In this episode, President-elect Donald Trump speaks about his vision for the future of the United States and why he believes it s time to declare independence from China. He also discusses the role of the technocratic class in creating a culture of fear, and how they use fear to get us to do the things they need to do in order to advance their agenda and get us out of the worst economic, political, and moral impasses we can find ourselves in, and why we should be worried about the things we don t know, like what we don't know, and what we can t know about the unknowns, such as the Ukraine crisis and the current crisis in Ukraine, as well as the ongoing crisis in Syria and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and Afghanistan, and the lessons that we can learn from the past and present about how the technocracy exploits the fear of the unknown to advance its agenda and achieve its goals, including declaring unilateral unilateralism and decoupling from China's economic and geopolitical isolationism. President Trump's vision for a more free and fair relationship with China, and his call for declaring unilateral independence from Beijing's control over the world's second-largest economy and trade relations with the rest of the world, China's access to more market access, trade, and a better economic and diplomatic leverage, he calls for a new era of economic and political freedom from China, not less dependence on Beijing, and more autonomy from Beijing. China s control over our energy and trade access, and access to the world. We can all learn from each other, and we can all be free of China s access to our own information, and competition, and learn to be free from China s influence, and our own economic sovereignty, and freedom, and have a better and fair access to market access to trade and finance, and fair trade, as long-term economic freedom, as a better understanding of our own voice and prosperity. and more freedom to choose our own futures, and prosperity, and so much more, we can be free and prosperous, not just better, better, more prosperous and more prosperous, more free, more fair and more affordable, prosperous, and less expensive, more secure, more peaceful, and fairer lives, and better, we all can all of us can all have a more freedom and more of a better life, more of those things, he explains how to be a better world, and he explains why this is a good thing and why it s important.
Transcript
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00:00:02.000So, we're starting to see an interesting pattern emerge across different controversies that seem like they have nothing to do with each other.
00:00:32.000Public schools across this country were closed for the better part of a year, creating a systematic inequality amongst kids who went to public schools versus the smarter private schools that didn't close.
00:00:43.000And that's going to last a generation and we're going to have to pay for it.
00:00:47.000That's as it relates to school closures.
00:00:49.000Now you go to similarly ongoing risk factors today.
00:01:26.000We can't say for sure that Putin won't go for Poland if he succeeds in annexing Ukraine.
00:01:32.000And so we do the thing that the technocracy preys on, which is fear about the unknown possibility.
00:01:38.000However fringe that possibility may be, that then wins the day again to do what would be the so-called cautious thing to do.
00:01:45.000Give so far $100 billion plus in aid to Ukraine and counting.
00:01:49.000You're seeing a pattern here where the so-called safe thing to do, school closures on the one hand, $100 plus billion in aid that could have been spent on different domestic priority agendas or even foreign policy priority agendas.
00:02:01.000What it sounds like the safe thing isn't really actually the safe thing at all.
00:02:05.000It's just what feels safe through the lens of the technocracy that preys on fear.
00:02:10.000You saw the same thing with respect to the Silicon Valley bank bailout.
00:02:13.000It really wasn't a bailout of the bank technically, but it was a bailout of Silicon Valley itself.
00:02:17.000This idea that a bank that was different than all the other banks in the United States, only 11% of its deposits were actually insured.
00:02:27.000That's very different than most other banks where a majority of banks deposits are insured.
00:02:31.000They said, well, even still, this bank that we said for the longest time is not systemically important.
00:02:36.000It's a fringe bank that serves a rare set of customers, Silicon Valley tech companies.
00:02:41.000Somehow over this last weekend became deemed to be systemically important where those Silicon Valley interests basically said there's going to be a bank run in America on Monday unless you bail us out.
00:02:52.000And again, the technocracy wins buckling to the fear of the unknown and the technocracy wins the day.
00:03:00.000We bail out those banks, even though that creates new corporate moral hazard for probably a decade, if not a generation to come.
00:03:08.000And so the seemingly safe option isn't actually the option that's either safest or most desirable for us in the end, but they use it.
00:03:17.000This is one of the tricks of the technocratic class.
00:03:20.000we lack a fundamental self-confidence, when we lack fundamental conviction in what we know to be right as Americans, when that conviction is lacking, they're able to prey on that fear to be able to implement an agenda that they otherwise would not have been able to implement from COVID school closures to a war in Ukraine to a bailout of special interests they're able to prey on that fear to be able to implement an That's part of what the cost of the loss of self-confidence in America is all about.
00:03:45.000When we lose our self-confidence about our actually deepest and even most obviously held convictions, that's what allows us to fall prey to the new culture of fear.
00:03:56.000One of those areas where I predict that to play out over the next year is actually going to be, if I'm successfully elected as president, in implementing one of my core policy priorities, which is to declare independence from China.
00:04:13.000The thing that we're going to hear is that this is going to result in economic calamity here in the United States.
00:04:21.000Even though we know that China is a long-run enemy, even though China is using American companies to advance their geopolitical ends, we just can't afford to actually decouple.
00:04:32.000We just can't afford to declare independence.
00:04:34.000Now, my broader view here is deeper, is that if we're willing to do it, We actually won't have to because China will reform its behaviors because there will be greater loss to them than there is to us over here.
00:04:44.000That's really what more deeply motivates me to seize on this moment when Xi Jinping has shot China's economy in the foot last year as part of his grip on a third term of power.
00:04:53.000That's really what's going on from my perspective.
00:05:04.000But you can make a sacrifice if you know what you're sacrificing for on the timescales of history rather than electoral cycles, this thing we call America.
00:05:13.000And if you're willing to make that sacrifice, at least in geopolitics, it means that you probably won't have to make that sacrifice at all.
00:05:21.000But with that being said, I'm actually joined today by Jim Nels, somebody who knows a lot about supply chains, including the international supply chains that provide the products, the shoes on our feet, the phones in our pockets, the products that power our everyday modern way of life, and who's thought a lot about these supply the products that power our everyday modern way of life, and who's thought a lot about these supply chain And as I've said, Even if we do declare independence from China, it's not just a rosy picture.
00:05:46.000We got to get into the weeds of understanding what the potential consequences of that could actually be.
00:05:52.000And so among other topics, that's what I'm going to be discussing with Jim today.
00:06:00.000So, share just a bit about your background, a bit about, you know, your area of expertise, particularly in this area of supply chains, how you came to that, and then we'll get right into the conversation.
00:06:16.000My first job out of the military was at an industrial distribution company, and while I was doing my management rotation through procurement, the procurement manager quit, and I was a procurement manager the next day, and just kind of moved on from there, and then after I got my MBA, I started doing consulting and ended up doing supply chain and procurement consulting and just have been unable to get that piece of gum off my shoes.
00:06:36.000So it's what I've been looking at, it's what I've been studying, it's what I write about primarily, that and the economy.
00:06:41.000And it's an area where no one thought about it for the last 50 years until two years ago.
00:06:48.000And one of the things that I think people misunderstand about what's happened is COVID did not cause the supply chain crisis.
00:06:55.000COVID exposed the weakness of the American supply chain.
00:06:59.000When you have a supply chain that is 12,000 miles long, you use just-in-time inventory, you have the two worst ports in the world in Long Beach and Los Angeles when it comes to efficiency.
00:07:11.000And then you move those things over broken roads with a shortage of truck drivers.
00:07:15.000It's not surprising that when COVID happened and there were major hiccups, we couldn't find diapers on the shelf and we couldn't find toilet paper.
00:07:22.000It does challenge the conventional narrative a little bit, right?
00:07:49.000Four to six week transit time and then usually less than a week to unload.
00:07:53.000What we saw during COVID because of what was happening in China, whether or not you thought that they were doing that on purpose to hurt the US economy or not, we saw that transit time go up to two months.
00:08:14.000So as soon as they would have an outbreak of COVID, they would shut down shipping, they would shut down trucking, they would shut down the cities, they would shut down plants.
00:08:22.000And so it just caused irregularities, if you will, in the supply chain.
00:08:27.000You couldn't predict when things were going to come.
00:08:30.000And what kinds of goods are we talking about here?
00:08:32.000You're talking about everything from tennis shoes to your Peloton bikes to clothing.
00:08:55.000So if you look at, there was a recent survey that came out and rated the 350 largest ports in the world.
00:09:02.000The port of Long Beach and Los Angeles were 349 and 350 when it came to efficiency, meaning it takes us nearly twice as long to unload a ship as it does any other port in the world.
00:09:14.000So you look at ports in Saudi Arabia, you even look at a port in the Congo, and they do better than we do.
00:09:21.000So have we always been this bad, or is this a more of a recent trend?
00:09:24.000We've always been this bad, but because there were no hiccups in the supply chain, no one noticed.
00:09:29.000I guess why is it that we're so inefficient when it comes to Port unloading.
00:09:37.000Is that the term you use, port unloading?
00:10:47.000Not my favorite one, but my favorite example, if you will.
00:10:49.000If you were a young woman who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, and you were a truck driver in Iraq and Afghanistan, you come home, you leave the military, you're not allowed to drive a commercial truck across state lines until you're 21 years old.
00:11:04.000You can't get a commercial driver's license to cross state lines until you're 21. Why are we telling someone who was able to drive a truck in a war zone that she's not capable to drive a truck from Missouri into Southern Illinois?
00:11:21.000What is like a worker unionist, union protectionist kind of?
00:11:24.000There's a union thing, but there's also just antiquated rules.
00:11:26.000I'll give you another example, the Jones Act, something that most people don't even know about.
00:11:30.000I don't know about it, I have to admit.
00:11:32.000So Jones Act says that if a foreign ship makes a port call in the United States, it can't make a second port call in the United States.
00:11:39.000Meaning, if you are a ship full of goods that come from Vietnam, let's say, a ship full of textiles, And you have deliveries to make in Los Angeles and in Hawaii.
00:11:51.000You can only stop at one of those two places.
00:11:53.000And then the goods have to be offloaded, put on a U.S. flagship, and moved that way.
00:12:07.000What logic might have been for them to worry about if it's already coming to the U.S. once, what exactly are they worried about if it was to make a second stop?
00:12:15.000To promote U.S. shipping is basically what it was.
00:12:44.000It's antiquated, but even after hurricanes, when Puerto Rico got hit by a hurricane, they wouldn't even relieve the Jones Act in order for people to take goods to Puerto Rico for the relief effort there.
00:12:55.000But it all comes back to The government is not smart, right?
00:13:01.000It doesn't make sense to take thousands and thousands of trucks off the road when we already have a shortage of about 80,000 truck drivers in the United States.
00:13:08.000It doesn't make sense to tell a ship that it has to bypass Hawaii Go to Los Angeles and then reload all those goods and take it back to Hawaii, which causes their prices to go up by 20%.
00:13:18.000It doesn't make sense to tell a combat veteran that she can't drive the same truck she drove in Iraq, like I said, from Missouri into Illinois or Missouri into Ohio.
00:14:11.000It was just the pandemic exposed these pre-existing.
00:14:15.000Generally, what I'm hearing are regulatory failures as well as antiquated laws that contribute to those regulatory failures combined with unions as an obstacle.
00:14:46.000Is it leaves, it embarks from somewhere, it debarks in the United States.
00:14:51.000There's a distribution chain within the United States as well.
00:14:55.000Is it really that shipping, debarking?
00:14:58.000How much of the chokehold is there versus at other steps in the cascade?
00:15:03.000Well, there are a lot of areas where things can go wrong, right?
00:15:05.000So let's take a computer keyboard, for example.
00:15:08.000Computer keyboard made in southern China would then be put on a truck and taken to a warehouse and then either put onto a cargo container in Hong Kong or in Shanghai.
00:15:19.000It would then be shipped via ship to the United States, come into the port of Long Beach or Los Angeles for the most part.
00:15:26.000And there it would be unloaded and then taken to another warehouse where then another truck would come, pick it up, probably take it to yet another warehouse and then distribute it to, say, your Best Buy, your computer store, your Amazons, what have you.
00:15:41.000So there are a number of things that go wrong there.
00:15:55.000And is that more of a recent phenomenon than it was 20 years ago?
00:15:59.000Or do you think that also has been lurking for a long time as a problem in this country?
00:16:02.000It's been coming for a long time, but it's more critical now.
00:16:05.000They have some new health standards for truck drivers that seem silly.
00:16:10.000There's that law in California, the gig economy law, where they're making truck drivers be part of an organization as opposed to their own independent contractors, which is imposing a lot more paperwork on these guys, and they just don't want to do it.
00:16:24.000But also, who wants to be a truck driver?
00:16:31.000The health issues are not good because, again, driving across the country.
00:16:35.000So folks, it's not a very entertaining industry to get into.
00:16:39.000And then, like I said before, we make it hard for people to get into it because they can't start until they're 21. So you lose a whole generation of folks who maybe go into construction or become electricians because they can't drive a truck across state lines.
00:16:53.000Or just sit in their parents' basement.
00:16:56.000The other area that we had a lot of problems with during COVID, it's getting a little bit better now, was just finding the labor in the warehouses to move things from point A to point B. The Biden administration- And that's more of a last few years.
00:17:10.000Yes, that's more of a last few years thing.
00:17:11.000But given how much money that they paid people to stay at home, why would I want to go work in a hot warehouse?
00:17:17.000I'll just stay at home and like you said, sit in the basement, watch TV or play video games.
00:17:21.000How much, I guess if you were to think about breaking this down between...
00:17:27.000The regulations, let's just say on debarking for ships or even the trucker shortage versus the incentives that we've created for people not to work that create this human capital shortage.
00:18:36.000The cost being higher and the uncertainty of those dollar-denominated price increases at every step of the chain, that's actually another important factor as well.
00:18:45.000So, I mean, one of the issues that I'm focused on, I've said, you know, you heard me say it before, is declaring independence from China.
00:18:54.000Okay, so this is not going to be an easy pill to swallow.
00:19:01.000I would say geopolitical long-run reasons why I think it's really important for us to make sure that we're not dependent on our chief military rival for our modern way of life.
00:19:10.000The example I've often used is if that was a Russian spy balloon flying over the United States, we would have shot it down in an instant and ratcheted up sanctions.
00:19:18.000But the reason we didn't do it for the Chinese spy balloon is that we know we have to dance around China very carefully because we are dependent on them.
00:19:30.000I mean, this is what China planned for in their best case scenario when Kissinger opened up relations between the US and China, when our economies opened up.
00:19:38.000We thought we were using Capitalism as a vehicle to spread democracy and American values to places like China.
00:19:47.000They actually, I think, knew what they were doing.
00:19:49.000They turned that game upside down and said, you know what, we can play this game in reverse.
00:19:53.000We'll use capitalism, their version of it at least, as a vehicle for advancing the Chinese geopolitical agenda, getting companies to do things that those companies otherwise wouldn't have done.
00:20:05.000Were it not for a condition of gaining access to the Chinese market, Airbnb handing over the data of US users to the CCP as a condition for doing business there, getting companies to apply emissions caps in the US that China refuses to adopt, you know, for BlackRock, for example, that constrains American companies with one hand, lets Chinese companies like PetroChina roam free with the other.
00:20:26.000And so anyway, I've talked about all of these forming the basis for why we actually have an opportunity when China's relatively vulnerable economically.
00:20:34.000Xi Jinping isn't even in a as politically vulnerable position as he's ever going to be after holding on to that third term that he took over last October.
00:20:41.000Now's our window of opportunity to say that we're going to declare independence from China.
00:20:46.000We pull a little bit of the economic rug out from under them.
00:20:49.000It'll involve some short-term pain for us, but it'll involve I think greater cost for them that we can use that as a catalyst to get the CCP to reform.
00:20:57.000That's, broadly speaking, one of the core aspects of my foreign policy agenda and foreign policy priorities vis-a-vis China is to, in some ways, defeat them economically so that we don't have to militarily later.
00:21:10.000There's a lot to peel back from there.
00:21:13.000A lot in your area of expertise, too, about what the costs of this are going to be because I don't want to paint too rosy of a picture.
00:21:30.000And then if you look back at the Clinton era where they gave the missile, the satellite technology to the Chinese as well, there were a lot of mistakes that we made.
00:21:39.000And if you want to be positive, we made them with the best of intentions.
00:21:44.000But let's not argue that point right now.
00:21:47.000Decoupling from China is going to be challenging, but one of the things I've been preaching recently is repatriating the supply chain.
00:21:54.000And if you look, it's actually Vivek starting to happen.
00:21:59.000Production of groundbreaking of U.S. plants, of manufacturing facilities in the United States was up 120% in 2022 compared to 2021. Say that again.
00:22:18.000The other thing that we're seeing is a lot of American companies are – they're stopping the reliance on China and looking more into the USMCA region, specifically Mexico.
00:23:42.000Of not only the cost of the good, but the cost of getting it from point A to point B. And the cost of getting it then into the consumer's hands.
00:23:49.000We might be able to at least maintain costs or even reduce costs.
00:23:53.000The other thing though is that if it's available, you can sell it.
00:23:57.000If it's not on the shelf, it goes unsold.
00:24:00.000So I actually have a lot of hope for the future of what's going to happen.
00:24:42.000I'm with you that I think that this needn't be as hard as we make it out to be for decoupling first supply chains and then more broadly from China.
00:24:52.000But let's go into a little bit more detail there.
00:24:53.000How would you see that process actually playing out?
00:24:58.000Let's get into the meat of what that decoupling for American businesses looks like.
00:25:03.000First and foremost, I think we're going to have to provide incentives for companies to invest in America again.
00:25:08.000And if you look at President Biden's budget, he's spending a whole bunch of money on agencies as opposed to maybe giving tax credits to business to invest in America.
00:25:25.000The first is just decoupling from China.
00:25:27.000But there is this whole rest of the world outside of China that we could also – Mexico among it, among the rest of the world.
00:25:35.000Japan, India, Australia, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, Brazil – How much of the slack do we pick up from China from the rest of the world versus having to repatriate that to this?
00:25:51.000There may be a lot of reasons why it's desirable to do that in the US as a matter of so-called industrial policy or otherwise, but put that to one side.
00:25:57.000If we're just talking about the goal first of for geopolitical reasons, decoupling from China.
00:26:05.000How much of that slack can be picked up by other international supply chains as well, diversified across a broader base of countries?
00:27:06.000I'm tired of giving money to people that hate my values.
00:27:09.000I'm tired of giving money to my enemy.
00:27:12.000I mean, I think that this is related to some one of the things I was talking about where I just think that we have an opportunity to revive conviction in what is right.
00:27:21.000We know that we're gonna have to do this with respect to China.
00:27:24.000I talked about this examples with COVID school closures.
00:27:27.000I talked about it with respect to resisting the siren song of the bank run when it comes to the Silicon Valley bailout just in recent weeks.
00:27:36.000And yet, you hear the same thing with respect to decoupling from China.
00:27:41.000There's an economic calamity awaiting in America, even though we know that's the right thing to do.
00:27:49.000Talk to the American people right now.
00:27:52.000Why should we not be afraid, even if we know in our hearts that's the right thing we have to do to protect America over the long run vis-a-vis communist China, but to the people who will say, yeah, but that's going to make my life too difficult for that to be worth it.
00:28:07.000Maybe my grandkids can deal with it, but not me.
00:28:11.000Talk to them and make the most persuasive case you can that between the rest of the world, redundancies we have in other countries, and the trends we're seeing here in the United States, you know, factory construction, etc., up 120%, as you said, you know, even over relative years, even over year-on-year growth.
00:28:30.000Why we shouldn't be As afraid as we are of pulling that rug out.
00:28:36.000Well, first, you have to listen to who's telling you it's going to be painful.
00:28:40.000Who benefits from telling you that it's going to be painful?
00:29:29.000And to the point that you made earlier in the discussion, you may not have to pull all the way away because once you start doing it, they're going to collapse.
00:29:37.000Here's the interesting thing about China.
00:29:39.000And first of all, any American who tells you that he or she understands China is lying, right?
00:30:59.000What is it about the American psychology right now that stops us from being able to just man up and do what we know we're supposed to do, to put it bluntly?
00:31:13.000Where is the speech that says, here's what I want to do for the economy?
00:31:18.000I want American dollars to be spent in America.
00:31:20.000I don't want to continue to make my enemy rich.
00:31:24.000Where is that Ronald Reagan-esque speech talking about that?
00:31:27.000I think the second part is even just the most obvious.
00:31:32.000I don't want my dollars to be spent on subsidizing my enemy.
00:31:55.000Or in the United States, there's some combination of Honduras, Mexico, West Africa, India, Japan, Western Europe, the Philippines, and Brazil.
00:32:14.000The funny thing about Africa is, you know, with the rare earth mineral discussion is, I think a lot of those African nations, including West African nations, they like dealing with the US better than they do with China.
00:32:27.000But right now, if they're given opportunities to have development deals with both, they'll take both.
00:32:32.000And yet we in the United States could be, this is another point of, you know, pulling the rug out from under China a little bit, playing a little bit harder ball, is to tell those African nations that, hey, we're here for you.
00:32:48.000And the arguments some of the African nations provide, I mean, you know, look, I don't blame them.
00:32:51.000Every nation should look after its own self-interest first, but they'll make these arguments back to the U.S. that say, have you heard this expression?
00:32:57.000They'll say, when two elephants fight, it is the grass that dies.
00:33:04.000So the U.S. then says, oh, okay, okay, all right, we understand and, you know, we'll tell China to be a little bit more of a team player, but At the end of the day, these African nations, they had to choose.
00:33:16.000You know, China offers these raw deals.
00:33:21.000They encumber these countries with debt they can't get out of.
00:33:24.000And they – you're talking about racism?
00:33:25.000China has deeply racist attitudes towards black people.
00:33:29.000More so, including African black people, more so than anything we've ever seen in the United States.
00:33:32.000And certainly more than exists in the United States today.
00:33:34.000So those African nations, they don't want – if they had to choose, it's definitely America over China.
00:33:37.000Yet we're allowing them – And them being China, the courtesy of being allowed into a picture that we could just disintermediate and cut them out of.
00:33:46.000Well, China's been brilliant and we've been lazy, is the way I put it, right?
00:33:49.000So they give these loans that the country can't pay back.
00:33:52.000And so they say, okay, we'll take your port.
00:34:01.000You know, where is the State Department with stuff like this?
00:34:03.000Why are we not having meetings with these African nations saying, do you understand what's happening?
00:34:08.000And we're, like you said, we're here for you.
00:34:11.000Think of all the money we've given to Ukraine that maybe we could have used in Africa to help develop some of those countries and have better trading partners.
00:34:29.000They seize ownership of the ports, the airports, etc., the infrastructure that then allows them to exert leverage that they otherwise wouldn't have had when the United States was just providing that same money in the form of aid.
00:34:42.000And investment that didn't have the same kinds of strings attached while allowing them to actually sell their security interests, like as in debt security interests, to China.
00:34:53.000So, you know, I just think it's a matter of mustering the fortitude and self-confidence to actually – Just say no to China.
00:35:06.000And maybe instead of giving speeches about how evil Republicans are, we should be talking about how our vision for the future, what that needs to look like.
00:35:15.000I would love a speech that talks like that.
00:35:54.000Once we gain that sense of self-confidence of what is possible, our conviction in what is right, then we set the milestone marker and we go achieve it.
00:36:06.000It's like one of my experiences in building businesses, successful businesses, is that there's two ways of thinking about You know, building a startup business.
00:36:16.000Okay, one is you start from where you are and you look at what your resources are and say, what could I reasonably achieve as a goal over the next three-month period or six-month period or 12-month period or whatever, and then you sort of move from the present forward.
00:36:32.000You don't really achieve liftoff that way.
00:36:36.000That's how you build a classical what they call small business.
00:36:41.000By the way, these Silicon Valley tech startups that show up with trillion-dollar business plans have now re-characterized themselves as small businesses to get a bailout.
00:36:47.000But that's that small business thinking.
00:36:49.000If you really want to create a startup with uncapped potential, the way you do it is the other way.
00:36:57.000And say that is what we need to achieve to change the world in whatever way we want to change the world and create seismic amounts of value in the process.
00:37:16.000The risk to that is that you fail, of course, that you plant the flag and despite all of the best intentioned, you know, hubris, good kind of hubris, you still fall short that happens.
00:37:57.000Or when I work with my clients and they're trying to improve their EBITDA and we have to take out a certain amount of money in order to make them more profitable.
00:38:08.000And I'd rather set a goal of 50 million and achieve 35 than set a goal of 10 and achieve 11. That's right.
00:38:14.000And you have no chance of achieving 10 out of 10 goals unless you actually set the goal of actually doing it, right?
00:38:20.000- And this comes back to the point I keep bringing up and what I would love for you to continue to do is set that future, that vision. - Yeah. - It's not complaining about previous administrations.
00:38:32.000It's not complaining about the malaise of the American people.
00:38:35.000It is, this is where I wanna take the country.
00:38:38.000And Americans, I mean, they'll do almost anything if they see that vision and they believe in that vision.
00:38:52.000And I think when it comes to the subject that you and I are talking about, I mean, there's two ways in which I'd like to do it.
00:38:58.000One is to say that I believe that we as a nation can stand on our own two feet with our allies by trading with people who actually believe in the same values that we do without having to rely on people who believe in decimating, annihilating the existence of our country and those values over the long run.
00:39:51.000And then we work backwards and see how we make that happen.
00:39:53.000And then as it relates to how we unleash our economy at home… We've fallen, both parties have, we've fallen into this trap of small ball where one camp wants to raise taxes, one camp wants to talk about, you know, entitlement cuts as a way of managing our deficit because after all, China is the second largest provider of that debt after Japan.
00:40:15.000My view is we grew at over 4% GDP growth annualized for our entire nation's history and I think the rise of the new climate cult is another such factor, or shackles the United States while leaving other parts of the world untouched.
00:40:44.000I think the rise of affirmative action and anti-meritocratic policies in the American economy created a culture that was fundamentally hostile.
00:40:53.000It's a victim culture and victimhood culture is not good for the economy.
00:40:56.000So there's a lot of reasons why we've flattened out GDP growth.
00:40:59.000But the other area where I just think we can achieve it is say, we're going to unleash the American economy and actually forget about playing small ball debating tax increases versus spending cuts.
00:41:09.000We will grow our way out of the problems.
00:41:11.000Let's restore 5 plus percent GDP growth.
00:41:14.000You know, I think we're working on the exact numbers here.
00:41:18.000But like Kennedy going to the moon, if we can go to the moon, we certainly can get back to a place of 5 plus or if not 5 plus, 4 plus percent annualized GDP growth.
00:41:28.000And if we did that, the rest of our problems become easy by comparison.
00:41:31.000I think that's just the big ball, the way we got to be thinking.
00:41:59.000Think about COVID. They taught us to be afraid during COVID. It was the flu.
00:42:04.000And I know people died, and I'm sorry people die, but people die of the flu every year as well.
00:42:08.000People die of pneumonia every year as well.
00:42:10.000It was the flu, and we hid in our homes, we ordered groceries delivered, we left them outside, then we sprayed sanitizer on them, and then maybe we ate them, right?
00:42:19.000I mean, think how quickly the American people gave up their civil rights during COVID. For fear.
00:42:43.000I'm going to be in there every Saturday because I know the people that I work with don't go in on Saturdays, but the boss is always going to see me in there on a Saturday.
00:43:00.000He got every one of his fraternity brothers to change their registration to Michigan so they could vote in local elections and vote the right way.
00:43:43.000I mean, I think it reminds me of, you know, back when I was maybe, yeah, it was about maybe that age, actually, when there was these cases of the people post 9-11 that were, you know, locked up in Guantanamo, likely terrorists.
00:43:57.000We needed to go through the process of convicting them.
00:43:59.000And I was one of those weird people at that time who said that Yes, but we need to still respect due process so that we know with conviction who really was guilty and who was not.
00:44:13.000And, you know, back then, I wouldn't call myself – I mean, I'd like to think I was brave, but the reality is the people who took that position were celebrated in some ways by principled people on the left, actually, in this country that stood up to the, you know, the authoritarian ways of the Bush-Cheney administration.
00:44:31.000That's suspended due process and whatnot.
00:44:34.000And yet the thing that's disappointing for me is those people are silent, pin drop silent when it comes to the January 6 defendants who we now know were denied access to potentially exculpatory video evidence.
00:44:49.000That is a, you know, hands down Brady violation.
00:44:53.000It's a constitutional rule that says that basically, if you're being going to be criminally charged, you have to have- Exculptory evidence presented to you.
00:45:01.000And so that's something that's had me down a little bit, just the fact that the very people who would stand up for Guantanamo Bay likely alleged terrorists- Won't stand up for American citizens.
00:45:11.000Won't stand up for American citizens who are actually more actively being denied those same constitutional rights.
00:45:15.000But then it makes me feel- Makes me feel good when you hear a 19-year-old girl in this country, who's, I guess she would be Gen Z, I suppose, still, right?
00:46:39.000And we would stay up till three o'clock in the morning with just these wonderful debates about our views on life and our views on politics and our views on the economy.
00:46:48.000And it made us better friends, but we weren't afraid to have the conversation.
00:46:52.000You can't have those conversations today.
00:46:54.000And that's why I'm so proud of my son and my daughter because they're not afraid to have those conversations.
00:47:00.000That's also what gives me hope because they're not that unique.
00:47:04.000Every parent thinks their child is unique.
00:47:07.000They have friends who do the same thing.
00:47:08.000We need the leadership that's going to encourage that type of behavior.
00:47:13.000One of the things that I've long said in the last couple of years is that you want a good litmus test for how well we're doing as a country, the civic health of our country.
00:47:23.000Take the gap between what people are willing to say in private and what people are willing to say in public.
00:47:30.000When that gap is narrow, we're doing great as a country.
00:47:32.000When that gap is wide, we're not doing well.
00:47:35.000No doubt, today we're in a moment where there's a big gap between what people are willing to say in private and what people are willing to say in public.
00:47:59.000Actually, that's one of our slogans is… It takes more people to be contagious before that's true, right?
00:48:07.000So it's not like courage doesn't spread automatically.
00:48:10.000But if you have enough people, people like your son, your daughter, who for their generation amongst their classmates are willing to demonstrate that, Then courage actually is ready to spread too, but it takes a few people to start it.
00:48:31.000You know, I think we're at that moment where people are quietly hungry for it.
00:48:35.000And, you know, whether it's decoupling from China, whether it's actually taking the right course of action in Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine, whether what we've learned about what those school closure policies did for us in the COVID era, Silicon Valley Bank and its depositors this weekend.
00:48:51.000When you submit to fear, you actually make – you actually take a greater risk without knowing it even though temporarily you feel like you did the safe thing.
00:49:01.000But we're starting to see pockets of resistance if you will.
00:49:33.000That was the point that you made on the podcast the other day was, why do they get different rules?
00:49:36.000And it is that moral hazard that we're creating now because basically, if I'm running a bank, I don't have to worry about insuring my folks.
00:49:45.000I can play with the money any way I want to because the government's going to come in and fix it.
00:49:48.000And I think that the way we get there is to start talking openly again.
00:50:06.000And, you know, I think the supply chain people utter the words, but I think you understand it more deeply in a way that, you know, there's something about overcoming fear too, where part of the root of fear is the failure to understand I'm
00:50:46.000Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.