The Culture War #7 - Vivek Ramaswamy GOP 2024 Candidate, Competing With Trump, Ending Wokeness
BUY CASTBREW COFFEE, SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/
Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com
My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews
Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
Merch - http://teespring.com/timcast
Make sure to subscribe for more travel, news, opinion, and documentary with Tim Pool everyday.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I was in the world of, we can talk about it, I was in the world of business and biotech.
Ended up transitioning from that to writing books about our culture.
Still didn't think that partisan politics was where it was at for me, but my basic reason for being in this is I think we're in the middle of this national identity crisis.
To be an American represents the will of the people, the consent of the governed, belief in community, personal responsibility, individuality, meritocracy, freedoms, liberties, I would simplify it all the way down to the rights of the individual as it comes together to form the greater community.
So, I view being American as a variety of things.
That's the simple ideological view.
And then the more subjective view, I suppose, is a connection with our history, of course.
Belief in the vision of the Founding Fathers and the progress that has been made over the past several hundred years to do away with awful things like racism, attaining amazing things like civil rights.
Being American is to strive for people—it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as our Founding Fathers envisioned, and the pursuit of improving upon that system, doing away with the bad and building upon the good.
Then you can get into the granular and say, a core tenet of this country has always been individuality, meritocracy, personal responsibility.
That, you know, I'll leave it there, otherwise I'm going to go on for an hour.
It's not a conflict, but that's the tension at the heart of the American identity that causes us to struggle with this because there's part of each of us that wants to be the individualist, the rugged individual pursuing our version of the American dream best manifests through free market capitalism.
And you know what?
Republicans and conservatives like to lean into that.
Like, that's the part.
The rugged individual.
That's me.
And I've lived that dream.
I mean, that's important to me.
It's important to you.
It's a big part of what it means to be American.
But we don't admit, often, what the other side embraces.
They reject the rugged individual and say there's this collectivist identity and what it means to be American as a member of this collective.
And I think the unique thing about what it means to be American is it's both of those things at once.
Individualism and unity, right?
The American dream, capitalism and being part of a self-governing constitutional republic.
Both of those are what it means to be American, and they run roughshod over each other from time to time.
But anyway, I'm on this quest to rediscover American identity.
That's a part of it.
Then you've got the part relating to excellence and meritocracy and the set of ideals that set the nation into motion.
I don't know if it's reductionist, I think it misses the point.
Conservatives obviously band together.
They're doing a big boycott of Anheuser-Busch right now.
They're all, you know, Kid Rock's firing a gun at Bud Light because he knows that among his community this resonates.
It means something to him, it means something to you.
That is something part of the greater.
The people on the right absolutely believe in the American government, the Constitution, and all that stuff.
And then there's this view of the culture war, the cold civil war, whatever you want to call it, as if it's these two things.
But I don't see it that way at all.
I don't see any ideological drive among the left.
And the funny thing is, Many of these commentators and these leftists will argue that I'm biased and I'm right-wing and all that, and I absolutely disagree.
I believe that my view is...
I wouldn't ever claim to be omniscient, I would just say moderately objective.
But what I mean by that is, I'm not a conservative, I've never been a conservative, I have many liberal-leaning views, and I believe many things the left would completely agree with, but they would still attack me anyway, because the left is not ideologically driven.
It is, I would describe it as, it's almost I guess it's pure collectivism and nothing else.
It is quite literally, you adhere to what the left wants and that's all that matters.
And the best example of this, the way it's been described to me is, if you are someone who's on the left in this culture war as people describe it, and you deviate on leftist economic policy, they don't care.
If you're on the left and you say, actually, I don't necessarily believe in universal healthcare.
I think maybe we should have, you know, strong insurance, but like reform, they're gonna say, okay.
But if you say, I have questions about the transgender stuff, they're gonna say you're a far-right, you're white supremacists, get out.
So what's driving them doesn't seem to be necessarily anything other than falling in line with their version of the status quo of what their group deems at the time.
And the important factor there is that it changes all the time.
So the question is whether you describe that, and both can be true, like cynically as a top-down collectivist and or command and control project that demands a form of conformity.
And I think there's an element of that.
But, and this gets to the heart of why I'm running for president on this American identity campaign that I'm on is, I think the The good hearted version of it, right?
Just take the earnest version of this is actually what's going on in the American left is a big part of what's going on across the country is that we're just, you have a lot of people who are hungry for a cause.
People who are lost in the desert, like I said, hungry for purpose and meaning and identity The things that human beings have always been hungry for, by the way, but they're not filling that hunger anymore with, pick your favorite value, faith, God, patriotism, national identity.
In my life, it looks very different, but I've created things.
You can derive, you build something with your hands.
Whatever it is, you work hard and create something.
That's a source of identity.
You know, your family, for many people, is a source of identity.
The two parents that brought me into this world.
When those things disappear, you have this black hole of a vacuum.
And that's why, you know what, healthcare policy, or whatever, doesn't fill the vacuum of purpose.
But believing in a quasi-religious structure, which is what the trans movement is all about, or the woke movement, or the climate movement, or the COVID movement, That is actually the reason that becomes the third rail for kicking you out of the tribe, is that that's touching a place in your heart that you were long missing.
And healthcare policy or economic policy doesn't do that.
So that explains, I think, the distinction you see when you abandon the religious structure that otherwise gave them that sense of security that they were missing.
If you rip that away and take that away and say that trans is a mental illness or whatever, That's actually why you get the reaction that you do.
That means that's an open space for someone else or something else to prey upon.
And we use the word hollow, the hole.
You're familiar with maybe a quote from, I'll geek out in a different direction, but Blaise Pascal, he's a famous mathematician, scientist, You know, French guy.
He had a famous quote, all-time quote, which wasn't related to his main disciplines of math or science.
It was related to God, where he said, you hold the size of God in your heart and God doesn't fill it.
Something else will instead.
And it's again, this notion of the hollow.
And I just think that's what's going on in the country.
And I'll go one step further with the American left right now.
I was thinking about this last night when I got a text from a good friend of mine you know, former colleague and longtime, even a college New York classmate we overlooked in college.
And I get a text from him last night and he was pissed about all the things I've been saying about the trans movement recently.
unidentified
I may say, if I may say this myself, I don't think any of it's offensive.
I think, I believe that every human being deserves dignity.
And I think that that strand has been true through everything I've said.
But among other things, my vehemence, and I'm vehement on this, that gender dysphoria and the modern trans movement represents a manifestation of a mental illness.
Anyway, this was something that really ticked him off, and I got like a Niagara Falls of text messages around 11 p.m.
Last night, right?
And we just flew in here this morning and like, you know, I don't want to keep going on this long text chain with him, but he was clearly bothered.
He's a friend.
So, you know, here we were going back and forth.
There's even something further to the sense of being lost, right?
And I see this in him too.
It's not just that you're hungry for purpose, but you refuse to admit that you believe in God or that you pledge allegiance to the flag or that your family structure is actually an important part of your identity or that hard work.
It's not just that.
There's something even more going on, because temporarily you can fill that void.
With a hunt for civil rights, right?
A hunt for human rights.
That's a big part of what occupied this movement even since the 60s, since the 70s, is to say that, okay, even if I don't believe in those things, I can fight for secular justice, okay?
Rights and equality.
Here's the real problem that's going on in the year 2022 or 2023 to 2015, is that then they lost that too.
Why did they lose that?
"because we got to their promised land." - Yep. - So it's sort of a weird thing, right?
In the racial wokeism or the gender culture war.
Now we live in a country where you can marry who you want, if you want, how you want, when you want.
And it is precisely then that we reach this culture of vehemence with gender identity itself being the new obsession.
It's because when you run out of human rights and civil rights to stand for, you have to find new ones instead 'cause you don't have God, you don't have country.
So then you lost my, you took my civil rights struggle away too, now I'm going to make one.
Okay, so I wrote this book, Woke Inc., a couple years ago that was about sort of the marriage of wokeness and capitalist structure and what each side got out of the trade.
But that book was mostly about like the woke capitalism side of it, but I'd never gotten that book into the underlying cultural phenomenon of what's actually going on.
So, to take the corporations out of it, I wrote the second book called Nation of Victims, talks about the spread of victimhood culture in the United States.
The opening chapter actually, it was written in the late stages of the end of the, you know, COVID craze in this country.
So I drew this analogy where it's like the equivalent, when you think about whatever it is, take alleged racism in the United States, right?
There was a point in time, certainly 1870, Reconstruction in this country, where there was a justified, comprehensive societal response we needed to mount against actual systemic racism that we fought a civil war in this country, among other things to overcome.
That moment has long passed.
And so what you see right now is the activation of an overactive hyperimmune response that's trying to clear a virus that's already well below the limit of detection.
Am I saying there's none of it left?
No, but it's in the bloodstream, but it's like, you're not gonna detect it.
You may as well watch it wither away to irrelevance.
But if you mount a comprehensive immune response after the virus itself is gone, actually, I don't know if people know this, that's actually how people die in the hospital of COVID.
Long after the virus is gone, your immune system is still attacking your bodily organs.
That's how you actually die.
And I think that's the equivalent of what's going on in the so-called woke movement in this country is once the thing disappears, you don't even have a virus left to attack.
You're just attacking and killing the host itself.
That host is our country.
Exactly.
And so how do we fix that?
That is the question for the House.
That is why I'm running for president.
I think I'm the best.
I mean, look, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think that if I thought that somebody else was able to actually take on this challenge of our time.
And for a different number of reasons, we got some time on our hands so we can go through it, but I don't think that, I don't think that the rest of the conservative movement, there's different flavors of it, are quite up to that task in this moment.
So all I can really say is, without, you know, speculating, opining on the results of a GOP primary, I look forward to you saying everything you just said to these other people on stage and to the American people because it needs to be brought up in the conversation as we are moving forward in terms of who becomes president.
Not because I need the money, but, I mean, we all need the money, too.
But, I mean, I'll put an eight-figure check into this campaign just to kick it off, but I want it to be a grassroots-driven movement to at least force that to the center of the debate stage.
So, you know.
Vivek, 2024.com, literally, people just type it in and go there, give a dollar or five dollars, even if they might be voting for Trump or somebody else, who are still interested in seeing these questions asked and answered and addressed.
Now, our whole play is, whoever leads that way, the case I'll make next year is, pick the person who led the way in defining the agenda.
But we'll get to that next year.
But this year, it's about defining that agenda.
But back to the essence of this question is, I think that our work is harder than just playing whack-a-mole with that lost left-wing exit.
So we have a bunch of lost people on the other side.
Many of them literally mentally ill.
I mean, I think much of the trans movement is just the manifestation of a deeper mental illness that's part and parcel of being lost and hungry for this cause.
We can bat them down, but that's not going to do anything.
But the climate cult, the religiosity of self-flogging, wearing the hair shirt of climate change and the way you're supposed to apologize for your modern way of life, the belief in seeing that we have different shades of melanin and are supposed to presuppose some invisible societal relationship that precedes us and will post date us because of the race or the color of our skin.
These are all just symptoms of a deeper mental illness caused by two things, okay?
If you have two streams that hit each other, okay, two currents, you get a current that's not twice as powerful, it's ten times as powerful.
Two of the currents right now is on one hand you have this The hollow problem, as you put it, the void, the black hole, no faith, patriotism, hard work, family, all that gone.
So you got a hunger for purpose, you have a hollow.
On the other hand, you have a culture, especially for young people, that says you can't actually say what you believe.
So if you do have a thought that defects from an orthodox, you have to keep it to yourself.
Those are two currents that create this mental health epidemic that's spreading like wildfire.
It'll show up as depression, it'll show up as anxiety, it'll show up as gender dysphoria, it'll show up as woke.
And so against that backdrop, what do I see a lot of other conservatives doing?
He's just going through motions that imitate other people going after the real thing.
And how do I know that?
I was one of those people for the last three years going after woke and its manifestations.
That's what I spent a lot of my last three years after I stepped down as a biotech CEO.
That's been a big part of my focus.
And for me, it was...
Like, on a first personal level, I'm looking in the mirror here, it was reactionary.
I don't know if I ever told you my story, but, you know, after, you know, I was running a multi-billion dollar company, George Floyd's tragic death plays out, and, you know, it was a tragic death, but there was a demand that I make a statement on behalf of Black Lives Matter.
I refused to do it.
Led to a series of events that I, you know, described in Woke Inc.
Six months later, a bunch of prominent advisors to my company resigned.
I say, look, I have a choice.
I'm either gonna speak my mind freely, Or I'm going to speak through the filter of corporate self-interest.
And so after the George Floyd protest, what did I say?
I said that Look, whether you're black or white or whatever your views are on this, I'm proud to work on saving people's lives, something that can unite us and is a worthy purpose regardless.
And you know, what I was told is that didn't meet the moment.
That was exactly, I was tone deaf.
And anyway, that led to a series of events that actually I wrote an op-ed the following January in the Wall Street Journal.
So those were the former law professor of mine.
So I have a background in science.
I ended up, you know, I have a background in law as well.
But, you know, just a former law professor, in my personal capacity, nothing to do with the company, wrote a piece making the case that big tech companies, when they engage in censorship at behest of the government, that it actually was bound by the First Amendment.
It was like a nerdy academic argument.
And I know conservatives, this has since become popularized in the last several years after I made this argument.
This is the first time, this is the first time that argument was really made.
And so anyway, after I wrote that piece, I kid you not, now this is in the wake of January 6th.
Two years ago, multiple advisors to the company resigned within a 48-hour period.
Imagine if everyday Americans who have to worry about putting food on the dinner table, what choice they face.
So I made the choice and said, you know what?
I'm gonna speak freely as a citizen.
Step aside from my job as a biotech CEO.
Led me to the final stages of writing Woke Inc.
Published that book and published these other books.
But the thing that took me on that little detour was For the couple of years thereafter, I was focused on fighting woke.
And it was personal to me and part of it was reactionary.
And I can empathize a little bit with, because that's part of what I see in Trump, is it is reactionary.
It is vengeance driven, is driven with grievance.
Then I see the likes of the Ron DeSantis' pop up that say, okay, and he's read my book probably a couple of times over, et cetera.
Okay, whatever that is, I'm going to go do that, because people seem to like that.
It was a best-selling book, right, when I wrote it.
Okay, that seems like a thing to do.
Let's go do that, whatever that is.
When you're doing it imitatively, you're like off by half, and then you get outsmarted by the people on the other side, even though you get your Twitter trend and your media hits.
And so this is what I see is like, you know, in the Trump version of it, authentic, really interested in unapologetically going after the problem, outsider, not a politician, but driven by vengeance, grievance, and let's knock the hell out of them and win this.
Ron DeSantis, cheap imitation or professional politician, career politician of any kind.
It's not specific to him.
It's true of most career politicians.
Cheap imitation, that's cool.
I was going to talk about Social Security and Medicare reform 20 years ago because that was cool.
Now I'm going to switch to this because that's what's in.
But then you're off by half and you're not really getting the thing.
But myself was also driven by the war against this cultural religion for the longest time without Coming to the recognition that if we really want to solve the actual problem for the country, it's going to involve more than whack-a-mole.
Because even if we whack woke, then you see climate religion pops up.
And she gave like a very poor explanation of what woke meant when she was on The Hills Show, The Rising.
And then the left, of course, they seized upon it.
Yeah.
Saying, ha ha, they don't know what they're talking about.
And then I see all these people make definitions for wokeness that are completely wrong.
And still to this day, I argue with people, and it's exactly as you described it, they're playing whack-a-mole.
Because I'll tell you what I see.
Someone comes to me, and we'll be on the show, we'll be on Tim Cast IRL, and they'll say, look, woke is, it's this critical race theory stuff, and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're missing gender ideology when you say that.
And they say, well, these people are racist.
It's like, everybody is looking at one element that is within the woke sphere, and then saying that's what woke is.
And then I heard your definition, I will tell you my view of what Woke is, and it's very, very simple.
It is the modern, left-liberal culture formed by social media algorithms.
To elaborate, it is characterized by cult-like adherence to their social orthodoxy.
That's it.
So, if I want to dive deeper and explain what these things are.
The reason why it's whack-a-mole, the reason why there doesn't seem to be any kind of actual core element to what they believe is, well, there is no faith structure, there's no moral structure, it is quite literally, right now, if I make a video on Instagram, what will get the most clicks?
Dylan Mulvaney, very big in the news, especially because of the Bud Light thing, getting more and more famous by the minute, but controversially famous.
If you look at Dylan Mulvaney's TikTok history, what do you see?
The earliest videos were about animals.
Then it was about some Broadway stories.
Then it was, I'm gay and with animals.
Then it was nature hikes.
These things weren't working.
Dylan Mulvaney comes out as non-binary, hundreds of thousands of views.
Okay, 'cause this is, we're also having this discussion on the back of a week, a couple of weeks, where there's been a lot of discussion about the role of AI and the dangers of AI in our culture.
- Oh boy. - You know, you wanna know one of the dangers of AI you can just see right here today doesn't have to do with robots with laser eyes.
We said we have the hollow, the black hole, the void.
Something's gonna prey on that void.
We have some sense that it might be a human being.
Well, some human beings do, some activists might.
We have some sense that it might be Larry Fink or whatever, the financial types that have actually financial objectives from being able to prey on those insecurities to achieve their own ends.
AI itself is in part built on algorithmically exploiting, preying upon that vacuum.
And Mark Zuckerberg, as I was at Harvard a year behind Mark when he was a sophomore year, it was my freshman year, that's when he founded Facebook.
As you may remember, the predecessor to Facebook was Hot or Not, right?
Which is like, you know, you pick, you know, different pictures from the Harvard directory, you send them to people via email, and you just like, based on how rapidly you click, that was actually part of the computer algorithm to be able to see what it would tell you about the underlying people, about the person who was making the choice.
And the whole game was, I can use the speed with which you click on something to know more about you and your soul than you know about yourself.
That Facebook's algorithm, it will see that it finds after tracking a billion people, If you begin to move at least 10 meters, followed by stopping a location within 10 feet of a restaurant, you are 30 minutes from going to the bathroom.
Like, it can see things we can't see.
And so then it can take that data and apply it to you as an individual, and then Some will be tracking your data.
If you were to actually look at it, Facebook will be like, if you were looking at your data tracking you, you'd be sitting here feeling totally fine, and then Facebook sends you a message being like, according to our data, you'll get a coffee in 45 minutes.
And you're like, I don't want a coffee, that's weird.
45 minutes go by and you go, you know, I really do want a coffee.
I just want to be really clear in parsing this, right?
One is its ability to know something about you.
And I think that that's slightly different than the thing we're talking about with the Dillon Mulvaney problem, where It's having a discursive impact on changing you.
So this is the equivalent of, okay, Facebook discovers that you were going to want that coffee, but whether or not Facebook existed around that time, you were going to want that coffee.
So Matt Walsh has a couple viral videos from the speech that he gave in I think it was New Mexico.
And a trans woman, a biological male who wants to be a woman or identifies as such, asks him questions.
He responds with, how do you know you're a woman?
How did you find out you are a woman or you believe you are?
And this trans woman said, I was listening to a podcast from another trans woman describing their experience.
And I said, that's my experience too.
And it was fascinating.
Matt Walsh then says, but that's not a woman.
It's a trans person.
You're not hearing a woman's experience.
Simply put, if this individual never heard that show, was never fed that show, was never placed, the show was placed in front of them, they would not think they were a woman.
That's right.
It was given to them by the machine.
So the example I give to people, and I have, it's funny that all of this is happening right now, the way I explained it five years ago, People think AI meant Skynet, meant robots, Terminators.
And I was like, what makes you think the AI wants to kill you?
No, I'll tell you what's gonna happen.
It's gonna be 50 years from now.
Everyone is gonna be walking around and their clothing will be giant costumes of a corncob.
Everyone will be dressed in giant corncob outfits.
They will have corncob hats.
The pens will look like corn and they will go to the restaurant and they'll order some variation of corn and I'll tell you why.
To them, it'll all be normal cultural development.
But the AI sees that humans put a ton of production into corn, so humans must like corn, so feed them more corn content because humans like corn.
After 20 years of this, everyone will only just see corn because the AI has been feeding them nothing but corn content.
Now, of course, as it turns out, several years on, it wasn't corn, in fact.
It was hollow leftist ideologies misapplied That's right.
But we're able to fill that vacuum to a place where it's, you're going to use the immunology analogy, where you're able to immunize yourself against that external virus.
Let's put it that way.
The problem, what happens right now is when you're that empty, be it the combination of financial forces, ideological forces, or even algorithmic forces, that leaves you more vulnerable to exploitation.
That's the Dylan Mulvaney problem in the country.
Again, the question is, what do we do about it, right?
I don't think the problem is really, it's symptomatic therapy at best to go after the AI, to go after the algorithm.
Now, I'd say, I'm kind of, I don't know where you are on this.
I'm, among other reasons, for this reason, against social media, especially addictive social media usage, and we can define what social media is, in kids under the age of 16.
Under the age of 16, let's sort of, because kids aren't adults, and part of being an adult, on the flip side, is you're free to make bad choices.
That's part of what freedom means.
So adults, I'm not in favor of this ban stuff, but under the age of 16, keep it out of their hands.
But the deeper question is even for adults, the right answer isn't to go after the thing that exploits it, because if it's AI today, it'll be somebody else with the financial incentive tomorrow.
It's to fill the void.
With something more meaningful.
That is, I think, the number one calling, should be the number one calling, of the conservative movement in this country.
And I don't think that vengeance and grievance are gonna be sufficient.
It's not that I don't think they're justified.
I think they are justified, in many cases.
If you're Donald Trump, it's absolutely justified.
But that's not gonna be sufficient to immunize us against the actual force.
Some unifying task the country engages in that makes everybody like this is awesome.
The problem is... It could be that.
With the algorithmic manipulation...
There is no incentive for what we would describe as the left or the woke to actually entertain a unified front.
Because, for example, we had Destiny on Tim Castellaw, he's the omni-liberal, he's a centrist, left-leaning individual, the left calls him far-right, it's funny.
I think he's a good dude.
I think he's a good dude.
- This guy started to know this. - Destiny.
He's one of the most prominent leftist streamers.
- Okay.
- But he's actually a moderate guy.
He would talk to you and have an honest conversation.
He probably just, on the facts, he'd disagree with you.
I think people on the right, obviously roll their eyes at him and stuff, but at least he's willing to talk.
But he made a great point.
He said the right will see something that they think is not a good thing, like children getting sex changes, and instead of the left either ignoring it, saying, sure, they immediately come out and say, no, it's a good thing.
So he's like, you have this issue where I think in terms of mastectomies among minors, it's in the thousands.
A couple thousand young pre-pubescent girls, pubescent I think because they're developing, in the past four or five years, I think the number may be around 2,000, have gotten double mastectomies.
And he was like, not a whole lot of people, right?
Still a problem.
Why did the left decide to come out and say it's a good thing and we should encourage it?
Instead of just being like, let the right complain about this thing that's not an issue to us.
Instead, they've mounted this whole national campaign around defending sex changes for children.
Well, I think much of the right would not have been complaining about it were it not for the epidemic explosion of these genital mutilation surgeries across the country.
Yeah, so over the past five years, we're looking at maybe 70,000 who have been on drugs or surgeries.
And so with 330 million people, you know, it's not a large percentage, but still a problem, still something that should be called out and say, hey, we shouldn't allow this to expand.
We want to stop the fire before it spreads.
But instead of the left simply being like, sure, I guess.
They could have come out and been like, do you really believe that's big of a problem?
Fine, whatever, we'll ban it.
I mean, I think you're wasting your time.
Instead, they came out full force and said, you're wrong and we should have more of it.
And so this is the issue.
If the right came out, I mean, let's just put it this way.
Conservatives came out and said, Children shouldn't have sex changes.
And instead of just going, okay, they went, no, they should.
So if we were to come out, when Elon Musk is building Starship, I am so inspired by this.
I think Elon's fantastic.
I love the space program stuff.
You know, Donald Trump's talking about Artemis going to Mars.
They insult it.
And they say these things that make no sense.
When Elon Musk launched the car into space, they say, a billionaire just wasted billions of dollars sending all this money into space.
How stupid.
We could feed the hungry.
And then, what did we hear from the right?
The money spent stays on Earth.
He didn't blast a billion dollars in outer space to be destroyed.
They built a spaceship here, employing people here, who get the money here, who buy food here, and then they launch a spaceship to develop new technologies and make life better for people.
But it doesn't matter.
They have to oppose whatever it is you want.
And so the challenge I see with the culture war is, no matter what we say, no matter what we focus on, there is a chaotic and destructive force that is incentivized to oppose and destroy anything we want to endeavor for.
On the show, he wrote a book about the next civil war.
He believes we're also heading in this direction, but he is more on the left's perspective.
Though he thinks he's objective and in the middle, I had to explain to him he's not.
And the reason why is he was wrong on so many of his facts.
Because he's getting his views from the corporate press, whereas, you know, we here at Tim Kass and I'm sure you have a balanced absorption of information.
Take everything, yeah.
Within the United States, there is a multicultural democracy and a constitutional republic, and they cannot coexist.
And I said, brilliantly said, and you are 100% correct.
The multicultural democracy believes that they have a right to storm into a Capitol building in Tennessee and then change the rules.
And when they do that, it's democracy.
But if the right tries to storm into the Capitol in D.C., it's fascism.
Clearly, there are two distinct systems here.
The right tends to favor a constitutional republic, a representative democratic system, and the left thinks majority rules.
So, if you look at Canada, they are dominated by multicultural democracy.
The United States has these two ideologies fighting amongst each other.
Let me actually make a pause and make a really interesting observation, because capitalism fits into this picture in an interesting and unintuitive way, right?
Because the classic paean to capitalism is, it's the best known system to mankind to lift people up from poverty.
Yeah, yeah, all that.
I agree with it.
But I'm going to go to a different dimension on this.
Tocqueville, actually, Alexis Tocqueville traveled this country.
Sometimes it takes a foreigner's perspective to see something about a nation that you can't see in yourself, as he did, what, some 160-odd years ago when he was in this country.
He said that a diverse, multicultural democracy, and this is the way Tocqueville described it, but he might as well meant Constitutional Republic too.
He meant the two as part and parcel of the same.
A multicultural, diverse, divided version of it cannot stand for more than a generation or two unless This is the key unless.
Unless there are apolitical sanctuaries free from partisan identity and identity politics that bind those groups together.
We call them intermediary institutions.
We could talk about churches, we could talk about civic life and the Lions Club and the Rotary Club.
I mean, these are the kinds of civic associations of the kind that Tocqueville had in mind.
But the real one that did the job was actually free market capitalism in the country, right?
So that was what brought people together by keeping that as an apolitical sanctuary.
And that's manifest in the form of baseballs, football stadiums, workplaces in this country, biotech labs, whatever it is.
Spaces where people could come together regardless of whether they were black or white or Democrat or Republican.
And when you lose that glue, right, that's the basis for solidarity.
When that's gone, that's when the diverse multicultural democracy can't stand.
So in a certain way, the role of capitalism in all of this, in this discussion about the Republic, wasn't just the thing you and I even talked about in the beginning, the rugged individual realizing our version of the dream, making money, growing an economy, yeah, yeah, all that.
But it's also part of the glue, the apolitical, including even identitarian apolitical, space that binds us together.
And that's when those spheres themselves became infected with the throws and travails of identity and partisan politics.
That's when we go back to that breaking point.
And that's why I've been so focused on these issues and ESG and everything else.
Why do they matter?
This is why they matter.
They matter for whether or not we have a country left at the end of it.
And so we've lost the glue itself has been dissolved by the thing that's dissolved the bonds between us in partisan politics.
Whereas if we have these other areas to say, OK, we're going to fight like hell over here.
And we're gonna be diverse as hell over here, but here we're still more or less the same.
It doesn't matter.
We're gonna cheer from the baseball stadiums and football stadiums of the country, because you don't have fight for social justice written in the end zone, which is what you see in the NFL or whatever today.
Fight racism or whatever it says.
And not to say that, I mean, what's really underneath that is actually a divisive agenda.
And it's not actually about fighting racism.
It's about signaling your one-sided political social virtue.
That's when the society crumbles.
Now, I got a couple of things to say about this, okay?
Capitalism doesn't have to be the only such domain, right?
I think that part of what we've lost is apolitical spaces more broadly.
In Israel, for example, what brought different divided communities together was shared civic service, military service, right?
And actually the fact that Orthodox Jews were exempted ended up becoming the exception that proved the rule.
It actually created More division between non-Orthodox Jewish communities and Orthodox Jews, even as it fostered greater coherence between Jews and non-Jews, all of whom were actually required to serve in the military together.
And so I don't think, and I think that there's a ripe conversation to be had about the revival of civic service and civic duty in this country.
But I think that, and we could talk about that as a precondition for voting.
I mean, there's a deep philosophical conversation to have here.
But the tie to the conversation we're having about capitalism, and nobody thinks about capitalism in that light.
Capitalism plays that role too.
Side-side note, I think that works within the society.
I think that the irony is that this trade and be my brother mentality, that's part of what got us into the hole that we're in with China, because China duped us into actually saying that, hey, we'll have solidarity through trade, when in fact they use like mercantilism on the other side.
So I actually, as I wanted, just as a interest of clarifying my position on this, as much as I believe that that's true within a diverse body politic, And that capitalism, among other things, other apolitical civic spaces, even civic duty and civic service, playing the role of glue.
I think that we got duped into the siren song of thinking that applied to international relations, when in fact in certain cases, particularly in China's case, it didn't.
We could spend two hours on that, we can if you want, but that's a separate topic.
But coming back to part of putting the pieces back together in this country, And I do think that domestic fortitude, cultural fortitude, is a precondition for both economic growth and achieving our geopolitical objectives.
So that's why people are like, oh, how can you be a serious candidate if you're only focused on these cultural war issues?
Answer is, I'm not, actually.
I think that that's just the, cultural fortitude is the foundation for reviving our economy and reviving our standing on the global stage.
But why am I so focused on that?
I think that it's achievable.
And I think if we're able to recreate some of those apolitical spaces, to create civic cohesion and solidarity, fill that hunger for purpose and meaning, relieve the constraints that teach people you can't talk openly.
Actually, one of the things that binds us together is indeed our ability to talk openly.
Those are the beginning and building blocks of reviving a common sense of cause, purpose, meaning, and a cultural core in this country that, again, I'll come back to.
Forget the Democrats.
Because they're not doing, but even in the Republican Party, no one's really rising to that occasion.
You know, you're talking to train this in the America first terms.
I'm all in.
I'm like all in unapologetic America first conservative.
You don't call yourself conservative.
I do call myself a conservative.
But to put America first, we have to rediscover what America is.
And if we do that, we're going to actually have the moral foundation to go even further Far further than Donald Trump did even with the America First agenda.
And so that's my pitch to the America First movement.
This stuff isn't some sort of abstract philosophical stuff.
It's the precondition to go further than version 1.0.
And I like word version 1.0 Donald Trump.
Version 1.0 went far.
You want version 2.0, you want to go further, you got to restore this moral common core.
I mean, it comes up quite a bit, because it's always the guys being like, no, I'm fine with women voting, but the women, conservative women are like, nope!
Women overwhelmingly vote for policies that are social-based, emotional-based, and destructive in the long run, so just take away their rights to vote.
And my view of it is like, well, look, if there's an election, and you're losing two to one, you might come out and say, take away their right to vote that I get.
But they are women themselves.
And I was talking to my girlfriend about it, and she said, they're wrong.
Repealing 19th doesn't solve the problem.
The issue is we got rid of land ownership requirements and civic requirements.
And she actually asked me, she was like, why did we get rid of land ownership requirements?
And I was like, well, I mean, I think that makes sense.
Like you get a building, you get a growing city with a million people in it and people aren't all owning the building they're living in.
They still have to participate in society and have a right to vote.
And to which her reply was yes, but there's gotta be some civic duty.
To which you are participating before you can vote.
And if men and women were both doing it, they'd have more skin in the game and it doesn't matter what their gender is.
Uh, my argument, we were talking about this, I said the 19th amendment is unconstitutional In that it violates the 14th Amendment, equality under the law.
You cannot grant a voting privilege to a group of people without there being equality under the law.
Yeah, we could probably go around a rabbit hole that I could probably tell you isn't merited going down on the legal technicalities of that debate.
But I understand the spirit of what you're saying.
But let's use that 19th Amendment because it's just going to distract a lot of people because Once you get into the gender debate, people lose their ability to think clearly.
There's a few topics that do this to people.
Trump is one of them.
Gender debate is one of them.
They just lose their ability to think logically once said topic has been introduced, where we're actually kind of over the flame of a pretty important topic.
So let's get to that.
Let's get into it, which is this idea of having skin in the game to be a citizen.
I mean, that's really what we're talking about here, right?
It's not even about men and women.
Skin in the game to be a citizen.
So I'll tell you something.
I wrote about this in Nation of Victims.
I'm probably going to get myself in a little bit of trouble here, because I promised myself this was not going to be something we're going to talk about in the presidential campaign, but it keeps coming back to me.
And I'm not promising to you in any way that this is part of my presidential platform, but I'm just telling you it's on my mind.
I think that we need to bring back that concept In some way of civic duty as a precondition for full capital C citizenship.
I want to make sure people clarify the concepts behind this when we were at Starship Troopers.
In the Starship Troopers universe, the saying is service guarantees citizenship.
There are citizens and civilians.
Civilians are afforded full rights under the law, free speech, free enterprise, all of those protections, but they don't vote or run for office unless you provide two years of service to the community in some fashion.
It's not military.
It's just some form of community service.
And then you are granted citizenship where you can now vote and run for office.
I am very sympathetic, and then we're going to go into some objections to it, but this is important.
We're not having this conversation in this country, and we should.
And I'll tell you, you don't have to go to Starship Troopers.
You don't know where you can go?
Go to, you brought it up, 14th Amendment.
Let's look at section one of the 14th Amendment.
Privileges and immunities of citizenship.
Just pause for that a second.
Those are two different things.
The privileges and immunities.
These people knew what they were talking about, okay, who were writing the 14th Amendment.
So there's the immunities of citizenship.
Which say that the police can't show up at this, you know, let's assume the Constitution still works, can't show up at that place where we're having this conversation right now and say I'm going to enter without a search warrant.
We're skating on thin ice as a country right now more broadly, but nonetheless, put that to one side, the way it's supposed to work is that's an immunity of citizenship.
No matter who you are, whether or not you've served or whatever, the police can't show up at your door and say, I'm going to search you without a search warrant.
There's certain basic things.
The government can't take away the money in your bank account because you said something.
Do you think the people who thought through the greatest known protection of human liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and in the amendments that followed didn't think of that No, no, no.
And then you had kooky conservative women who are like, no, women don't make decisions.
The reality was the women who opposed suffrage We're actually saying, read the literature, I don't want to join the military or work in the fire brigade.
Because back then, when you voted, they could call you up for volunteer fire service, and you could be drafted.
It's conscription.
And men were.
There was World War I, there was World War II, and you had to go fight.
And the women said, leave us out of that.
And so, this is why I said that the 19th violated the 14th in that they granted a privilege of citizenship to a faction of people while rejecting the civic duty requirements required of other people.
Anytime you have an administrative apparatus and a bureaucratic apparatus, it lends itself to capture.
We've seen that movie time and again, which is, I gotta admit to him, we're having a philosophical conversation.
The idea shows up as a thought experiment in my second book as well.
This is the number one reason why I've stopped short of yet, and I will say as yet, making it part of, you know, and I don't know how closely you've been following my campaign, but we're pretty darn specific with very specific commitments and proposals.
I have not yet made this one, and I'm thinking through it.
I'm really thinking through it now, but that is the number one objection.
And this is why I come back to then the purpose has to be defined.
Because this is why when you say some form of service, that's when it gets squishy.
But some kids sitting next to where I am in Central Ohio or where you are here in Maryland or whatever, down the street will absolutely do it.
And I think that what does that do, Tim?
And I haven't heard other people talk about this aspect of it, but I think this is important too, is it actually separates money from respect.
And I think one of the things that's interesting about American culture, it's a trade-off that I'll take, but I'll still admit it's a trade-off, is that compared to like, let's just say the British aristocracy of even the prior century, And there's vestiges of it today, even in Europe today.
The amount of respect you're accorded in society isn't exactly or even close to the same thing as the amount of money you have, because it's hereditary.
And so part of the American bargain is to say that we get rid of that hereditary stuff.
And we say, I don't care who your parents were, but the side effect of that is, okay, the amount of respect you get in the society, there's one axis that matters in this country.
It's a number of green pieces in your bank account, because that's the only hierarchical order.
It shouldn't be, but I'm saying like for much of our last 50 years, It's changed.
Back to the point that I'm making here, though, is respect of a follower is a green piece of paper in your bank account.
Here we add a different axis.
You can be a capital C citizen, part of the special club of people who get to determine who runs the country, and it's open to everybody.
But you can be a member of it where the kid of a billionaire isn't, And I think that that can have an equalizing, civic equalizing effect in our country that could be really powerful.
So, he pushes $300, everything he's got, into the table and gives me a look like I got it.
And then I said, no you don't.
Call.
Called his bet.
He flips over nothing.
I took all his money and I had ace high.
Not even a pair.
He loses it.
He loses it.
He storms back, he leaves.
Comes back half an hour later with cash, buys back into the table, and then for the next 10 minutes just keeps cussing at me and swearing at me and I'm like, okay dude, this is inappropriate.
And when I asked security to take action, they told me to leave.
They said, why don't you leave?
And so I thought to myself, this is what I really hate about society, because I've been in these situations numerous occasions and I know exactly what's going to happen.
I'm a reasonable person.
I simply went to the poker room supervisor and said, look, this guy just sat down.
He just joined the table.
He is bothering us.
He's bothering me.
Can you ask him to play at a different table?
I didn't say ban the guy.
I didn't say adjudicate who is true and correct.
I simply said, we are currently in a feud.
Please separate us.
He said, no, you leave.
And then I'm like, here's the point of the story.
If I tweet to 1.6 million followers, they will call me up crying, saying, please, please stop.
And that pissed me off.
So I did tweet.
And of course, it did have an effect.
Why is it that I, as a reasonable person, Who simply said, hey, look, there's a feud here.
Can you separate us?
Can you make this guy?
He just sat down, played a different table.
They said, no, I'll do nothing for you.
But the moment I express the weight of my social gravitas, they fall to their knees.
That is bullshit.
This country should not function that way.
What should have happened is that reasonable people of good moral standing would simply say, I would prefer it if you didn't fight, sir.
Would you mind moving to a different table?
But instead, they say, fuck you.
I don't care about you.
I don't care about your problems.
Go sit down or leave.
And then my only response is, then I will wield the power I have because it's the only thing you unreasonable people answer to.
I was on a flight on American Airlines a couple years ago.
They cancelled the flight.
They tell me, sorry sir, you're out of luck.
Good luck.
And then I said, I have reasonably asked you, I waited in line for half an hour, I am trying not to be this person, but I know exactly what solves this problem.
I tweet.
What happens next?
I get a phone call.
We are so sorry sir, we have upgraded you and we are getting you on the first flight out.
Any one of these regular people who don't have followers should have been given the time of day and given reasonable accommodation, not being told to screw off, and this is what I can't stand.
I think that if we do, it's like a principle of diversification, right?
So you have dollars, then you have social media followers, but then now you have something that's unattuned to, but you have something that's untethered now to any of those currencies, which is just civic standing in a society.
Like the class of people who serve the country have a greater level of respect, because you know what?
I think we can change that if we put some teeth back into it.
So let's just, I mean, let's just have some fun with this for a second because it's been on my mind.
It keeps coming back and it's something that, you know, every sane instinct in my bones would tell me, okay, we're not going to make it actually part of a policy proposal.
Let's just at least use it to clarify the way we see the world.
But I got to admit to you, I think that this is part of an American revival, is at least reviving this idea of civic duty.
Now, I do think that we have to narrowly scope it.
It has to be closely tied to the national interest or else it devolves into vagueness that lends itself to capture.
So we could talk about, you know, court system.
I think local law enforcement is pretty interesting.
Military, of course, counting.
We could pick a couple of other select areas.
I think that, you know, you can also just tie to areas, right?
I mean, we're short on ships.
So somebody who doesn't have a skill set to join the Navy would be more useful working on a shipyard because our Navy is actually short on ships, building roads, you know, national parks.
So we could talk about what fits the list, what doesn't.
And I think that you got to be really careful to lend and not recreate the woke problem through a new bureaucracy, but put that to one side.
Philosophically speaking, I think that that creates, I think that there's no panaceas here, but that is an element of a national revival that dilutes woke to irrelevance.
So the idea is, that's basically the analogy I'm making.
You get a letter in the mail that says you've been selected for Congress duty, and you go, ugh, honey, I got Congress duty.
And then it's like a four-week session where accommodations are paid for, you're brought in, they say, here's what we've currently been proposing and working on.
You have to issue votes on several bills.
I like the idea in a limited scope because imagine what would happen if you are a carpenter, a plumber, an accountant, you get called for Congress duty and they say, do you want to give a hundred billion dollars to Ukraine?
What happens when you go home and all your neighbors, they're going to be like, what is wrong with you?
So you're going to say, no, no.
And not only Is there a social tie to not doing wrong by this country and supporting bloat?
But there's also your explicit interests as a regular working class person and your community so that when they say, we want to give a hundred billion dollars to war in Ukraine, you go, no one I know wants that.
I don't want that.
This is ridiculous.
And when you go back, you're more likely to see the interests of the common man upheld in a democratic system than in what we currently have.
I think that that's, That's definitely in the category of like interesting.
No, no, no, no.
That's an interesting thought experiment.
I think that it captures part of what I like about the idea that I'm actually much more serious about than I've let on, just because I want to really iron out the pieces before we roll this out.
By the way, like, our election integrity stuff, like, That's like child's play.
That's done now.
Like, will we fix that with this?
I mean, this is going to the next level.
And it's not just about voter ID.
It's like Harvey Mansfield.
You know who Harvey Mansfield is?
He wrote this piece.
He's like a conservative philosopher.
Anyway, he wrote this interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago, which is, why don't we just settle elections with polls?
This is when the peak of many of the discussions about voter fraud were playing out in the country.
Why don't we just settle it with polls?
And he actually made, for the first half of the article, and in the culture we live in, people only ever read the first half of an article, and it's like a brilliant man, he's an older man, he's very advanced in years, but he's a brilliant guy and he makes the first half, he reads the first half of the piece and a lot of sort of, you know, online Twitter conservative types would read it and be like, No, they failed to realize he's actually satirizing the other side and he didn't understand.
But the first half of the piece makes a brilliant argument for here's why we could do polling to settle who runs the country better than running elections.
And he makes a case for scientifically, the modeling, how you could actually get a better sense of what the populace thinks by just doing online panel and telephonic surveys of samples using modern polling science to get to a cleaner answer than you can by the messy system that we actually have a ballot harvesting voting etc.
It's actually a really fair point and he makes the point People recoil at it not knowing that actually the dude gets it more deeply than you do in advancing your own cause, and then he comes back and says, but we don't do it that way.
That part was behind the Wall Street Journal paywall or something.
So we don't do it that way, but we don't do it that way for a reason.
It's not because we don't trust the accuracy of the results as much.
In fact, I could prove to you that we could trust the accuracy of the results more than the clunky system that we have today.
It's because the act of voting itself means something.
It is the expression of who you are as a citizen and going through that ritual itself has an important civic function.
And so I think that when you think about that, take that analogy to now, not just the act of voting, but like, let's say the voter ID law.
Is it really just about verification?
Or is there something more to it than that?
Because you only get your ID if you're a man in this country, as you and I am.
I believe in two genders, one's a man and one's a woman.
And the people who are the men in this country have historically been required, I think women should be required too, if we're applying the principles fairly, to register.
If we say there's no longer a draft, there is service guaranteed citizenship.
You sign up for the selective service, which actually may, has a substantially higher percentage of you being called to some kind of civic duty than it does today.
A lot of people assume service guarantee citizenship implies for two years you're working on a shipyard, for two years you're in the military, for two years you're working in a courthouse or something like this.
All you do is you sign up for this thing, which is a very, very low probability of actually calling you up, but you volunteer for it, which then puts you in the service.
It's sort of how the National Guard works right now, right?
You have people who are in reserves for the National Guard.
You go in to train like one weekend a month.
It's actually kind of fun for most people who do it.
Now, these people who volunteer to do it are self-selected, but you do fun stuff.
And then in a time of some emergency, right?
Rescuing people out of the flood in Louisiana after a hurricane, whatever it is, you're on duty to be called.
Again, I don't think it has to be limited to physical service because not everybody's suited physically or otherwise to have the physical requirements of serving in the military.
But those people can have other constitutional education, et cetera, that still fills that need to fill in a court system, for example, that's often understaffed.
Why am I the only presidential candidate in US history, including Republicans?
Who has said I would end affirmative action with an executive order.
Because it started with an executive order.
And by the way, I pushed Trump's people on this.
Why did they not cross out 11246, the Johnson-era executive order?
You could have just done it.
You could have just done it with the stroke of a pen.
Why didn't he do it?
I'll give you an exact quote from his policy people.
It's not a political hill we want to die on.
So, and we can go on the climate cult, we can use military against the cartels, Mexico, secure border, shut down Department of Education, shut down FBI, all stuff I've said I'm going to do.
How do you do that and unite the country?
You do it based on...
First principles.
You do it based on a moral foundation, because if you're doing it based on grievance and vengeance, I mean, even this week in the Wall Street Journal, I wrote a piece, and it's really pathetic watching the dishonest of the world just sort of cower in fear and try to dance their way around this.
I said, I would pardon Trump.
And by the way, they say you can't pardon Trump because it's a state offense.
Actually, turns out, you study the constitution law a little bit, you learn that actually, if you're using a federal offense to charge it, even if you're a state prosecutor- That's the underlying crime.
Absolutely, you pardon the underlying crime.
And so, okay, so that- I mean, Yale Law professors on down, nobody challenges that.
Actually, people say I'm on solid footing here.
Even Bill Barr, I sent it to him, he said, you know, it's a colorable legal argument.
It's anywhere between a colorable legal argument to hard law.
So I think you've got to understand this stuff to actually govern in these complicated times.
But back to the point, that's the irony.
Trump himself is the victim now of an administrative failed state that A leader including him failed to fully reform.
We got to go the distance with America first.
Get the job done.
Vengeance and grievance will not get the job done all the way.
It's kind of like what Reagan did in the 1980s.
There's an opportunity to do it with A moral foundation based on first principles.
Let's go further than anybody ever did in this movement.
These guys will spend that much time, especially DeSantis, spend hours in a cloistered room somewhere with a bunch of political consultants planning out.
It's because they don't want to go off script, right?
I think you will get a substantial amount of votes.
I think Donald Trump will win the primary, and then I will vote for him.
I think that's what's going to end up happening.
After everything you've said already, I'll probably vote for you in the primary, and then end up voting for Trump in the general, because I think, generally speaking in this country, they're just going to vote for Trump.
I mean, I'm not a political analyst, man, so I don't have strong objections that I'm going to, like, push back with you on.
I'm not in the business of—I'm not even a politician, right?
So, who am I to make—I have authority on a lot of things.
Political science of polling and who's going to vote for who?
Hell if I know, right?
But what I am going to do is I'm going to be crystal clear about what I think needs to be the ingredient for a national revival in this country.
I think I'm gonna be unapologetic, I'm not gonna mince words, not gonna play some political game of snakes and ladders, and I would rather lose the primary, the election, whatever it is, and say what I believed at every step of the way, as we've been doing for the last hour here, and lose this election rather than play the political snakes and ladders and win.
And I view it as a fun experiment.
The experiment for me is, I'm actually really curious how the world and the country works right now.
Like, does that get rewarded all the way to victory?
My gut says, Kind of like, yeah, I mean, I'm in this because I think the answer to that is yes.
Otherwise, there's plenty of other ways to have an impact.
I'm churning out a book every six months and building businesses.
I could keep doing that, and I'm pretty satisfied.
Personally, it's a lot more fun and liberating than partisan politics.
But it'd be interesting to see, I mean, does...
Does the world work?
Does the country work in a way that that strategy actually is the winning one?
But I could see worlds in which we win without occupying a particular political position or occupying the political position while you actually lose the real thing because you become a hollowed out husk.
Speaking of hollow, hollowed out husk of yourself in the process.
And so that's it's the game I'm playing is really different than I think what most people who go into running for president are playing is I'm playing to win.
But you can win the nominal race and lose the actual war you're in, or you could lose the race and win the war you're in.
And I'd like to think we live in a world where those things match, but we'll find out.
Yeah, but regardless, I think Trump has done a few good things that has warmed me back up to him.
A year ago, I was like, you know what?
I'm for DeSantis.
Because really, we only had two choices at the time.
There was talk of Trump running again, everybody knew he was, and then maybe DeSantis is your guy.
And I said, DeSantis is getting the job done in Florida, and Trump is whining about 2020.
I'm annoyed by it.
But now, we've seen something different.
Ron DeSantis is coming off as, look, I like the guy, he's done a great job in Florida, but he's coming off as generic.
He's coming off as going through the motions, answer as you described it, as, you know, he's just doing the things on the surface level.
And Donald Trump is now putting out videos addressing culture war issues, things that are very important to us.
And the most important thing to me, outside of the fact that Trump is actually now, you know, putting up real policy positions, Going to East Palestine.
So I'm not saying it was Donald Trump as a political stunt.
If I went there, that's a political stunt.
So I don't like bragging about this, but you want to know what I did do when I self-reflected on that?
I wrote a six-figure check, and I didn't make a big fuss about it, and gave it to a nonprofit that was actually aiding people who were suffering in that community.
And the political move would be to then own that and issue some press release at the time.
We didn't, because for me, the question is, what does leadership mean?
It means serving the cause that you actually care about in the country.
So that, you don't know where I was, that's where I was.
It just feels like, I don't believe, I hate that signaling, it's so fake.
But you're asking me here, man-to-man, and we're having this conversation, this is the first time I'm saying it in public, okay?
That's what I did.
I gave a six-figure check to help the people in East Palestine, because I thought that was gonna have a bigger impact to a nonprofit, it was a church there that was actually aiding people on the ground.
I thought more than me showing up with a camera crew, that was what was gonna be more useful.
And actually, that's different from saying, I'm not saying that Donald Trump did a political stunt.
I'm speaking truth at every step, and we'll figure out whether that's a successful electoral strategy or not.
And that's the same reason why I didn't wanna wear it on my sleeve that I did something substantive, if I may say so, to help people in East Palestine, is that I didn't wanna make an advertisement out of it.
Now, I do think that He's somebody I respect, actually, as an outsider.
What he did in 2015, 2016, is what I'm doing now.
I think there's two things I would say, though.
One is you get to be an outsider once.
I'm not gonna be the same person.
If I get successfully elected, win this thing, run the country, Take on the administrative state in the way I'm going to attempt to shut down the FBI, IRS, I intend to follow through with it.
I'm not going to be the same person if I sit with you here eight years from now that I am today.
I'm human.
Donald Trump is human.
It doesn't work that way, okay?
You go in to drain the swamp, maybe you will, but it drains you back.
It's a two-sided war, okay?
Donald Trump is not the same Donald Trump that existed in 2015.
It's just a fact.
It's just true.
It's not critical at anything.
I won't be the same person eight years from now that I am today.
I've got fresh legs as an outsider.
Okay, you get to be that outsider once.
You seize that, you do as much as you can, you take the ball as far as you take it, you drop the mic, let the next guy pick it up.
Now, my view is the tradition in the GOP Should be for the presidency.
It's fine for foot soldiers, governors, congressmen, senators, etc.
to be, you know, people that are products and trained in the political system.
So be it, if that's the way it's got to be.
But for the White House, you want someone to take on the permanent state?
It should be the outsider, okay?
We should be the party that puts the outsider in the White House.
Democrats can be the party of the professional politician.
Now, I think that, so that leaves two people in this race.
And I think by this fall, let's call it by this November, I think heading into the, you know, the elections next year, I think that either shortly after the early states, if not even before the early states, it's going to be a two-person race between me and Donald Trump.
Because that's where this ends up.
I think that's where the base is at in terms of understanding this has got to be the outside.
Not in a serious way.
No, I think he's more or less irrelevant, either shortly after, if not even shortly after, even before the early states.
I think he's like, he goes Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, is what I think.
He's a very libertarian, anarchist kind of personality.
He hates government, and he praises Ron DeSantis.
He likes these things.
But I gotta be honest, when I see you speak, when I see Ron DeSantis speak, I don't see Ron DeSantis being able to go toe-to-toe with you on a debate stage.
You're getting a lot of firsts out of me because you're just like really honest and I think we should just do this.
So there was an event, I was on the book tour for Woke Inc.
Rhonda Santos and I are both speaking at that event.
You know, he's the main speaker.
Nobody's coming to, you know, I'm not the main person people are coming to hear, but I was also a speaker.
I speak, you know, whatever.
Different environments are different.
I get a standing ovation or whatever.
He comes on afterwards, more muted crowd reaction.
He's pissed.
He leaves.
He was supposed to stay for the dinner, he leaves.
One of the sponsors of the table pulled me aside afterwards.
Oh, great job, et cetera.
You know, donor guy.
Says, hey, just let me give you a piece of advice.
In the future, when you're speaking with Ron on stage, Don't upstage him.
I think you upstaged him.
I think he was a little bit upset.
I'm not kidding.
And Ron DeSantis was upset.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so I did speak on many stages with Ron DeSantis since then.
And I kept that advice in mind.
I'm not running for office.
So every time in my mind, I'm like, all right, be careful.
Don't speak up.
Don't speak to, you know, be a little bit more demure.
Let's say we're in a fireside chat.
We've done that before, too.
You know, make sure you throw in enough praise for him just because, you know, he likes that.
And I'm not doing it to suck up to him.
I just want it to be a better event, better conversation, because it's not great when a guy just goes storming off and is angry because people didn't applaud for him.
It's just uncomfortable for everybody, right?
But to me, that's just a professional politician, you know, thin ego, thin skin syndrome.
That's not the guy, right?
And so now I'm competing against Ron DeSantis.
You better believe, you better believe I'm bringing it.
And right, he's gonna be irrelevant by comparison.
But back to the point, two people, right?
It's gonna be me and Donald Trump, two outsiders.
And I think that there'll be a strong case for both.
But I am in this race because I think I can take the America first agenda that Trump himself cares about.
I can take that further than Trump did.
Trump went as far, he tried, and he toiled for this country, and he made progress, and he took it about as far as he was gonna go.
Maybe he can go a little further, right?
COVID, a lot of things got in the way that fourth year, but he went about as far as he was gonna go, maybe a little further.
I've got fresh legs.
I'm Trump in 2015 and then some, because I'm not just doing, A, I have fresh legs, B, I'm younger, neck reached the next generation.
I think that's an important part of this, but C, If you're doing it based on first principles, moral foundation, you will go further than anybody will in the system let you if you're doing it based on some sense of personal grievance, personal vengeance, or personality-driven agenda.
And I just think that don't do it because that's the wrong way.
Go with me because it's the right way to just go further with the agenda itself.
And that's why I'm talking about affirmative action and Donald Trump isn't.
There's actually one factor that steps in first when I think of, can someone survive a debate on a stage?
And it's wit.
It's your quick responsiveness, simply put.
When I see DeSantis speak, I gotta be honest, based on what I've seen of him speaking and seen of you speaking, you seem like, DeSantis will say, make a point, and you'll already have in your mind 10 counters, 10 additional statements to make, ready to rapid fire.
Yeah, I mean, like, like, I just, I woke up that morning.
We could probably pull up the video on Twitter, maybe pull it up after this, check it out.
I just found out on Saturday when we're campaigning in South Carolina, it's a Saturday morning when I woke up, apparently news came out Friday night or that Saturday morning when I woke up, I saw it.
This is wrong.
This is un-American.
We're not a country where the party in power uses police power to arrest political opponents.
And why did I speak up?
I thought I had credibility, because I'm running against Donald Trump, and this is before he'd been indicted.
I thought that if more people who were running against Trump on principled ground came out against it, and I have this legal background, et cetera, pointed out a lot of the flaws about what was reported about the potential case, I thought it would have the potential to avert a bad thing from happening.
I thought that those of us in this race competing against Donald Trump could publicly... So I gave a speech in South Carolina that day.
Nikki Haley spoke at the same place.
She spoke on stage.
I went on after.
I held a press conference right there with a little press gaggle afterwards.
I said I'd call on everybody, prospectively or otherwise in this race, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley included, by tomorrow morning to join me in calling on Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg from Pursuing this politicized prosecution.
A million people saw it.
Not a word from Ron DeSantis, though.
Not a word from Ron DeSantis.
Until the weeks later when he maps out, okay, the political strategies, the advisors, what do we do?
Oh, I have an idea, guys.
I don't think Trump will actually stay in Florida.
So let's be the ones who say, after he says he won't actually do it, within 48 hours, but then two weeks later is like, oh, well, maybe we can bluff that we won't get involved in an extradition process so that we look stronger.
But some Soros-backed, it's just like, you know, George Soros is a bad guy, but he's saying that for a different reason, to cover up for his failure to actually have courage to stand against the indictment of Donald Trump.
I'll tell you what I want to hear, and I want to hear it because it's what I would say.
The moment the news came down of a pending indictment, I would hold a press conference and I would look directly into the cameras and say, mark my words, no one will lay one finger on Donald Trump in my state.
Because I think we can actually sometimes, those of us who have public positions of authority, platforms, etc., can at least help influence the dialogue.
I didn't succeed on my own then.
Where was Ron DeSantis?
He didn't say a word after that bailout.
You wanna know why?
Because one of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists, David Sachs and others, who were clamoring for their own, and I guess it's not their fault.
If you're arguing for people giving you money, I guess that's not your fault.
It's just other people's fault for believing you.
What does he do?
He's the guy who then hosts a fundraiser for Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman who lobbies for a bailout.
I'm still going to go further than he did with that America First agenda on the foreign policy side.
We could have used the military.
to secure the border.
The wall was never gonna be enough.
But the small stuff, I mean, we can pick up building, not small stuff, big stuff.
But you can always, even after I'm in for four years, somebody's gonna be able to point to things that I didn't do just 'cause you don't get to them in four years.
So I'm with you on that. - I think you're really taking DeSantis down a peg or two.
And I'm not saying that in a disrespectful or like, I'm not trying to be mean, I'm trying to say like, a lot of people don't know about who's behind Ron DeSantis.
I don't think there necessarily needs to be any kind of, like, I hate you, you hate me.
No, not at all.
Because I think he's done a good job, but I actually think... He's a good governor in Florida.
People are saying, like, Trump, then DeSantis, and I'm like, I don't know, maybe, I think it's probably you.
In terms of anyone I've heard talk about their plans, the agenda, what's going on in this country, you've said more to me that matters than even Trump has ever said.
The thing about Trump is...
I think he's got a substantially higher likelihood of winning this election, and I think the revenge is going to result in a Schedule F termination of all these bureaucrats.
I think you'd likely do that, too, if you win the GOP nomination.
I'm, you know, I appreciate the vote of confidence or whatever, but let's just say a couple things about the Schedule F thing, because this is a good example of even going further than Trump did.
So let's talk about, your audience probably knows this, so I don't need to bore you with the details, but the basic gist.
Is they wanted to cleanse the administrative state.
And so what do they do?
They came up with a clever solution.
I know the people in the White House in the Trump White House who were advancing this.
In fact, I've actually given them some advice on this particular path.
They've asked for it and I've given it to them.
And I think it's a positive step forward.
So what they're saying is, okay, there's civil service protections.
Laws passed by Congress that say you can't fire bureaucrats, but there are exceptions to those civil service protections that say if you're in a policymaking role, then the president can fire you.
Even if you're in a technical bureaucratic role, they can't.
So that's called Schedule F, effectively.
I'm simplifying it.
But what it means is then they said, okay, we're going to redefine that more broadly to say that more of those roles are policymaking roles so we can fire more of those people.
Read against those civil service protections, and then read the civil service protections carefully, measured against a different statute called the Presidential Reorganization Powers.
I don't think we need Schedule F!
You can just do it right now!
And I'll tell you, you know, Trump has been a CEO, I've been a CEO, I've built the company, multi-billion dollar business, you know, different kind of company, but we've both been in the private sector.
I'll bring you a simple understanding of the Article 2 of the Constitution.
Take my Yale Law School hat off and put on my CEO hat, okay?
If somebody works for you and you can't fire them, They don't work for you.
It means you work for them because you're responsible for what they do without having any authority over it.
So you know what would happen, and this is why Trump didn't do it, is that they would sue.
And they would take that to the Supreme Court.
Well, guess what I've done?
I've studied the current Supreme Court.
And I give Trump some credit for this because he helped create the composition of that Supreme Court.
So full props to my man Trump for that, okay?
But now use it!
Use it in your favor Those guys agree with this position.
So let's say we do that.
What do we do?
We permanently codify the end of the administrative permanent state that rules the president.
That we ensure the people who we elect to run the government, who would have ever thought, end up being the people who actually run the government.
Because then it's not just during my term in office.
That's codified in precedent by the Supreme Court and any future president.
What do I say?
It's the model of Trump had his four years, did what he could, drop the mic, I'll pick it up, take it to the, you know, take it to the, you know, next first down, drop the mic, the next guy picks it up.
I've made his job easier because we codified that in Supreme Court precedent itself.
So that's the way we got to be thinking.
You know, and this is just to sort of finish getting this thought on the table, because I think it goes to the distinction between Trump and me and goes to, look, I'm an America first guy.
I'm a pro-Trump guy, 2020, all in for him.
America First, MAGA.
These ideas do not belong to any one man.
They are bigger than any of us.
It's bigger than Donald Trump.
It is bigger than me.
We are vehicles for advancing that agenda.
It is bigger than the Republican Party.
In fact, we're just co-opting the Republican Party to advance this agenda.
So it's even bigger than partisan politics, which means you can unite the country where a lot of independents and even some weird Democrats are actually going to come along with this.
That is what this is about and I will take that further than Trump ever did.
That's just my distinction from Trump, from two people who are arm-in-arms.
I'll tell you this too.
If Donald Trump wins, I will help him.
If I win, I expect and hope and fully expect that Trump will help me.
I will take him as an advisor.
But it's about getting the agenda advanced.
I don't need professional plastic politicians doing it, and DeSantis should govern in Florida.
But I think that when we're talking about actually reforming the country, that's the way this looks.
Yeah, whatever, but we're not even just two people who care about the country and are willing to be heterodox in their respective parties in different ways.
We're going to have a conversation.
He's not what your textbook example of what you would learn in third grade for being charismatic as a speaker, but he has a certain charisma about him because charisma is just a vehicle for conviction.
Ron DeSantis doesn't lack charisma, he lacks conviction.
Right?
And any professional politician does, too.
Ukraine, I was here.
Oh, no, I was here, except when Tucker asked me to.
Oh, wait, people push back.
Oh, then I'm actually not there in Ukraine.
You can't be a flag waving in whatever direction the wind blows.
So I would say get rid of the teleprompter, get rid of the written speeches.
That's an easy thing for candidates to do.
But the thing is, As it relates to DeSantis and it relates to people like him, it's not even that you can't grab the beer with him or the charisma.
It's not the personal skill set.
Because, like, Mike Pence is a much more personable guy, or Nikki Haley is, you know, in a certain sense of the word, personable.
It's that they actually are just designed to be stuffed suits, the equivalent of a flag that waves in whatever direction the wind blows on a given day.
And, like, our base, our movement, maybe the Republican Party is different than our movement that I'm talking about.
- Yeah, but I think even, oh, you mean younger candidates, younger voters? - Younger voters. - See, I think this is true about older voters too in the country.
When I travel across the country, begin to go to Iowa, New Hampshire, et cetera, I think there are people who are 62 years old who still want the thing that I'm talking about, which is somebody who's outside of the professional politician mold.
But, you know, and it's good to be, you know, I live the full arc of the American dream.
We're making the sacrifice to put money in this campaign, but yeah, we'll take the steps we need to as a family to do that and protect ourselves, because some of the stuff I'm saying, even about the trans movement right now, is making people mad.
But anyway, put that to one side.
The point is, I think there's an opportunity where the kinds of people that were behind Ron, Ron Paul in 2008, I think combined with our MAGA movement, I mean, that's a, the America First movement broadly, I think that together, Is the super set of what we call the America first movement today.
Let's not make it about the person this time.
Make it about the agenda and then pick who's going to be the best vehicle.
It's like we're on a team and we're taking it to the end zone.
Let's get our first downs to take it all the way.
Trump got it pretty far.
My goal is I want to be the guy that gets it to the end zone.
If I don't get all the way there, I'll drop the mic, give it to the next guy and lay the path for him to score the touchdown.
And so, Michael Moore said that he was a human Molotov cocktail.
The biggest F you.
I mean, Michael Moore's speech was actually really brilliant until he made the big mistake.
I don't know if you heard it, he said- I didn't, no.
He said, you know, he explains a bunch of the problems in this country.
Donald Trump is the first person, he walks into these auto manufacturers and says, if you build these cars overseas, I will tax you 30% and no one will buy your car again.
And that resonated with these working class people who have seen their industries- I think it resonated with Michael Moore.
I'm not going to be the same person eight years from now, and so he's been through a hellish eight years too, so I don't know if he would say yes to that.
The reason why so many people like TimCast IRL, for those that don't know, I'm assuming most of you do, it's a nightly show at 8pm, is because the audience is moderate.
And then conservatives, actually, I think, I think it's, uh, I think conservatives are the, like, Trump-supporting conservatives are the third biggest.
So it's principally middle-of-the-road people.
They're probably voting for Trump.
They may consider themselves conservative now, but they traditionally were not.
Followed by libertarians, followed by actual conservatives who have, like, been conservative for a long time.
And I think it's kind of obvious why, because that's where I'm at.
I grew up in Chicago as a Chicago urban liberal, and then said these people are corrupt.
Find myself voting for Trump, but I'm not a staunch conservative, so my opinions probably resonate more with that group than with, like, die-hard conservative Trump supporters.
So what ends up happening is we don't have the biggest show in the world.
We do have, like, typically the biggest live stream on YouTube for the time slot.
But we had Marjorie Taylor Greene on the show, and the response was amazing.
People saying, I've never heard her speak before, I thought she was insane.
Well of course Trump supporters and conservatives have heard her speak, that's why they like her and they vote for her.
But regular people thought she was just insane based on the news reports.
Steve Bannon comes on the show, and they say, I didn't realize Bannon was like this economic populist guy, I thought he was a racist.
I've never heard him speak before.
And so we're not getting the millions of views of like Steve Crowder or whatever or Steve Bannon, but we're reaching a group of people that everyone's kind of fighting over, which is the moderate, middle-of-the-road kind of voice.
That's who I feel like where I'm at.
I don't like the Democrats.
I don't like Joe Biden.
I don't like the establishment.
We want viable alternatives.
Trump has his issues, but I'll vote for him because he does things that I like, especially with foreign policy.
Whereas the hardcore Trump supporters vote for Trump basically at this point, no matter what, because they're like, he's our guy.
So long story short, maybe we can get you and Trump to sit down together simply because there are people in the, you know, we reach a lot of these independents and moderates who wanna know the difference and wanna hear it.
But I gotta be honest, I think the reason Trump might not do it is because you're gonna win.
Trump's, you're gonna bring up very specific things Trump's not gonna be familiar with.
He's not going to want to sit for two hours and if Trump does get up and leave and you stick around that gives you the final word.
I think that's the risk to anybody in politics.
To put it simply, I mean, you have the energy, the knowledge, and the willingness that I don't think other people have.
And you know what, if I'm twice my age or even eight years from now after running the country for eight years, I'm probably not gonna be the same person now either, right?
I'm gonna have wrinkles, gonna be tired, don't have fresh legs anymore.
Yeah, I mean, that's just the way the system works, is it can't be tethered.
I mean, if you believe in America first, it's bigger than one man.
So my question for you then is, I often say on the show, If I had the means and the wealth and the resources, there are so many things that I would fire off on.
Hiring people, starting companies to win a culture war.
And I wonder why it is.
I'll give you my favorite example.
I was talking to Dave Smith.
He's potentially going to be the libertarian candidate.
And we were talking about the culture war efforts.
I said, I put Michael Malice on a billboard in Times Square as one of our recurring guests, but it's because Michael Malice is one of my favorite people.
He's a personality, he's an anarchist, but he challenges the establishment in a very powerful way and he's brilliant.
And I'm like, having a guy like that on a Times Square billboard, and we did it more than once, sends a message to the machine, you are not the elites anymore.
And it was expensive.
And if I had half a billion dollars, I would buy Times Square, and I would put all of these people up there and say, we are coming, we are taking over.
My question is, I suppose, not for you because you're running for president, but there's got to be a lot of people who have a ton of money who could write a check to someone and say, win.
And I'm wondering why that doesn't happen.
Again, you're running for president, so I get that.
Yeah, so here's one of the limitations I've found, is that, and it's getting real here, I mean, I think that When it comes to business building, let's take that avenue in particular, it takes some rigor, it takes some discipline and skill that a lot of the people who are most motivated by sort of the, I think the heart being in the right place, ideologically and otherwise, It's just the sad truth, man.
Do not overlap with the same skill set that the people on the left have when it comes to like, you know, build a tech company, build a banking institution, a financial institution.
And so for me, I'm at that unique intersection, right?
Whatever the metrics are academically or in terms of financial or technical competence or whatever on the left, like I'm going to be better than that 99.9% of the time, but I have different value set.
And so that wasn't calling for me.
But I think one of the limitations that being in the front end of that, investing in other companies and or starting them, I can just tell you the rate limiter on our side is in that domain, the kind of talent that results in successful, large scale business building.
And I don't think that's permanent.
I think that that's starting to backfill.
I think a lot of young people now are becoming disaffected from the woke orthodoxies that are coming around.
Well, no, I mean, and obviously with Strive, with your books, like you're the last person I'd be referring to.
You're doing too much, perhaps.
But running for president is one of the biggest things.
So one of the things that we've been talking about doing is a scattershot of culture building.
And so The challenges I'm running into is managerial power to do it, because we can only grow as fast as we can grow with skill of people who are interested.
But the idea would be, within my means, a $10,000 grant once a month to someone working on something culturally, so that the way I... It's a scattershot of, let's give 100 people 10 grand, and then maybe one of them actually ends up making something big.
I like where your heart's at and where the spirit is.
I'm just telling you from experience, like, these things take real effort, real discipline, focus, and the chance that the idea matches the reality is really itself a scattershot.
But that's why I say- Even the scattershot idea is itself part of a broader scattershot, is my point.
That's a big part of it, and then there's the version of what I was doing with Strive and trying to do in that mission going forward is...
Use shareholder power to change the existing institutions as they exist, because that's a big part of the reason they behave the way they do is actually top down as well.
So there's no silver bullet to complex problems.
I see that there's a plethora of partial solutions.
That's the best you're going to get.
So there's a role for everyone to play in bringing their own, building their piece of the quilt.
And I think that creating new institutions from scratch, reforming existing institutions in the private sector, setting a cultural revival, including through political leadership from the top.
There's a role for each of these things, even in the university realm.
There's people who are starting University of Austin.
People are starting, you know, I would say, Ralston College.
I just think sometimes we fall into the trap of those of us who have our respective ideas.
Myself, I've fallen into this trap too.
If thinking that because it's the mousetrap that we're closest to or have the skillset that's most tied to, that we then want to sell to ourselves and then to the world the idea that that's the silver bullet.
I mean, look, I think, um, I think that the, I mean, I'm, I'm campaigning across the country and it kind of relates to what we were just talking about, you know, so maybe I'll just wrap with that is, I think people have this expectation and hope that someone, especially in politics, that someone from on high is going to come and save us.
And I think that's part of the appeal that Trump taps into.
And he did do a lot in this country.
But I think that it's less about any politician, Trump or me or anybody else.
I think there's a mentality for our base and our movement.
The bad news is nobody is going to come from on high and save us.
It's not going to happen.
If we're going to be saved, it's going to be because we save ourselves.
All right?
And I think that once people get that sense, then that answers your question about why aren't the other people stepping up with money or even with less money or whatever.
It's a mentality that you're waiting for somebody else to save you.
We have to save ourselves.
And I think that that's the...
That's the mentality.
And I think if you're going to embrace that, I think human beings require some, not false optimism, but some reason to believe that they can be optimistic about the change that they're going to be, the way they're going to participate in us saving ourselves.
And the thing I'll say there is, look, we are, we live in this moment where the thing we're taught to believe is that we're on a path to a national divorce and or we're on this inevitable national decline.
And I was in a pretty bad mood when I wrote my second book.
My whole second book, the premise of it was, are we Rome?
Or, got to the twist midway through, are we Carthage?
Because we should be so lucky as to be Rome.
Rome lasted a lot longer than America has lived so far.
Maybe we're just Carthage.
And I think that where I am now is I don't think we have to be either Rome or Carthage.
Just as a thought experiment, put on the possibility, just for a second, that we're just a little young.
Going through our version of, Adolescence.
We said we're lost in the desert.
Trans movement, woke movement, whatever.
We're lost.
Going through our version of adolescence, still figuring out who we really are.
And when you think of it that way, it takes the pressure off a little bit and gives us a sense of direction that we're still maturing towards our version of adulthood.
And I think if we are not waiting for somebody to come from on high and lead us there, but lead ourselves there, I don't know, it seems a lot more tractable to me.
And I think I'm in a much more hopeful place than I was even a year and a half ago when I was at the thick of writing that last book.
I think DeSantis would be boring, so let's not waste our time with that, but let's have a real conversation about where we're taking the country forward, because I'm not If I want to write books and advance ideas, there's better ways to do that than run for president.
I said this at the beginning, you don't have to vote for me next year.
You don't even have to know who you're voting for.
Put a dollar in, put five dollars in.
I want to be next to Trump on that debate stage so that we're advancing, not just on the side, we're gonna be on the debate stage, you know, based on how we're doing with, you know, all of our metrics.
