The Charlie Kirk Show - A Four Point Plan to Win the War Against Big Tech with Blake Masters
Aired: 2021-08-06
Duration: 47:45


=== Supporting The Charlie Kirk Show (03:26) ===

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[00:02:22]  Hey, everybody.
[00:02:23]  Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:02:25]  With us today, it's a friend of mine, Blake Masters.
[00:02:27]  Blake, welcome.
[00:02:28]  Thanks.
[00:02:28]  Thanks for having me.
[00:02:29]  Blake is running for the United States Senate in Arizona.
[00:02:32]  Never ran for anything before, unless you ran for like student body president Stanford or where?
[00:02:38]  No, like middle school.
[00:02:40]  Yeah.
[00:02:40]  So your candidacy is one that's getting headlines, but I actually really don't want to talk about politics with you.
[00:02:46]  We can if you want.
[00:02:47]  I'd rather talk about ideas and where our country has gone wrong because I think you have a lot to say in that regard.
[00:02:56]  I just want to give our audience some context.
[00:02:58]  You recently joined Tucker Carlson.
[00:03:00]  Tucker had some really good things to say about you jumping into the race.
[00:03:04]  You have a background in tech, best-selling author, New York Times, number one, 3 million copies sold.
[00:03:10]  The book is called Zero to One.
[00:03:12]  We'll flash it on our screen.
[00:03:14]  And you kind of lived a comfortable and good life.
[00:03:17]  And all of a sudden, you want to get into the nastiest kind of thing you possibly can do.
[00:03:23]  Has the country really gone so wrong that you have to get into politics now?

=== Capitalism Versus Communism History (02:25) ===

[00:03:27]  I think it has.
[00:03:28]  I think it has.
[00:03:28]  Like, in some sense, it'd be great if we just had Republican politicians who were going to get the job done, who actually paid attention to what's happening in the country, who actually cared.
[00:03:39]  And it seems like we don't.
[00:03:40]  So it actually seems like the most important thing to do.
[00:03:42]  Obviously, I don't need to tell you how important this Arizona Senate seat is, but I think it very well could determine whether or not we have a good country in the next 10 or 20 years.
[00:03:51]  So that's it.
[00:03:52]  I mean, I totally agree.
[00:03:53]  And so let's talk about this.
[00:03:54]  So from a policy standpoint, you're in what I would call kind of a new Republican.
[00:03:59]  JD Vance reminds me a lot of kind of what you talk about.
[00:04:03]  I know you guys know each other, but there's this idea that we as conservatives need to get the basics correct.
[00:04:09]  We need to almost commit to why we're in this in the first place, which is strong families and a strong nation, and then also be unafraid to kind of challenge this, some of this dogma that's been dominating the party.
[00:04:24]  Walk us through that.
[00:04:25]  Yeah, it's like most Republican politicians still parrot lines from, you know, the Reagan administration.
[00:04:33]  And it's like Reagan was a great leader.
[00:04:35]  Okay, he was a great Republican, but that doesn't mean that we're in 1980.
[00:04:38]  It doesn't mean that we're in 1985 right now.
[00:04:41]  And if you think about it, it's like, look at the society that, you know, that Reagan sort of took charge of in 1980, in the 70s, you know, things were stagnant and you had crazy stagflation.
[00:04:53]  It was a consolidated economy.
[00:04:56]  And we needed deregulation.
[00:04:58]  We needed the spirit of dynamism, which I think Reagan had a lot of good policies to address that.
[00:05:03]  We also had to fight the Soviet threat, right?
[00:05:07]  We were fighting communism.
[00:05:08]  It was capitalism versus communism.
[00:05:11]  And so the deregulation, the focus on free markets, all of that made a lot of sense then.
[00:05:16]  Even our China policy made sense then, right?
[00:05:19]  You needed China to industrialize.
[00:05:21]  We wanted China to be more our ally vis-a-vis the Soviets.
[00:05:25]  And so we had a relatively free trade policy with China.
[00:05:29]  That made sense in 1987, you know, but then times changed.
[00:05:33]  We defeated the Soviets.
[00:05:34]  Communism collapsed.
[00:05:36]  The wall fell.
[00:05:37]  And so now it's 1990, 1992, 1994.
[00:05:40]  And what do you do?
[00:05:42]  Do you keep doing the same exact thing?
[00:05:44]  Well, that's what our leaders decided to do.
[00:05:46]  We've offshored our entire industrial base.
[00:05:49]  We helped China industrialize.

=== Individualism Run Amok Explained (07:03) ===

[00:05:52]  And for the last 20 or 30 years, we haven't updated the playbook.
[00:05:55]  We've just been repeating the same mindless capitalism versus socialism mantras, and it hasn't actually worked.
[00:06:02]  And this is what President Trump came along and did in 2016.
[00:06:05]  He pointed out, hi, we've been getting taken advantage of for China by China for the last 25 years, and I'm here to put a stop to it.
[00:06:12]  This is something that Republicans need to update instead of just kind of burying their head and doing the things that used to work decades ago.
[00:06:19]  So you're kind of making an argument that from your generation's perspective, it's time for fresh thinking and also to challenge some of this orthodoxy or dogma, as I would call it.
[00:06:33]  One issue in particular you care about, I want to get really into the weeds with you on, is big tech.
[00:06:38]  Yeah.
[00:06:39]  And I always joke around when Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress, I think half the senators asked him if they could get back into their Facebook account because they were logged out.
[00:06:48]  Right.
[00:06:49]  Right.
[00:06:49]  Is the Facebook the thing on the phone?
[00:06:51]  Yeah.
[00:06:52]  Is that like a phone book?
[00:06:53]  It's a series of tubes.
[00:06:54]  The internet is a series of tubes.
[00:06:56]  They're lecturing Mark Zuckerberg on the internet, and they just sound ridiculous.
[00:07:00]  And Mark Zuckerberg laughed the entire time.
[00:07:02]  Facebook stock goes up from those hearings because people know these regulators, they just don't even know what they're talking about.
[00:07:09]  It's a real problem.
[00:07:10]  So you come from that world.
[00:07:12]  You come from the Menlo Park mentality.
[00:07:15]  You literally went to Stanford.
[00:07:17]  Yes.
[00:07:17]  How big is the threat of tech?
[00:07:20]  I think it's huge.
[00:07:21]  And, you know, it's probably existential.
[00:07:23]  It's like, why is it?
[00:07:24]  That's a good idea.
[00:07:24]  Google.
[00:07:25]  Google at this, I mean, these companies, they're more powerful than most governments.
[00:07:29]  In some sense, in some ways, they're more powerful than the U.S. government.
[00:07:33]  And, you know, Google can swing a presidential election and they can do it in secret.
[00:07:38]  Like, I don't have access to the underlying search algorithms.
[00:07:41]  Who knows how they're tweaking it?
[00:07:42]  Our government doesn't have access to that.
[00:07:45]  And Facebook, maybe when they censor, it's a little bit more transparent.
[00:07:49]  Like they ripped the Hunter Biden laptop story.
[00:07:51]  I think that was a New York Post story, right?
[00:07:53]  It's like one of the biggest newspapers in the country.
[00:07:55]  It was founded by Alexander Hamilton.
[00:07:57]  And Facebook takes this story, which is factual and true.
[00:08:01]  And the week before an election, they rip it off their platform, which is that is political censorship.
[00:08:06]  And Facebook is at the scale where it's as powerful as a government.
[00:08:11]  I think that has huge First Amendment implications.
[00:08:13]  And no company of that scale should be allowed to influence our elections like that.
[00:08:18]  And so if we don't do anything about it, these companies are just going to come and increasingly dominate our politics, dominate our society.
[00:08:25]  There's going to be very little room for any sort of free exchange of ideas.
[00:08:28]  So, but Blake, some people say they're private companies.
[00:08:31]  It's no different than the local baker that shouldn't be forced to make a cake for the gay couple.
[00:08:37]  That is a stupid argument.
[00:08:40]  Tell me why is it stupid?
[00:08:41]  It is stupid.
[00:08:41]  And you know what?
[00:08:42]  Eight years ago, I'm sympathetic to it.
[00:08:44]  I remember the first time.
[00:08:45]  I haven't said it before.
[00:08:46]  I have too.
[00:08:47]  I remember the, and it was less stupid in 2013.
[00:08:50]  I remember when people in Silicon Valley in 2011, 2012, right, when Facebook was going public, people started sounding the alarm, like real tech libertarian type people.
[00:08:59]  And it was like, gosh, maybe we should regulate Facebook as a public utility.
[00:09:02]  And I remember at the time thinking that was crazy.
[00:09:05]  And it probably was crazy back then, although it was somewhat prescient.
[00:09:09]  No, this idea that you have to treat huge multinational corporations that control the flow of information in our society, you have to treat those the same way as you'd treat a hair salon or a bakery.
[00:09:21]  Like that's absolutely absurd.
[00:09:23]  And the Republicans that I'm talking to, you know, activists in the Republican Party, real pro-market type people, pro-entrepreneurship, pro-business, now they're ready to hear this argument.
[00:09:34]  They agree.
[00:09:34]  They know that at a certain point, the government goes and sets the rules for the market.
[00:09:40]  That's what it does.
[00:09:41]  It doesn't mean throw your hands up and let companies get so big that they can dominate an entire society.
[00:09:45]  That's not, that's not what, or if that's what you think laissez-faire is, God help you, because you're not going to have that.
[00:09:50]  Well, I also think the problem is that markets need to be a means to an end.
[00:09:54]  That's right.
[00:09:54]  The market doesn't need to be the end.
[00:09:56]  And this is what I mean about Reaganite dogma.
[00:09:58]  It's like when you raise a whole generation of people to say free market capitalism is the be-all and end-all, it's like, no, free market capitalism is good because it creates a system in which human beings can flourish, in which families can flourish and society can flourish.
[00:10:12]  But the market is a tool that serves human ends.
[00:10:16]  It serves human flourishing.
[00:10:18]  And if you reverse it, it just becomes an idol.
[00:10:21]  You worship the market no matter what happens.
[00:10:23]  Well, then we become, we don't become ends focused.
[00:10:28]  Right.
[00:10:28]  The ends then just is the lack of interference towards your desired company, regardless of any sort of damage that might be occurring or an externality that might be created.
[00:10:39]  So what is the ends that we should demand then, Blake?
[00:10:41]  Because you become a U.S. Senator.
[00:10:43]  What are you going to advocate for through all these sorts of different potential legislative choices you can make?
[00:10:51]  Are you going to say the ends, obviously you're not going to say this, are just like the market.
[00:10:55]  What does success look like?
[00:10:57]  What is the country actually trying to build?
[00:10:58]  I think it's super commonsensical.
[00:11:00]  It's just, can you raise, well, here's one tagline.
[00:11:04]  You have to be able to raise a family in America on one single income.
[00:11:09]  Like that is the goal.
[00:11:10]  That's unthinkable.
[00:11:11]  We used to be able to do it.
[00:11:12]  You used to be able to do it.
[00:11:13]  Globalization happened.
[00:11:15]  A lot of bad policy choices happened.
[00:11:17]  Modernization happened.
[00:11:18]  You can't do it anymore.
[00:11:18]  So it's a complicated story why.
[00:11:20]  But that is, I think, I think a real good distillation of the goal.
[00:11:24]  Like if you can raise a family in America, if you can afford to do that and you live in a safe and secure neighborhood, a community, an actual cohesive community, and you have economic opportunity, you can go and get training.
[00:11:36]  You can go and get educated.
[00:11:37]  You can go get a job.
[00:11:39]  You be free to worship according to your conscience and then have kids and then have grandkids.
[00:11:44]  Like that's what it's about.
[00:11:45]  It's just a healthy society.
[00:11:47]  It's really not complicated.
[00:11:49]  Except our policymakers can't even talk like this.
[00:11:51]  Why have our policymakers made it so complicated?
[00:11:54]  Why is it that that's considered to be a central planning type thing?
[00:11:58]  Why is that?
[00:11:59]  I, again, I think on, well, the left, I think, doesn't care about the family.
[00:12:03]  I think they don't like that program.
[00:12:06]  The whole project of liberalism is to just free people of unchosen bonds.
[00:12:11]  So it's like the idea that you might have to care for your parents someday just as they cared for you.
[00:12:15]  No, no, no, can't do that.
[00:12:16]  We should have a private corporation be like a giant nursing home conglomerate and you should ship your parents off to, you know, something like this.
[00:12:24]  It's just individualism run amok.
[00:12:27]  But like the individual is important.
[00:12:29]  So is the family.
[00:12:30]  So is the community.
[00:12:31]  And I think people on the right understand this a little bit more than the left.
[00:12:34]  The left is just hedonistic and they don't care about families.
[00:12:38]  The right cares more about families.
[00:12:40]  But again, I think they've made families and family life and a healthy community life subservient to the market.
[00:12:47]  I think they've got it precisely backwards.
[00:12:49]  Again, because I think there's too much of an obsession over the Reaganite past.

=== Protecting Your Patriot Supply (02:32) ===

[00:12:55]  You know, we just have to, we just have to update.
[00:12:58]  And again, I credit President Trump for, he's not an economic theorist, but he intuited that this was off, that the balance was off.
[00:13:06]  He looks around at what's happening in the middle of the country and says, like, this isn't working.
[00:13:10]  This economic policy, this Paul Ryanism, this Mitt Romneyism, this idea, you know, trickle down or supply side, whatever you want to call it, it doesn't work.
[00:13:19]  It no longer works.
[00:13:20]  And we have to focus and actually pay attention.
[00:13:22]  Like, how are our policies working?
[00:13:26]  Hey, everybody.
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[00:14:15]  If the Chinese hack our cyber grid, everybody, and all of a sudden there's no electric power, are you able to feed your family for more than a day, two days?
[00:14:22]  Do you know that they say after five days, there'll be total chaos and bedlam in the streets?
[00:14:26]  Grocery stores will be plundered.
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[00:14:31]  What will you eat?
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[00:14:48]  Look, here's how this works.
[00:14:50]  You look at all the psychological studies.
[00:14:52]  They say maybe a suburban area can take it maybe a week without all of a sudden people pointing fingers.
[00:14:59]  Hey, the Jones have more food than we do.
[00:15:01]  How about the Smiths?
[00:15:02]  You think that we'll be able to make without the internet for a week?
[00:15:05]  The Chinese are already planning this.
[00:15:07]  So that's why I'm so excited to be able to share with you this new partner.
[00:15:11]  And here's how you can get food in case things go bad.
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[00:15:23]  You know, people used to laugh all the time.
[00:15:25]  They say, oh, what are you preparing for?
[00:15:27]  Everything's great.

=== Breaking Up Big Tech Now (15:03) ===

[00:15:28]  I think after the last year, we have realized that everything's not great.
[00:15:33]  They literally have ransomware attacks or they can shut down trains, meat packing plants, you name it.
[00:15:40]  So right now, I'm telling you, you got to protect yourself against whatever is coming next.
[00:15:45]  So order now, and your four-week pit will arrive discreetly at your door in the next few days.
[00:15:50]  Don't wait until it's too late.
[00:15:52]  Visit preparewithkirk.com.
[00:15:55]  That's preparewithkirk.com.
[00:16:00]  Let's go back to tech for a second because I do want to really focus on that.
[00:16:03]  Is it time to break up these companies?
[00:16:05]  I think so.
[00:16:06]  I think, so I have sort of like a cute four-part plan here.
[00:16:10]  Section 230.
[00:16:11]  People talk about it a lot.
[00:16:12]  You know, President Trump was tweeting Section 230, caps, caps lock, exclamation point.
[00:16:17]  And so that's become like the thing that people want to hear about.
[00:16:20]  Section 230, though, just means you strip away the sort of platform immunity that these companies enjoy when they act as publishers, when they actually put their thumb on the scale and they say, we're going to censor this, we're going to run this content.
[00:16:32]  They're being publishers, they're being editors, so you should treat them as such.
[00:16:35]  That's fine.
[00:16:36]  I think that's table stakes.
[00:16:37]  We should do it.
[00:16:38]  The companies don't like it, but that's just step one.
[00:16:40]  Step two, I think, is to treat these companies, Facebook, Google, Twitter, et cetera, as common carriers, just like the phone company.
[00:16:47]  So the phone company cannot kick you or me off because we have a conversation about conservative politics.
[00:16:54]  They would love to.
[00:16:55]  They would love to, but they can't do it.
[00:16:57]  We should make sure that Facebook can't do it, not that the phone companies should do it.
[00:17:02]  You treat them as common carriers, public utilities.
[00:17:04]  I think Senator Haggerty had a bill on this that was pretty good.
[00:17:07]  Clarence Thomas wrote about this in a dissent, too.
[00:17:09]  Strongly indicating that we ought to take a look at this.
[00:17:12]  And I agree with Justice Thomas on so much.
[00:17:14]  He's the man.
[00:17:15]  He's the man.
[00:17:16]  But step three is using antitrust to break these companies up.
[00:17:19]  And Republicans have a rich history with antitrust, right?
[00:17:22]  I mean, Theodore Roosevelt, later Barry Goldwater in our homestead here in Arizona, they knew that Republicans are supposed to distrust concentrations of power.
[00:17:34]  And we're good at that when the government's involved.
[00:17:36]  We distrust big government, and rightfully so.
[00:17:39]  But corporate concentrations of power can also be really bad.
[00:17:45]  You know, these antitrust laws that were written 100 years ago were written for the railroads and the telegraph lines, and they may not elegantly fit the new business model where the company, you know, it's free to use Facebook.
[00:17:57]  So in some sense, like, where's the consumer harm?
[00:17:59]  Because you're not actually getting price gouged or something.
[00:18:03]  So I think we need young, smart people in there to maybe rewrite those laws because it's clear to me that Facebook needs to be broken up.
[00:18:09]  So let's focus on the breaking up one.
[00:18:11]  I've heard a lot of different arguments, but you actually know the nuance of this better than I do.
[00:18:16]  And I'm able to tap dance around it.
[00:18:18]  One counter argument is Charlie, it actually will make them stronger.
[00:18:22]  Is that breaking them up has no teeth?
[00:18:25]  Look at Bell is an example that they use.
[00:18:28]  Is there any merit to that argument?
[00:18:30]  I think if you do it the wrong way, maybe it makes them stronger.
[00:18:32]  Or if you have three big problems and you break them up and all of a sudden you have 27 medium-sized problems, maybe that's administrative.
[00:18:38]  So what's the right way to do it?
[00:18:39]  Well, I think you do it in concert with Section 230 in concert with treating them as public utilities.
[00:18:44]  You break up.
[00:18:45]  I mean, so you can break Facebook up cleanly, right?
[00:18:47]  There's WhatsApp, there's Facebook classic, and then there's Instagram.
[00:18:51]  Oculus.
[00:18:52]  Oculus.
[00:18:52]  Every line of business should be its probably own company.
[00:18:57]  And Facebook probably shouldn't have been able to buy WhatsApp in the first place.
[00:19:00]  And that's been a huge challenge and they've won, though.
[00:19:02]  DOJ probably should have, a healthy DOJ probably would have blocked.
[00:19:05]  Or FTC would have led the charge.
[00:19:07]  FTC.
[00:19:09]  Google, for instance, it's like they have their search engine.
[00:19:13]  And with their growing cloud business, they also own so much infrastructure of the core internet.
[00:19:19]  Those should be separate businesses.
[00:19:21]  They're logically separate.
[00:19:22]  And YouTube.
[00:19:23]  And what Google does is they buy a company or two every week for the last, you know, however many years, 15 years, 20 years.
[00:19:29]  They sit on them.
[00:19:30]  They buy it.
[00:19:31]  Maybe they integrate some of the tech, but mostly they just squash it.
[00:19:34]  And that's anti-competitive.
[00:19:35]  Like, why would any market-loving Republican go on working?
[00:19:40]  Do you think the laws speak to that?
[00:19:43]  Yes, partially.
[00:19:45]  And then there's a lack of political will.
[00:19:46]  Yeah, people that want to use a problem, I think.
[00:19:49]  I think a good FTC and a good, I mean, DOJ has an antitrust division.
[00:19:53]  I think they have enough laws on the books to actually sink some teeth into these companies.
[00:19:57]  And there's a lack of political will, or at least there has been up until this moment, to get something done.
[00:20:03]  I also think the laws probably do need to be modernized.
[00:20:05]  And, you know, you got to really study in detail and you probably need people who understand these businesses to go and, again, rewrite these laws.
[00:20:11]  These laws are like 100 years old.
[00:20:13]  So I think it's both.
[00:20:14]  But we do have tools that we're not using right now.
[00:20:17]  So to go back to breaking them up, other people say that we just let the competitors come online.
[00:20:24]  Breaking them up is messy.
[00:20:26]  Build your own social network.
[00:20:27]  Why is that?
[00:20:28]  Why wouldn't, why, Blake, should we not just say, go build your own Google?
[00:20:32]  Well, come on, WizKid, Blake man.
[00:20:34]  You're so smart.
[00:20:36]  It's such the parlor experience was so interesting here, right?
[00:20:39]  It's like, go build your own social network.
[00:20:41]  So then some people are like, okay, cool.
[00:20:43]  I built my own social network.
[00:20:45]  Can I stay on the internet?
[00:20:46]  And then, you know, Amazon and Apple and everybody's like, no, we're going to rip you off.
[00:20:50]  And Google, you can't be on our app store.
[00:20:52]  You know, Amazon, AWS, that's powering so much of the infrastructure behind these companies.
[00:20:56]  They'll just kick you off.
[00:20:57]  If Cloudflare, you know, decides to deny you DNS services, it's like your website's off the internet.
[00:21:04]  Congratulations.
[00:21:05]  You can't actually build your own social network because the censorship goes so much deeper.
[00:21:09]  It's like at the infrastructure layer.
[00:21:11]  So I find that argument's in bad faith.
[00:21:13]  Plus, like build your own search engine.
[00:21:15]  Well, you can't do it.
[00:21:16]  Google's a monopoly.
[00:21:18]  If you actually did anything interested, you know, in anything interesting, they just buy you up anyway.
[00:21:24]  But like, you're so what?
[00:21:25]  Even if you built better technology than Google, they have such a network effect, you can't actually compete.
[00:21:29]  Like they're a monopoly.
[00:21:31]  That means that you can't really dislodge them, except you have to use the power of the state to do it.
[00:21:35]  So we're staying under number three.
[00:21:37]  We'll get to number four in a second.
[00:21:38]  So the Section 230 and the treat them as common carriers.
[00:21:41]  I get those.
[00:21:42]  The third one is the biggest opposition amongst the free market libertarian types.
[00:21:48]  The base of the party is like break them up into a million pieces.
[00:21:51]  And it's mostly kind of like a retribute, like a retribution type justice type thing.
[00:21:57]  You know what I mean?
[00:21:58]  Kind of like they screwed up.
[00:21:59]  They want to punish them.
[00:22:00]  Like I want to punish Twitter for kicking President Trump off.
[00:22:03]  I'm the same.
[00:22:03]  Holy crap.
[00:22:04]  So I had a Zoom call recently with a certain tech company leader that you would know, and I'll say it offline.
[00:22:11]  And they're like, well, what's the philosophical argument?
[00:22:13]  Like, I thought you're a free market guy.
[00:22:14]  I said, no, no, no.
[00:22:15]  I want you to suffer.
[00:22:16]  That's the philosophical argument.
[00:22:18]  I said, you have waged cultural jihad on us.
[00:22:21]  Right.
[00:22:21]  And you accept us not, you know, expect us not to use political power.
[00:22:26]  So the question, I guess, with this is some people would say, Charlie or Blake, you break them up, then the Chinese companies are going to rule.
[00:22:34]  Would you really want that to happen?
[00:22:35]  Have you heard this argument?
[00:22:37]  Not specifically.
[00:22:38]  That we want American social media companies to rule, not Chinese companies.
[00:22:42]  Those same people don't even want us to ban TikTok.
[00:22:45]  Exactly right.
[00:22:46]  Which I thought the Trump administration was like close to doing.
[00:22:48]  Unfortunately, didn't quite get that done.
[00:22:51]  Yeah, Huawei is not going to take over the American internet.
[00:22:55]  Well, but I always, I say in response, I say, wait, how is Facebook and Google not already a Chinese company?
[00:23:00]  Totally.
[00:23:00]  They're happy to do whatever.
[00:23:01]  They do whatever they ask.
[00:23:02]  Yep.
[00:23:03]  So it's kind of like, and by the way, I would prefer to have some sort of a company that tries to win over the American consumer than one that has like complete influence.
[00:23:12]  That holds them in complete contempt.
[00:23:14]  Exactly.
[00:23:14]  At least like there's some sort of like a persuasion index.
[00:23:17]  Right.
[00:23:17]  Yeah.
[00:23:18]  No, we can't get into Chinese markets for the most part.
[00:23:20]  I mean, Google's in there a little bit.
[00:23:21]  Facebook can't really get in.
[00:23:22]  And we let TikTok in.
[00:23:23]  Yes.
[00:23:24]  It's just like we let an entire generation of young people send all their data back to CCP in China.
[00:23:30]  We just let it happen.
[00:23:31]  What are the potential downsides of breaking up a company?
[00:23:35]  I mean, gosh, with these companies, I don't see much downside.
[00:23:41]  I really don't.
[00:23:42]  Like, look, the world was pretty good before Facebook, or at least Facebook, you know, there's some benefits, but I think it's a net negative at this point.
[00:23:48]  I don't think you need it.
[00:23:49]  Like, if you ruined Facebook's business, I guess it's like bad for the shareholders.
[00:23:53]  You know, some mostly institutional, but some ma and pa people own Facebook and there'd be some stock losses or something like that.
[00:24:01]  But you could remedy those.
[00:24:03]  Yeah.
[00:24:03]  And it's like the world, you know, Google has been helpful.
[00:24:07]  And it's like the world was also fine before everybody was just like addicted to their phones.
[00:24:11]  Would you expand the tech critique to Apple and Amazon as well?
[00:24:15]  Why are you really focused on the communication technology?
[00:24:19]  Well, we'll get into point four here, which has to do with targeted advertising.
[00:24:22]  But I think Apple's the least bad of these companies.
[00:24:25]  I think it's pretty bad.
[00:24:26]  Like it's happy to use slave labor.
[00:24:28]  Also, Apple News is really bad.
[00:24:30]  It's the editorialization.
[00:24:32]  It's notifying the Washington Post to every 19-year-old in the country.
[00:24:36]  Yep.
[00:24:37]  I think that's bad.
[00:24:39]  I think the monopolistic behavior that Apple engages in on its app store is bad.
[00:24:44]  It's basically like you can't go build your own app store.
[00:24:46]  That's the whole point.
[00:24:47]  You can't really go to the business.
[00:24:48]  They built their own operating system.
[00:24:50]  Yeah, and it's so closed, and now they want to charge app developers 30% of all revenues.
[00:24:54]  And I have some problems with that.
[00:24:55]  But I will say Apple's the best of them, or I'd say the least bad is probably the way to put it, because they don't rely on targeted advertising for their business.
[00:25:04]  So let's get to number four then.
[00:25:05]  Number four is: I think we should probably just go ahead and ban targeted advertising.
[00:25:08]  What is targeted advertising?
[00:25:09]  Targeted advertising is advertising that these companies can serve to you specifically based on all the crazy large amounts of data they have on you.
[00:25:20]  So Google knows basically everything about you, right?
[00:25:23]  Unless you're very tech savvy and you've taken steps to not use Google or disguise yourself or something, but they have years and years of search history on most people.
[00:25:31]  They know exactly what you've been into on the internet and they build this profile of you and they can use it to basically manipulate you as a consumer, right?
[00:25:38]  So I'm going to be able to serve you ads that I'm highly statistically confident will work, i.e., you're going to spend the money.
[00:25:49]  That really works on people.
[00:25:51]  It's kind of a hard case to make because people don't feel like it works.
[00:25:54]  Everybody wants to think, oh, advertising doesn't work on me.
[00:25:56]  It does work on you.
[00:25:57]  Tell me why.
[00:25:58]  It absolutely does.
[00:25:59]  Because it's, I mean, it just does.
[00:26:04]  Well, what's the data behind that?
[00:26:06]  So if you it basically hacks people's psychology.
[00:26:10]  It's like if like Google knows more about you in some clinical cold sense than your wife does.
[00:26:16]  And the same is true of me.
[00:26:17]  The same is true of everybody.
[00:26:18]  These companies know they know your location.
[00:26:21]  They know how you spend money.
[00:26:23]  They know what you search.
[00:26:25]  They probably know many of our thoughts in some sense before we even think them.
[00:26:29]  I mean, it's like getting into sort of minority report level premonition type stuff.
[00:26:35]  It's really scary.
[00:26:35]  I mean, they have terabytes of data on every individual person.
[00:26:38]  This is not stuff.
[00:26:39]  I guess technically it's data we volunteered to them and technically we signed their user consent by actually using these companies, but it's not real consent.
[00:26:48]  People have no idea how much data these companies are collecting on them and using it against them in this commercial context.
[00:26:56]  Sometimes it's good.
[00:26:57]  Like there's some consumer benefit to this, right?
[00:26:59]  Like on Instagram, I actually get ads that for products I sometimes buy and like and sometimes I can even appreciate that, right?
[00:27:07]  But the downside, the underbelly of it is very dark.
[00:27:11]  And when you let a handful of companies, you know, in a nation of 300 million people, basically acquire so much knowledge about each individual person that you can make what I think are predatory advertising decisions, you get this really weird economic system.
[00:27:32]  I think it just preys on people.
[00:27:34]  I would have maybe less of a problem with it if the companies didn't use these monopoly, monopoly profits to do bad, nefarious political things.
[00:27:42]  But this is why these companies are so profitable.
[00:27:44]  It's the targeted advertising.
[00:27:46]  I think Facebook could still have an interesting business if it had to advertise like a magazine advertises or like a billboard, you know, where you can't specifically and precisely deliver the ads that the person is, you know, going to likely respond to based on all that historical data.
[00:27:59]  Now, I can already hear the Chamber of Commerce screaming and sending a lobbyist to go destroy your political campaign because the argument in response is that the chamber will say, this will make us more ineffective.
[00:28:13]  This will make us less efficient.
[00:28:16]  We won't have as much corporate profits and we'll have to lay off workers.
[00:28:20]  So, for example, the lobbyist will say, Blake, or the spokesperson for the chamber, we buy advertising on Christian radio because we're targeting a Christian radio audience.
[00:28:31]  Why shouldn't we be able to tell Facebook we want to just target people that have liked Christian radio stations?
[00:28:36]  Why is that different?
[00:28:37]  It's going to make advertising a little bit less efficient.
[00:28:40]  And I think there's a definite trade-off to it.
[00:28:43]  We've tilted so far in the direction, though, of just completely letting Facebook and Google and Amazon too.
[00:28:50]  You know, Amazon sells these little devices, right?
[00:28:53]  What is it, the Echo?
[00:28:53]  The Alex.
[00:28:54]  The Alexa and the Echo Dot or whatever.
[00:28:57]  It literally listens to people's living room conversations if it's in the bedroom, if you're sort of unwise enough to put these things in your bedroom.
[00:29:04]  You shouldn't have one at all.
[00:29:04]  You shouldn't have one at all.
[00:29:05]  It listens to what you say and it will, though they probably say they don't do this, but they absolutely do.
[00:29:11]  They will refine their ad model and add data points into your file to go and serve you ads.
[00:29:16]  And how many people have experienced this, right?
[00:29:18]  Like you're talking to your girlfriend or to your mom or something about a product and 10 minutes later it shows up on your iPhone.
[00:29:25]  Or like, gosh, it'd be fun to go camping.
[00:29:26]  Is that a coincidence?
[00:29:27]  It's not a coincidence.
[00:29:28]  And I think it's really messed up.
[00:29:30]  And I think, you know, you can make some economic efficiency argument.
[00:29:35]  But I think people are kind of sick and tired of that.
[00:29:37]  Or at least when I and a bunch of other people are done telling people how predatory this is and how insane this data collection stuff is, I think people are going to have a real big problem with it because people don't really know what they're giving up.
[00:29:51]  So look, it's not clear to me that we shouldn't just ban targeted ads, or at least that's the table stakes.
[00:29:55]  That's my opening offer.
[00:29:56]  And then maybe you end up with some better regulatory regime where people have more control over what data they're actually giving to these companies.
[00:30:04]  Section 230.
[00:30:05]  Yep.
[00:30:05]  Repeal it.
[00:30:06]  Treat them as common carriers.
[00:30:07]  Yep.
[00:30:07]  Sherman Antitrust Act.
[00:30:09]  Break them up to the extent it makes sense.
[00:30:11]  And then ban targeted advertising.
[00:30:13]  Yeah.
[00:30:14]  I think we should do that.
[00:30:15]  That last one, I mean, I agree.
[00:30:16]  It's sort of nuclear.
[00:30:18]  Well, because you're not just going after the tech companies then.
[00:30:20]  You're going after Estee Laudur.
[00:30:24]  You're going after Marriott.
[00:30:26]  Look, they may just have to advertise just like they did in 2001.
[00:30:30]  And they're going to say, well, our profits weren't as great then.

=== Repealing Section 230 Today (15:00) ===

[00:30:32]  We weren't as many.
[00:30:33]  It's kind of a spray and pray strategy.
[00:30:35]  Who are you, Blake, you collectivist social central planner?
[00:30:39]  I don't know.
[00:30:40]  Far from it.
[00:30:40]  It's better to have a healthy country where you don't just let a few multinational corporations prey on people and you can have a healthy, you know, advertising businesses made money before big data.
[00:30:53]  They really did.
[00:30:54]  And all I'm saying is we got to tilt back in the direction towards consumer privacy and protecting people because they have no idea what these companies are doing with their.
[00:31:01]  Do you think targeted advertising is one of the reasons we've seen such a dramatic acceleration of wealth inequality in our country?
[00:31:08]  I'd have to unpack that and think about it.
[00:31:11]  Well, it makes it easier for big companies to be able to maximize profits.
[00:31:15]  So for example, for every dollar that they would have in their marketing budget, it'll go a lot further with targeted ads than if they just bought radio or television.
[00:31:25]  Sure.
[00:31:25]  So therefore, the 100 most valuable companies just on basically will get more valuable because they will be able to sell more products to people quicker and more efficiently.
[00:31:38]  It certainly doesn't help.
[00:31:39]  I don't know how much it I'm just asking from an economic driving trend.
[00:31:44]  How critical or not has targeted advertising been to some of these other economic trends?
[00:31:48]  I think to the extent the big company, the big tech company, the rise of big tech has contributed to wealth inequality, which is some.
[00:31:54]  I don't think it's mostly.
[00:31:55]  I don't think rising inequality is probably mostly a Silicon Valley phenomenon, although I think the massive success of the big tech companies contributes to it.
[00:32:03]  It definitely doesn't help.
[00:32:05]  I think the inequality problem is probably just much deeper.
[00:32:11]  Did you know that if you shop at Nike, they turn around and give your hard-earned dollars to pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and the Population Council.
[00:32:19]  Sinister folks, by the way.
[00:32:20]  Did you know that Airbnb gave $500,000 to the Marxist BLM incorporated organization?
[00:32:28]  Your first vote is at the ballot box, but that isn't enough to defend our traditional Judeo-Christian values.
[00:32:36]  Left-wing corporations are subverting our nation and our republic by taking money from conservative customers and giving it to radical organizations that support abortion, gun control, and critical race theory.
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[00:34:18]  Maybe it's like, hey, I don't know if the car I'm buying, are they donating to Planned Parenthood?
[00:34:24]  What about all these companies?
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[00:34:37]  Where are the Democrats on this tech issue?
[00:34:39]  I thought they hated big stuff.
[00:34:42]  They used to, and then they realized it's like, well, the White House actually finds it convenient to be able to tell Facebook, hey, that's misinformation.
[00:34:49]  Go ahead and pull that off.
[00:34:50]  Don't let anybody talk about side effects of vaccines, for instance.
[00:34:53]  We wouldn't want to spread disinformation on the platform.
[00:34:56]  So I think now the left or Democrats are finding it convenient.
[00:35:02]  And certainly these companies are ideological.
[00:35:04]  I think Twitter is probably the worst.
[00:35:06]  But I know many rank and file engineers at these companies and most are died in the wool progressives.
[00:35:11]  And so surprise, surprise, these companies, if you zoom out, they have a very left-leaning politics.
[00:35:18]  Democrats used to, yeah, used to be for the little guy, used to be against, you know, corporate concentration of power.
[00:35:26]  Not so much anymore.
[00:35:28]  It's interesting, though, because like President Biden did nominate Lena Kahn to run the FTC.
[00:35:35]  And I think most of his nominations are garbage, just garbage.
[00:35:40]  And Maybe she'll turn out to be a disappointment, but I supported her nomination for what that's worth.
[00:35:46]  And I think it's interesting because she's written about, you know, economic harms to Main Street America that Amazon causes.
[00:35:55]  And I think it's interesting.
[00:35:57]  So we'll see what she does.
[00:35:58]  And they elevated her to chairman, right?
[00:36:00]  Of the FTC.
[00:36:01]  She's got to get confirmed first.
[00:36:02]  She's got to get confirmed.
[00:36:03]  But it's very interesting, though.
[00:36:05]  So we'll see.
[00:36:05]  Will they get serious about this?
[00:36:07]  Or is this just them playing politics and they know there's going to be a rising consumer backlash against these companies?
[00:36:12]  Yeah, I'm more cynical.
[00:36:13]  I think they're doing it as a way to threaten the tech companies to get what they want.
[00:36:17]  Sure.
[00:36:17]  Yeah.
[00:36:18]  Yeah.
[00:36:18]  Politically.
[00:36:19]  Yeah.
[00:36:19]  Well, that's how antitrust has usually been used.
[00:36:21]  That's just, we have the hammer.
[00:36:22]  Don't make us use it.
[00:36:23]  And that's usually.
[00:36:24]  It's sort of Damocles.
[00:36:25]  We're not going to let it fall.
[00:36:27]  That's probably right.
[00:36:28]  That's why it's important to elect Republicans people.
[00:36:30]  I agree.
[00:36:30]  So let's talk about the Republican Party.
[00:36:32]  You've said that they're just kind of stuck in this form of the incantation of the Reagan era.
[00:36:39]  You're trying to change that.
[00:36:42]  And so as you look, as people outside of the state of Arizona look at their candidates, what should they be asking and demanding of their Republican candidates?
[00:36:51]  Because we have a sizable audience here that's very involved.
[00:36:55]  What would you say?
[00:36:56]  I think it's three things.
[00:36:57]  You know, obviously it's important for a candidate to be able to get elected.
[00:37:00]  You got to win a primary and win a general.
[00:37:02]  So every voter needs to be thinking about electability.
[00:37:05]  Two is like, once they're in office, will they vote the right way?
[00:37:07]  And I've talked to so many Republicans in Arizona who are used to hearing good things on the campaign trail.
[00:37:12]  They elect somebody and then that person once in office just takes disappointing vote after vote.
[00:37:16]  What we don't think enough about is point three, which is like, what is this person actually going to do in office?
[00:37:22]  Like why them?
[00:37:23]  Like what is the unique vision of the country that they have?
[00:37:28]  What kind of country are they talking about living in in 10 or 20 years?
[00:37:32]  What's the new thing?
[00:37:33]  And when someone like Josh Hawley, Senator Hawley ran in 2018, I think voters in Missouri could see like he was talking about big tech.
[00:37:43]  He was very concerned about that.
[00:37:45]  That was new.
[00:37:45]  That wasn't that popular to talk about then.
[00:37:47]  You know, we hadn't yet seen much of the censorship from big tech that we saw just in this last 2020 election.
[00:37:54]  So I think he was showing leadership.
[00:37:55]  He was out in front on that issue.
[00:37:57]  And people could tell he was not just a cookie cutter Republican.
[00:38:00]  It wasn't just about electing a guy who was going to vote the right way on the whatever issue was.
[00:38:06]  He was actually charting a new course and saying, hey, I see this problem.
[00:38:09]  It's going to get worse.
[00:38:10]  I'm going to get in and do something about it.
[00:38:11]  And I think that's what people need to be looking for in their candidates.
[00:38:16]  Again, in my announcement video, I caused some controversy sort of on the left and the right by repeating that line that I said a few minutes ago.
[00:38:25]  You ought to be able to raise a family in America on one single income.
[00:38:30]  And I think that's like an obviously commonsensical goal.
[00:38:35]  But like, why don't you hear politicians talking that way?
[00:38:38]  Why is that such a weird thing to say?
[00:38:40]  To me, it seems self-evident.
[00:38:41]  So that's interesting.
[00:38:42]  And I think we ought to be electing people who are willing to not just talk about that, but yeah, say it and then craft policy that's actually going to get us there.
[00:38:52]  Otherwise, you're just sort of along for the ride.
[00:38:53]  And I think most politicians in this country, right and left, are just along for the ride, especially the older ones, by the way, which is why I'm sort of excited about this new generation of young leadership that I think we're seeing.
[00:39:05]  Most baby boomers, God bless them, it's like you had your turn.
[00:39:08]  And so if you're a baby boomer politician who's running for office now, mostly you've probably, you know, you're probably rich.
[00:39:14]  You probably had a successful career and you're just looking for a capstone at the end of it.
[00:39:19]  And I think voters can sense this.
[00:39:20]  If someone's 65, 70 years old.
[00:39:22]  There's a lot of that.
[00:39:23]  And they're running for office.
[00:39:24]  Like, what are you doing?
[00:39:25]  What are you, what are you really going to do?
[00:39:27]  Are you really going to have the energy to chart a new course?
[00:39:32]  Which is why I think there's something so exciting about what you're doing too.
[00:39:35]  It's just mobilizing and educating a new generation of young conservatives.
[00:39:39]  Think it's very radical to be in your 20s or 30s and be a conservative.
[00:39:42]  Yes.
[00:39:43]  Because you're basically saying, I believe that we can hold this ship together.
[00:39:48]  I believe that we can have a cohesive America still in 2030 and 2040 and 2050.
[00:39:53]  And that's actually, I think, given the trajectory, given the, you know, the disintegrating society that we have right now.
[00:40:01]  I mean, it's badly broken.
[00:40:02]  I think to have that optimism and to be able to chart a vision where you can articulate how America will be a functioning country in 2050, like that's radical stuff.
[00:40:10]  But I think in a good way, and that's what we need more of.
[00:40:13]  Yeah, there's been very short-term thinking.
[00:40:15]  You know, we did a whole podcast recently on generational theft on not just the financial stuff, the debt, the inflation, but also just other policy decisions, school closures, mask mandates.
[00:40:27]  There has been this nonstop downward plunder.
[00:40:30]  Right.
[00:40:31]  And I'm not a big, like, I don't like the Cortez thing.
[00:40:34]  Everyone before me is a loser and I hate them all.
[00:40:36]  I don't like that.
[00:40:37]  Right.
[00:40:37]  I think that we are called and commanded to respect our elders and people that came before us.
[00:40:42]  But I also think it needs to come with a very valid concern and critique that the generation that kind of has been in the leadership class the last 15, 20 years is violating the Boy Scout ethos of leave no trace.
[00:40:55]  Right.
[00:40:55]  Like they're leaving the campground much worse than they found it.
[00:40:59]  Yeah.
[00:40:59]  And in some sense, it's like they just sort of automatically had an easy ride, the baby boomer generation.
[00:41:06]  Because the greatest generation set up a framework that was incredible.
[00:41:10]  Yeah.
[00:41:10]  If you were born in 1950, things got better and better every year of your life until maybe sometime very recently.
[00:41:19]  But things just automatically seem to work.
[00:41:21]  It was, as Eric Weinstein would say, the ego.
[00:41:23]  The ego.
[00:41:24]  The embedded growth obligation.
[00:41:26]  Yep.
[00:41:26]  Yep.
[00:41:26]  Which I think is one of his favorite things.
[00:41:27]  Things just grew.
[00:41:28]  There was.
[00:41:29]  Yeah.
[00:41:30]  Yeah.
[00:41:31]  We can talk about Eric.
[00:41:32]  I love Eric.
[00:41:34]  Things just got better.
[00:41:35]  Things just worked.
[00:41:35]  You know, you had this post-war boom, this economic miracle.
[00:41:41]  It was a unique set of historical conditions.
[00:41:44]  I think we can get back to that level of prosperity, but it doesn't just happen unthinkingly and automatically.
[00:41:50]  And it certainly doesn't happen if you, as the generation in charge, takes your eye off the ball, you know, and the debt that the baby boomers have left us with, just the crazy politics.
[00:42:03]  Like, I think it, in some ways, you know, the leadership class, the elite leadership class that rose to the top was a selfish generation, and we're all going to pay for it.
[00:42:12]  And the question is, can we correct course?
[00:42:16]  Do you find yourself being able to work with the Cortez types, the Talib types, the Omar types?
[00:42:24]  Depends on the issue.
[00:42:25]  Depends.
[00:42:25]  Depends on the issue.
[00:42:26]  But I agree, I mean, I don't think that's the right perspective to take.
[00:42:29]  No, I'm asking just because you say that this corrosive politics has been inherited.
[00:42:35]  Whether we like it or not, 30% of our generation at least are Bolsheviks, right?
[00:42:41]  Probably more.
[00:42:42]  So how do we heal that?
[00:42:43]  So that's the question.
[00:42:44]  I think the future is Generation Z.
[00:42:46]  It is.
[00:42:47]  I think the Millennials, God bless them, I'm a millennial.
[00:42:49]  I'm a millennial.
[00:42:50]  Waste of time.
[00:42:50]  It's a waste of time.
[00:42:51]  Right.
[00:42:51]  I mean, look, I think in Arizona, for instance, I'll peel off enough to have an interesting voting block because I do think it's not all Bolsheviks.
[00:43:00]  But it has a lot of cynics in the millennials.
[00:43:02]  The millennials will not save America.
[00:43:05]  I agree.
[00:43:05]  Generation Z, if America is to be saved.
[00:43:08]  I totally agree.
[00:43:09]  That's where it is.
[00:43:10]  Because I think, I mean, you know, what I'm, I'm 34.
[00:43:13]  I think I'm like slightly older millennial, but still kind of a younger millennial.
[00:43:18]  Yeah.
[00:43:18]  You're at the young end of the millennials.
[00:43:22]  I think that ship has sailed, but I think the Generation Z kids, right, or someone in college right now, or hopefully they're dropping out of college.
[00:43:30]  They see, they look forward at our generation, especially sort of my side of it, and they just see it not working.
[00:43:36]  Like, okay, great.
[00:43:37]  I've done well.
[00:43:38]  It sort of worked for me.
[00:43:39]  You know, I got lucky.
[00:43:40]  But like most of my peers, even the ones that went to Stanford, like they don't, they're not on track to be able to own a home.
[00:43:47]  And they went to Stanford.
[00:43:48]  Say that again.
[00:43:49]  Most of my peers that went to Stanford are not on track to be able to own a home.
[00:43:54]  And they look back at their parents at their age, early 30s.
[00:43:56]  Their parents were like, you know, buying houses back when houses cost like 85 grand.
[00:44:01]  Yeah.
[00:44:01]  I mean, things just worked then.
[00:44:03]  Now people don't.
[00:44:05]  Most, you know, I have three kids, but like literally most of my classmates do not have children and they're 34, 35.
[00:44:12]  You know, there's going to be a ticking time bomb here.
[00:44:15]  People are sort of promised things will work out.
[00:44:17]  And then, surprise, you're 42, you know, you haven't actually saved that much money.
[00:44:23]  You've had a lot of consumptive experiences, you know.
[00:44:26]  But you don't have a wife and you don't have any kids.
[00:44:28]  You don't have a husband.
[00:44:28]  You don't have any kids.
[00:44:29]  Like, what is that?
[00:44:31]  And I, and my hope is that Generation Z looks forward at our generation and says, like, that's not for me.
[00:44:39]  That doesn't work.
[00:44:40]  I don't want to run that playbook.
[00:44:42]  I pray you're right.
[00:44:43]  You said one thing and then we'll close it out.
[00:44:45]  Dropping out of college.
[00:44:47]  Yeah, do it.
[00:44:48]  Tell me why.
[00:44:49]  Well, we at the Teal Foundation, we run a program called the Teal Fellowship.
[00:44:54]  I applied when I was in high school, graduate high school.
[00:44:56]  I made it to the second round.
[00:44:58]  That's funny.
[00:44:59]  I'm a non-successful Teal fellow.
[00:45:00]  There you go.
[00:45:01]  But you dropped out.
[00:45:02]  You didn't go to college.
[00:45:03]  Then you built something awesome instead.
[00:45:05]  I wasn't smart enough.
[00:45:06]  I wasn't involved in.
[00:45:07]  I'm kidding.
[00:45:08]  No, we pay really sort of, you know, crazy, smart young people $100,000 to your program.
[00:45:15]  And the only condition is you got to drop out of school, drop out of college, and most of them start a business.
[00:45:20]  And I think it's been phenomenally successful.
[00:45:22]  It's like $40 billion in collective.
[00:45:24]  $40 billion in market cap, not including Ethereum, Vitalik Butter, and the founder of Ethereum.
[00:45:28]  Ethereum and see if only I would have been able on the ICO on that one.

=== Dropping Out Of College (02:12) ===

[00:45:32]  And me too.
[00:45:33]  I was sitting there thinking about doing it and didn't do it.
[00:45:35]  Oops.
[00:45:36]  And it would not have been a lot of money at the time, right?
[00:45:38]  Oh, 500 bucks then would have made like, you know, five, six million.
[00:45:41]  Oops.
[00:45:42]  You can't do that.
[00:45:43]  This is one thing, but you're in Silicon Valley.
[00:45:44]  You miss so many in retrospect all the time, right?
[00:45:48]  You got to be at peace with it.
[00:45:49]  It's fine.
[00:45:49]  But no, we really sparked this conversation about like, is college worth it?
[00:45:54]  College gets more and more expensive every year.
[00:45:56]  Most people get dumber by going to college.
[00:45:59]  You just got to get indoctrinated.
[00:46:00]  You don't actually learn any valuable life skills.
[00:46:03]  Maybe it's good to like, you know, network with your peers or something like that.
[00:46:06]  But you got to have multiple different paths to success in society instead of just pretending that, you know, you're worthless if you don't go and get this degree.
[00:46:17]  I think we let down an entire generation of kids when we say you have to go to college.
[00:46:22]  We make them incur a lot of debt.
[00:46:24]  They get out.
[00:46:25]  They still don't know what to do.
[00:46:27]  I think that's a problem.
[00:46:29]  My next book is going to be The College Scam.
[00:46:31]  When's it come out?
[00:46:33]  September, October issue.
[00:46:35]  Great.
[00:46:36]  Couldn't be a more important topic.
[00:46:38]  Drop out of school, kids.
[00:46:38]  Do something else.
[00:46:40]  Our parents are driving off the road as they hear this right now.
[00:46:44]  Well, look, God bless them.
[00:46:45]  I get it.
[00:46:45]  You want your kid to not fall through the cracks in our society, but what an indictment of society that you have to go through this crazy, expensive process where you literally almost learn nothing just in order to make sure that you're not like homeless someday.
[00:46:58]  Like we have to do better.
[00:47:00]  And that's why you're running blakemasters.com.
[00:47:02]  Is that right?
[00:47:03]  That's right.
[00:47:03]  Any closing thoughts?
[00:47:05]  Thanks for having me on.
[00:47:06]  Yeah, go to blakemasters.com.
[00:47:08]  Most political websites are horrible.
[00:47:10]  You got ads jumping out everywhere.
[00:47:12]  Volunteer, sign up, donate.
[00:47:13]  No, I wanted a really clear one-page website so you can go and understand exactly where I am on the issues.
[00:47:18]  And grateful for any support you can give.
[00:47:21]  BlakeMasters.com.
[00:47:22]  Blake, thanks so much.
[00:47:23]  Thank you.
[00:47:26]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:47:27]  Email us your questions, freedom at charlottekirk.com.
[00:47:31]  If you want to support our program, you can do so at charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:47:36]  God bless you guys.
[00:47:37]  Speak to you soon.
[00:47:41]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.