding that words are labels, you know.

01:52:42.000 Yeah, for sure, but I'm talking about something concrete within that label and what left-wing thought stands for.

01:52:49.000 When we first get the term leftism, it's from the French Revolution, and what were they doing?

01:52:53.000 I mean, they were slaughtering innocent people.

01:52:56.000 There's historic precedent for understanding leftism in this way.

01:53:01.000 Yeah, I think that it's always one of these interesting dilemmas where human beings, we require language to communicate, right?

01:53:08.000 And so would you rather take the existence of a word in that language that's 80% precise

01:53:16.000 but otherwise can actually be confining versus being true to actually yes, every label let

01:53:23.000 in use of the word leftist which I don't talk much about Republicans and Democrats and I

01:53:26.000 don't even usually use the word the left although on occasion I do because it's the most precise

01:53:31.000 word available to describe it.

01:53:33.000 It's always this trade off between yes, you can always be a little bit confining and a

01:53:37.000 little less than precise when you use that label but I understand where Seamus is coming

01:53:42.000 from where he's crudely getting to a basic concept.

01:53:45.000 And so don't fixate on the use of the word leftist, but of the people who have made a fanatical movement around Planned Parenthood as their golden calf.

01:54:00.000 It's an interesting observation to make.

01:54:01.000 And then as a crude heuristic, we're going to call them leftist for the purposes of now, even though we shouldn't let that label sink in too deep.

01:54:09.000 Well, I mean, what I would say is the divide there a little bit.

01:54:12.000 Yeah, no term is perfect, at least when you're dealing with politics in the United States where things change so quickly.

01:54:19.000 And just because someone's on the right doesn't mean they're doing good things.

01:54:22.000 I understand all of that, but it's still a label I believe applies there.

01:54:27.000 Noah Sanders says, Yeah, so thank you for that.

01:54:29.000 You're an outsider who is independently wealthy, making one of the hurdles that candidates

01:54:33.000 have to leap that much easier.

01:54:36.000 What advice do you have for average Americans who want to run for public office?

01:54:39.000 God bless you and the great work you do.

01:54:41.000 Yes, so thank you for that.

01:54:45.000 You know, it's something I struggle with because one of the main problems, and I've only seen

01:54:50.000 this since I've entered this race, is what kind of chokehold the donor class, the mega

01:54:57.000 donor class has over the Republican Party.

01:54:59.000 I'm the only candidate in this race who certainly will be on that debate stage who is entirely independent of a class that views themselves as puppet masters for politicians who they view as their puppets.

01:55:13.000 But then that leaves the option of, you know, limiting the people who are actually truly independent to being those who have actually succeeded at a scale that shouldn't be a requirement for entering public service.

01:55:27.000 So what advice do I have?

01:55:29.000 I mean, I guess I'd had my advice on how to become a successful capitalist.

01:55:33.000 We could have a couple hours on that.

01:55:34.000 But if I was to offer simple advice in a nutshell, be contrarian, be right.

01:55:42.000 Sounds simple in that it's not complex.

01:55:44.000 It's hard in that it's not easy.

01:55:45.000 It's easy to do one of those things.

01:55:47.000 It's hard to do both of them.

01:55:49.000 But the advice I would give you in politics is actually kind of the same thing.

01:55:52.000 Whereas no amount of money is still going to substitute for the power of a message.

01:55:58.000 And it has to be a message that you're uniquely delivering that nobody else is.

01:56:01.000 And so in a certain sense, that's being contrary, but it has to be a message that isn't false.

01:56:04.000 It has to be a message that is true.

01:56:07.000 So in some ways, I'd give you that general category of advice, whether it's to succeed as a capitalist, which then puts you in a position to maybe independently serve the country in many ways, philanthropically, politically, or otherwise.

01:56:18.000 But even if you're not choosing the self-money-making track, I think one of the ways of having an impact, period, including as somebody who may be an aspiring public servant, is to be contrarian and make sure you're right while you're doing it.

01:56:31.000 No point in being contrarian and doing the wrong thing.

01:56:33.000 But there's really no point in entering public service if you're just going to say the same thing that everybody else is saying, even if it is the right thing, because somebody else could do it instead.

01:56:39.000 So that'd be my two-part advice.

01:56:42.000 If the pack is running one way, run the other way.

01:56:44.000 But when you do, make sure you're running actually to the right target.

01:56:47.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:56:48.000 Good way of putting it.

01:56:50.000 The letter A. The letter A has chatted in.

01:56:53.000 VR, will you denounce the multi-billion dollar for-profit American family court system that separates children from parents?

01:57:02.000 Yes.

01:57:02.000 I actually have to admit, this isn't one of the areas where I've dived deep, but any institution that separates Parents and their children and that has cynical interests behind it.

01:57:16.000 Fueling that is a corrupt institution and so denounce it.

01:57:20.000 Yes, what I need to do more homework on is what I can actually do about it because a lot of that is actually at the state level.

01:57:28.000 I'm running for U.S.

01:57:29.000 President.

01:57:30.000 I think part of running for U.S.

01:57:32.000 President means there are certain problems that bad as badly as you want to to solve them, you have to because the 10th Amendment in this country, the way we're set up, the right thing to do is to leave it to the states to solve that problem.

01:57:43.000 But in terms of calling attention to it, And the question was, denounce it?

01:57:47.000 Yeah, I'm right there with you.

01:57:49.000 Sanctuary Cities was another one you mentioned earlier that I was like, how are you going to federally knock out California's Sanctuary City?

01:57:55.000 Yeah, so one of the things is, again, that has to be driven by the states.

01:57:58.000 However, there you do have the federal purse power, right?

01:58:01.000 These states are all receiving large block grants from the federal government.

01:58:05.000 I don't like that system, but so long as we have the system, I'm going to say that you're not going to get money as a municipality or state if you're propping up sanctuary cities.

01:58:14.000 I think that's fair game.

01:58:16.000 Especially because it relates to an issue the federal government ought to be concerned about, which is immigration at the southern border, which is a national crisis, and so any state That's using and creating the incentive for that national problem, that nationwide problem.

01:58:30.000 That's a legitimate use of a practice that I also already just don't like, block grants and using the power of the purse with respect to states to drive behavior.

01:58:38.000 I'm generally a skeptic of that, but in that limited circumstance, if there's a use case for doing it on proper authority, that would be it.

01:58:44.000 Does that make sense?

01:58:45.000 Oh, yeah.

01:58:48.000 I was just thinking of other contrary ways to go about solving the problem as you were speaking.

01:58:52.000 Totally.

01:58:53.000 I mean, I think we do need a new governor in California, too.

01:58:56.000 And I think they'll be much more effective at directly ending the sanctuary city problem there than what I'm going to do as president, but I'll do my part.

01:59:02.000 Do you also think that it'll help with immigration at the northern border?

01:59:05.000 I've been so stunned to see the rapid increase of illegal immigration at the northern border through Canada.

01:59:10.000 It's back to that hydraulic pump.

01:59:12.000 You start squeezing in one place, it shows up in another.

01:59:14.000 So I've done the math on this.

01:59:16.000 I think when we look at the undeployed troops or troops that are deployed in places they shouldn't be, we absolutely have enough to be able to seal the Swiss cheese of a southern border and to secure most of the vulnerable parts of our northern border as well.

01:59:30.000 And I actually think this is one of the ways we revive pride in our military.

01:59:35.000 It's one of the things we've lost is the purpose of that institution.

01:59:39.000 Fought pointless wars for a long time.

01:59:42.000 Young men and women going to die, spending hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

01:59:46.000 Now, 25% of young people, actually, young people don't want to serve the military.

01:59:50.000 We have a 25% recruitment deficit in the US military last year.

01:59:56.000 Part of the way we fix that problem is let's use our military to actually, who would have ever thought, protect the lives of Americans, starting here on American soil.

02:00:06.000 So I think that's also one of the ways we solve that crisis of purpose in our military.

02:00:10.000 And when the military lacks purpose, that's when wokeism and gender ideology substitute and fill the void. 0.99

02:00:16.000 In some ways, it's the Pentagon.

02:00:17.000 They blow woke smoke to deflect accountability for their own failure of mission over the last 25 years.

02:00:24.000 Fighting pointless wars, wokeness is a great deflection tactic. 1.00

02:00:27.000 Just like it is for the public schools.

02:00:29.000 They say math is racist.

02:00:30.000 It's a great way to deflect attention from saying you're not actually teaching.

02:00:33.000 You can't actually teach them anything.

02:00:35.000 Exactly.

02:00:36.000 If you don't want to be involved with it, you don't want to do it.

02:00:37.000 If you're failing at it, call it racist.

02:00:39.000 We're going to wrap up now.

02:00:40.000 This has been an awesome conversation.

02:00:42.000 I want to thank you so much for joining us and also just give you an opportunity to plug anything else you'd like to to the audience.

02:00:50.000 Let them know where they can find more of your work and what they can do to help you out.

02:00:54.000 The thing I'll plug is an idea.

02:00:57.000 Actually, the idea that our diversity is not our strength.

02:01:04.000 I'm glad I brought a different shade of melanin to this room.

02:01:06.000 We have a couple different genders. 0.97

02:01:07.000 There's two genders, by the way. 1.00

02:01:09.000 We have two genders in this room, right? 1.00

02:01:12.000 Who cares?

02:01:14.000 We've grown so habituated to celebrating our diversity and our differences That we forgot all of the ways we're really just the same as Americans, bound by a common creed.

02:01:31.000 And so what's the parting pitch I want to leave with people?

02:01:35.000 It is this, it is E Pluribus Unum, the founding creed of this country, from many, one.

02:01:43.000 And if you share that vision with me and you want to see that revived in our country and a national identity around it, Then help me do it.

02:01:52.000 I'm in this volunteer to do my part.

02:01:55.000 My kids will be entering high school in January 2033 when I'm leaving office after two terms.

02:02:00.000 I'm ready to do it.

02:02:01.000 We're going to stop at nothing.

02:02:03.000 But help me get there.

02:02:04.000 The website is vivek2024.com.

02:02:07.000 That's my first name, V-I-V-E-K, 2024.com.

02:02:14.000 And do whatever suits you.

02:02:15.000 Sign up as a volunteer.

02:02:17.000 Join the list.

02:02:18.000 Hear more.

02:02:18.000 If you have some money, donate it.

02:02:20.000 That's great.

02:02:20.000 We'll take that too.

02:02:21.000 For those who are able.

02:02:22.000 For those who aren't, help us in a different way.

02:02:23.000 But I think it's going to take each of us to do our part.

02:02:27.000 I'm not going to come from the White House on high to promise to save us like a messiah.

02:02:31.000 It is going to require each of us to do our part.

02:02:34.000 And if you guys do yours, I promise you I'll do mine.

02:02:36.000 And that's why I'm in this.

02:02:38.000 So cool.

02:02:39.000 Well, I'm so glad you were able to come out tonight and join us.

02:02:41.000 It's been an awesome conversation, as predicted.

02:02:45.000 I'm Hannah-Claire Brimlow.

02:02:46.000 I'm a writer for TimCast.com.

02:02:47.000 You can follow at TimCastNews on Twitter and Instagram if you want to follow me personally.

02:02:51.000 I'm at hannahclaire.b on Instagram and hcbrimlow on Twitter.

02:02:55.000 Again, thank you so much for coming out.

02:02:57.000 Oh yeah, man.

02:02:58.000 Pleasure.

02:02:58.000 Always.

02:02:59.000 And come back when Tim's on.

02:03:00.000 When Tim's back, come back.

02:03:01.000 We'll do this again.

02:03:02.000 This is great.

02:03:03.000 Tell us what's up.

02:03:03.000 Yo dawg.

02:03:06.000 Uh, VR?

02:03:07.000 Yo, we didn't talk about virtual reality and the metaverse and what's coming in the next 15-20 years.

02:03:12.000 Maybe we'll talk about that next time.

02:03:14.000 Alphabetically comes after VP, next is VR, right?

02:03:17.000 VQVR, yeah.

02:03:18.000 I love it.

02:03:18.000 So we'll do that.

02:03:19.000 Catch you later, Vivek.

02:03:19.000 I appreciate it, man.

02:03:21.000 Yeah, pleasure meeting you, my friend.

02:03:23.000 I didn't get to speak to you previously, and I was really looking forward to it, so it's nice to finally close the loop, I guess you could say.

02:03:28.000 It's good to see you, man.

02:03:31.000 Yeah, pleasure.

02:03:32.000 Imsurge.com on the internet.

02:03:34.000 Argue with me on Twitter.

02:03:35.000 I love it, guys.

02:03:36.000 Yeah, that was a good one, Seamus.

02:03:37.000 You did a good job.

02:03:38.000 Oh, thank you.

02:03:39.000 Thank you.

02:03:39.000 Well, I had an awesome guest.

02:03:41.000 My name is Seamus Coghlan.

02:03:43.000 I have a YouTube channel called Freedom Tunes, where we do animated cartoons.

02:03:46.000 I think you guys will enjoy those.

02:03:47.000 We just got the keys returned to us by YouTube.

02:03:50.000 There was a mistake.

02:03:51.000 We were locked out for a couple days, but we're back in business.

02:03:54.000 If you enjoy comedy, if you enjoy my perspective, go check those cartoons out.

02:03:58.000 Also, if you enjoy what I have to say, you like me as a podcaster, I have a Rumble channel called Shamer.

02:04:04.000 We stream at least twice a week.

02:04:06.000 We're going to be uploading a lot of streams next week that'll be premiering live if you guys want to check that out.

02:04:12.000 And also, if you want to support me financially, become a member at freedomtunes.com and you'll get an extra cartoon each week as well as behind-the-scenes content.

02:04:18.000 So, what I want to ask you all to do is smash the like button on this video, share the video if you enjoyed it, and become a member at TimCast.com.

02:04:27.000 TimCast.com.

02:04:28.000 Oh my gosh, I almost Nevada-ed it.

02:04:30.000 It's cast, not cost.

02:04:32.000 TimCast.com.

02:04:34.000 Go over to TimCast.com and join us for the after show, which is going to be live at about 10.10.

02:04:38.000 Thank you very much.

02:04:39.000 We should say, before full disclosure, you may be bouncing out early.

02:04:42.000 I know you've got a speech tomorrow, so if you guys, maybe we'll have an opportunity to take calls early or something.

02:04:47.000 I don't know, technically, if you like that idea, if you're still down for five or ten minutes.

02:04:50.000 I can hang around for a few minutes.

02:04:51.000 I really want to take a few calls.

02:04:52.000 All right, we'll see you at TimCast.com.

02:04:53.000 Yeah, see you there. 0.79

02:04:55.000 Later! 0.71

Timcast IRL - Tim Pool - July 19, 2023

Timcast IRL - MTG Shares EXPLICIT Images From Hunter Biden's Laptop w- Vivek Ramaswamy

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