Running Thiel Capital And The Race For Senate With Blake Masters | OAP #54
Blake Masters grew up in Tucson, Arizona. He attended Stanford University and Stanford Law School.
Blake runs Thiel Capital, a multi-billion dollar firm that invests in new technology companies, and the Thiel Foundation, a nonprofit foundation that promotes science and innovation. The Foundation’s Thiel Fellowship Program has paid 225 young people to drop out of college and instead create new companies, which are together now worth more than $45 billion.
In 2014, Blake co-authored the #1 New York Times bestseller Zero to One, which sold more than three million copies.
Blake lives in Tucson—a short drive from where he and his wife Catherine grew up. They homeschool their three sons, Miles, Graham, and Rex, and they enjoy hiking in the desert.
EPISODE LINKS:
Blake's Twitter: https://twitter.com/bgmasters
Chase's Twitter: https://twitter.com/realchasegeiser
Blake's Website: https://www.blakemasters.com
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My name is Chase Geiser, and I am One American.
It's One American Podcast live with Blake Masters running for Senate in Arizona because no one else good is.
What's up, man?
Not me.
Yeah, I know, I'm just teasing.
How are you doing?
Good.
What's up, Chase?
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for taking the time to come on the show.
It was really good to hear from your team and get you booked.
And I'm really excited to talk to you because unbeknownst to me, I have been a fan for a long time.
So tell me a little bit about your background, where you grew up.
I watched your video on your website.
I know you grew up in Arizona and that you met your wife in middle school and all that cool stuff.
Tell me about coming up and how you started your career and where you're at now.
Yeah, I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where I live now.
My parents were still there.
My wife's parents are still there.
I did meet my wife in middle school, which seemed natural at the time, but looking back, I think that's pretty crazy.
Now we raised three boys in Arizona, but I spent the first part of my career after going to Stanford and Stanford Law School.
I was in San Francisco.
I was in Silicon Valley.
I linked up with Peter Thiel, you know, the billionaire tech investor, who's I think the one really prominent, outspoken, conservative tech investor.
And we wrote this book, Zero to One.
That was 2014.
And since then, I've been working for and with Peter, just trying to lend my support to that mission of investing in really new and innovative technology companies.
But of course, one thing we also do is get involved in politics.
So in 2016, we were big surrogates for the Trump 2016 campaign.
And when Trump won, we joined his transition team to try to get some good appointees in to the government.
So I've been involved with politics for a number of years.
We moved back to Arizona in sort of late 2017.
By mid-2018, we were in Arizona full time and I had this front row seat to watch Arizona lose two Senate seats, which is really crazy because I don't think Arizona is a Democratic state.
It's not a blue state.
And so I started thinking about getting involved.
I ran a PAC in Arizona in 2020.
We raised $3 million to keep the state legislature Republican, which worked.
But then when Mark Kelly was declared the winner here after this November 2020 election, I said, no way, this is bad news.
And, you know, I started thinking seriously about doing what I did, which is tossing my hat in the ring.
And I'm going to win this Senate seat back for Republicans in Arizona.
You know, it's crazy.
I've been thinking about this for really a couple of years now, but a lot since the pandemic started, which I guess was a couple of years ago, if you really think about it.
15 days last a long time.
Right.
And it occurs to me, it's so one of the things that bothers me the most about everything that's going on is the amount of mind power that is taken from otherwise brilliant people, right?
So you've got your Peter Thiels, we've got gentlemen like you, Weinstein, who's a brilliant physicist and actuary, right?
Or mathematician, rather.
And his brother, of course, who's a brilliant evolutionary biologist.
And it's like, why are these people who are so brilliant in their fields?
Why is the environment such that they have to be so distracted by the politics?
Like, why do we have to have Weinsteins talking about freedom of speech in this country when their minds could be applied to create amazing things?
It seems like Elon Musk is sort of one of the only minds.
It's like, no, I'm still focusing on going to space.
Elik's getting more political.
I know.
Elon's getting more political.
And I agree with you.
Like, it'd be nice if we didn't have to.
It'd be nice if politics could be sane and sort of coherent.
And look, there's a spectrum and there's going to be a sort of left and a right.
But it'd be nice if that system mostly worked.
So that I think, yeah, I mean, I'd rather, in a sense, focus on, you know, building new businesses, investing in startup technology companies, doing new stuff.
But at a certain point, everything is political and you may not be interested in politics, but it's certainly the left-wing politics is interested in you and they'll come after everything.
And I just see this country, it's basically like falling apart.
I think we're like six inches away from totally disintegrating.
And the sort of right of center conservative politics has just been playing defense forever.
They've given up the keys.
And so this is why I think, you know, a few years ago, I would have said, no, the thing to do is to go into business, which is what I did after graduating law school in 2012, 2012.
It was like Mitt Romney lost.
This sucks.
There's a sort of uniparty.
I'll just go into business.
But then I think Trump 2016 showed me, no, we can actually do new things in politics.
And of course, the ascendance of the left just in the last eight months really has been breathtaking.
And I think they're ruining it.
So I think to me, the most important thing right now is to dive headfirst into the political fray and see what we can't clean up.
Otherwise, we're not going to have a country anymore.
Yeah.
So what do you think the solution to this?
I read Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday and I'm familiar with some of the very clever moves that are being made subtly and without a lot of hoorah because that's sort of necessary part of the strategy.
But what are the moves that we can make to end what I consider to be the biggest problem, and you may disagree, but I consider the big tech censorship to be probably among the top three of our biggest problems in the United States.
What can we do to actually solve that?
Because this opponent seems insurmountable at this point.
Yeah, and maybe it is.
I don't think it is.
Certainly we got to fight back, though, because if you just give up, then it's over.
Of course.
Right.
So I agree with you.
I think Section 230 protection, fine, you know, get rid of it.
If they want to act like publishers instead of platforms and actually put their thumb on the scale and editorialize, strip them from that protection.
I think that's just sort of table stakes, though.
That doesn't, we probably have to go harder.
We probably have to make big technology companies like Facebook and Twitter common carriers, right?
So they shouldn't be able to discriminate politically.
They shouldn't be able to kick you off any more than the phone company can rip you off, you know, for having a political conversation they don't like.
So I think that would do it, at least on the censorship part.
I do think one problem is these companies are just too big.
And the bigness actually, I think, is something to attack.
So I think Google, you know, is so big that they actually can swing a presidential election.
And I worry a lot about that.
I think they have the motive.
I think they have the opportunity.
They have a real monopoly on search.
But when these monopolies get so big that they're more powerful than most governments, I think Republicans and conservatives can afford to say, hey, maybe we got to treat these companies differently than we treat a hair salon.
Just maybe.
And there's a whole rich Republican history of being very skeptical of concentrations of power, even if they're corporate instead of governmental.
So we may need to use antitrust law and break some of these companies up, or we may need to modernize antitrust law to deal with big harms for the modern context.
When these laws were written, we were worried about a railroad getting a territorial monopoly and then jacking up prices.
Well, Facebook has this huge monopoly in social networking, but there is no price that you pay to use Facebook.
You are the product.
You don't pay to use the product.
You are the product.
And so maybe we need, I don't know, smart young people in government to figure out how to regulate Facebook.
But the answer is not just like, hey, do whatever you want.
And I think the targeted advertising stuff, the addictiveness that they bake into these products, all this stuff is really bad.
So let me agree with you.
This is like a top three problem that we face.
And we'll decide if we have a free country or not based on whether we get serious about regulating it.
Yeah.
And there's sort of a motif too among the tech giants, it seems to me, where if you look at the Googles, if you look at Twitter, Facebook, for example, these are companies that 10 years ago were awesome.
I mean, it actually used to be a joy to go on Facebook.
I don't know if you remember.
Right.
In 2004, the wild west of Facebook.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
And it, like I said, it was awesome.
It was sort of apolitical.
I mean, it was as political, I guess, as the general conversation was.
But it seems to me that what happens is these companies, they go public.
And then when they go public, everything changes.
Right.
And I don't know if it's because of pressure from the board or if it's just constant concern over shareholders rather than user experience, but I can't imagine 10 years ago Donald Trump being just censored from Twitter, right?
Or I don't know, Alex Jones being removed from Facebook as ludicrous as he may seem sometimes, right?
So From your experience, and I know that I know that Peter was an early investor in Facebook back when Facebook was awesome.
From your experience, what do you think has caused this shift to occur among these big tech companies where they went from being these awesome viral services to sort of like these political, almost political action committees in and of themselves?
Right.
I think the bigness has a lot to do with it.
You know, I mean, in zero to one, we say like, obviously, an entrepreneur wants to build a monopoly, which we define as a business so successful that its profit stream is durable and no one can hope to compete with it because its products are really good.
And you can imagine really good versions of that.
If a company is continually innovating, continually out ahead of competitors, you know, and just getting big because that's how it's successful.
Well, that seems good.
But if a company innovates once and then because of network effects, you know, just gets to dominate its market and then stops innovating, but just kind of keeps collecting rents based on past innovation.
I think that's what we've seen with these giants since at least 2014, 2015.
They've gotten so big and so powerful, they just turn into what you see, which is sort of rent-seeking, giant leviathan corporations.
I think probably the politics of the rank and file engineers matter a lot.
If you're in a startup, small and it's dynamic and you're building something, you've caught some virality, you're really growing, you don't have time to think about politics, right?
You're like building Facebook.
That was exciting.
Remember the Facebook movie?
I think they tried to make Zuckerberg look bad in the social network movie.
I thought he was cool.
Actually, he looks cool, right?
There was a real energy to this stuff.
I agree.
I don't think there's anything necessarily inherent about it going public that really does it.
I don't think it's like a financial thing so much as just, you know, obviously going public is correlated with bigness and success and growth.
And Facebook's only gotten just like a lot bigger since 2011, 2012 when it went public.
So I think, you know, it just grows and it becomes political.
All organizations not explicitly conservative, even those, become left-wing over time if you get big enough and you have mission creep.
And so I think at this point, you know, maybe it's kind of a phenomenon of the inmates running the asylum, but these companies just get so big and so left-wing and now they have to go along to get along.
So if the Biden administration tells Facebook, hey, we got this big antitrust action, but play ball with us.
Go ahead and remove all this discussion around the vaccine hesitancy.
And maybe we won't put the hammer down on you.
All of a sudden, Facebook has just become co-opted and now it's just a part of this giant administrative state.
So I think that's what we're seeing.
Right.
Well, and that's one of the interesting things about the freedom of speech argument is that the opponents of regulating these giants say, well, listen, these are private companies.
Don't you support private companies?
They have a right to censor who they want on their own platform.
And it seems to me that you can really hardly distinguish some of these major corporations, regardless of whether or not they're a platform for speech, but these major corporations from the government because the government has so much leverage over them.
I mean, every time Elizabeth Warren tweets that we need to break up Amazon, I'm sure somebody at Amazon is shaking in their boots, right?
So who's managing who?
That's right.
No, when I was a kid, I was just more naive and I thought maybe corporate America was really good or maybe it's just going to continue to work how it used to where you would have big institutions, General Motors or something.
And in some sense, it was just another power center that wasn't the government.
Maybe in aggregate, these institutions would actually put a check on the government.
But as those elements of civil society, as big businesses just become co-opted by government, as our churches have weakened, as the social institutions have declined, it's really just the government.
And it'll absorb all these nominally private nonprofits and big tech companies into this complex.
And I think that's really scary.
I think that the whole like, oh, it's a private company, man.
Who are you to say?
It's like, no, it's not even a private company anymore.
I'm sorry, it's not.
And it's just obvious.
And if conservatives want to put their head in the sand and pretend like there's no problem, in a couple of years, there's just no more free speech in this country.
And it will have been a slow boil.
But the time to fight back is right now.
And you see a lot of people just sort of jump the gun.
I have this with my followers on Twitter and just say, oh, Dorsey, Dorsey, Dorsey, or Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg.
And from your experience, is it really a top-down problem?
Or is it sort of kind of like what I was getting from you a moment ago, a company culture issue where it's just, look, everybody who works for us is sort of a Silicon Valley computer science major from like a major institution and they just kind of have the same views on stuff because of their culture.
And that impacts the way the ship sails, so to speak.
Yeah, I think it's mostly that.
I don't think it's super top-down.
You know, Dorsey is interesting because he does the long beard thing and he goes on meditation retreats and he's just all over the place.
I mean, I think he's like the Beatles meeting top.
Yeah, exactly.
He's really interesting, but he's really weird.
And is he doing like a Howard Hughes act where like if you're just you act weird as hell, maybe nobody knows quite how to get their hooks into you.
You know, he shows up at the priest collar when he's like testifying in front of Congress.
And, you know, maybe he's just like, hey, I'm not in control of my own company.
I don't know what's going on.
He's Microgosen, bro.
Zuckerberg doesn't do that.
I think he's more in control of Facebook, but I also, I don't think he's that political.
I think he's sort of, you know, center, center left.
He's happy to go along.
He cares more about Facebook.
And I don't begrudge that.
As an entrepreneur, it's like he wants to make Facebook, you know, world changing and world beating.
It's an amazing accomplishment.
I'm sure it's his priority.
At a certain point, it's up to our leaders.
It's up to the government to say, like, hey, no, this is abuse and this kind of targeted advertising should be illegal.
And, you know, you can't rip the Hunter Biden story off the internet the week before the election because that's interference.
It's sort of like a toddler.
Like you, as the parent, have to set the rules and the toddler will always go and test those rules.
You know, you can't blame the kid.
That's what kids do.
They will go and test those rules and look for pushback.
And so, of course, Zuckerberg's going to expand his empire.
He's going to look out for Facebook before he looks out for America.
Of course, he's going to do that.
And the question is, do we have any leaders who understand this stuff who can actually put in place the right laws and the right guardrails so that huge companies like Facebook and Google actually behave themselves?
They're not going to self-police.
So we have to do it for them.
So I am one of those people who is sort of like an armchair, just bullshit layman thinker.
Okay.
So I'm not an expert.
I don't have an economics background.
I mean, I read Wealth of Nations.
It's been a bad two years for experts.
So I think that's a good idea.
I'm setting myself up to ask a question that may be stupid, but I don't know if it's stupid or not.
I just have to ask it.
So I have fallen down the rabbit hole of looking into cryptocurrencies and Federal Reserve Banking and Fiat and how that may play out.
Right.
And I'm concerned, frankly, and it could be because I'm just ignorant and I don't really understand the full scope of things, but it seems to me that the way our monetary system is is sort of inherently inevitably going to collapse at some point in time.
Just the nature of it, how we produce more debt than there is money to pay it back and how it just has to get bigger and bigger and bigger until it pops.
Am I just totally full of shit on that?
What is the future of the US dollar and what can we do to mitigate some sort of disaster situation in the case that it loses reserve status and collapses?
No, I don't think it's a bad question at all.
Okay, thank you.
Unfortunately, I think your instinct is right, which is this is somehow not stable.
The weird thing is, like, I mean, I remember reading the creature from Jekyll Island.
Yes.
I was in high school, right?
Just huge tome on how the Federal Reserve works.
And I remember saying, like, this can't last.
We're just printing money out of thin air, right?
Like, we need hard money.
And I was a Ron Paul guy in 2008, and I still believe we should have sounder money.
The system, in some sense, doesn't work.
It doesn't make sense.
And it will ultimately fail.
The question is, like, when.
And I will say it's gone on for a lot longer than I would have thought possible.
You know, so long now that you have fancy pseudo-academic theories like MMT, you know, modern monetary theory that basically gets coined to suggest like, no, it doesn't matter.
Government can print as much money as it wants forever.
And I suspect that's not true.
And now that that's becoming popular, maybe it's the kind of thing where like a watched, a watched pot never boils.
But if everybody stops watching the pot, you know, we're going to have some problems.
I think with just all the crazy money printing we've had in the last 18 months, obviously we're starting to see inflation.
I think the Biden administration wants to say it doesn't exist.
It exists.
People can feel it.
And I think it's just going to get worse and worse and worse.
But maybe the system has another decade or two or three.
I don't know.
Maybe you can paper over the problems.
Well, it seems like it works as long as GDP grows at a faster rate than inflation, but it seems like that's not going to happen for much longer.
It seems like it's not going to happen.
And, you know, I think GDP can even grow sort of nominally and also not have that work out for the benefit of most people in the country.
So it may be the thing where GDP still goes up for a while and you can still print more money and there's some inflation.
But meanwhile, the sort of middle America continues to get hollowed out.
Normal people continue to feel squeezed, right?
you get even more wealth inequality with a thin layer of sort of elite at the top that are doing really well and a kind of hollowed out middle.
And then the underclass, you know, is just kind of perpetually receiving stimulus checks or welfare or UBI or whatever it is.
I don't think that system is stable that long.
I think this stuff can always go on a little bit longer than we think.
But it's the kind of thing that may be failing gradually right before our eyes, punctuated then at the end.
I don't know if that's five years or 15 years or whatever, by something very sudden and unexpected, some kind of collapse.
So no, I do think we need harder money.
We need more discipline.
We need to stop trying to print our way out of problems.
It won't work in the extreme long term.
And I think we've got to batten down the hatches and try to do better.
Well, and I want to ask you, I want to ask you a tough question because I know that you're running for Senate in Arizona and anything that you could possibly say against Trump could probably only harm your campaign.
So I'm not trying to set you up, okay?
But with that said, I'll set you up.
With that said, let me set you up.
And I support you and Trump.
So don't take this as like an opponent asking you.
So that being said, was there anything that Trump did, especially with reference to the spending and some of the decisions made last year?
Was there anything he did that you were disappointed in?
Well, like, I thought the early COVID relief spending was probably necessary.
I forget what the first bill was.
Was it like 1.4 trillion or something?
But like, we really didn't know what we were dealing with, right?
There was sort of an unprecedented virus from China.
The thing could have been 10 or 20 times worse.
Like it really could have been bad.
We were sort of very lucky that it was just like whatever in the range of the flu, maybe worse for the flu, obviously for people with comorbidities, but it was bad.
You know, made that decision to sort of lock down, or many states did, or every state did.
And that was really disruptive.
So you probably did, like, that's an emergency.
And like, you should only, it's like having surgery.
You don't want to get addicted to it, but when you really need to have surgery, you need to.
And so that's like printing money.
Don't get addicted to printing money.
But if you get a once-in-a-generation virus from China and you got to shut the economy down for six weeks, maybe you got to print some money.
The crime then is sort of the Biden-Harris spending, continuing it, where now it's like we know a whole lot about COVID.
We can put it in context.
We can't lock down anymore, but they're just paying people.
You know, they're paying people not to work.
They're just paying, you know, we'll see if this $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill passes, but they're just printing so much money.
So I wouldn't fault President Trump for that early, early COVID relief.
I thought that was good.
And look, I thought his administration, while not perfect, was also such a gift to the American people.
First of all, he saved us from Hillary Clinton, right?
I remind people who are really sad about the 2020 election and now Biden's in office and it's horrible.
I remind them, no, like, first of all, we had four great years.
And also, it would be year five of a Hillary Clinton presidency right now.
Like, that's what we were going to get.
I think that's crazy.
That would be game over.
And so I think really Trump gave us a new lease on life.
You can always quibble with stuff, but really, it's like, I would, I think Trump would agree with me too.
He was sort of sabotaged by, you know, certainly the left-wing resistance forces, but also by a lot of sort of center-right establishment, you know, GOPE type types.
Well, the GOP wanted Cruz and the establishment wanted Cruz.
They did.
They absolutely did.
One of my competitors, Attorney General Bernovich, was a delegate in Arizona, and he was one of the few delegates not to go to the RNC in Cleveland.
He sort of resigned or declined to go because it was Trump instead of Cruz and he wanted Cruz and refused to support President Trump.
Good luck winning in Arizona.
Good luck winning in Arizona.
He'll try to, now he wants to be Trump's best friend, right?
And say like, oh, I suppose whatever.
But no, the GOPE really didn't want this America-first agenda.
And so my only critique of the administration is, I know, I wish they got more done.
But I think Trump, he ran an awesome campaign in 2016.
He talked about the issues, right?
Less immigration so that we can actually have a tight labor market for our domestic workers.
He's the only one that ran a campaign at all in 2020.
Right?
Yeah.
It was pretty good.
And, you know, I think they finally got the personnel stuff really figured out towards the end.
And so I think the second administration would have been even more effective than the first.
Yeah.
So not to backtrack too much, but what as a senator would you do in order to protect the status of our monetary system?
Because we were talking five, 10 years.
That's right around the corner if there's going to be some.
We have to stop printing crazy amounts of money.
Sometimes it's even worse than sort of printing it and letting it on fire because it goes, I mean, look at the infrastructure bill.
Out of like 1.2 trillion or whatever, there's probably like 100 million dollars of actual infrastructure that makes sense.
And it's just like crazy, crazy projects, right?
Um, so we got to stop doing that.
It doesn't mean you know, austerity, it doesn't mean the government shouldn't spend money at all.
It doesn't even mean we shouldn't invest in infrastructure.
But I think making sure that we're not supporting this crazy sort of Democrat spending spree and instead that we're actually thinking carefully and yes, medium and long term about like what should we be investing in?
And once we allocate the funds, how can we make sure this stuff is done competently?
You know, it's become a meme too much on the right that like, oh, government can't do anything efficiently.
And I'm sympathetic to that because I look around and I see the government wasting money and I see it being incompetent.
And so like, fine, that's bad.
But it wasn't always the case.
Like, we got the Manhattan Project done.
We got the Apollo project done.
You know, the government could build the Hoover Dam.
And now we can't even build like an on-ramp to the Golden Gate Bridge in less than like 10 years and for a reasonable amount of money.
You know, so like we're drowning in bureaucracy.
Things are just not competent.
But I think the right can't just say like, oh, the government has no role to play.
Because that's not true either.
So just kind of getting in and advancing the right legislation and spiking the bad stuff and using the pulpit.
Most people forget this.
Like half the power that the senator has isn't in the up or down votes, you know.
But it's in like, what are you communicating?
Are you using the platform to communicate the right stuff to people?
Are you telling people the truth?
Are you telling people, you know, about all the corruption?
And are you exposing how DC actually works?
I think we need more people like this.
And that's something I'd intend to do a lot of.
What are your thoughts on the seemingly subtle and abrupt infiltration by China on U.S. politics?
Yeah, it's been like 30 years in the making, right?
Our leaders, left and right, forgot to update after the Cold War.
And it was this fantasy that, hey, let's just help China liberalize, right?
They'll become a Western democracy just like us.
Isn't this great?
And I think that was probably pretty naive in the 90s.
And then by the late 90s, 2000s, when it sort of wasn't really working, then it started to become pretty negligent not to notice and not to reverse course.
Then by the 2010s, you know, sort of second part of the Obama administration, it became basically criminal not to realize China was eating our lunch.
We were giving them away the keys, you know, inviting tons of Chinese nationals to come here and study in our universities, work in our companies.
Of course, all that material just gets fed back into the CCP.
Like, this is an actual communist regime.
This is the geopolitical threat that we face.
That's been true for a long while now.
So every time the left wants to blather about Russia, Russia, Russia, to me, they're just shouting, We don't want to talk about China.
I think in 2014, Joe Biden was like, China, come on, man.
Like, you know, they'll never catch up to us.
And so that's just, they've been asleep at the wheel.
I credit President Trump for really changing the conversation about China, right?
He came along and he wanted to say, no, I don't know what you guys are doing, but like for 30 years, you've been giving away the kingdom to China.
This is crazy.
They're taking advantage of us and I'm going to put a stop to it.
And so for the first time, I think we had a real healthy conversation about China.
I think the tariff policy he implemented was great.
I think he was militarily tough and unpredictable.
And China must be salivating right now at the Joe Biden administration, right?
They see the weakness in Afghanistan and the way we withdrew there.
How are they not looking at Taiwan and just absolutely salivating?
So part I just have to get leaders in that actually understand what the threats are.
And we haven't had that ever since Trump left the White House.
So what do you think?
What do you think China's long-term goal is here?
Because, you know, there's that constant defense that we've leaned on for a long time in the United States.
China would never do anything to us because we're their number one customer.
And it seems like it isn't.
That's true.
I had a at Stanford when I was an undergrad.
When I was a freshman, I had a professor, Mark Mancal, really brilliant guy.
He was a communist.
He's like an actual communist.
So I think he actually read the book.
He read the book.
I think he wrote like the Constitution of Bhutan or something.
He's just like one of these old school guys.
He unfortunately passed away a year or two ago.
But really, I mean, he lived a full life and he traveled a lot.
And he was just a really smart sort of old school leftist.
And it made him a very interesting professor.
He at least didn't try to like indoctrinate anybody.
He would just kind of openly say, I support communism.
And it was really weird.
But he'd have these conversations with him.
And he would say, and this was 2004.
I remember him telling me, Blake, the Chinese Communist Party is very serious, unlike the leaders in this country.
And they play the long game and they learned.
They learned from Mao's failed experiment that you can't skip the capitalist stage of industrialization.
That's part of the communist playbook.
And Mao tried to skip it.
And you try to skip it.
You end up killing like 50 or 60 million people, right?
Some estimates, even 100 million.
So the new Chinese Communist Party was smart and they were going to use capitalism.
They were going to use sort of economic development and markets.
They were going to take advantage of the naivete of the United States leaders and the West in helping them industrialize without giving up political control.
And we just sort of let that happen.
But in 2005 or four, Mark Mancall said, don't think that they won't just screw the U.S. in the future.
He's like, I don't know if it'll be in my lifetime.
I don't know if it'll be in 10 years or 50 years from now.
But the second China has enough leverage where they can, maybe it takes the form of dumping U.S. debt that they hold, or maybe it takes some other form.
But the second they can really move, it'll be really painful for them.
Like you said, right?
The line is China's our biggest customer.
They would never do anything to hurt themselves.
No, they absolutely would if it relatively disadvantages the U.S. more.
And so as they get more powerful and powerful and try to compete, and if we continue to be so intertwined that we basically become dependent on them, at the right point, they could just flip the switch and they're happy to take the casualty if it sort of makes them number one.
Well, and the thing.
The thing to understand, too, is that in China, the political class isn't really accountable to the constituents, to the people, right?
I mean, it's a communist government.
So the power is established already.
Whereas in the U.S., the Bloomberg quote, Bloomberg last year said, like, well, even Chairman Xi has constituents that he has to answer to.
Yeah, whatever.
No.
So, yeah, just like Hitler too.
If you can just send your political dissidents to a concentration camp or have them disappeared, I don't think you're really going to be that responsible.
Right.
And so my point is they don't care if that's how you can, you know, between 1958 and 1962, you can have the great leap forward without any sort of major unsettling of a power establishment, right?
And so they could do something that would even cost the lives of millions of their own people.
And it wouldn't have an impact on their status, really, unless there was some sort of an domestic revolution.
And so I think that people underestimate because for some reason, Americans, I think, just operate as if every other country is America too, even though it's not.
I think people have no idea, myself included.
It's very hard to understand how Chinese leadership thinks.
It is very, very foreign to us.
But I think the first step into getting a clear picture is to actually understand that because it's not the same calculus that like Chuck Schumer has, you know.
Right.
Right.
So do you think, do you think that COVID-19 was an intentional leak or do you think it was like China's Chernobyl?
Probably more like China's Chernobyl.
I'm open, right?
I think the last 18 months have shown us, like, do not make a dogmatic opinion based on what the mainstream media says.
So I think it should be investigated and we should figure it out.
No, I think they were probably just aggressively pursuing biomedical bioweapons research.
And they do this stuff with like low quality control and everything.
It's like building a building in China.
They can put up a skyscraper in two days and it's like, yeah, okay.
And that sort of works.
And maybe the building collapses or maybe the escalators, you know, you fall through or something.
So it sort of works until it doesn't.
And I think they pursue all of this research really aggressively.
You know, they do stuff that ethics rules would basically like prohibit U.S. laboratories from doing.
And I suspect we're funding.
We'll fund it.
We'll launder the funding.
But we're not going to do it.
Tao Chi can get up and lie about it.
No, we funded the gain of function research, but they actually do it.
And I suspect something went bad and oops, it gets out and kills many, many millions of people.
But I do suspect that was probably an accident.
Like I have no real basis to say it wasn't.
But then, of course, as soon as something like that happens, like they're going to use it to their advantage.
And I think structurally, the whole COVID thing was like a huge boon to China.
Okay, yeah, some Chinese people died and China doesn't love that.
But like they love that they got Joe Biden elected.
They love that, because I think Trump would have just won by such an absolute cheat-proof margin if not for COVID.
Like the economy was humming, things were working.
He sort of delegitimated the media.
And then you just kind of have this whole suppressed year with the COVID lockdowns and the illness and the craziness, right?
So I think COVID ended up working out really well for China.
And they got the president that they prefer.
And so interesting to speculate on like what's intentional and what's not.
But I think once something like this exists, it's like a lot of people want to say too, like, oh, China's pushing the critical race theory stuff and the wokeness stuff.
And I'm like, not domestically.
Well, not certainly not in their country, but like, oh, they want to, people want to say they sent that stuff over and it was a meme.
Right.
You know, China's responsible for it.
And I'm like, I think dumb American leftists are responsible for it.
Like, let's take some responsibility.
Like, I think our own sort of unhinged media elite academic class.
Sure.
Well, and not everything Marxist is Chinese communist.
Right.
China's happy to profit and foment any sort of existing problems or divisions in the U.S. But I think it's too cute to just say they're causing all the problems.
No, I think they're exploiting the problems that we have because we're sort of unable to apparently keep it together as a functioning country here.
So what are your top priorities once you land in the Senate?
Just so we can make sure they cover those bases.
Yeah, I mean, close the border, right?
We know how to do this.
This isn't that innovative.
So in some sense, it's not that fun to talk about, but it's like finish the border wall.
It was working.
It was under construction.
Most of it's already built.
Just finish it, re-implement the Trump policies, which we're working now.
We've got like 250,000 people streaming across the border every month, which is crazy.
Most of them trafficked by cartels, you know, a whole lot of them bringing drugs.
And that's just really crazy.
So obviously the correct amount of illegal immigration is zero.
And we should just have a border and then have a debate on like who should come in legally, right?
But I think actually securing the border is sort of step one.
A big priority is taking on big tech.
You know, we've talked about that.
But again, I think in two or three short years, no meaningful First Amendment in this country if we don't do that.
And so I would intend to do that.
I also just want to stop the offshoring of our jobs.
Like to me, it's still crazy having worked in Silicon Valley that we don't make most of our silicon anymore.
Like it was a policy choice over decades to take that productive industrial capacity and to ship it off to Southeast Asia.
It seemed good at the time because maybe you could save a few bucks, you know, per computer chip.
But I think the COVID stuff also showed us our supply chains are in a really bad spot.
You know, Ford can't make F-150s now.
Look at the prices of even used cars because of the chip shortage.
And it's really crazy to have half this stuff made in Taiwan.
If China seizes Taiwan, it puts an even bigger squeeze on that.
Obviously, just huge national security implications for our weak supply chain.
So finding ways to stop offshoring, re-onshore many of those high-paying manufacturing jobs and of course all the infrastructure that gets built around them.
Arizona is bringing back a few semiconductor plants.
TSMC and Intel are bringing plants into Phoenix, Arizona, which is great.
I think we just need to do more of that, which is still consistent with free markets, right?
I want markets to be as free as possible domestically.
Maybe a company like Google gets so big and you got to sort of watch it a little bit more closely.
But I'm a free market guy domestically.
We just can't pretend that the so-called free trade where we just ship all of our productive capacity overseas will work because it just leaves us vulnerable.
Pretty soon you need to make stuff here at home and you can't do it.
And we can't leave ourselves that defenseless.
So where can people find you, support you, follow you?
Yeah, go to blakemasters.com and sign up to volunteer if you've got some time.
Donate a few bucks if you've got some money.
We're going to have Bitcoin donations coming up pretty soon.
You'll be able to donate with Bitcoin.
So that's cool.
But yeah, any way you can think of to help, there's no way to draw the path back to the majority in the Senate that doesn't go through Arizona.
So I think this Senate race is going to be the most important.
And the Democrats tell us what they're going to do if they take power.
They're going to pack the Supreme Court.
They're going to add new states to the union.
They're going to federalize elections.
So I think we've run out of room to play defense and the future of America is determined in 2022 and 2024.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
It's been a pleasure to speak with you.
I can hang out with you all day.
I'll come back.
This is great.
Thanks, Jason.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, take care.
And thanks again.
And let's stay in touch.
Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you.
