Vivek Ramaswamy is back with us to talk about his new book, Truth: The Future of America First. It's more than just a book, it's a toolkit on how to win in November and beyond. And amid the left-wing madness that we see each and every day, we need a tool kit like that more than ever. The rest of big tech, the mainstream media, they're stacked against us. We have to work harder each and everyday to make sure that we break through all of the noise and actually grow this movement. Protect yourself from economic insanity, anxiety, and everything else going on in the world with the Birch Gold Group. Protect your savings by converting an IRA or 401k into an IRA in physical gold. Seems like a great opportunity to learn about hedging? This craziness just blows my mind every day. So to learn more, text DONJR, D-O-N-J-R, to the number 989898 and claim your FREE, no obligation, info kit on gold. You know the deal. You got to be prepared for over 20 years of economic insanity and anxiety. Today's episode is a mashup of the top headlines that we spot here on the show. You can get it on my news app, MXM News, like minute by minute, and check it out here on TikTok. . Subscribe to my new show, Triggered, where I break it all down and talk about what's going on around the world and how you can be a part of it! and how to live your best life in the best way possible! And if you like it, share it on social media, tweet me so you can help spread it everywhere you can spread it around the word! and let me know what s going on! Timestamps: 5 Star Potential: 6) 7) What are you listening to me on your feed? 8) What do you think of it? 9) What would you like to see me tweet me in your feed 5 Stars: or your thoughts? or a screenshot of something that s going to be a little bit more? and a screenshot from the show? & so I can help me spread it out there? I ll send it to someone else do that? 5) What s your thoughts on it? or a tweet me a message about it? :)
00:03:40.000She can't even get through a softball interview, but we're supposed to believe that she's got all the answers, and her campaign is simply filled with joy.
00:03:49.000I don't see a lot of joy on people's faces in grocery stores, or when they're trying to buy a home, or maybe get a mortgage.
00:03:59.000I don't see any joy in Eastern Europe, where hundreds of thousands of young men are getting slaughtered in pointless wars, or in the Middle East.
00:04:10.000Not a lot of joy going on in the world.
00:04:11.000So I have a feeling that campaign is falling flat.
00:04:15.000It's all nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and we're going to break it all down.
00:04:21.000So make sure you guys are liking, sharing, subscribing, so you never miss one of these episodes.
00:04:28.000The rest of big tech, the mainstream media, they're stacked against us.
00:04:31.000We have to work harder each and every day to make sure that we break through all of the noise and actually grow this movement.
00:04:39.000Remember, folks, if you miss Triggered here on a given night, or if you're just traveling, whatever it may be, in your car, you can get Triggered on Spotify.
00:04:59.000For all of the top headlines that we'll spot here on the show, check out my news app, MXM News, like minute by minute, MXM, where you can get the mainstream news without the mainstream bias, okay?
00:05:11.000We're gonna get to those headlines in a second, but don't forget about our incredible and brave sponsors who have the guts to support programming like this, okay?
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00:05:30.000You guys see the market volatility each and every day, and we know that the Fed is just printing more money, folks.
00:05:40.000They're trying to influence an election.
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00:08:28.000Kamala Harris is such an anti-gun radical that she said she would walk into a locked home to examine how someone actually stores their guns.
00:08:38.000Responsible behaviors among everybody in the community and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn't mean that we're not going to walk into that home and check to see if you're being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.
00:08:55.000So now she's gonna walk into your home to check, to make sure.
00:08:58.000Because, in her mind, that's the government's right.
00:09:02.000What's the first word that pops into your head when you hear the name Kamala Harris?
00:09:04.000If they don't like anything else you're doing, they can just walk into your home.
00:11:09.000It's almost like no one's reporting them.
00:11:12.000Just because someone's no longer reporting crimes, or the FBI is no longer reporting on the statistics, or collecting them, or local agencies are too preoccupied to actually report, or they realize that they're just going to be manipulating statistics anyway, it's almost like the crimes aren't happening, even if they're happening.
00:11:30.000And tomorrow, Kamala Harris is hitting the border and will claim to be really tough on illegal immigration.
00:12:33.000And very unfair that people want to leave, they want to get out.
00:12:37.000But everyone's afraid to say, I want to get out, because they want to be politically correct.
00:12:42.000And other towns just like them, hundreds of them all over America, Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating inundation of illegal aliens.
00:13:19.000They want to get rid of some people they want to hire.
00:13:21.000Springfield is looking, the mayor said it the other day, looking for interpreters because Nobody in all of the 32,000 people that took into the town.
00:18:26.000He talked about the tens of thousands of migrants stuck in high-end New York City hotels, costing city taxpayers billions on an annual basis, watching crime skyrocket as officers are beaten in the street, etc., etc., etc.
00:18:45.000You can do whatever you want as a Democrat.
00:20:39.000And we need to be, I think, more honest with that.
00:20:42.000And it's funny that they, you know, they don't understand critical race theory, but they actually tell some truth when they're like, yeah, it is anti-state.
00:20:52.000You can't be a critical race theorist and be pro-US.
00:20:57.000It is an anti-state theory that says the United States needs to be deconstructed, period.
00:21:06.000So I think it's an interesting argument there, and that's why I'm a critical race theorist.
00:21:44.000The party of defunding the police and radical school indoctrination, the leaders of those camps, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, want you to think that they're moderate.
00:23:52.000But first, we have a brand new sponsor that totally aligns with the themes we talk about on the show.
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00:24:17.000We will live in a time when bad actors inside our own government want to illegal spy and target you based on your politics.
00:24:26.000We've seen it happen over and over again.
00:26:38.000Listen, I saw some of the videos you were doing.
00:26:39.000I saw you were with Charlie Kirk on some of these college campuses.
00:26:42.000You were talking there, and it was interesting.
00:26:44.000You know, you had, and he's done this for a long time, you're very good at it yourself.
00:26:48.000I used to do it with him all the time, even back in 15 and 16 before, you know, when it was still almost verboten for a Republican to go on a college campus.
00:26:57.000I saw a lot of people kind of come at you initially with hate, but the second they actually had a moment to be sort of retrospective, to think about some of the basic You know, premises that they took as though it was like the gospel, and they were like, wait, what?
00:27:32.000It's not like, OK, there's a few hundred people.
00:27:34.000These are like hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of people.
00:27:37.000For many of whom are just straight-up pro-Republican, pro-Trump, who are unafraid to say it on the campus.
00:27:42.000I thought that was an interesting sign.
00:27:44.000Much better, though, in the dynamic was, OK, yeah, we can get a bunch of, you know, fawning praise from people coming to the mic and say, we love you so much and can you sign my hat.
00:27:52.000OK, that's only going to get us so far.
00:27:53.000They're going to come vote for us anyway.
00:27:55.000What we said is, come to the front of the line.
00:27:58.000Clear the way for somebody who actually wants to actually disagree with us.
00:28:02.000And I will tell you, I've had different types of disagreements over the course of, obviously, the presidential campaign over the last two years.
00:28:09.000We got mostly, I would say, 90% of those who came up were thoughtful, open-minded.
00:28:15.000Some of them openly anti-Trump, but they would end the question with, but make the case to me, which I think is actually pretty interesting.
00:28:22.000Which reflects a different kind of openness.
00:28:23.000That would have never happened eight years ago.
00:28:33.000We were one of the, I think up in Michigan, like Michigan State Police.
00:28:35.000It was me, Charlie, Tommy Hicks at the time.
00:28:38.000It was like 50, we were like, hey, of course the university, you know, limits the size of the room, even though we had sort of overflow tickets, but then they have to make sure that equal side of the leg.
00:28:47.000And they're like, we can't protect you.
00:29:32.000So he wants people to write in Joe Biden and Pennsylvania in the ballot.
00:29:36.000So there was interesting views across the spectrum.
00:29:39.000But one of the things I would say is, so look, I was in the campaign.
00:29:43.000I got an interaction with Don Lemon early on in my campaign.
00:29:46.000He ended up getting fired after he erupted in ways that weren't productive for him.
00:29:50.000But there are times where you're facing off with the left, especially with people in the media,
00:29:55.000especially people who have actually bad intentions, the puppet master of the Democratic Party,
00:29:59.000where you got to go hard. You got to go with gloves off, full on throttle, brass knuckles.
00:30:07.000I think when you go to a college campus, and I think one of the things that I realized is we don't want to do that to a bunch of 18, 19, 20, 21 year olds.
00:30:52.000But if we allow them the space to come out a little bit, see the sunlight, I think we
00:30:55.000actually did wind up, end up winning some converts.
00:30:58.000And so that's been one of my learnings in the last year, is you have some cynical, bad actors on the left, you gotta fight, you gotta fight hard without apology.
00:31:06.000You've also got the next generation, many of whom are not really against us, even though they think they might be.
00:31:11.000We just gotta give them the space to discover Maybe a different point of view that's different than what's been stuffed down their throats.
00:31:17.000Yeah, because I mean, I look at all these young leftists.
00:31:19.000I'm like, they're like, they think they're the rebels.
00:31:21.000I'm like, listen, if you're siding with corporate media, if you're siding with like every mainstream left-wing politician, if you're siding with, uh, you know, woke corporate and Hollywood, like.
00:31:32.000You're not the rebel you think you are.
00:31:35.000If you're a conservative on a college campus, you actually have some guts.
00:31:47.000Also, in terms of your money's worth, college is pretty expensive right now.
00:31:51.000You want to get more money out of your money's worth?
00:31:53.000You actually learn more in college when you're challenged.
00:31:55.000So if you're a conservative on a college campus or even a libertarian or even somebody who's an independent, but just maybe wants to question whether or not it's going to be existential threat to humanity if global surface temperatures go up by one degree Celsius, which by the way, there's no fact to suggest that that's going to be a threat to humanity.
00:32:11.000Try questioning that on a college campus.
00:32:12.000You're going to get some reactions, but they're going to force you to be on your toes and you're going to get a better education as a result too.
00:32:18.000So with college being as expensive as it is, it's also almost a pitch to just get your money's worth out of an experience that otherwise is pretty wasteful.
00:32:25.000I mean, I published Charlie Kirk's, you know, book, The College Scam, talking about sort of the ever-decreasing value proposition of that college education.
00:32:32.000And so, you know, I know all about that.
00:32:35.000And as it relates to global warming, like, I'm actually currently much more worried about the global warming where the temperatures go from basically average temperatures as they've been for the last few hundred years to like 5,000 degrees Celsius because of nuclear war.
00:32:48.000which we seem to be approaching much closer each and every day
00:32:52.000as we torment Russia, as we now want to send long-range missiles
00:32:55.000into Russia that are American-made, probably operated by Americans in Ukraine,
00:32:59.000because I'm sure that Ukrainians couldn't figure out how to do it.
00:33:01.000So as I watch that escalation, that's the real global warming that I'm worried about.
00:33:07.000That's the one that there's no coming back from.
00:33:09.000I would say that there are, I could probably list for you, a number of potentially existential threats to humanity
00:33:15.000that rank way higher than climate change, probably hundreds.
00:33:18.000But two that I'd put high on the list is major risk of World War III and also depopulation in the West and in the United States of America.
00:33:25.000The decline in the fertility rate, the increase in global conflict rates from foreign interventionism, both of those are far greater threats to the future existence of humanity and to the United States than climate change is or ever will be.
00:33:38.000But why aren't we actually talking about it?
00:33:40.000It's actually, these agendas actually end up going together, actually.
00:33:43.000It's no accident that people who are pushing the global climate agenda are also calling for greater depopulation in the name of saving climate, because it actually has nothing to do with human prosperity in the end.
00:33:52.000That's too long of a discussion for us to have now.
00:33:54.000That's why I write the book, and there's a whole chapter dedicated to the climate change debates.
00:33:59.000But back to the broader point is you've got young people in particular, Don, and you know this, who are hungering for purpose, hungry to be part of something bigger.
00:34:07.000And my advice to them is, I don't, you know, if you go to campus and say, vote Trump, I don't think, you know, some people will be convinced by that, and I'll put it that way.
00:34:14.000But what I've said is, so I said this in Wisconsin last night, I said it in Pennsylvania last week, is just figure out who is going to make you more proud of being a citizen of this country.
00:34:25.000Who is going to leave you more proud of your American identity?
00:34:28.000Who's going to leave you feeling stronger as an American?
00:34:30.000Figure out who that person is for you and vote for that person.
00:34:33.000I have no doubt that if people are honestly going through that reflection, especially if they're undecided, who's actually going to make you feel stronger and more proud and more grounded as an American?
00:34:43.000But I'd rather actually let those final few undecides, they're not going to come to our side because we're, you know, screaming them to agree with us.
00:34:50.000But I think they will, if they think about who's going to make you more proud to be a citizen of this nation, there's one answer to that.
00:34:54.000And so that's been effective, I would say, on the ground.
00:34:57.000And I say, you know, who do you think is actually going to do a better job for all of the things that matter to you?
00:35:02.000For the young kids on a college campus, like you're going to graduate, you want to be able to get a job, who's going to do a better job with the economy?
00:35:07.000That's not even close, because we've had actually four years under the Harris-Biden regime.
00:35:12.000Joe Biden the other day just said, no, no, no, Kamala Harris was a part of every decision we made, and she owns every decision we made.
00:35:18.000Almost confident he's throwing her under the bus because of the coup that she pulled off on him.
00:35:22.000But, you know, are you going to be safer?
00:35:23.000Are you going to get sent to the front lines of World War III?
00:35:27.000The people who were so weak that they effectively brought on war and or so stupid that they gave Russia every excuse they needed to invade?
00:35:35.000I mean, don't forget, three days before Russia invaded, Kamala Harris was the one they sent over there to try to calm things down and talk it down.
00:35:57.000I think you ought to do it from a different perspective than perhaps the way we've been doing it for the last few years.
00:36:02.000Yeah, and one point on the war piece of this, people are really focusing on the Russia-Ukraine war correctly because it's bled about $200 billion of our taxpayer resources.
00:37:03.000Tell her I'm going to make more money when I graduate if Donald Trump is the president and now he's a sophomore in college than if Kamala Harris is.
00:37:10.000I think that'll actually convince her, which is actually one way to do it at the bottom line.
00:37:13.000Unless you want me living in your basement for the rest of eternity.
00:37:16.000Now, there's some moms that may want that, so you've got to figure out where they strategically lie, but 100%.
00:37:22.000We touched on war a little bit, Vivek.
00:37:24.000My father's apparently meeting with Zelensky at Trump Tower tomorrow.
00:37:28.000How do you think that conversation should go?
00:37:30.000I mean, after sort of campaigning against him and realizing maybe he spent enough time with Kamala Harris to see the writing on the wall, now he's coming to meet with my father.
00:37:38.000But what do you think should be said there?
00:37:41.000How does it relate to any of the themes perhaps in your book?
00:37:44.000Obviously, you're going to be very anti-war and, you know, we got to get involved in things that actually perhaps benefit America.
00:37:48.000I think, you know, America first, that should be a fundamental tenet of that.
00:37:53.000What do you think happens there tomorrow?
00:37:55.000Yeah, well, I mean, I could talk about the principles behind this in the book, but very pragmatic tomorrow.
00:38:00.000Well, I'll say the first thing is, it'll be very technical about this because you know what type of environment we live in with lawfare in the United States.
00:38:07.000I would give advice for what that meeting looks like on January 20th, okay, after inauguration day or January 21st.
00:38:16.000He's not going to be conducting diplomacy as a citizen.
00:38:19.000He's going to be engaging in a conversation.
00:38:21.000But when he's back in office, what does that first conversation look like?
00:38:26.000I would tell you it's actually got to be deeply pragmatic.
00:38:29.000One of the things I like about your dad is he's able to have a conversation with even people who have Disagreed with him, criticized him in the past.
00:38:36.000He's able to put that to one side and do what's pragmatic for the future.
00:38:39.000And I think that he's going to be able to find, and your father's good at this, I think good business leaders generally are, at finding everybody's incentives, all right?
00:38:47.000How is everybody at the table going to be taken care of?
00:38:50.000Right now, Ukraine actually is in a more vulnerable position than it would be if they did a deal that was backstopped by U.S.
00:39:24.000Russia has a military presence in all those areas.
00:39:26.000So I would use, from an American perspective, and your father's very candid, and I think his candor works in his favor, to say, candidly, this is what we want for the United States of America.
00:39:36.000And we also don't particularly want to have them in an alliance with China.
00:39:40.000And it's no skin off your back, Ukraine, if we even reopen some economic relations with Russia, okay?
00:39:45.000We can have that reasonable discussion.
00:39:46.000And if Russia's better off economically, because we're open to trading with them, That doesn't take any skin off your back.
00:39:51.000But Russia's deal as a consequence is going to be, we're going to have some reasonable territorial concessions.
00:39:56.000But if they infringe on those territorial concessions, again, the rest of the deal is off.
00:40:00.000And so now Russia is in a tough spot if they renege on the deal.
00:40:04.000Ukraine is better off because now hundreds of thousands of your own sons and daughters are not dying in that war.
00:40:09.000And by the way, Ukraine's military is so Depleted.
00:40:13.000They're now having to recruit people above the age of 40 to serve.
00:40:16.000Put an end to that senseless war that you should have done in 2022 before Boris Johnson showed up on your doorstep to deflect from his own domestic problems in politics at home.
00:40:25.000And you actually get a reasonable deal.
00:40:36.000That's far more powerful than what you're going to get by fighting an uphill war that otherwise, frankly, could result in Even much of Ukraine no longer existing as a sovereign country if you actually see this play out several more years on the correct trajectory.
00:40:50.000I mean, listen, Russia haven't exactly had an overperformance in terms of military might of the Russian standing army, which, you know, any one of us who would have grown up in the 80s would have feared and, you know, And we're like, not a great performance.
00:41:03.000And Putin's lost a ton of men too, but he's finding people from Siberia
00:42:44.000In a business setting, if there's a 1% chance that you're going to make a billion dollar cash out on a deal, that's still an expected value of $10 million.
00:42:53.000But if you take a 99% chance you're going to end up with a zero, that's still like a high potential expected value, where in fact, you might actually just be better off getting a normal job that makes you two million bucks.
00:43:02.000Okay, that's actually a better case scenario for your family.
00:43:05.000But if you're thinking big, and you have a 1% chance at a billion dollars, that's a $10 million value, you might have a person who's willing to take that risk.
00:43:14.000That's effectively the situation we're putting Zelensky in, which is with our own health, He has some shot at maybe even going on an offensive in Russia and emerging with strength, but actually the downside for his own people is going to be hundreds of thousands of deaths, we've already seen, and casualties.
00:43:32.000And I think the actual security threat to the very people who are funding it, the West that's funding it, ends up on the losing end of that security catastrophe.
00:43:38.000So Brzezinski makes sense to go for broke because, or at least in some vision of the world, it could make sense to go for broke.
00:44:19.000And I am focused on making sure we defeat Kamala Harris and win the down-ballot races.
00:44:23.000But what's the point of winning if our own party is actually going to adopt some of the very poison that we think we're up against?
00:44:30.000And so I think the more we're able to look at this outside of the partisan silos and just talk about this in first principles, the stronger we're actually going to be.
00:44:38.000So how would you describe the, you know, the Harris campaign strategy right now?
00:44:42.000I mean, I don't know if you saw sort of my intro, but I played some of the clips of her, you know, talking about, you know, the cloud and cloud technology and other word salads.
00:44:51.000You know, she's now adapting a pro crypto stance.
00:45:12.000You must, it's like, you know, when you're looking at some, you know, modern art, like, uh, you see the guy that's a big art guy in the world.
00:47:06.000So in some sense, it's actually a brilliant strategy.
00:47:08.000And we've seen that proven by the fact that every time she has tried to veer into grocery price controls or some element of substantive policy, it hasn't gone well for her.
00:47:17.000And so she understands that for much of the voter base in the United States of America, especially in the state of civic decline that we're in, they vote based on a vibe rather than actually based on policy.
00:47:28.000The question for us is, what do we actually do about it?
00:47:30.000It's our job to actually call that out, to offer our own alternative vision, to show up in the places where we're not otherwise showing up.
00:47:37.000I think your father has done a masterful job of that, but I think that that's going to be required all the way through the finish line, because, frankly, it's a strategy that you're asking, are people seeing through it?
00:48:48.000Right, yeah, so she's not an ideologue, and that almost gives her too much credit.
00:48:50.000The second thing it does is it puts them in a position to allow, right, the billionaire class who's on CNBC on a given day to talk about how, no, no, she's actually pro-capitalism.
00:48:59.000Well, she switched yesterday to being in favor of some sort of pro-growth policy on cryptocurrency or AI or whatever the next thing.
00:49:06.000It doesn't matter, but it allows her on paper to defy the idea that a true Marxist wouldn't say this.
00:49:12.000And second of all, she isn't really smart enough or I think even principled enough to have a deep-seated political philosopher ideology.
00:49:20.000I think the truth of the matter is she is a cog in a machine.
00:49:24.000And we're running against that machine.
00:49:25.000And I think our movement is at its best, I think your father's at his best, when he is running against the machine, to dismantle the machine, above the fray of partisan politics.
00:49:35.000There's a reason why we're not only seeing former Democrats come to our side, we're seeing former Republicans like Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney move to the other side.
00:49:43.000It's not about Republicans and Democrats, really.
00:49:45.000It's about the citizen versus this managerial class.
00:49:49.000And more than anybody who's run for president in our lifetime, who's been the major nominee of either party in our lifetime, Donald Trump is the person whose mission it is.
00:49:57.000When we say drain the swamp, it is to dismantle that machine.
00:50:01.000I think that's a powerful message that wins over a lot more of those independents rather than just Saying that she's a communist, which I think gives her too much credit.
00:50:09.000Because at least, you know, say what you will about Karl Marx.
00:50:12.000Say what you will about Bernie Sanders.
00:50:13.000At least he has the principles, right?
00:50:15.000I think that neither of which we could say about really about Kamala Harris.
00:50:18.000But I think what we can say is just like Biden's cognitive deficits were In some ways, a feature, not a bug.
00:50:27.000Her policy deficits are really a feature, not a bug for the people who are controlling her.
00:50:32.000But if we call this out as the machine we're up against, it doesn't matter if it's Kamala, Joe, Sherrod Brown, or whoever the next guy, they're all cogs in that machine and we're going in to break the machine.
00:50:41.000I think that's a powerful message, but I think it's a powerful message because it's closest to the truth.
00:50:46.000So, you know, speaking of sort of, you know, the failed policies, you know, Kamala Harris, she's going to the border tomorrow.
00:50:51.000I mean, it sort of feels to me like that's like a murderer visiting the crime scene.
00:50:55.000But can you explain how your book maybe helps demystify why the American left is all in on open borders?
00:51:03.000I mean, they literally hate the idea of a national sovereignty.
00:51:22.000So I'm going to read you the title of this chapter.
00:51:24.000It's called, An Open Border Is Not A Border.
00:51:27.000Where, if I told this to you, or like most of the other chapters in this book, if I told this to you in the 2000s, I would advise you to save your money and not buy this book because it's far too obvious for any person to even waste the paper that it's printed on.
00:51:39.000Today it's actually a controversial thing to say in many corridors of the modern left.
00:51:43.000So, there's two sides to this, and there's one side that our side gets a little shy about talking about, which is the legal immigration side of this, which I'll get to in a second.
00:51:52.000On the illegal side, and I say this as the kid of legal immigrants myself.
00:53:24.000I'll give you 75% of the solution here, and I talk about this in the book.
00:53:28.000If you basically have a system that says, if you are going to rely on welfare, if we can predictably say, based on your economic condition, we require transparency of what your economic condition is before you enter, if we know you're going to rely on government assistance within the first couple of years you're here, we're not going to admit you, and we make you ineligible to receive any form of government assistance for at least 7 to 10 years after you come.
00:53:51.000Okay, if you're going to rely on government assistance, welfare, Medicaid, etc., and we know that, we should not be admitting you to the country.
00:53:57.000If you do not speak English, we should not be admitting you to the country.
00:54:01.000If you don't know the first thing about the U.S.
00:54:02.000civic ideals, and we have a civics exam for naturalization, move that to the front end.
00:54:06.000If you don't know the basics about the civic understanding of the United States, you're going to run out of the country.
00:54:11.000If we eliminate anybody who's going to rely on government welfare or recipient of government aid, anybody who can't speak English, and anybody who doesn't know the first thing about U.S.
00:54:19.000civic history, that alone solves, I kid you not, 75 plus percent of our legal immigration problem.
00:54:35.000I mean, half the tech stuff I invested, you know, it's done over there.
00:54:39.000Those guys have zero chance of getting into America.
00:54:41.000Now, they could create jobs, they could add value.
00:54:43.000They would never be dependents, but the entire Democrat party seems intent.
00:54:48.000The only kind of immigration they want are people who will be permanent dependents because it's a reliable vote for them.
00:54:54.000They've ostracized so many people that would have otherwise been reliable Democrat voters, whether that's a lot of, let's call it even African American men, certainly a lot of Hispanics around the country.
00:55:05.000You know, they're just importing a reliable voter base since they're not willing to actually do the right things for the people that were traditionally Democrat voters.
00:55:12.000Yeah, and to those who would say that's a conspiracy theory, I would encourage you to just go back and look at what the Democrats themselves were saying in 2012, right?
00:55:22.000That was a stated strategy of mass migration, which has long-run electoral advantages into the country.
00:55:27.000I do think a lot of Democrats, especially those at the more local level and the state level, mayors, even some governors, I think are beginning to see the first-hand effects that's having on them.
00:55:35.000So I think they could actually be the front lines of shifting the tide on this.
00:55:39.000But forget partisan politics about it for a second.
00:55:44.000This is actually one of the things I expose in this chapter of the book is you could design an immigration system and it's like whatever the incentives are, whatever the incentives you set up in that system is exactly what you get.
00:55:53.000So in the legal immigration system, you could imagine one that rewards people who are the smartest, in which case you get the most intelligent.
00:55:59.000You could imagine you reward somebody who is the most hardworking, most likely to be industrious or make contributions.
00:56:05.000You could imagine you could have a system that rewards those who demonstrate a love of the United States or readiness to assimilate or speak English the best, whatever it is.
00:56:12.000You could imagine any one of those as being the type of person or at least the type of quality that the immigration system rewards.
00:56:19.000In fact, the immigration system, even on the legal side right now, the immigration system we have is none of those.
00:56:25.000The hard truth is that the number one human attribute that our current immigration system rewards is Your willingness to lie, actually.
00:56:37.000Your willingness to just outright, intentionally tell a lie under oath, under pain and penalty of breaking the law.
00:56:44.000If you're willing to do that, that dramatically increases your odds of getting into the country.
00:56:48.000Now, you have somebody on the other side of that saying, OK, I can't in good conscience tell you that I'm seeking asylum or refugee status because I face imminent risk of bodily harm due to my race or my religion.
00:56:59.000And therefore, that's what it takes to qualify.
00:57:03.000The person who's willing to tell that lie is exactly who our current immigration system rewards.
00:57:09.000And against that backdrop, it is no surprise that you're seeing an increase in crime, because if you're willing to lie to break the law as your first act of entering, even through the so-called legal system, you're going to be more likely to continue to break the law while you're here.
00:57:22.000And we haven't talked about that enough on our side, but I mean, that's part of the reason I write this book.
00:57:25.000Well, it's complicated, because on behalf of the people that are doing the asylum checklist, well, they travel through eight countries to get here.
00:57:33.000They could have sought asylum in any one of the other countries, but, you know, America's the one that's gonna give them, you know, $3,000 a month, and a phone, and a this, and housing, and guaranteed healthcare.
00:57:42.000You know, you lose a little bit of that asylum right when it's like, oh no, I just got to a place where I'm safe.
00:57:49.000No, no, no, you traveled through seven other countries to get to America.
00:57:54.000It's even funny how it relates to sort of the woke victimhood culture mentality a little bit in terms of what our immigration system rewards.
00:58:00.000So I tell one of the stories, it's a true story, but I tell one of the stories in the book of a woman who came here Fleeing from persecution, so under the asylum system, persecution by Vladimir Putin because of his assault on the LGBTQIA plus community.
00:58:16.000She's a lesbian and she comes here because she's going to be unsafe, imminent risk of some kind of bodily harm to her if she stays in Russia.
00:58:23.000She comes here on the slightest questioning of it based on the way she lives her life here.
00:59:33.000So, you know, interesting one, because I want to shift gears a little bit.
00:59:36.000I mean, since we sort of started speaking about that woke victimhood culture that people are clearly taking advantage of, and many are just lying about to gamble.
00:59:45.000And I'm sure there's some people that really believe this stuff.
00:59:46.000And I'm sure there's plenty that say, hey, I'd love to go to Harvard, so I'm going to be trans.
01:00:14.000So when they were going down the tubes, I had a little show and fraud, you know,
01:00:18.000I don't often take glee in other people's misery, but they tried going after me one time on a total lie.
01:00:24.000I I managed to catch him I'll tell you because it's actually they tried linking me to Jeffrey Epstein Uh, you know because I was at some party I guess a friend of mine was doing this development I'm a real estate guy from New York.
01:00:34.000So a real estate guy from New York was a good friend invited me down And apparently Jeffrey Epstein was at this party.
01:02:11.000Uh, you know, and so I remember, it was BuzzFeed at the time, and so it was one of those, when they went down, so what the hell?
01:02:17.000And also BuzzFeed News was actually the one, they're also one of the ones, the BuzzFeed News division, which actually doesn't exist anymore, they shuttered it, was also one of the ones that broke the stories on a lot of the, a lot of the supposed Russia's collusion, all that stuff back in 2016.
01:02:30.000Oh yeah, no, these guys were vicious, and it was all lies, and all nonsense, and no consequence.
01:02:34.000So when they went down, I was like, You know, I know they love to throw out the learn to code to a bunch of guys that are plumbers and construction workers, but it was like, yeah, maybe you guys are going to need to learn to code or be replaced by AI in about two weeks because that's where probably most of that's going anyway.
01:02:52.000Are you going to be able to change it?
01:02:54.000Yeah, so first let's take a step back.
01:02:56.000So I left the campaign and I got in the world of politics, but the business world was my background.
01:03:00.000And so I left the campaign in January.
01:03:02.000Obviously I've been heavily involved in helping your father and other candidates.
01:03:07.000But I do have a lot more spare time on my hands after leaving the campaign, which is a full-time activity.
01:03:12.000Yeah, I miss scratching the business side of my brain a little bit as well.
01:03:16.000And so I've started a couple of companies, actually, a couple of which I think are going to go on to do some big things of guided enterprises that have already started.
01:03:24.000But I also have always had an itch for finding undervalued opportunities.
01:03:28.000This is a company that has just, for some of the reasons you may have mentioned, cratered since its IPO.
01:03:34.000It is Still generating an interesting amount of revenue.
01:03:38.000It has a bloated cost structure that hasn't served the company too well, and there's some debt-related pressures.
01:03:44.000But I said, you know, for a relatively modest sum, at least, you know, thankfully, I've lived the American dream.
01:03:49.000But from my own vantage point, from my portfolio, a relatively modest investment, I could come out owning a significant piece of a company that, if they did change direction, Could create, I think, a lot of value.
01:04:02.000And one of the things that I think is missing in the conglomerate model of media... I mean, you got the creator economy today, right?
01:04:08.000By the way, I was an investor in Rumble back when it was a private company, even before its own public listing.
01:04:13.000And so I believe in driving positive change through capitalism.
01:04:17.000But, you know, one of the things you see in the creator economy, whether it's Rumble or X, is Yes, you have no ideological filter, and I think that's great, but you also have no quality filter, which is to say that that's not a publisher, it's a platform.
01:04:29.000And then you have publishers who apply ideological filters, they apply quality filters, but with that quality filter comes also an ideological filter.
01:04:37.000And I just happen to think there is an opportunity out there for somebody, right?
01:04:41.000You could say whether it's BuzzFeed or anybody else, but for somebody to create a content publisher, not a platform, but a content publisher, That actually represents a truly diverse range of viewpoints under the same platform, under the same publisher, and builds a powerful corporate brand around that.
01:05:07.000Which is a wish for any media startup to have.
01:05:10.000Distribution channels and pipes of reaching tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people via social media, YouTube, and their followings, yet they don't have the right fluid flowing through those pipes.
01:05:19.000And so those were, in my view, underappreciated assets if they were managed in the right way, but that's the big if.
01:05:25.000And so historically, you know, the way it works is, so I'm the second largest outside shareholder.
01:05:30.000I didn't, you know, it's pretty easy for publicly traded companies.
01:05:33.000You buy the shares of the stock and you file the right thing when you're supposed to file the right thing.
01:05:38.000And so I'm an activist investor in BuzzFeed and it's the, I'm the second largest outside shareholder.
01:05:42.000Now, conventional wisdom is that in certain companies that have the dual class shareholding structure, What the founder, who in this case is also CEO of the company, has outsized voting power, you're not going to be able to drive too much change as an activist.
01:05:57.000There's some interesting dynamics here, and I'll keep it pretty high level, but they do have some debt that could effectively come due or be put to the company as soon as the end of this year, which changes the usual game theory around that situation.
01:06:11.000Obviously, there's a lot going on this year and a lot that I have my focus on even outside of the business world.
01:06:17.000But in the effort of trying to drive some positive change through the private sector and creating value in the process, I saw this as an opportunity to, as an outside investor, not as a CEO or anything like that, but as an activist investor, to bring some interesting ideas to the table at a time where they're going to have to do something.
01:06:50.000If you actually have a coherent vision for how you're going to create value, forget the ideological left-wing or right-wingness of it.
01:06:56.000Is there an opportunity to use existing assets to build a coherent brand and create value?
01:07:00.000Even if it's not the one that I've suggested, but it's something different than the direction the company is going and bring some discipline to a cost structure and so on.
01:07:06.000Yeah, I do see an opportunity to create value in mismanaged companies.
01:07:10.000And this is one of several private sector pursuits I've picked up since leaving the campaign.
01:07:15.000It just happens to be the most visible because it's a publicly traded company.
01:07:41.000How do we curate that so it doesn't just come back to, you know, the same old, same old swamp garbage that I think so many people are fed up of?
01:07:49.000Yeah, so actually, this book deals with both of those things.
01:07:52.000But the first of those is, in some sense, easier.
01:07:55.000The second of those is actually an interesting intellectual fissure, even within our own movement.
01:08:35.000Obviously, there's a lot of nuance and a lot of breadth of range of issues.
01:08:37.000But if you want to save a country and distill it to two punchlines that effectively come out and are developed in more obviously rigorous and detailed ways in this book, You have the first mass deportation of millions of illegals out of this country.
01:08:48.000Your father talks about it all the time.
01:08:50.000The only thing is, I would say, don't forget that second mass deportation of literally, there's four million unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
01:08:57.000that are writing rules that never passed Congress that are acting like a wet blanket on our economy, constraining our freedom and providing the basis for weaponization.
01:09:05.000We have saved a country in the process.
01:09:07.000So that's what I think a second Trump term that's North Star number one and two.
01:09:12.000You could debate which one's number one and number two.
01:09:13.000I put actually the unelected bureaucrats as number one.
01:09:15.000By the way, in terms of future damage, in terms of being able to, you know, take advantage of a guy that, like my father, who has the guts to actually do some of these things, that would be very controversial in Washington, D.C., even if it's right for the people.
01:09:29.000I think that's, you know, as important, if not more so, perhaps.
01:09:33.000And I like the dynamic, by the way, the setup that it's going to be a second term, so it's not like he's going to have to have some sort of, you know, re-election, you know, sort of back in the back of a shadow.
01:09:42.000I like the fact that he's been out of office for four years and had a chance to actually even reflect, as you and I both know he has, on exactly how we're going to, in that second term, achieve even more than he did in the first.
01:09:52.000I know he's, and you know this obviously better than anybody, how ambitious he is about that.
01:09:57.000So I think that's what that term looks like.
01:09:58.000I think the The thing I touch on in this book, and this is really intended to just open the conversation in this book, I'm opening the conversation on this, is one of the tough questions we're going to have to grapple with in the new America First movement, right?
01:10:14.000Rejecting the neoliberalism of yesterday, okay?
01:10:16.000The idea that we're going to spread democracy through capitalism to China didn't really work, okay?
01:10:20.000So we reject the neoliberal shibboleths of yesterday, but As we go forward, I think we confront a tough question where there's great people who mutually respect each other, good friends, allies, right?
01:10:34.000We're sitting on the same side of the table here.
01:10:35.000I think we're still gonna have to sort out where our priority is.
01:10:38.000On one hand, do we want to replace the left-wing nanny state with A version of a right-wing nanny state.
01:10:47.000Industrial policy that provides subsidies to select sectors over others.
01:10:51.000You know, we want to set caps on credit card interest rates.
01:10:54.000I mean, Kamala Harris once said, grocery price caps, we got interest rates.
01:11:00.000Do we want to actually use the levers of government and the use the levers of the bureaucracy to advance our substantive goals for American workers or manufacturers in a well-intentioned way?
01:11:18.000I believe the right answer for the long run, even for America, even and especially for American workers and manufacturers, is actually going to be getting there and actually just shut it down.
01:11:28.000You may cut so much fat that you also cut some muscle.
01:11:32.000But I don't want to turn to the CFPB, which is the same agency that Elizabeth Warren was the first head of, scold them for saying we're asking small businesses for their race and gender data, but on the other side of our mouth say that, hey, we want to empower that CFPB to cap the way that credit card interest rates are being calculated.
01:11:49.000I actually would rather just scrap the whole thing.
01:11:51.000I can see a lot of that stuff backfiring.
01:11:52.000We come up with something that seems to be well-intentioned, and then the left takes it when they get back in power someday and just weaponizes it against everything.
01:12:39.000I think we have to be very careful about that.
01:12:41.000And one of the things I'm encouraged by in sort of the future leadership in our movement, I mean, we've had...
01:12:46.000You know, we've been at dinners, yourself, myself, JD, you know, being able to debate the different contours of this.
01:12:54.000I mean, broadly aligned on the overall principle, deeply aligned on putting our country first over any other one.
01:12:59.000But against that backdrop to say, OK, how are we actually going to make America stronger?
01:13:03.000Is it in the short run going to be through a little bit more of a muscular subsidy based and temporary even regulatory state to reorient it the right way?
01:13:12.000Or is the right next step to actually just say, you know what?
01:13:15.000It might cost us some in the short run, but just dismantle it.
01:13:21.000And when necessary, start from a blank slate.
01:13:23.000And I think that that's That's, I think, what I see in the character of the emerging... You asked about the binge.
01:13:28.000One of the things I love about some of the people who have been around those dinner tables with us is that they're people who share the same principles, but are still able to actually engage in reasoned debate.
01:13:38.000Here's what I want to see not happen in the America First movement, right?
01:13:42.000The reason the neoconservative and the Mitt Romney John McCain version of the GOP, it floundered.
01:13:48.000It wasn't just that they had the wrong ideas.
01:13:52.000Think about liberal internationalism, the democratic capitalism of somehow believing we're going to change China through trade.
01:13:59.000The reason it failed wasn't just that those were inherently bad ideas in retrospect.
01:14:05.000You never know, you know, no one's going to get it right in the first instance.
01:14:08.000None of us know what the future holds in store.
01:14:09.000We have the benefit of retrospect and we reject that today.
01:14:12.000The reason it failed is it became so codified where it was, these guys, Mitt Romney, John McCain, they didn't know why they were saying the things they were saying.
01:14:22.000They just knew they were supposed to say them.
01:14:23.000They said them out of habit, out of muscle memory.
01:14:26.000And so, you know, I'm speaking I was, you know, spitting some hard truth for us here, too, if I may, but I think it's going to make us stronger.
01:14:33.000And I say the book is truths, it's not just to the left, but 360 degrees.
01:14:38.000I don't, I sometimes, when I'm traveling the country for these down-ballot Canada's, I'll occasionally see people, they'll go on a stage and say things like, We need to put America first.
01:14:51.000But the way they're saying it reminds me of the way that John McCain or Mitt Romney might have said it, just because it feels like what you're supposed to say, as opposed to actually knowing why we're saying it.
01:15:01.000I don't want to see the same thing happen in our movement.
01:15:04.000So I want to keep that culture of healthy debate in a constructive sense of how we put America first alive.
01:15:10.000Our bench, and especially the younger side of that bench, I think, has that character to it.
01:15:15.000But, you know, we got a job to achieve.
01:15:16.000His first is, let's put your father back in office, the two mass deportations, fix the country and revive that economy, seal the border, get us out of the brink of World War III, just like he did, by the way, last time he took office back in 2016 with North Korea.
01:15:31.000And then after that, I hope there's a longer renaissance yet to come where we're going to be iterating on what it means to be America first.
01:15:38.000And this book, I think, opens the door on that conversation.
01:15:43.000It's actually interesting, you know, watching, you know, a guy like yourself and a J.D.
01:15:47.000sort of, you know, do well, you know, a couple others even, you know, sort of emerge in a Republican primary.
01:15:52.000You know, two years ago, I would have been like, oh, man, like, what's next?
01:15:56.000Like, it's just going to go back to the same old.
01:15:57.000But it's great to see people that have come out, you know, sort of as warriors, people who are willing to have those conversations about not just Again, the rote truth that they're told to say, but like, who actually understand the truths, are willing to go to bat for them, are willing to enable, more importantly, are able to articulate them beyond sort of the surface.
01:16:23.000Where's your role in the future of the movement?
01:16:26.000What footprint do you want to have, Vivek?
01:16:28.000You know, we should probably talk about that in about 45 days after we've won this thing.
01:16:34.000It's really hard to kind of think about it, you know, contingency plan.
01:16:37.000I mean, people in Ohio, you know what their effort was.
01:16:40.000I mean, even in Springfield, people here want me to be the next governor here.
01:16:43.000I mean, I think obviously we got J.D.' 's seat for the Senate, so there's the Ohio-centric stuff.
01:16:48.000You know, obviously there's a lot that needs to be done in implementing the agenda.
01:16:51.000You know, we've talked in the past about cabinet positions, administration.
01:16:55.000I think, let's turn to that soon after November 5th, when we have some clarity.
01:17:00.000And clarity, I mean, not just in terms of the presidency, where frankly right now, I don't want people to be complacent, but I actually feel pretty good.
01:17:08.000But also in terms of what the Senate looks like.
01:17:10.000I mean, look, we couldn't pass the SAVE Act.
01:17:35.000Just to cancel out the guys that will just vote with the Democrats every time because it's like that, because they can, it's because it's easy for them.
01:17:46.000So if we're really in, if we're like in really like outstanding shape, like close to a 60-40 or 55, 56-44, right, in the Senate, yeah, that could be point one direction.
01:17:56.000On the other hand, if we're razor thin, that could point in a different direction.
01:18:01.000You know, I think there's a lot of ways to have change in the next four years, but whatever it is, we want to, we don't want to, we don't want to play small ball.
01:18:31.000You know, funny story, actually, is it's been on number one on Amazon, like, the whole week, and then I just, the publisher agent just told me it was, oh, it just got bumped to number two.
01:18:41.000I looked at, like, who bumped me from number one?
01:18:55.000It'd be pretty cool if we, you know, topped the bestseller list or whatever, just because it forces people on the left to read it and engage with it.
01:19:35.000I'm like, you know, I just think we should remind people though, like your father has friends, you have friends, I have friends on the left, but what we want to do is actually open their eyes.
01:19:44.000And so when people ask me in the campaign, how did you do that?
01:19:47.000How do you talk to people on the other side?
01:19:49.000That's actually what motivated me to write this book.
01:20:03.000Guys, make sure you check out the book.
01:20:05.000Vivek, I'm sure I'll run into you on the campaign trail.
01:20:07.000I think I'm seeing you at a couple events over the next few weeks, so I look forward to catching up in person, and then in 40-something days, starting those other conversations up again, because we're going to have a busy road ahead.
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